Wes was back in an instant with a stack of albums. He watched as she studied each picture, poignant sadness mingled with tender joy on her face. He answered her questions, told her stories about different snapshots, relayed accidents and events that had colored Amy’s young life. Every few minutes Laney would stop to go and check on Amy, and then she was back at his side, laughing with him, misting up now and then, as he helped her learn about her daughter.
And as Laney learned about Amy, Wes learned about her. But the knowledge tugged at his senses, making it harder to keep his distance, making it more and more difficult to remain detached. Laney Fields Grayson was etching herself on his heart, forging herself into his life, and he found himself feeling good about it. Somewhere along the way they had crossed the threshold between tolerance and affection.
A my awakened several times that night, and they coaxed her into drinking cold beverages, but around two a.m., she began to cough so violently that she couldn’t catch a breath. Laney held her and pounded her back, trying to clear her lungs. “She can’t breathe!” she shouted to Wes.
“The shower!” he said over the hacking. “Get her into the bathroom.”
“We can’t give her a shower now!” Laney cried. Wes grabbed her arm and pulled them behind him.
“The steam,” he said, turning on the hot water and closing them into the tiny bathroom. “It’ll open her up.”
“Oh. The steam.” Laney sat on the floor with Amy in her lap and watched the room fill with steam. How had he gotten so smart? she wondered breathlessly. Would there ever be a day when parental decisions came as easily to her? Slowly the croupy coughing subsided, and Amy began to breathe better. So did Laney.
Wes stroked his daughter’s hair back from her damp face and smiled as she laid her head limply on Laney’s shoulder. “She’s going to be fine,” he whispered. “Let’s get her back to bed.”
When they were back in the bedroom, Amy started to cry. “My throat hurts,” she rasped.
Before Wes could reach her, Laney had her back in her arms. She took her to the rocking chair and began to sing. The song had a folk flavor, a soft, slow beat that lulled Amy to sleep. He listened, captivated, until the song was over and Amy was breathing easily. “You need to get some sleep,” he whispered over Amy. “Why don’t you come back to bed?”
Laney looked down at the little girl sleeping so comfortably in her lap. “No, I’ll just stay here a while longer.”
Disappointment and a feeling very close to jealousy crept through him. He’d felt so close to Laney tonight, sharing the baby pictures with her, warming to her genuine interest when anyone else in the world would rather have been shot than go through a stack of family albums. He wanted more of that warmth for himself. He wanted to lie next to her, slip his arms around her, maybe even see how she’d react if he showed her how much he wanted her. He was afraid, he admitted. It had been a long time since he’d courted a woman. What if she rejected him?
Then sadly, it occurred to him that this parody of a marriage they had entered into was the very thing that would keep him from courting her. They had skipped the steps that might have led to love. They had bypassed God’s work in their lives, thinking that he worked too slowly or that he would make the wrong choices in their futures. Laney didn’t know God; she had the excuse of ignorance. But Wes knew better. And now he realized that his punishment might be to live trapped in a fake marriage with a burgeoning but inexpressible love. For if he acted on it, when he knew in his heart that the marriage had been neither planned nor blessed by God, wouldn’t that be the height of mockery?
But none of it mattered tonight, he told himself, because she wasn’t coming to bed. She and Amy needed each other now.
He went to the bedroom and, with great difficulty, finally fell asleep on the couch. He dreamed of sleek black hair, tanned skin, and the subtle scent of apricots. He woke in the middle of the night in a sweat, more tired and frustrated than before he’d gone to bed. The digital clock said four a.m., and still Laney was not in bed.
He got up and went barefoot to Amy’s room and felt his heart swelling. Laney was asleep in the rocker, her head resting on Amy’s head, and her arms entwined around the sleeping child with a tightness that would have given an orphaned street child a sense of security. He stepped into the room, felt Amy’s head, and saw that her fever had broken. Laney, exhausted from the intense vigil, didn’t stir when he took Amy from her and laid her in bed.
Then he lifted Laney into his arms. She stirred only enough to see what was happening then laid her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes again. It was as if his holding her was perfectly natural—as natural as her maternal embrace of Amy, as natural as a husband’s embrace of his wife.
He laid her carefully in the bed, covered her, then lay on top of the bedspread next to her. She curled up facing him, and fell rapidly into a sound sleep. He reached out and touched her face. Was he falling in love with her? Could it happen so soon? He slid his hand down her shoulder and leaned over to drop a kiss on her forehead, but her rhythmic breathing wasn’t interrupted. He slid his arms around her, basking in the strange feelings of contentment coursing through him. When would they cross this threshold between living in a pseudo marriage and thriving in a real one? Would God forgive him for taking matters into his own hands and smile down on this fragile love that was blossoming between them? he asked silently.
Would Patrice?
But there was no answer. Only the gentle sound of Laney’s breathing. Only the growing guilt of his lonely heart.
Chapter Thirteen
Emotions ran high over the following weeks, and every hope Laney had dared to hope was shattered, one by one. She had hoped that her relationship with Amy would be stronger when she’d overcome the flu. Instead, the child emerged from her illness with the same lukewarm tolerance if not outright contempt that she’d had before. She had hoped that the night Wes had shared baby stories with her had somehow bound them, but as he grew more distant and more irritable with each passing day, she realized she had only imagined the tenderness in his eyes. Both Amy and Wes were beginning to see her as an unwelcome addition to their family, she feared, and no matter how hard she tried, she wasn’t able to change that.
Wes and Laney spent their evenings speaking to each other in monosyllables, and Wes would rather do almost anything than look her in the eye. He seemed angry at her, as if the night she’d sat up with Amy had somehow changed things. Since he’d gotten the contract for the amusement park, he spent longer days at work and even started working on weekends. At night as she lay in bed and he lay on the couch, he tossed and turned and wadded his pillow, as if the very thought of sleeping in the same room repulsed him.
And neither of them slept. Laney would lie awake, pretending to be asleep, waiting for his breath to settle into its peaceful cadence before she would surrender to sleep. But it never did. So they did battle with each other, both feigning sleep, neither reaching it completely, and both waking with shadows under their eyes and chips on their shoulders. And all the while Patrice’s picture sat like a taunting phantom on the table next to the bed.
Laney’s spirits were flat and battered one Saturday when she felt herself being sucked into a rare argument with her daughter about the cereal she was having for breakfast. The child was picking a fight, she realized, and she refused to be drawn in. She tried to appease Amy, virtually by giving in to her demands. When Amy “accidentally” dumped her cereal into Laney’s lap, Laney didn’t allow herself to lose her temper. But Amy kept at it. Her next argument was over the clothes she wanted to wear, an outfit that was being washed at that very moment, but Amy demanded she miraculously dry and dress her in it within the next five minutes. When Laney insisted that she wear something else at the price of a major tantrum, she realized they had to get out of the house.
At the grocery store Amy threw fits over every sugar-sweetened product known to ruin the teeth and temperaments of small children. Laney tried to com
promise and bought her some of what she asked for, just to avoid a scene, but even that didn’t settle the child down. At the checkout Amy began begging for a candy bar. When she told the child no, an embarrassing scene followed. She wound up carrying Amy out of the store kicking and screaming—terrified she’d get arrested again for kidnapping—and deposited her in the car along with her purse before she set the bags in the trunk. The crying and shouting stopped. Laney breathed a prayer of thanks. And then she went to get in the car.
Amy had locked her out, and the child sat with her arms crossed, staring at the glove compartment, absolutely refusing to let Laney in. Laney tried pleading. Amy ignored her. She tried threatening. Still nothing. And finally, when she was considering breaking a window, a kindly older woman in a post office uniform offered to help. Amy assumed the woman was a police officer, and at her first request she opened the door immediately.
Laney didn’t speak to Amy all the way home, but when they were in the house she took her by the hand and led her to her bedroom. There she would sit, she told her, until her father got home. Then she went to the den and cried as Amy shouted her hatred in volumes that reverberated throughout the house. When Amy finally exhausted her verbal abuse and fell asleep on her bedroom floor, Laney seriously considered that her existence in the child’s life might, indeed, be a mistake.
Wes came home earlier than usual that day and caught Laney in a hump on the couch.
“What are you doing here?” she snapped.
“I live here,” he said.
“But you’re early. It’s only four.”
“But it’s Saturday.”
“Oh,” she said sarcastically, “you noticed that, did you?”
He sat down and frowned. “Yes, I noticed. Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do I get the feeling I’ve done something wrong?”
“How can you do anything wrong?” she asked. “You’re never here. I wouldn’t have a clue whether you’ve done anything wrong or not—
“Did you have something you needed me to do today? Is that it?”
“No, Wes. I wouldn’t ask a thing of you. I never have.”
Dead end, he thought. She was mad at him, and he had no idea why. “Where’s Amy?”
Laney stood up. “She’s in her room. Being punished.” She crossed her arms and jutted her chin defiantly. “Go ahead, Wes. Yell at me. I punished Amy! Do you hate me, too?”
“What did she do?”
Laney began to tremble. “What didn’t she do? She had three bowls of cereal, none of which she liked; she dumped the last one in my lap, cursed me for not being able to miraculously dry her favorite dress in five minutes, made a public spectacle out of us at the grocery store, and locked me out of my own car until a complete stranger came up and told her to let me in!”
Wes nibbled his lower lip. “Oh.”
“Oh?” she shouted. “Oh? Is that all you have to say?”
“Well, what do you want me to say, Laney?”
She took a deep breath and forced herself to be strong. She wanted to know if he held her in such contempt, if he, too, rued the day she had walked into their lives. “What do you think, Wes? As dismal failures go, how do you rate me?”
“Laney, I’m not going to tell you you’re a failure. You’re—”
“I’m worse than a failure!” she cried. “My father was right. Go ahead, say it. He was right. I’m completely inadequate as a mother and as a wife. You hate me and Amy hates me and—”
“Wait a minute,” he said, catching her flailing arms. “Who said I hate you?”
She jerked away from him and backed across the room, her face glowing with pain and rage. “Nobody has to say it, Wes! All I have to do is look at you. You avoid me. You hardly speak to me. At night you lie on that couch and beat your pillow up.” She clutched her head. “I don’t know how much more I can expect the two of you to take—
“So what do you want?” he asked, suddenly angry at the direction her ranting was taking. “Do you want to leave?
Is that what you’re saying?”
“Is that what you want? Is that what Amy wants?” she shouted, desperate for him to beg her to stay but certain he wouldn’t.
“What if it is? Will you run out just like that because things are a little tough? If that’s all the backbone you have, then go ahead! Just leave!”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she shouted back. “Maybe that’s what all this is about. Maybe you just thought you could run me off by making it as hard as possible. But I don’t quit loving my daughter just because she tells me she hates me! I don’t quit wanting to know her just because she has a bad day! And I don’t back out of my marriage just because my husband avoids me like the plague! I’m not leaving, Wes! I’m staying!”
“Good!” he bellowed.
As if she didn’t hear, Laney went on. “And you can scream at me for punishing her if you have to. But when a child misbehaves, she should be punished. I believe that!”
“So do I!” he shouted back.
“Then why are you yelling at me?”
“Because you’re yelling at me!”
They stood staring at each other for a long moment, and finally a slow, mischievous smile traveled like sunshine across his face. “Are we finished yelling?” he asked.
She let herself absorb the neat tuck of his shirt, his hands hooked in the belt loops of his pants, his wind-ruffled hair. He looked better than he had a right to, especially when she was standing there with mascara smeared under her eyes.
“Yes, we’re finished,” she said, trying but failing to return his smile. “But nothing’s solved. Amy still hates me, I still punished her, and you’d probably like nothing better than to have never met me.”
Wes shook his head from side to side in a what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you gesture.
Stepping toward her, he gazed down at her red eyes. “It was an endurance test, Laney,” he said. “Amy was testing you. Don’t you see? In her own way she was trying to see how far she could push you and how much of a parent you really are. You passed.”
“I did?”
His hand came up, hovered over her cheek without touching, and his smile slowly faded. When his fingers finally made feather-light contact, she saw him swallow. “Yes, you did. And as for me”—his lips began a slow journey down to hers—“well, I’m starting to get used to you.”
She looked up into his luminous emerald eyes that seemed to contain both comfort and terror at the same time. Would he hurt her, she wondered, by taking her heart when he couldn’t give his in return? Would he make her love him only to realize she’d always have to battle the ghost of his first wife?
“Then why do you beat your pillow every night?” she whispered.
He ran his thumb across her bottom lip and wet his own. “It’s a little complicated,” he said.
They looked at each other for a fulminating moment, black, wistful eyes trying desperately not to be wistful, jade, desiring eyes trying desperately not to desire. They both failed as their lips came slowly together.
Wes’s arms slid around her, drawing her close as they came together like old lovers who’d been kept apart.
“Daddy?”
Amy’s voice from her bedroom startled them, but Wes didn’t let Laney go. “What, honey?” His voice was a breathless vibration against Laney’s lips.
“Can I come out now?”
“No, honey.”
“But why?”
“Because I’m kissing Laney,” he said, and then his mouth closed over hers again. She melted in his arms, but silence from Amy’s bedroom cooled her ardor after a moment. As difficult as it was, Laney broke the kiss. “Wes,” she whispered breathlessly against his face. “It’s time for her to come out. I want to go talk to her. I made her something.”
His eyes held worlds of frustration, but he reluctantly released her. She stood looking at him, almost shyly, before she darted to Amy’s bedroom.
Wes listened i
mpatiently as Laney had a talk with Amy that would have put most mothers to shame. And he watched as she pulled out a little book she had made for Amy, a picture book—pictures of her own and some she had pulled from the photo albums—that held the story of Laney’s plight and Amy’s adoption and the years between then and the present. He saw the pain on her face as she recounted the years, the tenderness as she spoke of Patrice, the warmth as she spoke of him. He saw Amy’s interest in, and her grudging respect of, the woman who was determined to be her mother, and he saw her need to be alone with the book.
But it was nothing like his need to be alone with Laney. While Laney was clearing the dishes from the supper table, Wes slipped to the bedroom and called Sherry. “Hey, Sis,” he said quietly. “Are you working at the restaurant tonight?”
“No,” she said. “I’m off. I’m working on my designs.”
“How’d you like an overnight guest?”
“You?” she asked hesitantly.
“No, Amy.”
He could imagine Sherry’s smile. “What’s the matter, Wes? Want to be alone with your wife?”
“I knew you’d like that,” he said. “You can pick Amy up at seven.”
“I might make it before that,” Sherry told him delightedly.
Grinning, Wes hung up the telephone.
Sherry was there in fifteen minutes, rounding up Amy’s things like a whirlwind and announcing that she had two tickets to a hot animated flick and that they planned to make it an all-nighter. Laney was so surprised that she didn’t know what to say. When she checked to make sure Amy had everything and found that the child had packed the album Laney had made her, along with her favorite doll, she decided time away was just what Amy needed.
But as soon as the door closed, she was stricken with a sudden rush of fear. She and Wes had never been in this house without Amy. That kiss still hung between them like something unfinished.
“Well,” she said uneasily. “That was a surprise.”
Wes’s eyes held a serious glint. “Not to me, it wasn’t.” He stepped toward her with the slow, patient purpose of a man with a mission.