Chapter Ten
I hated to bat against Drysdale. After
he hit you he’d come around, look at
the bruise on your arm and say,
“Do you want me to sign it?”
— Mickey Mantle
Keely carefully folded her denim skirt, then flung it in the general direction of her suitcase, where a pile of clothing already tilted heavily to the left. The skirt was just too much, and the entire pile tipped over, clothing and suitcase both tumbling off the bed and onto the floor.
“Damn it!” she said, looking at the mess she’d made. She wiped at her damp cheeks with the back of one hand, knowing she was behaving like an idiot. So who cared? She certainly didn’t care. She just wanted out of here—now.
Keely pressed her hands to her head, tried to regulate her breathing, which had been quick and shallow for so long that she decided she just might be hyperventilating. Oh, that would be good. Just what she needed, to have to go back downstairs and find a paper bag to breathe into while Jack watched.
How could she have been so stupid? She’d actually thought—hoped, believed—that Jack Trehan had been about to offer her an arrangement. More than an arrangement. She thought he was going to ask her to marry him. Not a love match—neither of them would even think such a thing—but one of those old-fashioned marriages of convenience, this one for the convenience of Jack, who wanted to show a stable environment for Candy when he went before the judge.
It would have been an insulting offer, highly insulting. He knew she wanted to go back to Manhattan—she’d certainly told him often enough. (Whom had she been reminding? Him, or herself?) But he also knew she was crazy about Candy, and she’d make her a good mother, damn it.
And what was she, anyway? Chopped liver? A marriage of convenience was one thing, but didn’t the man have eyes in his head? It wasn’t as if she were ninety years old, or cursed with two heads and a tail, or anything like that. He liked her legs. She already knew he liked her legs; a girl just knew that sort of thing, right?
She thought he’d liked more of her than just her legs. She thought he’d realized that the other night, when she’d so stupidly put her arms around him, and he’d looked at her as if he hadn’t wanted to let her go. Had that just been born of proximity? And just what was so bad about proximity anyway?
She certainly liked more of him than just that silly, boyish smile of his. And his bluer than blue eyes. And the way he got all silly and cute when he was around Candy, then tried to pretend his soft heart hadn’t been touched, captured, in Candy’s two usually damp little hands.
But marry him? Where had that idea come from? What had made her think that was where his “I need a favor” was going... and why was she so stupidly disappointed that it never got there?
What did she think she’d gotten caught up in, anyway, some dumb movie-of-the-week? David Hasselhoff gets stuck with baby, hires Valerie Bertinelli off the street, falls in love with baby and Valerie, neglectful biological mother Calista Flockhart, in her one altruistic action of her entire life, conveniently falls off cliff in Tibet after giving baby to David in her will, which was scratched on a rock as she lay dying—and the new little family lives happily ever after?
Idiocy! Pure idiocy!
Besides, she didn’t really even like Jack Trehan. She was attracted to him, definitely, but that didn’t mean she liked him. Much. Maybe a little. Oh, okay, so the guy kind of grew on you... so does moss, if you don’t move around often enough.
What had she been thinking? She had a career waiting for her back in Manhattan. Even Gregory had finally realized that, or he wouldn’t have put her on to the shop in the Village. Gregory was a lot of things, but nothing he did was because he couldn’t help himself, he just had this great big heart. Gregory? A heart? Hardly.
So what did she want with a kid, or with Jack Trehan? Nothing, that’s what she wanted. She’d had some temporary aberration, that’s all, maybe from sniffing too many brownie fumes. She’d been playing the happy homemaker for more than a week now, decorating, cooking, smiling, and talking—even arguing—across the dinner table, taking care of the baby. It had all come together to temporarily warp her brain. She’d actually begun to enjoy herself, discover things about herself she’d never known. That she wasn’t like her Aunt Mary. She did have the makings of a mother, a wife. That there was more out there than trying to be the best, never wrong and never failing.
“Well, girl,” she said, going down on her knees to begin picking up her clothing, “that was profound, wasn’t it? So, now that you’ve started analyzing yourself, let’s mull this one over for a while—were you falling for the happy family stuff or were you looking for a way not to go back to Manhattan, maybe to fail again? Or, worst of all, were you actually falling for Jack Trehan?”
As luck would have it, good or bad, she wasn’t sure, there was a knock on her door just then, so that she didn’t have to try to answer any of those questions.
“What?” she asked, still on her knees. “It’s late, Jack. Go to bed.”
Obedient the man wasn’t, because she heard the door opening behind her, and Jack’s footsteps on the hardwood floor. She sat back on her heels, turned her head. “Go away.”
“What are you doing? I heard a bump on the floor a little while ago.”
“Yeah. It’s next on my list—buy more carpets. That way, when I murder you for barging into my room unannounced, the thunk of your body hitting the floor won’t wake Candy.”
“Cute. You’ve such a way with words, Keely.” Jack went down on his heels beside her, picked up a blouse, which she quickly snatched from his hand to toss it on top of a black lace bra that lay on the floor. “Going somewhere?”
“Unpacking,” she lied, grabbing an armful of clothes and tossing them onto the bed as she stood up. “I told you I’d brought more clothing back from the shop with me. The suitcase slipped off the bed.”
Jack grabbed at the nightshirt she’d worn a few days ago, then washed and put back in a drawer: “So this is all stuff from your aunt’s place? You own two of these?” he asked as he stood up as well, stood entirely too close to her.
“Okay, okay, so I was maybe thinking about leaving. Sue me.”
He still held the nightshirt, sort of waved it in front of her face. “For breach of contract, or for lying?”
Keely turned her back on him, or the nightshirt, or both. “I... I had a moment. But I’m over it. I’m not leaving. I need the money, remember?”
“How could I forget?” Jack asked, putting his hands on her shoulders, turning her to face him. “Look, Keely, I was sitting downstairs, going over our conversation, and something occurred to me. I mean, I don’t think I explained myself very well. In fact”—he gave a slight cough—“somebody could almost think I had been about to say something totally different from what I said. Am I making sense here?”
“Not at all,” Keely told him, ducking out from under his hands and picking up a hanger, sliding it inside one of her blouses. “Because if one was to think you might have thought you were about to say something different than what you intended to say, then one would, could, possibly think that you’d maybe meant to say something other than what you said. Which you didn’t.”
Jack tipped his head to one side, looked at her owlishly. “Are we doing some interior decorator imitation of Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s On First’ routine? Because I didn’t understand a word of that.”
“Yes–you–did,” Keely told him shortly, picking up another hanger, momentarily considering how it would look if she squashed it down on Jack’s head. “Not only that, but you weren’t satisfied with just not saying what you almost said. Now you’ve come up here and almost said it again, just to remind me that you didn’t say it. Tell me, did you knock down the same batter twice in the same game?”
“Only if I wasn’t thrown out the first time,” Jack told her, his lopsided smile hurting her heart, her pride, and probably threatening her sanity.
> “Yeah, well, you don’t have to knock me down twice, Jack Trehan. I’ve got it. I understand perfectly. I’m here to take care of Candy and furnish this house. Anything else I may do—cook for you, take a swim in your pool, talk to you—is all stuff I’ve decided to do on my own. You never asked me to do any of it, so I shouldn’t start getting ideas. Is that it? Because if it is, you can go now. Go to bed, go downstairs, go to hell. Go anywhere, Jack, because I don’t want you here anymore.”
When it came to getting in the last word, Keely had pretty much developed the practice into an art form. But she was destined to never remember exactly what she’d just said, because suddenly Jack’s hands were on her shoulders again, and his mouth was against hers.
He didn’t actually take her into his arms, so she could have moved away if she wanted, slapped his face, called him names. Something. Instead, she did nothing. She just stood there, her eyes closed, her arms sort of waving in the air, and pressed her mouth against his, trying not to sag against him as her knees melted.
“There,” he said a moment later, having moved back so that his face was mere inches from hers. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? We do a lot better when we’re not talking to each other. Maybe Tim was only half right. Maybe we can build on that.”
And then he was gone, and Keely all but staggered over to the bed to sit down, try to calm her rapidly beating heart.