* * *
Jack wondered how many laps he’d have to swim before his mind shut down and he didn’t have to think about Keely. Didn’t see her every time he shut his eyes, didn’t long to hold her, kiss her, make long, lazy love to her.
He pushed off from the edge, began another lap, his arms and legs moving mechanically, his brain whirling, whirling.
What had happened in that motel room in Arizona—plus what had come before it, and after it—would always remain one of his best, and worst, memories. If only he could remember all of it.
For hours, the director had him looking at Keely, supposedly gazing into her eyes in a romantic haze, holding her hands, then driving away with her. For hours, Keely had obediently followed Brad’s directions and gazed adoringly back at Jack, waiting for him to help her into the car, drive away with her.
The more Jack had thought about driving away with Keely, the more clumsy he’d become. Dropping the keys, tripping over the fender, fumbling with the door handle.
He reached the end of the pool, did a kick flip, and struck out once more.
Drive away... drive away... drive away... get away. Take her away. Take her places the two of them had never gone.
Just the two of them. No Candy, much as he loved her. No Sadie, no Joey, no Petra. No nobody. No baseball, no Manhattan business, no custody battles.
Just Keely, only Keely.
By the time he had gotten her alone, he’d been half out of his mind from wanting her. Couldn’t keep his hands off her, couldn’t slow down, couldn’t woo her, soothe her. Just take, take, take. Like a randy teenager. Like a man who hadn’t been with a woman for a dozen long, lonely years.
Like a man who couldn’t believe she’d stay, if only he offered to let her go.
It was the pressure, that’s what it was. They’d both felt it, been under the gun. A custody battle, a mock engagement, a baby they both adored.
And proximity.
That’s what Keely had called it. Proximity. Bullshit. That’s what he called it.
She drove him nuts. She was a worrywort, a perfectionist. Nosy. Bossy. A know-it-all, yet desperately afraid of making a mistake. Prickly. Driven to succeed. And she had a mouth on her...
One more lap. Maybe one more lap would shut down his brain.
He was crazy about her. Nuts about her.
The way she looked at Candy, the way she cared for her. The way she was making his empty house a home, a house that would be empty again if she ever left, no matter how much furniture, drapes, and what the hell else she left behind. The way she had taken over his life, sticking her nose into every last part of it, because she cared. She wasn’t just nosy or bossy. She cared.
And she knew. She knew what it was like to fail, to lose. They shared that. Except that he had finally accepted that his baseball career was over, finished, kaput. She hadn’t accepted that about her business in Manhattan. She wanted, needed, to try again.
Just as he had needed to try again.
So he’d send her away once this was over. Suck it up, keep his mouth shut, and let her go. Buy her way back to Manhattan if he had to, so she could rub that Gregory character’s nose in her success. Would that make her happy?
He didn’t know. Getting the offer from the Japanese team hadn’t made him happy. He’d thought he’d known what he wanted, up until the minute he was offered it. So now he’d offered that second chance to Keely. Would she take it?
What would he do if she took it?
Out of breath, he surfaced at the far end of the pool, holding on to the edge, feeling a shadow move over him. Keely? Could it be Keely? He looked up, shielding his eyes with his hand, a smile already on his face, and saw: “Joey? When did you get back?”
“What’s it to ya?” Joey asked, stepping back a pace. “Ya keepin’ tabs on me now, Jack? Maybe got my room bugged? You’d like dat, wouldn’t ya?”
“Ah, we’re being paranoid today. Always something new with you, Joey,” Jack said, hauling himself out of the pool, looking at his cousin. “Nice look. It works for you.”
Joey was dressed in a black Speedo that was definitely a one of a kind, because it bulged nowhere. He had huge black-rimmed sunglasses covering what was left of his shiner. And his skinny legs were hidden to the calf beneath black Banlon socks and heavy-soled, lace-up black Florsheims. Bayonne’s in-your-face rebuttal to GQ.
Joey grabbed hold of the ends of the towel slung around his nearly nonexistent shoulders and glared at Jack. “You’ll be laughin’ outta da other side of yer mouth when I show that Peters lady what I’ve got. Papers, Jack-o, I’ve got papers. That’s docu... f-ing... tation!”
Jack glanced at the crotch of the Speedo. “You’re showing everybody what you’ve got, Joey. I don’t want to burst any bubbles for you, but it’s not all that impressive.”
“Why, you—”
But Jack wasn’t listening, because he’d spied Keely walking toward the gate of the fence surrounding the pool. She was dressed in that same mind-blowing bathing suit and nothing else. Imagination had guided him the first time he’d seen her that way, but now he knew. Perfection lay beneath that suit, and he had touched, tasted, loved that perfection.
No wonder he was going crazy.
“Later, Joey,” he said, brushing past his cousin to meet up with Keely as she neared the pool. “Hi. Gonna take a swim?”
“No, actually I’m waiting for a bus,” she told him, and she didn’t smile. “Can we talk?”
“Here?” Jack turned, looked at Joey, who was approaching them, holding out a tape recorder no larger than his palm. “Joey? What the hell?”
“My mouthpiece says ta get everything on tape,” Joey told him. “I told him how rotten you are, and he wants everyone to know. So come on, Jack, talk. Tell the little lady how you’re tryin’ ta steal my beloved niece from me.”
“Jack?”
He slid his arm around Keely, gave her a quick squeeze. “It’s all right, Keely. Joey has just entered the paranoid portion of our program. Take a hike, Joey, before I twist you into a pretzel and then drown you.”
Joey began to dance around like a little kid, holding up the tape recorder. “Ha! Got it! Got that on tape! Violent tendencies. We’re gonna bury ya, Jack. Bury ya!”
Jack stepped up, put a hand on his cousin’s chest, and backed him up, pushed him into the pool. He watched as Joey sank in the middle of a large splash, waited until he’d surfaced and grabbed onto the side of the pool, minus his tape recorder, his sunglasses sitting cockeyed on his head. “Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom, Two Eyes,” he said, then took Keely’s arm and walked her away from the pool.
“That wasn’t nice,” Keely said, but she was laughing as she said it. “Do you think the water ruined his little minitapee thing?”
“And his shoes, too, if we’re lucky,” Jack told her, scooping up a towel as they headed for the gate. “I don’t mean to take you away if you really want to go for a swim, but I’m thinking I should have the pool drained, cleaned, and refilled before anybody else uses it.”
“Now that really isn’t nice,” Keely told him. “When did he get back?”
“Just now,” he said. “With documentation, whatever that means. I just know he was too happy to make me happy.” He continued walking, then stopped dead. “You don’t think he somehow contacted Cecily, got her to fax him a letter giving him custody?”
“Oh, God,” Keely said, grabbing Jack’s forearm. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
Jack pressed thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose, trying not to panic. “I don’t know either. Jimmy’s people found her. Maybe Joey’s people found her, too. Damn Cecily! She probably said yes to both of us. She hates scenes.”
“Jack, stop it. You’re overreacting. This is Joey, remember? Aunt Sadie says he doesn’t play at being dumb—he is dumb. Would a dumb man hire a smart lawyer?”
Jack glanced back at the pool, to where Joey was sitting on the cement pool surround, pouring out his Florsheims. ??
?Good point,” he said, trying to control his pounding heart, his leaping conclusions. “Come on, come with me. I’m not going to let this drag out, drive myself nuts.”
He grabbed her hand and walked back to the pool. “Joey? What kind of docu–f–ing–tation do you have?”
“Hah!” he exclaimed, desperately trying to pull off one of his thigh-high socks with little success. “That’s for me ta know and youse ta find out.”
Jack squatted in front of his cousin, looking him straight in his two eyes. “Wanna go for another swim? It can be arranged. Only this time, I might just tie a rock around your neck first. Right after I make you eat your minirecorder.”
“Papers, okay!” Joey exclaimed, backing up on all fours, rather like a black-socked crab. “I’ve got papers.”
“What kind of papers?” Jack asked, still glowering at his cousin.
“Papers! You deaf? Papers!”
“Excuse me,” Keely said, tapping Jack on the shoulder, motioning for him to rise. “You’re not doing this right.”
Jack bristled. He loved Keely. Really, he did. But, man, she was bossy, a real know-it-all. “Oh? And I suppose you think you could do it better?”
Joey looked at Jack, shivered. Looked at Keely, sighed.
“Yes, I could,” she told Jack smugly, “and without threatening him. You two aren’t kids anymore, you know, even if you both act it.” Then she sat down cross-legged on the grass edging the cement surround, and helped Joey remove his socks. “There. That’s better. Now, what are the papers, Joey? Can you tell me? Do you have papers from Cecily?”
Joey looked up at Jack once more, shook his head. “Cecily? No. Nobody even knows where she’s at, right? I got other papers, stuff dat shows what an upstandin’ citizen I am, ya know?”
Jack sort of laughed, sort of coughed, and Keely gave him a punch in the shin: “That’s interesting, Joey,” she pressed on. “So you’re talking about character letters, aren’t you? Letters from friends, maybe the mayor of Bayonne? The local priest? People who can vouch for you?”
“Naw,” he said, shaking his head. “I tried to get Monsignor Rafelli to write one of them character letters, but he says I gotta come ta church again before he’ll help me out.”
“Monsignor Rafelli?” Jack broke in, chuckling again. “I’ve got a memory coming here—a real Joey moment. Back from when you were an altar boy, right? Wasn’t it Monsignor Rafelli who chased you all the way home after you drank the holy water?”
“So it was July, and hot, and I was thirsty,” Joey said challengingly. “Anybody woulda done dat. Besides, I didn’t know he’d blessed it already.”
“Aunt Flo called my mom, as I remember it, crying her eyes out, sure you were going to hell,” Jack said, still waxing nostalgic over days gone by. The good old days, when Joey was just funny, not pathetic.
“Can... can we get back to the papers?” Keely asked, her voice sounding just a little choked. “Joey?”
“I don’t know that I wants ta tell youse now,” he said, visibly pouting as he squeezed water from his socks.
“Please?” Keely said, leaning forward, putting a hand on Joey’s arm, and if she was giving him as good a look at her cleavage as Jack was getting from where he was standing, he might just have to kill his cousin. Unless she got him to talk.
“Well, okay,” Joey said, shrugging his thin white shoulders. “I’ve got my birth certificate, of course. To prove I’m in the country legally, ya know. Lots of people think I’m Sicilian, ya know.”
“Of course,” Keely agreed, and Jack could actually see her shoulders beginning to shake as she tried to hold on to her composure. “What else?”
“Well, da mouthpiece, he said I was to get anything that showed me—how’d he say it?—in a good light. So I got Uncle Sal to write a letter sayin’ I’m his favorite nephew. He’s about the richest guy in Bayonne, so that’s big, really big. I got other letters, from Marco, the grocer on the corner, because I didn’t shoplift nothin’ after that last time he caught me, and dat was years ago. One from my shrink. A couple of bocce ball trophies, to show I’m an all-round sorta guy. Oh, and my perfect attendance plaque from when I won it in the third grade.”
Jack had, halfway through Joey’s recitation, pushed both palms against his head, to keep it from exploding. Keely lasted longer, not falling over onto her side, beating one fist against the grass, howling with laughter, until Joey got to the bit about his perfect attendance plaque.
Jack collapsed beside her, relief making him weak, hilarity replacing the fear that Cecily had given Joey custody. Keely grabbed at him, laughing, gasping for breath, and he held her, and the two of them rolled onto the grassy slope, arms and legs tangling, ignoring Joey, who was threatening both of them with cement shoes or taking them both for a ride or whatever the idiot was trying to say.
And then Joey was saying something else. He was saying, “Gotcha! Here comes Ms. Peters, and the two of ya are gropin’ each other, right out here where anybody can see ya. I’m gonna go tell her ya tried to drown me.”
“Oh, God,” Keely said, pushing herself away from Jack, trying to stand up while simultaneously pulling up her swimsuit with one hand and tugging it down with the other. “Ms. Peters!” she exclaimed, taking off toward the house as Jack, who’d also hopped to his feet, blocked Joey’s progress. “How good to see you again.”
Jack joined the two women just as they reached the house, the towel he’d wrapped around his waist hopefully making him seem more presentable.
“Oh, yes,” Keely was saying even as she tried to smooth down her hair, which bounced around her head because she’d somehow lost her clip as they’d flailed about on the lawn—while Jack restrained himself from pulling several blades of grass from her curls. “We have several baby monitors. We started out with just one, the one in the den, that actually has a television screen, so that we can see Candy as she sleeps. But I went back to the store—that is, we went back to the store and bought more. We’ve got the base set in Candy’s room and the receiver is cordless, so that we can take it out to the pool or anywhere in the house, monitor Candy from anywhere while she sleeps.”
“So the monitor is back at the pool?” Ms. Peters asked Jack, her pen poised over the top sheet of a thick stack of papers on her clipboard. Obviously today’s surprise visit was going to be more in-depth than the first one.
“Er... um... Keely?”
“Hmmm? Um... no,” Keely said, still trying to pretend her bathing suit was really a kimono that covered her from neck to ankles. “There... there was no need, because Petra is watching her right now. She and Sweet—she and Bruno, an employee of Mr. Trehan’s cousin. They’re playing with her up in her room, actually. I... I checked on them just before changing to come outside for a swim.”
“Bug bite scratches, out for a swim,” Ms. Peters said, scribbling on the clipboard. “Sometimes, Ms. McBride, it’s as if I lived my youth on a whole other planet. Very well, let’s go upstairs then, and see Candy.”
“She’s not being as nice as she was the first time,” Keely whispered out of the corner of her mouth as Ms. Peters preceded them up the back stairs. More loudly, she said, “We’ll be with you in a moment, Ms. Peters. I just have something I need to ask Mr. Trehan. Jack,” she added, wincing.
“Yeah, Jack. Don’t be too formal. And don’t worry about anything,” Jack whispered back bracingly as they walked a few feet away from the stairs. “Now that we know that Joey’s shooting blanks, all we need is that document from Cecily and we’re home free.”
“Not if she thinks we’re two sex-starved maniacs who barely pay any attention to Candy,” Keely countered. “What must she think of me?”
“That you can’t keep your hands off me?” Jack asked, then ducked when it looked as if Keely might be wanting to take a swing at him.
But she was distracted, suddenly looking around the kitchen, into the den. “Where’s Aunt Sadie? The dishes are gone, so she finished those before she left. But I didn’t see he
r outside, heading back to her apartment. Do you think she’s upstairs, putting clean sheets on the beds? I want her to stick close to us while Ms. Peters is here. The woman likes her.”
Keely was speaking quickly, her words all but tumbling over each other, so Jack took hold of her shoulders and gave her a small shake. “Would you calm down, please?” he asked, pulling her into his arms. “Relax, just relax.”
“I can’t. This is too important.”
Jack kissed the top of her head. “Thank you, Keely. Thank you for thinking this is important. Thank you for caring.”
Her body was warm, sun-kissed, and fairly naked. He felt her legs against his own bare legs, could press his hands on her bare back. “Keely?” he said, pushing her slightly away from him, but not too far, definitely not too far. “Ah, hell, Keely...” he said, drawing her close once more, his mouth descending to capture hers.
And he almost got there.
“Jack! Jack—Keely! Get up here this minute!” his Aunt Sadie was yelling. “Edith just fainted!”