Liberating Lacey (13 page)

He waited until she opened the door and tilted her head up to his for a quick kiss.

On impulse she stopped in the open door and said, “Is this normal?”

“Which part?” he asked with a grin.

“Very funny. This,” she said, tilting her head at the back of the car. “The…heat. Is that normal?”

The grin disappeared. “Normal for who?”

“People in general, I guess. New couples.” He looked at her, now stone-faced.

“You,” she said, finally getting to the heart of her question. She was grateful the darkness covered the flush flaring in her cheeks.

Before answering he opened the driver’s door and braced one arm on the edge.

“Why?”

He’d go to a function with her. He’d take her in a parking lot, in her kitchen, in the back seat of a car. History was pretty well off-limits. She knew almost nothing about his background, previous girlfriends, anything about his family beyond his father. As much as she knew there was sheer coincidence. But just because
she
was falling, something she knew she shouldn’t do, didn’t mean
he
was making the same mistake.

“Never mind. It’s none of my business,” she said. She tossed her purse on the washer in the mudroom.

“It’s not normal for me.”

“You don’t have to say that because I put you in an uncomfortable position,” she said.
Again. Shut up, Lacey.

“You think I’d lie to you?”

Fifteen years of working in a highly competitive, male-dominated environment taught her many things about the delicate male ego. Questioning a man’s honor was asking for trouble. “No.”

“You’re not the only one going through a whole list of firsts in this relationship, Lacey.” He looked at his watch. “I gotta go. The shift LT’s gonna chew my ass as it is.

Later, beautiful.”

She stood in the doorway, her mouth literally hanging open, and watched him drive away.

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Lacey tiptoed through the piles of large shopping bags strewn on La Java’s brick patio and set a large iced tea and two packets of sweetener in front of Claire. She settled into her own wrought iron chair and removed the plate holding slices of chocolate chip banana bread from the top of her cup, then sipped her mocha. They’d been lucky to get a table. The coffee shop’s outdoor seating was crowded with people soaking up the early fall sunshine after taking advantage of the back-to-school sales at the neighborhood boutiques.

“Thanks, sweetie,” Claire said. She dumped the sweetener packets into the tea and stirred with the long-handled spoon. “Wow. Out shopping alone on a Saturday afternoon. It feels weird. No kids, no sling, no stroller, no diaper bag. We used to do this all the time, right? Ah, the good old days.”

“Things change,” Lacey said with a smile. “I take it your new nanny is working out?”

“She’s great,” Claire said as she set the spoon on the table. “I kept telling myself I was either old or lazy. I managed the entire technology infrastructure for a multinational corporation. Why am I now too tired to watch TV at the end of the day?”

“You had a team of nine highly educated, experienced professionals working for you,” Lacey pointed out as she split the chocolate chip banana bread in half and slid a portion across the table to Claire. “Now you have two children, a husband who works sixty hours a week and one college student working afternoons and the occasional Saturday.”

“Sixty hours is a good week. It’s been more like seventy lately. But I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about you.” Claire narrowed her eyes at Lacey as she bit into a slice of banana bread. “I hear you showed up at the entrepreneur’s cocktail hour at the Met with a very silent tall, dark and handsome type.”

“I’m glad provide fodder for the grapevine,” Lacey said. “I’d missed two quarters in a row so I had to go. I wanted some company.”

“So you took Hunter, who’s probably never set foot in the Met in his life, rather than one of the dozen eligible bachelors from the hospital fundraiser?”

“I’m not dating any of those eligible bachelors.” Claire’s blonde eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead. “Are you dating Hunter?”

“What else would you call it?” Just a bit defensive, Lacey held up a forestalling hand when Claire opened her mouth. “Don’t answer that question. You know what makes me feel old? Trying to figure out the lingo. Are we dating? Hanging out? Friends 91

Anne Calhoun

with benefits? Hooking up? In a relationship? I’m too old to have a boyfriend.

Boyfriend feels like I’m passing notes in study hall and hoping for a date to prom.”

“What do you call him?” Claire asked around a mouthful of banana bread.

She thought about as she sipped the mocha and watched the window shoppers examine the jewelry in The Coop, the local artist’s cooperative showroom across the street. “My lover,” she said finally.

Claire’s head came up sharply, her eyes wide. “Oh.” Her best friend sat quietly for a few moments, using her fork to cut off the darkened top of the banana bread. Lacey flashed back to the first day of kindergarten at Salton-Hodges Academy where she’d watched Claire pinch the crusts off her homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the lunchroom. Lacey had the school lunch but loved peanut butter and jelly. She’d swapped half her tater tot casserole for half of Claire’s PB&J, beginning a friendship that had lasted thirty-one years and counting.

Based on three decades of experience, she knew her best friend’s slightly furrowed brow and unusual silence meant only one thing. “Go ahead and say it. You think I’m making a mistake.”

“Mistake isn’t the right word,” Claire hastily demurred. “I do think you’re much more emotionally involved in this…this…relationship than he is. I don’t know Hunter but I know his type. I also know guys in the market for something long-term aren’t looking at Buff. They’re at church or in the grocery store or online dating sites. I met Julian at a Young Professionals meet-and-greet, not a bar.”

“You’ve seen Hunter,” Lacey said. “We were out to dinner last week and the waitress all but propositioned him before she even took his order. Why would he keep coming back for sex with me of all women, let alone go to the Met with me, if it didn’t mean something to him?”
If I didn’t mean something to him…

“It’s totally out of character,” Claire agreed. “That’s what worries me. There are rules for things like this and you two aren’t exactly following them.” Despite her growing feelings for Hunter, Lacey had to agree. They were both in unexplored territory. She knew nothing about the emotional consequence of casual sex.

He knew next to nothing about forging a long-term relationship. The chances of one of them making a total mess of the situation were very, very good.

Claire reached across the table and clasped Lacey’s hand. “Sweetie, I’m not trying to rain on your parade. Hell, I’m the one who suggested you have a little fun. This, however, is beyond fun and now I’m afraid you’re going to get your heart broken.”

“Well then Hunter will be the second man to break my heart as well as my second lover,” Lacey said. Her casual laugh sounded just a bit brittle to her ears, so she returned Claire’s grip. “I’m enjoying myself with someone I actually like. That sounds like a win-win to me.”

“It’s okay to like him,” Claire said. “You should at least like the guy you’re sleeping with. Just…be careful before you go all the way from like to love, okay?” 92

Liberating Lacey

Well, that was the tricky bit, because she was already halfway there. Every time he made himself just a little more available, opened himself even the tiniest bit, she fell a little further.

You aren’t the only one going through a whole list of firsts in this relationship.

Given that on a good day Hunter was as inscrutable as the Sphinx, his remark could mean anything. She could daydream all she liked, but he probably meant sex. Hunter didn’t talk about escapades with previous girlfriends any more than he talked about his personal life and he seemed as shocked as she was by the pheromone charged intensity that ramped up with each encounter.

Of course he meant sex. Nothing more emotional than genuine affection. Certainly not love.

Claire’s gentle warning reminded her that it was entirely possible she was tripping down the primrose path all by her blissfully naïve self. He’d said nothing, exactly
nothing
, about a future, about anything more than the next date. He wouldn’t even leave a change of clothes at her house, for God’s sake.

Use some of that business savvy in your personal life, Lacey. If you can’t handle a second
devastating break-up in less than two years, then for your own good learn how to separate sex
from your emotions.

“You’re sweet to worry, but you really don’t need to. I’ll be careful,” she said. She set her empty mocha cup on the table, then changed the subject with a smile she had to force more than she liked. “Do you have a few more minutes? Let’s go look at the new designs at the Coop.”

* * * * *

“It’s going to rain.”

“It’s not gonna rain,” Hunter said, but one glance at the wall of iron-gray clouds, low and threatening over the trees at the western edge of Memorial Park told him he was delaying the inevitable. Rain was coming, and not just a random shower.

Lacey simply shook her head. “Fine. It’s not going to rain. So you watched
Knight
Rider
and got interested in muscle cars?” It was pretty damn cute how she learned the lingo for things, his kit, cars, and used it. She was even picking up on cop jargon, the codes for shifts or calls. “Yeah. I had Matchbox cars, but KITT, the car on the show, was so cool. The red lights zipping back and forth under the hood, how it could drive itself. My big Christmas present that year was a toy version. I played with that car for hours, slept with it,” he said, keeping one eye on the horizon. The first sign of lightning and they were inside. “That spring I left it at the tee-ball park and didn’t realize it until it was bedtime and I couldn’t find the car. I was trying to be tough, not cry, you know? Dad and I searched for over an hour with flashlights until we found it down by the tree line.” 93

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She watched him like he was saying something really important, a smile curving her pretty lips. Maybe he was. After the conversation in her driveway he knew she wanted more about him. He hadn’t talked much about his childhood or his family, because nothing good would come of that. Listening to her talk about her doting stay-at-home-mother, ballet and horseback riding lessons and debutante balls was different.

But, wearing a khaki skirt and pink top with flowers along the square neckline and her red hair left to dry in its natural waves, she didn’t look so far out of his league.

And if he kept telling himself that he just might believe it. He was delaying the inevitable for more than just the weather.

They’d both had busy weeks so he hadn’t seen her since the night of the party. He’d called after a particularly shitty day, just to hear her voice, knowing she was about to head out to a work dinner. She didn’t know how unusual that was for him. He wasn’t about to tell her, not until he knew what it meant himself. After the Met Club fiasco, a walk in the park to enjoy what might be the last couple of hours of Indian summer sounded pretty safe. Tame. Three hours earlier he’d met her at La Java for a mocha for her and black coffee for him. Since then they’d walked all around Memorial Park and down to the pub for lunch.

When she suggested continuing their walk he agreed, despite the massing clouds.

They strolled through the nearly empty park as reasonable people took shelter before the rain hit. But he was used to being outside in hundred-degree heat, sub-zero temperatures, or rain and Lacey seemed to be humoring him. She held his hand when he guided her across the street after lunch and let it go without comment when he pulled away to check on a suspicious box behind a trash can.

This was easy. Too easy.

“You watched Knight Rider?” he asked as they turned north along the trees and glades lining the east side of the park. Sullen humidity pressed against his skin, but the oncoming clouds had a foreboding air of a rapid temperature change. Hunter noted the flattened bushes where they’d finally found the suspect who’d fled on foot a few weeks earlier. His scabs had quickly healed. The guy was undergoing a forced detox in jail.

“Yes, but not for the car. All the girls in my class had big crushes on David Hasselhoff.”

He smirked at her. “David Hasselhoff.”

“It’s perfect marketing,” she argued. “Action and cars for men of all ages and a hot guy for women. I bet the new series will be a hit with both.”

“You think the new guy’s hot?”

“I think he’s young,” she retorted as the wind gusted at her skirt.

“He’s probably my age,” Hunter said. He didn’t actually have any idea how old the new guy was, or even who the new Knight Rider was, but he bet the actor was closer to his age than Lacey’s. Besides, watching the blush flare in her cheeks still made him hard.

“You’re not young,” she said. “In years, yes, but not how it counts.” 94

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That was nice, her acting like he had enough of anything for her—maturity, money, sophistication. Anything. And maybe it was true. He wasn’t young, hadn’t been since the day he learned he could trust his dad and no one else. Lacey, however, seemed to trust everyone.

She looked at the clouds, then at the empty park. “It’s going to rain,” she said again, her tone the one used by people who stated the obvious to residents of la-la land.

“It’s not gonna rain.”

She considered him for a moment, her brown eyes shining with laughter and a sheer pleasure that made him feel like a million bucks, then sat down on the cement stairs leading from the war memorial at the top of the hill. “Fine. Let’s sit in the rain.”

“It’s not going to rain,” he said, just to be ridiculous, because he was feeling ridiculous. Ridiculously comfortable, at ease in a way he rarely was with anyone other than his father, or his friends on the department. Had any woman ever enjoyed his company, just being with him, so much?

Not that he could remember. To be fair, he hadn’t given most of them a chance. He was busy with a job he loved and did work he loved almost as much with his father. To continue being fair, Lacey hadn’t really asked for a chance. She’d just kind of moved into his life. Or maybe he’d let her in. Did it matter how it happened? She was there.

Fat, cold raindrops plunked around them, eased for a moment, then a steady rain pelted the grass, stairs and them. Within seconds the flag at the top of the war memorial hung sodden and lifeless.

Lacey looked at him, her eyes dancing. Water streamed off the tip of her nose and her hair hung in red strands. “Is this where you tell me it’s not raining?”

“Nope. Not raining,” he said from his position sprawled back on his elbows on the stairs beside her.

She threw her head back and laughed, slicking her hair back off her face as she did, then held her palms out to catch the raindrops. “I love how not-rain feels.”

“How does it feel?”

“Just like rain.”

“Who knew?”

She giggled. He could have sat there with her forever, through the rain, through the night, through the rest of his life, looking down the slope of the hill toward the street.

The rain, the lack of pedestrians and the presence of the woman at his side created a cocoon of isolation, a feeling of invincibility he normally got only on his bike at speeds so high whoever pulled him over would be forced to give him a ticket rather than the usual courtesy warning extended to a fellow officer.

On the street running at the base of the park traffic had slowed to a crawl, the cars’

windshield wipers methodically splashing.

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“Look at all those confused people,” Lacey said. “They think it’s raining. They think they have to get in out of the rain. Little do they know we’re sitting here, enjoying a beautiful sunny day.”