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Authors: Laurie Breton

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BOOK: Sleeping With the Enemy
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But that wasn’t what had made her cry.  She was crying because he had never once questioned that the child was his.

 

***

 

The hoarse shriek of heavy metal terrorized the neighborhood, courtesy of the zillion-megawatt stereo system Eddie had bought Luke for Christmas.  When the doorbell rang, twenty minutes early, she was still in the bedroom, trying to decide what to wear.  Chauncey sprang up and began barking, and Rose looked at her watch in horror.  “Luke!” she shouted, trying to be heard above the din.  “Lucas!”

He didn’t respond.  Music continued to shake the house to the rafters.  Cussing under her breath, Rose splashed cold water on her face, tightened the belt to her robe, and trailed the frantic dog to the kitchen.

Chauncey was in a barking frenzy, racing around the kitchen and slamming his massive body against the door.  “Get down, you fool,” she said, squaring her jaw as she dragged him away from the scratched wooden door.  Gripping his collar in one hand, she flung open the door with the other, and went hot all over.

The shuddering house was scoring higher on the Richter scale than California during the Northridge quake.  She was still wearing the faded blue bathrobe that Eddie had given her for their tenth anniversary.  Luke’s music was threatening to shatter the sound barrier, and she was using all the strength she possessed to restrain one very large sheep dog from flattening the intruder and lapping him to death.  He waited on her doorstep, the Viking god, perfection personified, immaculate in neatly creased jeans and a plaid shirt.  A walking, talking wet dream. 

“The least you could do,” she told him irritably, “is show up when you say you will.  You’re twenty minutes early.  I’m a wreck, the house looks like a war zone, Luke’s music is making me crazy, and Chauncey is about five seconds away from being vaporized.”

The corner of Jesse’s mouth twitched.  Her knees went weak, and she reminded herself that she’d learned the hard way not to trust a man.  Any man.  “Who’s Chauncey?” he said.

Rose tugged mightily on the leather collar attached to eighty pounds of squirming, slavering dog.  “This beast is Chauncey.  Eddie’s biggest lie.  When he brought this monster home, he told me it was a dog.” She brushed an errant wisp of damp hair from her face.  “And I believed him.”

Jesse knelt on one knee and rubbed behind the dog’s ears.  “Hey, dog.”

Clearly smitten, Chauncey wiggled his behind in ecstasy.  “Traitor,” she said, and opened the door wider.  “You might as well come in.  Give me a few minutes to get dressed, and we’ll escape this asylum.  We certainly can’t talk here.”

 

***

 

She took him to Sonny’s, a fifties-style diner that had red leather booths, a jukebox that played three decades of golden oldies, and the best pizza Boston had to offer.  The clink of glassware and the tinkle of silver competed with Rod Stewart for supremacy, and the resulting din wasn’t so different from that of home.  But here, they could blend into the crowd without fear of their conversation being overheard by the wrong ears.

And the smells. 
Oh, the smells!
So wonderful, and so nauseating.  She wondered how long it would be before she could eat pizza again.  When the waitress came, she ordered tea, the only thing she dared.  Jesse ordered coffee and they sat looking at each other while the jukebox asked the age-old question,
Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?

It was a little late to be asking now.

She’d been sure she remembered him wrong, certain that no man could possibly look that good.  But he was every bit as appealing as she remembered, with those dark eyes contrasting so vividly with his silvery hair. 
God help me
, she thought. 
He is one spectacular man
.

The spectacular man in question cleared his throat.  “How are you feeling?”

“Lousy.  Sick all the time.  I was this way with Luke, too.  That’s what first tipped me off that I was, ah—” She searched for an acceptable euphemism, but found none.  “—pregnant.” She met his eyes head-on.  “That and the nasty disposition.  Pregnancy always turns me into the queen of mean.”

“That explains why you met me at the door with both barrels loaded.”

“Look, Jesse, this is damn awkward, no matter how you look at it.  I’m single, I already have two teenagers, and I just found out that I’m pregnant by a man I barely know.  Forgive me if I sound rattled.”

The waitress brought their drinks, and Rose took a calming sip of tea.  Jesse opened a packet of sugar and stirred it into his coffee.  “How do you feel about having this baby?”

How many times had she asked herself that very question? “Confused,” she said.  “Frightened.  A little resentful.” She took another sip of tea.  “Excited.  Hopeful.  Awed.”

“I guess that means I’m normal.  I’ve run through the same gamut of emotions in the last four hours.”

“It’s a miracle,” she said.  “Even in a cruddy situation like ours, the beginning of a new life is always a miracle.” She paused.  “It’s also terrifying.  I thought my child-rearing days were over.  My kids are almost grown, and here I am, starting over at square one.”

“One of my biggest regrets in life is that I never had another child.”

She raised her teacup and saluted him.  Wryly, she said, “Congratulations, Dad.”

“Rose, there’s something I think we should consider.”

She studied the long, slender fingers cupping his coffee mug, the sprinkling of pale blond hairs along the back of his hands.  Deep inside her, something stirred.  “What?” she said.

“We could get married.”

Of the myriad of possibilities she could have considered, this was probably the only one she hadn’t.  She gaped at him in disbelief.  “Married? You want to get
married
?”

“I had a four-hour drive getting here.  It gave me time to think.”

“Three hours and forty minutes,” she corrected, “and what makes you think I’d even consider marrying you?”

“Are you so surprised? It’s not unheard of, you know.  A man gets a woman pregnant, he makes her an offer of marriage.  It’s a pretty common tale.”

Against her will, she remembered the fantasies she’d been wrestling with ever since her brother’s wedding, the speculation she’d indulged in, the endless possibilities she’d imagined between herself and this man.  All of it now meaningless.  “It’s absolutely out of the question,” she said, burying her face in her teacup because she didn’t know what else to do.

He studied her over the rim of his coffee cup.  “Why?”

“I tried it once.  I didn’t like it.”

His dark eyes did dangerous things to her insides.  “Maybe you were just married to the wrong man.”

“I live here, Jesse.  My home is here.  My job is here.  My kids are here.  You live four hours away.  Which one of us is supposed to commute?”

“Three hours and forty minutes,” he reminded her.  “And there are all kinds of jobs in Maine for a woman with your background.”

“Of course.”  She snatched at the only weapon he’d allowed her.  “I’m the one who’s expected to quit my job and move my kids to another state.”

“I’m a teacher,” he said with maddening logic.  “The school year’s already underway.  Look, this isn’t as crazy as it sounds.  I’m alone.  You’re alone.  And you have to admit there’s a strong attraction between us.”

“You can’t build a marriage on sex!”

“I wasn’t talking about sex.  We like each other, Rose.  We liked each other before we had sex, and we still liked each other afterward.  That should count for something.”

She didn’t argue his point, because he was right.  She found something about him immensely appealing, something unrelated to sexual chemistry.  It was a shame that he was a member of the enemy camp.  If not for that damned Y chromosome, they might have been friends.  “Do you have any idea,” she said, “what you’re talking about taking on?  Besides a wife and a new baby?”

“Two teenagers and one very large dog.”

“Two belligerent teenagers who would hate us both because they had to leave their lives behind.”

“They probably would hate us for a while.  But kids adjust quickly.  Before you know it, they’d make new friends and forget that we’d ruined their lives.”

“Chauncey is a mammoth pain in the ass.  He’d eat you out of house and home.  He’d chew your furniture and pee on your floors.  You’d also be taking on the loudest stereo system this side of hell.  And we haven’t even gotten to the iguana yet.”

“The iguana?”

“You got it, toots.  A three-foot-long iguana.  Welcome to my world.” She leaned over the table.  “Look, I like you, Jesse.  But I’ve seen up close and personal just how few marriages survive.  People promise to love and cherish each other forever, and five years later, they’re duking it out in divorce court.  And I’m talking about people who started out in love.  You and I don’t even know each other.  What chance would we have for a successful marriage?”

“I think we’d have a pretty good chance.  We have an advantage that a lot of people don’t have when they start out.  We’ve both been there.  We already know how much work it takes.”

“But it’s such a risk.”

He leaned back against red leather and extended one long leg into the aisle.  “Look,” he said, “the baby you’re carrying is mine, too.  I don’t want to be the kind of father who sees his kid one Saturday afternoon a month.  I may be old-fashioned, but I believe that a baby deserves the right start in life.  And that includes having two responsible parents who happen to be married to each other.” His mouth thinned.  “I don’t want my child being called a bastard.”

Unknowingly, he’d found the chink in her armor.  In spite of her liberal politics, Rose’s Catholic school upbringing, with its rigid moral teachings, still held sway in a tiny corner of her heart, the corner that believed children should be brought forth within the bonds of holy matrimony.  “Listen, Rose,” he continued earnestly, “the city’s no place to raise kids.  Jackson Falls is a small town.  The high school’s one of the best in the state.  The crime rate’s almost nonexistent.  Your kids would have fresh air and wide-open spaces.  And that big dog of yours would have room to run.”

He was eloquent, damn him, and his arguments made sense.  So did his need to create a safe haven for their child.  Rose had been amazed to discover just how much she wanted the child that she’d conceived on a hot summer afternoon with this fiercely intent stranger.  She wanted to give her baby the moon and the stars.  She wanted him to have the kind of upbringing she’d had, in a home brimming with noise and commotion and love.  Especially love.  With two parents who adored each other, solid as a rock.  Like Mary and Patrick MacKenzie.

But she and Jesse Lindstrom didn’t love each other.  They barely knew each other.  What he was offering was a shotgun wedding at the age of thirty-six, a marriage of convenience, not of love.  Was it remotely possible that a real marriage could grow out of something as insubstantial as the wild seeds they’d sown on that hot August afternoon?

While he sat there quietly drinking his coffee, Rose turned his proposal over and over in her mind, like a child’s wooden building block, examining it from every conceivable angle.  Jesse was the kind of man who would be a faithful husband.  She already knew that much about him.  He might not love her, but he wouldn’t run around.  All indications showed him to be an even-tempered, reasonable man.  And she suspected that he would offer Luke and Devon the paternal guidance they were lacking.

Since the day she’d thrown Eddie out, she’d been making decisions with her head instead of her heart.  Rose wanted the best for her kids.  And right now, although her heart was telling her to run for her life, her head was telling her that the best thing for her kids just might be Jesse Lindstrom.

“Give me some time,” she told him.  “I need to think it over.”

 

***

 

Her mother’s chrysanthemums still bloomed outside the kitchen door, but the house no longer looked like it had when Rose had been growing up here.  For years, Mary and Patrick MacKenzie had banked her brother Rob’s generous monthly checks instead of spending them.  Last spring, she and Rob had sat their parents down and read them the riot act.  Between the two of them, they had managed to convince their folks to make use of some of that money before the house disintegrated around them.

So they’d had a new roof put on, installed new insulation, new windows, new vinyl siding.  Rob had wanted to have the kitchen remodeled, but Mary had put her foot down and announced that the first person who moved anything in her kitchen by so much as an inch would be flying out the door with her foot planted firmly up his arse.  That pretty much took care of that idea.  Rose had been secretly relieved, for no matter how confusing her life got, she could always come home to her mother’s warm and comforting kitchen.  There, for a while at least, she could still be Mary’s little red-haired girl.

Her mother had just finished baking a lemon meringue pie.  “Hi, Mom,” Rose said, kissing her mother’s cheek.  “Where’s Dad?”

“Down at the corner bar, lifting a few with the Morency brothers.” Mary’s face was flushed from the oven, her auburn hair sprinkled with gray.  She rinsed her hands at the old-fashioned porcelain kitchen sink and briskly dried them on her apron.  “Why’re you looking so glum?”

“I’m pregnant.”

Her mother stopped midway across the kitchen floor, hands still clutching the apron, her ruddy face alight with astonishment.  Rose folded her arms across her chest and regarded her mother defiantly.  “Well,” Mary said.  “I guess I’d best be making a pot of tea.”

Over tea and lemon meringue pie, Rose spilled her tale of woe.  “He asked me to marry him.  And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m actually considering it.”

Mary set her fork on her pie plate.  “I see,” she said carefully.

“I swore to God I’d never get married again.  But I want what’s best for the baby.”

“What about what’s best for the rest of you? You have two other children, Rose.  What about them?”

“They’d hate it.  At first, anyway.  But they’re growing up too fast, and I’m scared, Ma.  Eddie doesn’t even bother to come around.  The kids are running wild.  They need something more than I can give them.  A man in their life.  Jesse would be a stabilizing influence.”

BOOK: Sleeping With the Enemy
11.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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