Something Unexpected (19 page)

Through the darkness, Rosemary saw the turbulence in his usually pacific blue eyes. Emotion roughened his voice like sandpaper. “I didn't want to lose you, Rosie. So I tried to control everything, and you're right—I screwed up. But you're mistaken about one thing. Kingsley men do value marriage. Fletcher and I valued it to the point that we were too scared to make a move toward it. Our father valued it so much, he tried to force us into it. The problem isn't that we don't want love—it's that we haven't got the faintest idea how to make it work.”

They pulled up in front of a grand home with only one small light glowing from an upstairs room. Dean cut the engine and opened his door.

“It really is too late to disturb someone,” Rosemary protested mildly, trying vainly to digest everything that had happened tonight and all Dean had just told her.

He came around to her side, opened the door and bent down to look at her. “It
is
too late to disturb someone. And maybe what Gwen is going to tell you won't matter in the end. But I'm not giving you—or our family—up without a fight, Rosemary Kingsley. The only ammunition I've got left is the truth.”

He stepped back, letting Rosemary decide what it was going to be: end things here or listen to what Gwen Gibson had to say.

Life seemed so ridiculously complex, so unbearably painful that Rosemary wanted to run from all of it. Even as she tried to steel herself against Dean, her heart thumped against her chest as if it were trying to move closer to him. She wanted to listen, wanted him to reassure and convince her that this issue of the will and a forced marriage was all some big misunderstanding.

Magical thinking.

She tried to remember that she had just left three friends, two sisters and a mother, all of whom were single and in a lot less pain than she was in right now.

Dean waited at the curb, his expression as intent as she had ever seen it. Anxious finger-combing had mussed his usually neat hair.

Not two hours ago, you were my knight in shining armor, and I was lucky in love,
Rosemary thought with a sadness that penetrated her bones.

When she got out of the car, it was not with hope, precisely, but rather with the weary conviction that if nothing else, perhaps Gwen Gibson would weave the loose threads of this insane tapestry together.

As she stepped onto the curb, Rosemary looked into Dean's troubled eyes.

The only ammunition I've got is the truth,
he'd said.

Truth was good. Maybe truth was all she needed. Because she certainly sensed she was finished with fairy tales, forevermore.

 

Lucy Jeffers sat on the floor of her sister's living room, picking food from a plate on the coffee table, which currently was set like a Thanksgiving buffet.

“Thanks for coming over and bringing…a snack.” Rosemary pushed a halfhearted smile her sister's way. Because Lucy never ate junk food, she had arrived at Rosemary's door with a whole roasted chicken from the market, a quart of wild-rice pilaf, salad, rolls, a Dutch apple pie, a pesto-crusted cheese ball and water crackers.

Eschewing the real food, Rosemary had curled into a corner of the couch with an open bag of cheese puffs—the natural kind, because she refused to feed the baby anything fluorescent, but still something that resembled food therapy. She was
depressed, miserable, wretched; roasted chicken and a green vegetable were not going to cut it.

“I still can't believe you stayed in town after Mom and Evelyn left,” Rosemary said, watching her sister carefully remove all visible fat from a bite of poultry. “How was the Honeyford Inn?”

“Good. They put me in the honeymoon suite, though.” She snorted. “What a crock.” Jamming a fork into the meat with unnecessary aggression, Lucy put the chicken in her mouth and chewed as if the bird still needed to be killed.

“Um, why did you stay exactly?”

Lucy looked up. “My sister having a nervous breakdown onstage at her wedding reception isn't a good enough reason?”

“I wasn't having a nervous breakdown,” Rosemary protested, hugging her cheese puffs. Apparently the veiled irony in her little toast hadn't been so veiled, after all. Daphne had phoned her three times on the trip back to Portland and once since. Vi had videotaped most of the toast with her cell phone and threatened to post it on YouTube unless Rosemary called to tell her exactly what was going on. “You, Mom and Evelyn should be proud of me,” Rosemary protested in a wobbly voice that sounded dangerously like whining. “I was refusing to be a patsy.”

“We are proud. It was just hard to figure out what was going on last night. ‘Oh, wow, my sister must have found out her husband had to marry her to inherit a building' is not the first thing that crosses your mind before the wedding cake is cut, you know?” Picking walnuts out of the wild-rice pilaf, Lucy raised a skinny brow, dark as soot against her pale skin. “Unbe
effing
lievable that he thought he'd get away with it.
Putz.
”

Squirming painfully on the sofa she had purchased originally for its uncommon comfort, Rosemary reminded Lucy
dejectedly, “Except that he wasn't trying to ‘get away with it.' Remember? I told you, Gwen confirmed that he's selling his building to the city. He just wanted to keep the will quiet as long as possible, because he knew there was no way to explain it to me so that it would make any kind of sense.”
Gee, put that way—

“Don't romanticize him, Rosemary,” Lucy snapped, and Rosemary jumped guiltily.

“I'm not romanticizing him. He still lied to me…by omission…for months, and…that's a deal breaker.”

“Damn straight. Because if a man lies once, he'll do it again. Men are such shmucks.” Abandoning the wild rice, Lucy plunged her fork into the Dutch apple pie.

Rosemary stared. “Luce, is there something
you
need to talk about? I mean, other than my being duped into a marriage of convenience, did something else happen to make you take this…vacation?”

Filling her mouth with apples and streusel topping, Lucy affected an amazed expression. “What? No. I am here for you.”

“Luce—”

“I said, no! Look, it's no big deal.” She shoveled in more pie, expanding her normally gaunt cheeks. “One of the partners at my firm got engaged, and his fiancée—” shifting from apple pie, she aimed her fork-weapon at the cheese ball “—joined the firm. Like being around each other 24/7 is going to contribute to marital bliss. Whatever. Anyway, no time like the present to claim some unused vacation time now that Lindsay the Perfect is there to pick up the slack. Not that there was any slack, because, of course, I have busted my butt for that ma—that firm practically my entire adult working life. But that's okay, because now there's plenty of lawyers on board to cover any emergency, so I can have a—” she looked as if she was going to cry or spit “—vacation.”

Stunned, Rosemary poked as gently as she could at her sister's huge, gaping, utterly unexpected wound. “Was Dustin Phillips the lawyer who got engaged?”

Lucy had worked for Dustin's father's firm since her college internship. Dustin was very into civic action, and Lucy had hammered nails alongside him for Habitat for Humanity. Five years ago, Rosemary noted that her sister hadn't been able to take her eyes off Dustin at the annual Phillips, Phillips, Arnold & Locke company softball game. She'd hovered around him, fetched bats and lemonade, laughed too loudly, nodded too hard. Rosemary had wondered then if her sister was finally smitten, but Evelyn had insisted Lucy was merely trying to score points with the boss.

Now tears filled Lucy's eyes, an occurrence about as frequent as a Sasquatch sighting. She tried heroically to sniff them back.

“Aw, gee, Luce.” Rosemary made to rise, but her sister shook her head, using the side of her fork to massacre the cheese ball.

“Don't romanticize it, Rosemary.”

Right.

Sinking back into the corner of her couch, Rosemary tugged the collar of her sweatshirt up over her chin and sighed. Lord knew that in the Jeffers family romanticizing anything—men, women, snow geese that were faithful for life—was a sin punishable by a lifetime of regrets. Hadn't Rosemary proved that point? Twice?

Releasing the sweatshirt, she plunged her hand into the cheese puffs, stuffing a handful of their all-natural selves into her mouth.

After descending on Gwen, she and Dean had returned to the cottage. Midnight had come and gone with Dean explaining how conflicted he had been about relinquishing the building, how responsible he felt for the success of Clinica
Adelina and how that had informed his original decision to comply with his father's nutty will.

“I'd never been in love. Not really.” He had looked sad and gorgeous, like Hubbell Gardner telling Katie Morosky he couldn't be what she needed in
The Way We Were
. “I honestly thought there was something broken inside me. So I resigned myself to a marriage that was sensible and figured everyone would be happy, myself included…or happy enough.”

Too agitated to sit despite the late hour, Dean had logged multiple laps across the living-room floor while Rosemary huddled on the sofa in her reception dress, her brain hurting from confusion, her hands ice-cold though the gas fireplace hissed and blazed. “Then I went to Tavern on the Highway and saw you, licking salt off the pretzels and trying to be cheerful for your friends…. You were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.”

He had stopped dead center of the couch, gazing at her with sorrow and longing, making her wish they were upstairs, spooned with one of his big, warm hands on her breast and the other on her belly, the way they had been for a small collection of the most delicious nights of her life.

“I wish I knew how to love you better.” His voice cracked. “The way you deserve to be loved. I'm not even sure what that means, that's the damn truth of it.”

It was the most vulnerable statement she'd heard a man utter. Though her body felt stiff and as fragile, she had wanted to hurl herself off the couch and into his arms. To kiss and reassure him that she had enough trust and courage for the both of them.

He said he loves you,
the romantic in her encouraged.
You'll be all better now. You'll be fine.
They would make love every night, spend weekends at the coast, go on a hundred second honeymoons—

Stop. No one present said, “I love you.”
The practical,
Jeffers side of her gave the romantic one upside the head, knocking her off her fluffy cloud.
That's beside the point, anyway, isn't it? Do you want the pain that comes with the kind of love you're mooning about? You think your heart's going to keep beating when it's that swollen and sore? When Dean lets you down or lies or decides he doesn't l-o-v-e you anymore? Will you be glad then that you tried again? Right, didn't think so.

Instead of diving for Dean's chest, Rosemary had stared at her husband of three weeks, her heart shuddering like an engine struggling to keep working just before it ran out of gas. Her throat had ached and suddenly she'd wished she had spent her thirty-second birthday at a Buddhist monastery or a verbal-fast retreat on Whidbey Island or just about anywhere but Tavern on the Highway.

Instead of reliving last night's final moments with Dean, Rosemary now demanded of her sister, “Tell me about Frank.”
Frank.
They never referred to the man who had sired them as Father. Or Dad, Daddy, Pop or any other name that might identify him as family. “Tell me about the day he left.”

Lucy coughed, spitting a little cheese onto the table. She swore beneath her breath. “God, Rosemary, what is it with you? Ever since we were kids, you've wanted to hear about it like it's a freaking bedtime story or something.”

“I want to remember.”

“What for? It's not one of your fairy tales.”

“I know that.” Not that there was anything wrong with the fairy tales that, yes, okay, had given her hope and comfort during the dark childhood fears. Fairy tales were kind…ultimately. The bad stuff happened mostly before the declaration of true love. Once the hero and heroine found each other, you knew nothing would tear them asunder. Ever. Sure, Cinderella had to return to the cellar and wait for the townies to try on her shoe, but that was a small price to pay for
lifelong devotion, a castle full of adorable singing mice and, eventually, babies.

On the other hand, Lucy had a point. Rosemary did like to hear the story—in excruciating, full-color detail—of the day her father had left their family for good. For decades now, she had examined the fine points like a CSI picking over evidence, sure she'd find something that could have prevented the crime.

Had she been in charge of the situation, she might have found a word, a touch, a promise to alter the outcome. She'd clung to that idea, using it to convince herself that she could dodge the land mines of pain that had detonated in the wake of her parents' divorce.

I romanticize everything, because reality scares the crap out of me.

Clutching the bag of cheese puffs like a teddy bear, she stared, wide-eyed, at her sister. “Luce, do you think you, Evelyn and I might be in good relationships today if we'd grown up in a healthy family? Or do you think everyone gets driven through the wringer when they love someone? I mean, I used to think people who were compatible and madly in love had easier relationships. But lately I wonder if it's this hard for everyone, and some people just have a higher pain tolerance.”

With a look that begged the universe to stop the torture, Lucy, previously her nutritionist's star client, ripped a white roll in half, shoved the entire piece into her mouth and chased it with pie. “Thith ith the motht deprething aftuhnoon evuh,” she mumbled through the mouthful.

Rosemary sighed. With Dean standing before her, openly confused and vulnerable—not at all the absolutely certain, fear-slaying, unequivocal man she'd always imagined—she had panicked.