The Heart of the Matter (12 page)

He kept up easily, working up only a light sweat but a considerable appetite by the time they reached the halfway mark and stopped for lunch.

There was a small clearing in the pines on the lake side of the road, and they sat on their sweatshirts and pulled the sandwiches out of the pack Jason carried. Laura fed the dog from her sandwich.

Jason took a bite, chewed and hesitated a moment over the unfamiliar taste. He finished chewing, swallowed, and asked Laura curiously, “Peanut butter and.?”

“Pickle,” she replied, as though that were a normal combination. At his raised eyebrow, she asked in surprise, “You don’t like it? I didn’t want to make sandwiches that might spoil, and peanut butter and jelly is so.juvenile.”

He had to smile at that. “You’re telling me peanut butter and pickle is chic?”

“I like it,” she replied defensively. “Buttercup likes it.”

“Well, then, I’m sure it’ll be showing up on the menu at the Four Seasons any time now.”

Laura saw the amusement behind Jason’s swift reply and couldn’t remember when she’d been happier in her entire life. And it was all because of him.

“Seems hiking boots have given you a bit of an attitude, too,” she said. “I’ve never known you to complain about food of any kind.”

“It wasn’t a complaint, it was a question,” he corrected her after chewing and swallowing another bite. “And I do like it.”

She leaned toward him, almost close enough to reach him with a kiss, and asked, “Then why the fuss?”

“It wasn’t a fuss, it was a question.”

“Then why the question?”

He leaned toward her, closing the millimeter of space that separated them. And he did kiss her. “Because I love the serious look you get when you feel like you have to justify yourself.”

“I wasn’t aware,” she challenged, “that I ever try to justify myself.”

“You do it all the time,” he disputed. “When you used to try to convince me that you didn’t want to have a relationship, then when you knew you couldn’t fight it and you tried to use the excuse that you didn’t think you could be a mother, then when you tried to apologize to Ben for acting just like one.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He was right. She was always trying to explain her position on things, mostly because she was always sure no one would understand why she reacted the way she did. Because she didn’t. She’d come to terms with the loss of her father’s fickle affections and the wayward habits of the men she’d dated, yet every time it came to laying her emotions on the line again, all the old protective instincts began piecing the wall together.

She prepared to defend herself. “And you find that annoying.”

He smiled and kissed her again. She found she had no defense against that. “I find it charming. Just like all the rest of you. You don’t have to justify anything to me. Whatever’s a part of you I accept as part of me.”

She studied him in amazement, saw the complete sincerity in his eyes and sighed in surrender. “You’re not from here, are you?”

He narrowed an eye in puzzlement. “Here?”

“This planet. This breed of man.”

“Sure I am,” he replied gravely. Then he added with a wicked grin, “Want to inspect me?”

They walked hand in hand after lunch for a long stretch, the dog blazing the trail, then had to go single file again on the far end of Jason’s side of the lake.

By midafternoon they put on their sweatshirts and got home just as the sun began to set. Jason dropped his pack on the porch, and Buttercup settled down beside it with a weary thump. Jason walked Laura to the end of the pier where they sat, feet dangling just above the water, and watched the sky turn from brilliant orange through a range of shades of pink and purple until the sky over the trees was lavender and the North Star shone like some divine promise.

Laura hooked an arm around Jason’s shoulder and leaned her head on it. “Thank you for a beautiful day,” she said. “Thank you for making me this happy.”

“I thought you had done it,” he said, resting his head on hers. He raised his hand to her cheek. “I love you, Laura.”

She turned her lips into his hand and kissed his palm. “I love you, Jason. Now,” she said, getting to her feet and offering him a hand up, “we can go to bed.”

They made love for hours, got up again at midnight to stuff themselves on shrimp and strawberries and wine while watching Mogambo. Jason lured Sergei out of the carrier with a shrimp. The cat followed him to get a second one, but evaded Jason’s hand when he reached out to pet him and ran back to the carrier.

Jason and Laura went back to bed, made love again and slept until midmorning.

Jason’s agent called while they ate cereal on the front porch, and Laura went inside to make more coffee.

“Barclay Books loves your proposal for a book about bringing romance into your life.” Louie Moss was almost a cliché where the public’s image of agents was concerned. He was short, rotund and bald, and never spoke without a cigar clamped in his teeth, the Surgeon General’s warnings notwithstanding.

“Great,” Jason said, running his fingertips over the woven wicker on the arm of Laura’s chair. He was discovering that he felt strangely empty when she wasn’t in sight. “I’ll develop it.”

“Good. But they’ll buy it development unseen.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. And for seven figures. And not the low seven, either.” He mentioned the specific sum.

Jason had to concentrate to continue to hold the phone. “But…why? I mean, it’s not like we’ve offered it to anybody else.”

“No, but everybody else has gotten wind of it, and Platinum called
me
with an offer this morning. But Barclay’s is better. I’d go with it.”

“Ah.yeah. Okay. What do you need me to do?”

“Just keep being funny, kid,” Louie said. Jason could hear him moving the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “And when you get a good outline together, fax it to me.”

“Couple of weeks?”

“Perfect. I’ll fax you the contract as soon as I get it and you tell me what you like and don’t like and we’ll see what we can do. How long you going to be at the cabin?”

“About three or four more days.”

“All right. I’ll be in touch when you get home so you can enjoy the rest of your vacation.”

Jason pushed the cordless phone’s off button and leaned back in his chair, absorbing the fairy-tale quality of the current status of his life. He was in love with a woman who loved him, his children loved her, too, and she loved them, and he was going to make an embarrassingly large sum of money to share with the reading public what that was like.

It was all so perfect, he couldn’t help an instinctive look up at the sky. But it didn’t appear to be falling and there wasn’t even a cloud. It was all right, he decided, to let himself accept that his life was working.

He went looking for Laura. The kitchen had been tidied, Sergei was asleep, but Laura wasn’t there. He called her name and waited for a response. There wasn’t one.

He was about to head upstairs when a movement beyond the kitchen window caught his eye. He leaned over the sink for a closer look. And there in the middle of the broad expanse of grass, Laura was setting up the tent with Buttercup’s moral support.

It was an old one Ben had given him when Adam was small, and she was puzzling over how it went up. He watched her try to plant the pegs, then laugh when the tent collapsed and Buttercup jumped atop her, thinking it was a game. He felt overwhelmed with love for her.

He went out to the backyard and approached her, hands in his pockets, pretending an air of superiority. “Does this tangle of tent and pegs mean you actually might need me for something?”

She squinted up at him with a smile, then pushed herself to her feet. She rested her hands on his chest and rose on tiptoe to kiss him lightly on the mouth. “I’ve needed you…” she said, the sunlight illuminating the depths of
her eyes. He saw love there. “Since the first time you smiled at me. Given enough time, I could learn to put up this tent without you and without the cinch lever locks I’m used to.” She stretched up to kiss him again. “I just couldn’t be happy in it unless you were in it, too.”

That was precisely what he wanted to hear. “Then, will you marry me?”

Surprise flared in her eyes, then was supplanted immediately by joy. “Yes, I will,” she said, wrapping her arms around him and holding him with a fierce strength. “I will.”

He crushed her to him, a little surprised that she’d offered no argument. But then she loved his children.

“You don’t have to think about it?”

She held him tighter. “No,” she said, her voice muffled against his chest.

“You’re marrying me for my children, aren’t you?” he teased.

“I love your children.” She tipped her head back to look at him. Her gray eyes were brimming with unshed tears and the joy he’d seen there a moment ago. “But I know what I’m doing here. You’re the knight, the prince, the hero I used to dream about as a little girl, that I waited for as a very young woman, and that I gave up on when I started dating.” She sighed and shook her head, as though mystified. “You don’t exist, and yet…here you are. And you want to belong to me.”

“I already do,” he said, leaning over her to kiss her soundly. “Marriage would only make it legal.”

They lay in the spoon position in the narrow confines of the tent, two air mattresses they used for floating on the lake positioned under them, two blankets over them. Every time Jason moved, the mattresses had a tendency
to move apart and dump him on the grass between them. Buttercup slept at their feet, undisturbed.

“Tell me again,” he said into Laura’s hair, “why this is preferable to sleeping in my bed.”

She snuggled backward against him. “Because it’s romantic.”

He tightened his grip on her and burrowed his nose in her hair to find the back of her neck. He planted a kiss there. “How do you figure? You insisted we zip the tent against raccoons, so we can’t even see the moon on the lake or the stars overhead.”

She turned over to face him. The mattresses parted and deposited her in the hole. He helped her scramble up and readjust the mattress.

“Next summer,” she said, moving carefully and snuggling into his shoulder, “it’d be fun to take the boys camping, don’t you think? So we have to get you used to it. And we’ll get a newer tent with a mesh skylight roof.”

“Why couldn’t we just buy a camper?” He was teasing her. He’d do whatever she wanted to do, but she was wearing that intense look again and he loved it.

“Do you know what those gas-guzzling things cost?” she asked. “And it’s not the same. It’s like dragging your house to this beautiful, remote spot and taking up all the space.”

“Or we could just live in a remote spot, and go to the city for vacations.”

She made a pensive sound. “But that wouldn’t be good for the boys. Adam’s going into high school, and he’ll have to be close enough to go back and forth for activities. And he’ll want to be where the girls are. And you’re forgetting that I have to be near a hospital.”

Jason sighed dramatically. “All right. I might be able
to learn to like camping if there’s such a thing as a
double
air mattress.”

She kissed his throat. “There is. But this wouldn’t be quite so uncomfortable if you had sleeping bags.”

“Silly me,” he said. “I had a bed. I thought that was enough.”

She slapped his chest- “You never told me what your agent wanted this morning.”

He smiled in the darkness. “He wanted to tell me that my publisher liked my book idea so much they want to buy it even without an outline.”

“Of course,” she said on a little yawn. “You’re brilliant. Everyone knows that.”

“I thought you didn’t like my stuff.”

“I didn’t like you poking fun at good nutrition,” she clarified. “And I guess I didn’t like that you had kids and family and stuff to write about, and I was alone. But now that I have it, too, I’ve changed my mind.”

“Wise woman.”

“I hope you’re getting good money for it,” she said. “Considering you’ve already made the bestseller list.”

He told her what Barclay offered.

“What?” she demanded, using a hand on his chest to push herself up. The mattresses parted and she fell into the hole again.

He helped her up, laughing. “And the first thing I’m going to buy is a double air mattress.”

“I’m going to be…” she breathed in disbelief “…a millionaire’s wife?”

Propped on his elbow, he pulled the blankets back up over her. “After Louie and the IRS get their share, it won’t be quite so impressive. And the boys need new shoes for school…”

“Jason!” she put a hand over his mouth and pushed
his head back to the pillow with it. She leaned over him, her eyes enormous. “You got a multimillion-dollar book deal! Think about it! I can’t believe you’re so casual. You’re one of the elite! Your life will be forever changed.”

He combed the hair back out of her face with his fingertips. “It will,” he said. “But the money didn’t do it.”

He saw her soften and felt her melt against him. She knew what was on his mind. “It didn’t?” she whispered.

“No.” He drew her down to him. “You did it when you said you’d marry me.”

Dealing with one’s mortality is hard. Dealing with one’s stupidity is devastating. It’s unsettling to live in a body for thirty-seven years and discover that somewhere along the way your brain has become disengaged. The only comfort is that you’re not alone in the malady.

—“Warfield’s Battles”

T
he boys came home late Sunday afternoon flushed and excited. Buttercup bounded around and between them as they ran up the walk with their gear.

Matt made his own way with remarkable dexterity, his bag slung across his chest.

Patsy and Ben offered quick hugs and apologized for being later than they’d planned. “We were having such a good time,” Patsy said, then winked at Jason and Laura, “and I imagine you did, too.”

“We did,” Jason said, and hugged Laura to him. “I’ll call you this week to…chat.”

Patsy’s eyes widened, probably guessing why he wanted to talk. But she kept it to herself, realizing he’d want to tell the boys first.

She hugged Jason again, then Laura, then all the boys, then Ben.

He looked surprised. “What was that for?”

She grabbed his arm and led him toward the car, blowing kisses over her shoulder toward the boys. “Does it have to be
for
something?”

“It usually is. You aren’t in overdraft on the Visa again, are you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t…?” The car door slammed on his interrogation and they drove away with the spewing of gravel and a tap of the horn.

Jason told the boys over dinner that he and Laura were getting married. They were delighted but not surprised.

Adam had only one concern. “We aren’t going to have to wear tuxedos, are we?”

“Ah…we haven’t gotten that far,” Jason replied, “but I don’t think so.”

“We’ll have to get a bigger car,” Eric said. “‘Cause we’ll probably have more kids, right?”

“Ah…”

“Can we get more boys?” Matt wanted to know. “We don’t have to have girls, do we? I mean, ‘cept for Laura.”

“I don’t know, guys,” Jason said frankly. “That’s all for the future. Right now, we just wanted you to know that we talked it over while you were gone and Laura loves you as much as I do, so we’re getting married.”

Adam nodded. “That’s cool. Did Brianna call?”

“Yes. I left her message on your pillow.”

His plate empty, Eric held it out to Laura. “May I have seconds, please?”

With a slightly concerned glance at Jason, Laura refilled Eric’s plate. The boys did seem pleased, she
thought, but she had expected a little more discussion, a lot more comment.

“Know what?” Matt asked.

“What?” Laura asked, sure Matt would have something to say.

“I met this kid at the boats who has to use crutches all the time!”

Deflated, Laura bucked up to listen attentively. “You did?”

“Yeah. He has…” He turned to Adam for help.

“Muscular dystrophy,” Adam supplied after swallowing a mouthful of pasta.

“But he went hiking with us!” Matt said, his eyes wide with admiration.

“And he fell down, too,” Eric said. “Scared everybody.”

“But
he
wasn’t scared,” Matt said. “He just waited for his dad to help him up and he kept on going.”

Laura sent Jason a teasingly reproachful look for his complaints about outdoor exercise. “He sounds like a brave little boy.”

“He was cool.” Adam crossed his knife and fork over his empty plate. “He said he used to be afraid of stuff at first, but that watching everybody do the stuff he wanted to do was worse than trying it himself and falling down.” He gave Matt an affectionate shove. “It made dufus here want to hang glide, but Uncle Ben said no.”

“Really.” Jason grinned at Laura. “We’ll have to send Uncle Ben some cigars. The publisher bought my book while you were gone.”

“All
right!”
Adam leaned toward Jason. “Then I can have those new Solar shoes with the spring toe and the lights?”

“Yes, you can.”

“And that ATV with the…?”

“No.” Jason didn’t even wait for him to finish.

Adam subsided, obviously not seriously disappointed. “May I be excused to call Brianna?”

“Sure.”

He carried his plate to the counter, detoured to hug Laura, then disappeared into the hallway, the dog at his heels.

Eric and Matt left shortly after, Matt getting to the sink on one crutch with his plate in his free hand, then picking up the other crutch on the way by, pausing to hug Laura, then following his brother.

“Do you think they’re upset?” Laura asked Jason anxiously as she poured more coffee.

“Of course not,” he answered with a frown. “Do they seem upset to you?”

They didn’t at all. “No, but I thought they’d want to talk about it a little more. You know…ask questions, tell us what they think.”

“They ask questions when they don’t understand,” he said. “Or when they’re worried. Obviously they’re comfortable with the idea and it poses no threat to their peace of mind. You got hugged more times than I did.”

She grinned, a little relieved. “That’s because I feed their voracious little faces.”

Eric reappeared in the doorway. “How come the tent’s up in the backyard?”

“Laura and I camped out last night,” Jason answered with an innocent expression. Laura tried to copy it.

Eric stared at him. “You camped out? You don’t even like to sit on the porch.”

“Well…Laura’s converted me.”

Eric grinned. “Way to go, Laura. Can me and Adam sleep in it tonight?”

“Sure.”

Jason spent the following morning in his office, trying to analyze his book idea down to its component parts and nail down chapter subjects and a logical start-to-finish progression.

To do that he was forced to remember the depression of the initial high-cholesterol diagnosis, the decision to meet with Laura as Barry suggested and their unsuccessful first encounter.

He smiled over it now, then laughed aloud as he remembered the rubber food. Then his mind’s eye showed him that grave expression on her face when she’d explained food exchanges to him, and somehow he couldn’t laugh with quite the same unbridled amusement. He’d come to know that urgent sincerity and appreciate the way she applied it to loving his children, and to
making
love with him.

He was thinking about where to go with the book from there when he heard a small, subtle sound. He looked down to find Sergei in a crouch several feet away from him. He reached a hand down to coax him closer. “Come on, kitty,” he wheedled. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

Sergei stretched his neck toward him to sniff his fingertips. Jason felt as though he’d found the secret to world peace.

The phone rang shrilly and Sergei bolted out of the office.

“Warfield residence,” Jason said as he picked up the receiver. “This is Jason.”

“Mr. Warfield, this is the lab at Cape Shore Hospital,” a quiet professional female voice said. “Your housekeeper said it would be all right to call you at this number. We’ve been trying to reach you to reschedule your blood tests.”

How appropriate to the moment, Jason thought. His appointment with Laura that fateful day had turned out so well that he almost couldn’t fault the lab for its confusion.

“I took the tests,” he said amiably. “If you’ll check your records you’ll discover that my cholesterol was high and that Dr. Driscoll referred me to a nutritionist”

“Right,” the young woman said, “and then we realized we’d confused your tests with someone else’s and explained the problem to Dr. Driscoll and Ms. Price. I’m so sorry.” There was a pause. “Didn’t either of them tell you?”

There was another pause on Jason’s end of the connection while he lowered his feet to the floor and sat up, an unsettling sense of foreboding trickling over him.

“Ah…I don’t understand.”

What did this mean? The lab had discovered that he
didn’t
have a life-threatening problem and neither his best friend nor his lover saw fit to tell him? That couldn’t be.

Well, Laura hadn’t been his lover then. But she’d kissed him and told him she cared about him. And that she loved his boys.

“Um…it seems that your blood tests showed normal blood cholesterol levels, but since there was confusion in the first place, we thought it best to retest everyone involved.”

“When did you discover this error?” he asked.

“Well…almost two weeks ago now. I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but we kept expecting Dr. Driscoll to reschedule you.”

Anger began to seep up from deep inside him to meet the foreboding. They clashed right around his perfectly healthy heart with a clang that jarred him out of his silence.

“I…I’ll call to reschedule as soon as I get home,” he said. “Probably Thursday.”

“Great. Thank you, Mr. Warfield. And again, we apologize.”

He hung up and stared at his notes on the book, trying to relate the loving gestures he’d recorded to the woman who hadn’t told him that the tests had been a mistake, after all.

He didn’t even stop to consider why Barry hadn’t told him. His mind wouldn’t let go of the question of why Laura hadn’t. And then he remembered all the times she’d told him how lonely she’d been, how disappointed she’d been in all the men in her life from her father on.

Then along he’d come, earnest and lonely himself, and a product of the old school taught to revere women, to treat them with care—but still enough a product of his time to know that in all the ways that counted, they were his equal in every way and to treat them accordingly.

Added to that he had charming children who’d fallen for her immediately, and exciting work and just enough of the spotlight to add spice to whatever appeal he had on his own.

Anger was now allied with disappointment and a sense of betrayal. Her willingness to deceive him was one thing, but by keeping silent about the tests, she’d also deceived his children. He found that unforgivable.

The book he’d proposed was a lie.

Laura rapped on Jason’s partially open door, the stems of a bunch of asters clasped in her fist. “Did I leave that pottery jug in here?” She pushed her way in, scanning desktop, tabletop and windowsill until she spotted the fat blue jug she’d put in here several days ago filled with marigolds, which now looked faded in the light of this
token from the boys. “Look what Adam, Eric and Matt picked for me!” She snatched the jug from his referencebook shelf, so thrilled with the boys’ gift that she didn’t notice Jason’s expression. “Isn’t that sweet?”

She came around him to check his coffee cup, and finding it empty, picked it up with the hand that held the flowers.

“I guess you were right about them being comfortable with the idea,” she rattled on. “Matt says…”

She stopped abruptly as she looked up, prepared to leave him to his work, and saw him watching her. His expression was dark, almost hostile, the angular lines of his jaw set in a hard line. She could only stare at him for a moment, trying to figure out where that look fit in with the delicious harmony of the cabin.

“Work…not going well?” she asked finally. The tension in him seemed suddenly to fill the room, and the pressure of it made her voice sound frail.

“It
was
going well,” he said. His expression didn’t change.

Was she supposed to know something she didn’t? “What happened?” she asked.

“Cape Shore Hospital called me,” he replied.

Her eyes widened.

Aha! Jason thought. He had her. He waited for a confession.

“Did they find something…worse?” she asked, taking a step toward him.

Rage shot up in him, punching him to his feet. “Laura, you know damn well they didn’t find anything worse!” he said, shouting at her. “They didn’t find anything at all! My tests were mixed with someone else’s—a detail you failed to mention to me.”

She stared at him, trying to make sense of what he’d
said. But she couldn’t. “What?” was all she could think to ask.

“My tests…” he said slowly, kicking his chair out of his way. It rolled back several yards. “Were confused with someone else’s. The lab says they told Barry and they told you—two weeks ago. Do I have to ask why you didn’t tell me?”

Laura put his cup and the blue pot down because she was beginning to suspect what he was suggesting, and she was afraid she might throw one or both at him. She yanked the old flowers out of the pot, put them in his coffee cup, then put her flowers from the boys in the pot for safekeeping.

Then she folded her arms and looked back at Jason over the angle of desk that separated them.

“Why don’t you tell me why you think I would have done something so cruel, not to mention so unprofessional?”

“Because the mistake brought you what you’ve always wanted,” he replied stiffly. “A man who adored you, children who worship you, the end of loneliness. And when you found out that the thing that brought us together no longer applied, you decided to keep it to yourself rather than risk losing all that.”

She stared at him while she thought that through and decided that it probably would have been a good argument if she’d never made love with him. Certainly he couldn’t have experienced what they’d shared and believe that she’d use him for personal gain? He couldn’t possibly have seen the depth of what she felt for his children and be convinced that she would trick them by letting them believe their father had health problems when she knew he didn’t?

But he did. It was written clearly on his face.

She felt as though the floor of her world had rotted out from under her and left her suspended over the life she’d known before Jason and his mixed-up lab results had walked into it. She put a hand to her waist where pain was knotting and drew a deep breath. There was a small gasp in it, and she saw something shift in Jason’s eyes at the sound.

She reached for the phone on his desk and stabbed out a number.

“Cape Shore Hospital,” a cheerful voice replied.

“Dr. Barry Driscoll’s office, please,” she said. Her throat was so tight, she was surprised to hear that she could speak.

Barry’s receptionist answered, and Laura identified herself and asked to speak to him.

“Hey!” his cheerful voice said almost immediately. “How’s the vacation? The nurses have a pool going for a wedding date.”