The One That I Want (24 page)

I nodded.

He exhaled slowly. “It feels like coming home.”

Chapter Sixteen

“You slept with him?” Shar cried on the phone. “Oh, my God, Julia. I’d been wondering. That’s…massive news. It changes everything!”

“Yeah, I know.”

Only, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her how much I wished we hadn’t done it, wonderful as it was. How there was no stuffing back into a box the emotions Dane had dredged out of me. How I no longer had the tight grip on reality that I’d worked so hard to accept, and I’d lost the comfort of the fantasy, too.

“So, wait,” my friend said, incredulity, wonder, and dawning comprehension in her voice. “Does that mean there are
other
things you haven’t told me about this week? That ‘news article’ was—”

“Oh, Shar. It’s such a disaster. Dane’s so upset.”

For a long, long moment, there was no sound on the other end of the phone line.

“Where’s he now?” she asked finally.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “I have no idea.”

~*~

As I later explained to Shar, Friday had started out well enough. In fact, I thought it was pretty damned marvelous at the time.

We’d been awakened initially by the ringing of the house phone, but the number on the Caller ID wasn’t one I’d recognized (Analise and the camp counselors always called my cell phone; I knew it wasn’t them), so I just let it go to voicemail. No messages were left, and we fell back asleep.

Dane and I snoozed on the sofa bed in the basement and, when I woke up later that morning, he trailed a line of butterfly kisses down my bare neck and shoulder.

I shivered under his touch, grabbed him to me, and we made love. Again.

And, again, it was spectacular.

He’d barely entered me when I started moaning, pushing him deeper, craving more. Everything about our connection had happened too fast, in my opinion, but I didn’t have many other sexual experiences with which to compare this one. I’d only slept with Ben a handful of times when we were dating in college, and with Adam, of course. Dane was my third.

“So, what was it like for you, once you hit it big, having all of these women throwing themselves at you?” I asked him. “Since, as you claimed, you couldn’t get any dates with girls during high school. The attention must have been…overwhelming?”

He was lying on his stomach next to me with his arm across my belly. A thin sheen of sweat covered his body, and I could hear that his breathing was still a little labored in the afterglow of the moments before.

He raised his head and squinted at me. “What’s this leading to?”

I smiled. “Just one of those post-sex discussion questions. I mean, we can talk about sports instead, if you’d rather. Chicago has a lot of sports teams.”

He laughed. “Fine. Yes, it was overwhelming. Difficult to figure out who likes you for you and who just wants a conquest.” He flipped to his side, facing me. “You know in the film
Dirty Dancing
, when Patrick Swayze’s character is talking to ‘Baby’ in bed about when he started to be known for his dance skills, how women suddenly wanted him? How they smelled so nice and were throwing cash his way, and he thought at first that they really liked him, but they were just using him?”

“Yeah.”

“It was like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “When I was eighteen, I thought it was the greatest acting perk in the universe.”

“When did that change?”

“It took a few years, Julia.” He rubbed my belly with the pads of his fingers and then began to slide them upward, circling my breasts. I could feel myself wanting him again. Already. The unnerving intensity of that desire had me asking another question.

“So, did you keep track, um, of all of those women? Like a…tally? Or a chart or something?”

He pulled his hand away from my chest and tilted his head at me. “A chart?” Then he collapsed onto the pillow and started convulsing with laughter. “God, you’re funny.” He shook his head. “No. There were no graphs, no charts, no tally marks on my wall or notches in my bedpost. And, before you ask, the answer is ‘no idea.’ I have absolutely no idea how many women I’ve slept with. These last few years have been different. I could tell you exactly when and with whom. But there’s a good decade-long period where those details are pretty fuzzy.”

“Huh. Not even a range? Like one hundred to two hundred? Or seven hundred and fifty to a thousand?”

He stared at me, astonishment etched on his handsome face. “We are so not having this conversation.”

“But other women you’ve slept with must have asked you about it, too, right? I can’t be the first one who’s ever wondered—”

He groaned comically, cradling his head in his hands for a second and then covering his ears. “La, la, la,
laaaaa!
” he sang. “This topic.
Never
. Ends.
Wellll
.”

I giggled and poked him in the ribs. “Wimp.”

He pulled his hands off his ears. “You have five seconds to ask something else, or I’ll find us a new conversation.”

“Be that way.” I ran my fingertip down his body until I reached his hip. “Tell me about your tattoo, then. ‘CATS.’ I don’t remember reading anything about your having been in the show on Broadway or anywhere else but, apparently, you have secrets, so…”

He grinned. “Yeah, a few.” He paused. “The letters don’t stand for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, although I’ve often wished I were a ‘Jellical Cat,’ so I could sleep all day, play around all night, and go to a big ball. The nine lives would be nice, too.”

“Are they initials, then?” I guessed.

He nodded.

“A woman’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Someone you had a relationship with?”

“Someone I’m
trying
to have a relationship with,” he countered.

I pulled back a little. “Oh. I’m—I’m sorry. In that case, I must be prying. I shouldn’t have—”

He reached between us and lightly tapped my lips, stopping me from saying more. “Julia, please listen to me. I have some real feelings for you. Actually—” he paused. “If I’m being completely honest, I’d have to admit outright that I’m starting to fall in love with you.” He paused again and studied my reaction to this statement.

I’d felt my mouth fall open as he said it, but my brain was so locked on the words “I’m starting to fall in love with you” that I had a damn near impossible time trying to process anything else. I couldn’t come close to speaking.

Dane Tyler was falling in love with
me?
No. That couldn’t be true.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to say anything about that yet. But, because I want to be open with you, I’m going to tell you a few private things. Only, you have to promise me you won’t talk about this with anyone else, all right?”

“I…um…”

“Please
promise
me, Julia.”

I managed to nod. “I promise.”

“Good. CATS stands for Cathleen Aria Tyler Stanton,” he said. “My daughter.”

Somehow, my brain managed to process that. “W-What? You’re a father? But when? I mean, how old is she—Cathleen?”

“She goes by Cat and she’s sixteen now. She lives with her mother in New York. She’s who I’m going to see at the end of the month.”

“I’ve never read a word about this. As far as I know, there’s never been anything written on…on you with a daughter.”

“No, there wouldn’t be. At least, we’ve worked really hard to keep it out of the press. Cat’s mother, Marissa Stanton, is a classically trained singer, and she’s been in a bunch of musicals, on and off Broadway. She got pregnant when we were both twenty-three, and Cat was born when I was twenty-four. Marissa wouldn’t let me give her my last name, let me acknowledge her publicly, or even let me be listed as the father on her birth certificate. She insisted that line be left blank.”

His jaw tightened as he told me this. All these years later, I could tell he was still hurt and angry about it.

“But she did, at least, include Tyler as part of Cat’s name,” he said. “And we had a lawyer discreetly draw up the papers for a special trust for her. Marissa wanted me to sign away rights to see her in exchange for no child support payments, but I insisted on both. Cat and I Skype every week and we get together every few months. No set dates, just whenever we can. Always out East, though. Marissa won’t let her come to California.”

“Oh, Dane. That’s got to be really hard.”

“It is. But I don’t regret her. Not for a second. The risky behavior, yes, but not the baby. My little girl, who’s not so little anymore.” He stared off into the distance for a long moment. “The hardest part is that Marissa has convinced Cat that she shouldn’t tell anyone I’m her dad because my ‘reputation’ isn’t the best. And there have been so many times when she’s tried to turn Cat against me. The woman keeps clippings of every bad thing the press has ever written about me, whether it’s true or not, so I have to be pretty careful. Once Cat is eighteen, though, she can decide for herself if she wants to acknowledge our relationship openly. But, legally, I can’t say anything about it in public until she does.”

The magnitude of what he’d just told me slowly began to sink in.

Dane’s ability to relate to my daughter with such ease made sense now. He had a daughter of his own. And his understanding of the difficulty I had in separating from Analise made sense, too. He’d experienced similar pangs of separation pain and more.

I also recognized these days of insularity for what they must be to him: Not just the two of us simply being caught up in each other, as might be typical of couples who were actually falling in love, but as an exercise in extreme discretion.

With the notable exception of the camp visit, which I was still hearing about from Yvette and other more casual acquaintances (most who’d heard through the Mirabelle Harbor grapevine and the gossip of social media that Dane and I were there together), we hadn’t interacted much in public at all.

Yes, there was that quick stop at IKEA.

And, yes, we’d dined out a couple of times.

But, for the majority of the hours we’d spent together since Sunday, we stayed in and traveled a path of triangulation between private residences—namely, his brother’s apartment, his hotel suite, and my house. It gave the illusion of movement without much real travel.

Funny thing was, I was never big into going out on the town. I appreciated our quiet fun. But it was one thing to personally select introverted behavior and another to have so many consecutive days of seclusion chosen for me. I hadn’t even realized it was happening, and I didn’t know whether I should be upset by that or not.

“Your daughter is very lucky to have you in her life, despite her mother’s resistance,” I told Dane, and I meant it sincerely. “You’re doing your best to be there for her.”

“Thanks—” he began.

The house phone rang. I wrapped myself up one of the sheets and picked up the line in the basement. Shar.

I cleared my throat. “Hey, how are you?”

“Haven’t talked to you in a couple of days, girlfriend. What’s up?”

“Oh, I’ve been in and out…”

“Alone?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“So, by these brief, vague responses, do I guess correctly that you have company?”

“That would be true,” I said.

“The
same
company that you’ve apparently been keeping all week? People have been talking, you know. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram.”

Damn that social media.

I sighed. “Anything I should worry about?” I asked her. A few feet away, Dane raised a curious brow at my words.

“Hmm. Not that I know of,” Shar said. “But I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. And when your
company
goes home, you need to give me a call and fill me in. On everything. Got it?”

I smiled. “Yeah, yeah. Talk to you later, Shar.”

“You’d better,” she said and then clicked off.

“Your friend Sharlene?” Dane guessed.

“The very one.”

“She’s rather well known in town, right? The center of Mirabelle Harbor society?”

“Uh, sure, I suppose.” I hadn’t really thought about that but, yes, Shar was a popular person in town. “Why?”

Dane opened his mouth to explain, but the house line rang again. Weird.

I checked the number on the Caller ID display. Didn’t recognize it.

“I don’t know who that is,” I told Dane. “Probably just some telemarketer. I’ll let voicemail pick it up.”

But the caller didn’t leave a message.

Whoever it was immediately tried calling a second time, though. Then a third. Freaking persistent.

I rolled my eyes at Dane.

Then my personal cell phone rang and I felt a momentary panic. Very few people had my cell number. Maybe it was someone I knew after all? Maybe it was an emergency?

“Sorry,” I said to him. “Guess I’d better get it or they’ll keep interrupting us.” I answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Julia Crane?” a woman with a very matter of fact voice replied.

“Yes. Who’s calling?”