A Child Of His Own, page 17
“I’m sorry for the way I reacted without hearing you out,” she said. “Who am I to judge you?”
He fan the back of his finger tenderly across her cheek. “You don’t have to apologize to me for that. You had every right to react the way you did. And as far as judging me, hell. Dory, that only makes you human. We like to think we’re better than that, but sometimes we just can’t help ourselves.”
Like the way he couldn’t help himself from wanting her all over again, not just for the incredible pleasure of her body, but for the comfort he found in it. He might never be able to shout it to the rest of the world, but in the quiet of the woods, he had spoken to her about his memories, confiding only to her the pain and frustration of the past five years.
To speak of it had somehow freed him. The memories would always be there; like the scars of a battle wound, they were a part of him now. But for the first time he felt that he could live with them.
With her cheek still tingling from his touch, Dory rose and went in search of her clothes. She dressed with her back to him, knowing that he was watching her, and blushing with embarrassment even though he had already done so much more than look.
“We should be getting back,” she said.
With those few words reality hit Ben like a bucket of cold water. He had taken a chance in opening himself up like he had, risking not only his future with his son, but any chance at happiness with Dory.
What was he thinking? What happiness could there be with Dory when he was incapable of giving her the love she needed and deserved? She deserved so much more than the basic coupling he could provide. Despite the passion that had raced unchecked between them only minutes ago, in the wake of their lovemaking, he was feeling just as much the loner as ever, just as destined to live without love in his life. Having lost almost everything because of his past, he saw little hope in the future.
He pulled his jeans up over his slim flanks, wondering yet again if there was any place for him in her life.
He shrugged into his denim shirt, pushing the sleeves up past his elbows as he followed Dory out of the woods.
Back at the carousel, Dory cast a quick glance around. The car wasn’t there. Thank goodness Martin wouldn’t be back for a while. She would have had a heck of a time explaining the disarray of her hair and the smell of crushed grass that clung to her.
“I have to go back to the house,” she said nervously. “You can just do whatever it was you were doing.”
“The roof. I was repairing the roof.”
“Right.” She turned to go, wanting to say more, but not knowing what.
“Dory?”
She turned back, her heart beating a little faster. “Yes?”
“Are you still going to make that special dinner Martin was telling me about?”
“Oh, the dinner.” She had completely forgotten. “Why, yes. I mean, sure. That is, if you still want it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
Inside, her heart was tripping over itself. “Martin and Jason won’t be there.”
“I know.”
She wet her lips. “All right.”
But neither of them moved.
In a ragged breath, he urged, “You’d better go. Because if you don’t, I may not be able to wait until dinner to have something to eat.”
Dory’s eyes flew open, partly out of shock, but mostly from pure delight. The thought of being devoured by him like some deliciously sweet dessert sent shivers down her spine. It was only the sound of approaching tires on the dirt road that prevented her from responding to it and sent her hurrying back to the house.
Chapter 15
The kitchen was bathed in the dim yellow glow of the overhead light and scented with the aroma of bread browning in the oven.
The table was set for two. Candles burned in cut-crystal holders atop a pretty tablecloth of Brussels lace that had belonged to her mother.
Dory bit her bottom lip nervously, wondering if the effect was too romantic. Twice she blew out the candles, only to light them again.
She felt like a schoolgirl on a first date, hands fumbling, her breathing slightly erratic as she hummed nervously to herself, checking and re-checking everything, including her own reflection in the glass of the cabinet door.
It was silly to think that this was a date, she told herself. Yet she could not deny that it had all the earmarks of one—the sweaty palms, the nervous sweeping aside of the dark locks that curved toward her face, the continuous wetting of her lips that were anxious with anticipation.
She was grateful that Martin had the wherewithal to sense what was going on, and the decency to not embarrass her by mentioning it, although she had suffered the sarcastic questioning that afternoon about the dinner she was planning, and a bemused look on his face a short while ago when he and Jason left to go into town.
“Why aren’t you and Ben coming with me and Pop-Pop, Mommy?” her son had asked her, and she hadn’t known how to respond to him.
Her inability to answer was due partly because she knew of no way to explain it to a four-year-old, but mostly because of the way he had said it. You and Ben. All in the same breath, as if they were one thing. It had sounded so right that it stunned her.
As she moved about the kitchen, she repeated it to herself, slowly first, then faster, until the words ran together in her mind to form a single sound, a hum that reverberated through her entire being.
She imagined that this must be what it was like to live with him, not just as boarder and employer, which, in reality, was what they were, but as, well, husband and wife, for instance. She would cook his breakfasts and sometimes make a special dinner. Certainly not extravagant gestures, but it was, after all, the little things that meant the most. At night she would sleep beside him, safe and secure, reduced to unspeakable pleasure by his lovemaking. And together, they would love Jason.
More and more Dory’s thoughts turned toward her family, and the deep, abiding love she had for her grandfather and her son. But there was someone else she had come to love just as strongly. In her mind she could even picture him around the house, doing the things that she imagined a man of the house would do, like fixing leaking faucets and building tree houses.
She couldn’t pinpoint precisely when she had begun to think of Ben that way, although she knew the exact moment she had fallen in love with him.
It was the night she had stood in the doorway to his room and observed him with her son. There had been a tender awkwardness about him, as if he had no clue how to relate to a four-year-old. In retrospect, his nervousness was understandable, knowing that he hadn’t spent much time around children before meeting Jason.
Yet despite the awkwardness she had sensed from the doorway, he had exhibited a warmheartedness toward Jason that had touched her, and in that moment, she knew she loved him.
She remembered thinking that a man who could display such gentleness and sensitivity toward a child would make a good father. Now she wondered whether the tender feelings she saw him display toward her son were more than just those of a man being nice to a precocious child, or whether, more likely, he had already begun to suspect that Jason was his.
And it wasn’t until much later that Dory had begun to suspect it, as well. It was funny, but the prospect no longer terrified her as it had in those first days and weeks of discovery. Perhaps it was knowing what she knew about him, the tragedy and trials he had endured, or the wild heights of passion he lifted her to, or the fact that she had come to love him with every desperate craving in her soul. But the fear was gone. Now, the only thing Dory feared was losing him.
But it wasn’t just her feelings for him that had changed over the last few weeks. Somewhere along the way she had begun to think of Ben as Jason’s father. It began with the trip to the attorney’s office, when the stark legality of it hit her. Prior to that, she had reacted solely with emotion. But that afternoon, sitting in the stiff-backed chair before the attorney’s desk, she’d had to deal for the first time with the very real possibility that Ben was Jason’s father.
That’s when her mind had taken over, trying to come up with ways to deal with the situation. She had analyzed it from every possible angle, considering everything that might or could happen. Or so she thought. One thing she had never considered was that she might fall in love with him. And what good did that do? she asked herself. She wasn’t at all certain of his feelings for her or what future there could be with a man who couldn’t love.
She wasn’t aware that her movements had come to a halt as she contemplated the crazy turn her life had taken. She stood motionless, filled for the first time with a sense of hope.
“Regrets, green eyes?”
Dory whirled around to the deep timbre of Ben’s voice from behind. He was standing in the doorway as calm as could be. He was wearing what looked to be a new pair of jeans that were slung a little low on his hips. The sleeves of a shirt she’d never seen him wearing before spanned the muscles of his upper arms, which were folded across his chest.
Dory lowered her gaze shyly, and admitted, “No. No regrets.”
He came forward and caught her under the chin with the tip of his forefinger and guided her face toward his. “I’ve dreamed of you like this,” he whispered.
She blushed furiously.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said with a soft chuckle. “Although, to be perfectly honest with you, I wanted to make love to you the minute I saw you. No, I meant here, in the kitchen.”
“The dining room’s a mess,” she said apologetically. “Jason’s toys are all over the place. I didn’t think you’d mind eating in the kitchen.”
“No, it’s perfect. I like it like this, just you and me, here in the kitchen, doing the kind of things that most...” He caught himself in the nick of time about to say “married people do,” and made a simple transition to “...that most people do.”
He had come to love this kind of life, the straightforward simplicity of small-town living, neighbors helping neighbors to get by, the respect a person earned from being decent and honest and hardworking. Those were the things that mattered to him now, the things he wanted in his life as badly as he wanted Dory and Jason.
Revealing his secrets and his hurts to her had brought a strange sense of calm to his turbulent soul. If only he could somehow instill that same feeling into his heart. Perhaps then the emotional walls would crumble and clear the way for him to love Dory in a way he had never loved a woman, fully, completely, with every fiber of his being. Until then, he continued to yearn to be a part of her life.
Only the impending court date gave him hope. If there had been any doubt in his mind before as to whether he could be a good father to Jason, there was none now. He suspected that Dory knew it, too.
He sensed her slow relinquishing of the hold she had on Jason, yielding a part of the boy over to him. Any day now, the courts would reach a decision. For the first time Ben felt confident that it would be favorable. But more than that, the unsealing of the adoption records would prove once and for all that what he had felt in his heart from the beginning was true, that he was Jason’s father.
Yet sharing custody of Jason would constitute only a partial victory for him. He wanted more. Having had an intimate taste of Dory and the life she offered, he wanted it all.
Caught in the heat of Ben’s stare, she felt herself weakening under it. She would have given herself to him right there, right then on the kitchen floor if he wanted it. She could feel the eagerness burning within her. Could he see it in her eyes? She didn’t care.
She thought he was about to kiss her, and tilted her face up at him as her lashes swooped down over her eyes.
“Smells like something’s burning,” he said.
Dory’s eyes snapped open like shutters on a windy day.
“The oven, Dory. Something’s burning in the oven.”
In that instant she smelled it, too.
“The bread!” she cried.
Grabbing an oven mitt from the counter, she raced to the stove and pulled open the door. Waves of smoke hit her in the face as she fumbled to get the pan out.
The bread smoked in the baking pan, crusty and burnt beyond recognition.
Dory laughed sheepishly. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Let me give you a hand with that,” he offered.
“There are plastic bags in the pantry. You can put it in one of those for now and I’ll give it to the birds in the morning.”
He was about to move, when the shrill sound of the smoke alarm startled him.
“Where’s the circuit breaker?” he shouted above the noise.
“In the basement, next to the hot water heater. But—”
He ran from the room and downstairs to the place she said. Yanking the door open, he scanned the board. Nothing was marked. He began throwing switches, sending various parts of the house into darkness, and muttering an oath under his breath at his inability to find the right one. When every switch had been thrown and the sound still screeched from above, he raced back upstairs, taking the creaking basement steps two at a time.
At the doorway to the kitchen, he froze. There was Dory, standing on tiptoe on one of the kitchen chairs, arms raised above her head in an attempt to dismantle the smoke alarm. She worked swiftly and deftly to unwind the wires. Within seconds the screeching stopped and the room was plunged into the acute silence that comes in the wake of loud, protracted noise.
It reminded him of the silence that accompanied lights-out in prison, when the din of the day was suddenly hushed, and he was plunged into the awful dead quiet of the night.
Why did he have to think of something like that now? And then he realized it was because the person he’d been then, and the person he was now, were the same. Those terrible days helped make him the man he was today. And the woman standing tiptoe on the chair in the middle of the room helped him to live with it.
Dory looked down at him from her vantage point, and said, “I tried to tell you, but you ran out of here so fast.”
“Does it always go off like that?”
“Only when I burn something in the oven.”
He came to stand beside the chair and raised his arms to help her down. Her hands went to his shoulders for support as his fingers encircled her waist and he lifted her effortlessly to the floor.
“And that’s the only way to fix it? You have to get up there?”
She shrugged with resignation.
“I’ll have to do something about that,” he said. “I’ll get on it first thing in the morning.”
“What are you going to do, rewire the whole house?” she teased.
“If I have to.”
The possessiveness of his reply made her look at him curiously. “That would take some time to do, wouldn’t it?”
He regretted instantly the impulsiveness of his reply. To imagine himself a part of all this was one thing. To say it out loud was quite another, especially when he had no reason to think that he would ever be.
“You’re right,” he replied instead. “In a couple of weeks it’ll be Memorial Day and you won’t be needing my help around here any longer. But I’d suggest you hire yourself a good electrician and get the place rewired.”
The lighthearted atmosphere of just minutes ago vanished, and a sudden whiff of tension permeated the kitchen as strongly as the aroma of cooking food.
What he didn’t say was that he might very well be around after Memorial Day. The fact was, he would be there until word arrived that their petition had been granted by the court. But even though the words remained unspoken, their shadow stretched over the room.
Dory turned her back to him and busied herself at the stove, stunned by the reality of their situation. They had made love and revealed their most painful, innermost secrets to each other, and still there remained the unresolved issue of Jason, like a chasm, dividing them right down the middle in spite of all her dreams to the contrary.
There was no ignoring the inevitable for either of them. As they waited for the decision from the court, the tension grew thicker and more palpable in spite of everything, and they both knew that whatever that decision was, their lives would be changed by it forever.
“Who are we kidding?” she heard him mutter across the room.
“You’re right. This dinner was a stupid idea.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” The dinner was a part of it, a part of the dream she had indulged in a moment of weakness, but she didn’t say that to him. “You’re right about that, too. Any way you cut it, the truth hurts.”
He didn’t like his meanings analyzed or second-guessed. How could she know what he was feeling, how deeply he longed for the kind of life she offered and how his own lack of belief stood in the way?
“What truth is that, Dory?” Something in his tone should have warned her that things were about to get more complicated.
“That you’ll be leaving as soon as we hear from the court.”
There, it was out. The words that hovered like phantoms all around them were finally spoken.
He smiled caustically into her eyes that were fixed defiantly upon him, as if daring him to refute it.
“Well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?”
Those beautiful green eyes looked at him petulantly. “You mean it’s up to the court, don’t you?”
“We both know in our hearts what the court is going to do. And when those adoption records are unsealed and we both learn the truth of what I’ve been telling you all along, we also both know that what happens after that will be up to you.”
“I won’t stand in your way if you want to petition the court for visitation rights. Is that what this is all about?”
His eyes were fixed tightly on her pale face. “I won’t need your permission for that. That much will be up to the court.”
“Then what are you talking about?” she demanded. The color rose to her cheeks as she grew more impatient and scared.
“I’m talking about courage, Dory. The courage to admit your feelings to someone else in spite of the consequences. The courage to admit the truth.”
