The Touch of Magic Series, page 125
That always made him take a deep breath. Two babies. Even if she didn’t want him around, he sure didn’t want to go it alone with two tiny babies for a whole weekend. That thought made him shudder. What if he did something wrong? He’d never been around babies and figured he was pretty much guaranteed to do something wrong. The thought petrified him.
He didn’t get to dwell on any of it for long, because there she was, in his doorway, nervously fidgeting with the knob, and finally entering and shutting the door behind her.
Wanting to tell her how beautiful she looked, Max bit his tongue. He was sure she didn’t want to hear it. She never wanted to hear it. She just tried to avoid him. Her normal aversion made him very curious why she was seeking him out now. The last time she came in here and closed the door behind herself, she’d laid her pregnancy on him like a mic drop. So what was she up to now?
Her words gushed out. “About what I said about you having a girlfriend...” But after the initial burst, she trailed off.
Max crossed his arms and didn’t get up from his seat, still pissed about that. If she wanted to bring it back up, so would he. “Oh, forget about it. I’m sure I seem like the kind of guy who sleeps around behind his girlfriend’s back all the time.” That came out ruder than he meant, but he had been thoroughly insulted.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He turned the chair around and began working at the small table behind him. If that was all she had come for, then she could leave.
“I do worry about it.”
“Don’t.” He tried again to wave her away without looking at her.
But she didn’t give up easily enough. “I wanted to apologize for a lot of things.”
At last, he turned slowly around and looked at her. This he wanted to hear. Maybe things were looking up. However, in the past, his hopes hadn’t served him all that well where Sloan was concerned. So he reined them in and waited.
“I’m sorry about that remark about you having a girlfriend and I’m sorry for way back in Chicago…that I suspected you.”
Leaning his seat back, he crossed his arms again and tried to be nonchalant and forgiving. “Not a big deal. I would have suspected me, too, given the circumstances.”
Her eyes searched until she held his gaze, and he didn’t like it. It felt like she could see into his soul. Clearly, she couldn’t, because she would have answered what she saw. She would have said either I love you, too or I don’t love you, so please stop trying. But she said neither of those things. She just looked sad. “I let everyone think that maybe you had. There were rumors. I never heard them directly, but I know they were around. I got Sheila to cough up a few things she had heard. And I should have told them that it wasn’t you.”
“You could tell them now.”
“I already did. A while ago. I gave serious information to a few key gossips. They spread the word. No one thinks it was you anymore. They haven’t for a while.” She managed the smile only on one side of her mouth.
He dug, hoping for more. “What exactly did you tell them?”
“That you didn’t do anything to me, that it was all Dylan. That I was confused. I went back and told them that this is your baby, and that it’s twins.” As he watched her hand fluttered and strayed, calming only when it found a home against her belly. She still hadn’t moved from where she leaned against the closed door. “It ought to feed the rumor mill for a while.”
“Wow.” That was a lot to digest. She would keep the gossip flowing for months with all that. He pushed his fingers through his hair. It must be standing on end. Now what?
“Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t think.” She was nearly in tears. Tears?
“Didn’t think what?”
“That you might not want everyone to know that these are your babies. Maybe you wanted to see someone else or...”
Now he was around his desk, his hands on her shoulders and he wanted nothing more than to hold her against him and let her cry about whatever she was crying about. “There isn’t anyone else. And I’m proud that this is mine.” His hand, too, found a place flat against her stomach. “I’m glad we’re having twins. You didn’t say anything wrong.”
She leaned toward him just the slightest amount and that was all he needed. His breath fell out of him and she was there, in his arms, where she should be. He held her close enough to feel her everywhere, wondering at the weight that always seemed to find a welcome home inside him whenever she was touching him. It was only part of how he knew she was the one. He felt grounded—fully here—when she was with him. He wondered if she felt even part of that, or if it was all in him. “I don’t know how to convince you that I’m a nice guy—”
“I know you are.” She sniffled.
“Because you don’t seem that convinced.”
Sloan blinked back a few stray tears and smiled up at him. “It took me a while to figure it out. I never pick the right guy.”
“I know. You told me.” His fingers found her temples, and his thumbs pushed back her hair revealing luminous, wet, blue eyes that pulled him under every time.
“Huh?... Oh, Chicago.”
“Yeah.” He tucked her head under his chin and inhaled the mixed scents of her shampoo and perfume. Her arms circled around his waist, and he hadn’t felt anything so good in too long. “I’m not Joe, or Craig, or even Jason Winsomething from third grade.”
“Fourth.” She looked up. “You know about Jason?”
“Yeah.” He wanted to tell her about the house. That she could have her own room if that’s what it took to get her there. Max wanted her to know about his plans, for the house, for a swing set, and ultimately a beautiful blond wife named Sloan. But that was probably too much to dump on her right now. So he toned it down. “I just want you to know that I won’t run away or run around. I’ll take care of you.”
She buried her face deeper into his chest and hugged him closer. It was the opening he needed. “I’ll marry you.”
Well, that was like throwing ice on it.
She jerked back. She glared daggers, furious for some reason he couldn’t fathom. “I can’t marry you, Max. Stop asking.”
She shoved at his chest, catching him off guard and making him stumble back a few feet. With that, she was out the door, gone before it had even stopped its swing. And the front of him, where she had been pressed just moments before, had gone cold.
CHAPTER 24
“He asked me again!” She wailed into the phone. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Rae, I can’t handle this.”
“Can I suggest something stupid?” her sister asked and even understood when Sloan sniffled a nodded answer. “Maybe you marry him. Maybe he’s the one.” When Rae said it, it sounded so very real. Reasonable even. Like Sloan could just waltz back in and say I made a mistake when I said no, I meant to say yes.
But that would never work. “Why would I do that? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in love with a man who doesn’t love me back.” Sloan sniffed. “He doesn’t really want me, he just doesn’t want his kids going back and forth between two parents. If I’m being honest, that just makes me want him more.”
“It will all be okay. You can handle it.” It seemed that she had heard that line a lot from Rae and Lisette lately. Usually, it made her feel better, but not today.
She railed against fate some more. “I finally fall for a nice guy, a good man, and he doesn’t love me.”
“I think my plan is actually really solid.” Sloan could hear her sister’s fingers snap over the telephone line and she wondered if her sister was casting a small spell. But Rae’s voice came through again before Sloan could ask. “Marry him, seduce him. End of story, happily ever after.”
“Seduce him?” That was the worst idea she had ever heard. She wailed. “I’m huge!”
“He slept with you in Madrid. I know you. He’ll fall in love with you. He will. I have no doubt you can pull this off.”
“I was only very large then. You wouldn’t believe how fast I am getting bigger.”
“I can only imagine, but the thing is: he keeps asking. If it was only about convenience, he would have come up with another idea by now. You said he’s smart. But he keeps asking the same thing. You can do this. Marry him.”
“And when he realizes that he can’t fake it anymore and cheats on me?”
“Then you divorce him, take half of everything he has, and sleep with every hot hunk who comes along on the weekends he has the kids.”
Sloan couldn’t help it. She bust out laughing, loud guffaws that cracked her up, until—without warning—they turned into tears. Just the thought of Max telling her he’d never loved her and he’d just done it for the kids was heart breaking. She tried to brush it off. “I’m just more emotional now.”
“No joke. I am a basket case, and I only went off my birth control.” She heard Rae talking to Sam in the background. “No, I’m fine, really.” Then back into the receiver “See? I’m crying for you right now, and Sam’s all worried.”
Of course. Because Rae had someone who loved her, someone there to worry about her. No wonder she thought Sloan should just marry Max, to Rae it had become unfathomable not to have that kind of love.
But Sloan knew what it was to not have it, to know that you’d never had it. And to know that, given your track record, you probably never would. “You don’t know what I did, Rae.”
“Uh-oh. What was that?”
She told her sister how she’d scryed about her perfect man. She wasn’t proud that she’d sunk low enough to look him up, but she had to confess. “He’s in Chicago, Rae! And I’m stuck here in L.A. tied to Max for the next twenty years. Oh, and I have such a huge crush on Max that I probably wouldn’t know my dream man if he walked up to me and told me he was the one. So how am I supposed to find him?”
Sloan was practically wailing again by the time she finished her confession-slash-diatribe. But it was the silence on the other end of the line that made her stop. “Rae? What are you thinking but not telling me?”
“Sloan, you found Max in Chicago…”
“No, Rae, he’s from here.”
“And you know as well as I do that ‘Chicago’ doesn’t mean he lives there or grew up there or any of that stuff. It just means that ‘Chicago’ is related to finding this guy.”
This time it was Sloan that was quiet. She hadn’t thought of that. Still, as she turned it over, tried to remember what exactly she’d scryed for, she tried to make it make sense. Could Max be the guy?
“I don’t think so, Rae. I work with Max all the time. Why wouldn’t I have found him here?”
“You did. You fell for him before that trip.”
“Then the scrying wouldn’t have said ‘Chicago.’” Her heart was tripping along, missing beats. Could Rae be right? Could it be Max?
“You did get together with him in Chicago. Maybe the answer you got was about the event, not where he was from. It sure changed everything.” Rae’s voice sighed through the information, washing over Sloan as a possibility she hadn’t considered. “I can’t say this idea is right, but I’m not convinced I’m wrong either, Sloan. Maybe you just found him in the most unconventional way. You certainly do have feelings for him. I can feel them from here!”
There was a smile in Rae’s voice on that last line and it put a matching one on Sloan’s. They had the same smile. She decided to consider it. She could scry again, get out her pendulum, ask more specific questions. But she wasn’t ready to deal with the answers tonight. As happened so often since she got pregnant, she was quickly overtaken with exhaustion. “I’ve got to go, Rae. I am sooo tired. I feel like lead!” She tried to sound casual. Like she wasn’t on the verge of way too many tears.
They said goodbyes without Sloan giving herself away. At least she hoped she’d pulled it off. Sometimes Rae let her get away with it, sometimes her sister called bullshit. Luckily, Rae just told her goodnight and to sleep well.
Trudging up to her bedroom, fighting to keep the tears from falling yet again, she did what she had decided she wouldn’t do. She admitted to herself that she was in love with Max Summerland. Whole heart. Whole soul.
She was so screwed.
Sloan lay down on the bed and stopped fighting it. Fat tears fell until the pillow was soaked. There was nothing she could do about any of it.
CHAPTER 25
Flats. Sloan needed to remember to wear flats. “Thank you again, guys!”
Sheila and Vanessa had picked up the tab for lunch. Sloan wouldn’t have ordered so much if she’d known they were going to do that, but she had to admit she’d finally been worth the cost. For the first time in her life she could eat the entire portion of seafood pasta at Gino’s. However, she could no longer walk the four blocks back to the office without her feet hurting. She’d tried not to show it, smiling and chatting all the way back, not wanting her coworkers to feel guilty about her own error.
At last she made it the final few steps into her office, flipped the blinds closed, and kicked off the so-painful shoes. As she put her feet up, she could almost feel the sound of relief slip out of her. Ahhhhhhh. But she quickly groaned and dropped her feet back under the desk as the unwelcome knock came at the door. Argh! “Come in.”
“Hey.” Max’s head peeked around the door, then he let himself in, casually closing it behind him. “I saw you going by. You know, you’re five months pregnant, you shouldn’t be wearing heels.”
“Trust me, I am painfully aware of that fact now. It was a miscalculation that I won’t be making again.”
“Are you okay?”
When she shrugged and offered only, “I will be,” he lowered himself onto the stool she had been using to support her feet.
“Here.” Reaching down, he pulled both her feet up into his lap, despite her protests. Gently tugging her wheeled office chair closer, he moved her until he held each foot in one hand, and began rubbing his thumbs along the arches of her feet.
“Ohhhhh. Oh. My. God.” Her head tilted back and it felt so good it almost hurt.
He smiled. A slow, soft, sweet, too-sexy-for-my-own-good, Max Summerland smile. Sloan melted right there in her swivel chair. In her head she let out a series of moans…followed by curse words. She just couldn’t afford to get in this deep with this guy.
“Feel better?” He kept rubbing, and Sloan nodded as she kept her eyes closed. Strong fingers found her ankle bones and pushed against the soles of her tired feet.
“Mmmmmm hmmmmm.” Rae’s words sprang to her mind. Marry him. She could have this all the time. Right?
But she couldn’t. In hear head, she could see the look on his face—the one she imagined—when he’s realized that she’s truly in love with him, and he thinks she’s pitiful. Or worse, because there would come a time when Max would come home smelling like another woman. Sloan could almost feel her heart break, just from her imaginary scene when Max would tell her he’s fallen in love. With someone else. When he never loved her. No thank you.
“I found a few houses.”
That snapped her eyes open, but she tried to sound unconcerned. “Oh?”
“I’d like you to come look at them with me.” His thumbs kept an even pace back and forth across her feet, dulling her thoughts.
“Max,” She couldn’t really lean forward for that ‘piece-of-my-mind’ look she was going for, not with her feet in his hands. She wasn’t about to give that up, she could feel it everywhere, and it felt sooooo good. “It’s your house, Max. You don’t need me to see it.”
“I’d like you to.” His hands snaked around her ankles again, applying gentle pressure and releasing the stress there. “Your children will live there. You should be concerned.”
“I am concerned.” Sloan took a deep breath and even the tone of the words conveyed almost the exact opposite of concern. How was she supposed to think when her crush was rubbing her feet? And even if she wasn’t being lulled by a massage, how was she to explain that she’d like nothing better than to go house hunting with him? For a house for their family. But not like this. They weren’t a family. Not the way she wanted. “But it’s your house. It really isn’t any of my business.”
With a nod he again moved his hands a little higher on her calves. “I see. So if you don’t come, then you are almost saying that I don’t have any right to see your place, or to be concerned about it.”
She didn’t even have to nod in response to that one. He couldn’t come to her place. Not unless he was moving into the other side of her queen-sized bed. She had a wiccan altar and spell set in her second bedroom closet. She was going to have to move that and make that room into a nursery. Shit. There was a literal Pandora’s box in there. She wanted to keep the lid on her thoughts and her newfound religion. But her voice had been run off by the feel of his fingers on her feet. She quickly shut the lid on that.
His tone was pleading. “Please. Come see the houses. I assume that your place is fine. I’m not going to weasel my way in. But I’ve got to move somewhere larger and I could really use some help.”
Did he really think she would fall for that old help-me line? Wow. She must have seemed dumb.
He smiled again. “Sloan, really. I have no idea how to go about buying a house to raise kids in—”
“Just get what you would have liked to have as a kid.” What kind of brush-off did the guy require? It was like she was diabetic and he kept offering her candy and cake. If he kept at this, she’d tumble one day, head over heels, then where would she be?
But Max completely missed the cues on her inner turmoil. He just laughed and kept feeling up her feet. Something about way he touched her skin made her feel like he was enjoying it as much as she was. She had to be making that up though. It was horribly difficult to pay attention to the words coming out of his mouth. “I don’t think anyone is selling houses with hidden passages and firepoles that slide from the bedroom right down to breakfast.”
