33 The Return of Bowie Bravo (12 page)

“He sounds like a wise man.”

“He was. I miss him. So much.”

She dared to suggest, “He sounds like a good father, like the father you never had.”

“Yes, he was. And I’m grateful to have known him, to have had him in my life, even if he was gone way too soon.” Bowie picked up the water glass and pushed back his chair. “I’m also glad that we had this talk.”

“So am I.” And she was. Maybe too glad.

He took his glass to the sink, crossing behind her to get there. She kept her gaze straight ahead, didn’t allow herself to turn and watch him. He was leaving, going back across the yard to his half of the barn. She reminded herself that it was past time for him to go.

“Don’t forget your Swiss Army knife.” She picked it up from the table and stood.

He came back in three long strides and he was right there, beside her. She stared up at him, feeling dazed and a little disoriented, like a woman suddenly roused from a deep sleep. All the breath seemed to have fled her body.

She made herself draw in air. And that only brought the scent of him into her. Spring wind. Wood shavings and evergreen. So tempting. So well-remembered.

“Thanks.” He took the knife from her hand, his rough fingers cradling hers for a sweet, endless moment, sending hot flares of sensation zipping up and down her arm.

She wanted him to let go, step back, give her room to gather her defenses, to regain her certainty that nothing intimate or crazy was ever going to happen between them again.

And at the same time, she knew she yearned for exactly the opposite: for him to move even closer, for him to put his strong arms around her. For the feel of his perfect mouth again. At last. Touching hers.

After all these years.

He whispered, “Glory?” using her name to frame the impossible question.

That was her final signal. This was the crucial last moment. Her response was the key.

A simple no. The slightest shake of her head. It wouldn’t have taken much. She knew him better now than she had the day he came to her out of the storm. She knew the strong, determined man he had become.

Such a man didn’t need much urging to do the right thing.

She should give him that urging. She was all too achingly aware of that, of what she
should
do.

And still, she held off. She let the last moment draw out forever.

She gazed up at him, transfixed, while somewhere in the wiser part of her mind, she frantically checked off the reasons why she needed to call a halt right now. She had loved him beyond reason and he had broken all his promises. He had deserted her. And there had been Matteo who was so good to her. Good
for
her…

But Angie was right. Matteo was gone.

And Glory was still very much alive.

And lately, in the darkest part of the night, when she reached out her hand and touched only the cool, empty sheets on the other side of the bed, it wasn’t Matteo she was reaching for.

“Bowie,” she whispered. It was her answer. It was her
yes.

He recognized it as such. He framed her face in his two rough, warm hands. He said her name again. “Glory…” He said it raggedly that second time, as though he was pulling it up from the deepest part of himself.

And he lowered his mouth to cover hers.

Chapter Nine

I
t was the wrong thing, to kiss her.

Bowie knew it.

He kissed her, anyway.

Because her eyes told him yes when she whispered his name.

Because she was everything he’d ever wanted, everything that mattered, everything he’d thrown away in his sad, desperate spiral down to his own personal rock-bottom. She was all that he’d known he had no right to ever hold again.

He found her as he remembered, apples and rain and unimaginable sweetness.

Just as he remembered…

Only better.

It was the wrong thing, to kiss her. And yet how could it be wrong when it felt so exactly, perfectly, essentially right?

She lifted her small, soft body toward him and he felt her breasts against his chest, fuller than they once were. So tempting. Already, he was growing hard.

Her cool, tender hands came up. She laid her palms against his chest and then slid them up, until her fingers linked around his neck. Her mouth opened beneath his on a long, sweet sigh.

It was too much. It was everything. Glory. In his arms again at last.

He gathered her closer, deepened the kiss, easing his tongue in where it was so warm and wet. She moaned a little. He drank in the sound.

But it had to end. It couldn’t go anywhere.

He understood that. His blood pounded in his veins and his body ached to be with her, the way it used to be, all those years ago.

Used to be…

And never would again.

When she brought her hands back down between them and laid them against his chest once more, she hardly exerted any pressure at all. He could have easily overridden her, could have pretended she wasn’t asking him to stop.

But he didn’t override her. He was long past that kind of pretending.

It tore his heart in half to do it, but he lifted his mouth from hers.

Those big eyes regarded him, so soft. Brandy-brown. “Good night, Bowie.”

“Good night.” He let her go.

“When?”
Angie demanded. “When did this happen?”

Glory ate a potato chip, slowly. “Last Wednesday night.”

“Bowie kissed you—he actually
kissed
you?”

“That’s what I said.”

“A
week
ago? And you never even
called
me?” Angie asked the two questions at full volume.

It was safe for them to speak above a whisper today. They were sharing lunch at Angie’s house, down by the river. Brett was at the clinic and the kids were in school. Sera was sleeping in a nest of pillows in the living room.

Glory picked up a triangle of chicken-salad sandwich and started to take a bite. But she couldn’t. Her sister’s eyes reproached her. She set the sandwich down. “Look, I shouldn’t have let it happen. And it’s not going to happen again.” Angie only stared at her. “You can just stop looking at me like that, please. It was just…one of those moments, you know?”

“One of what moments, exactly?”

“We were talking.…”

“You and Bowie, you mean?”

Glory nodded. “
Really
talking. About the past, you know? About his moving to town and about Johnny. And then, Bowie got up to go and…oh, I don’t know. It just happened.”

“Let me get this straight. You kissed Bowie for the first time in…what, seven years?”

“Actually, it was seven years and three months ago. In October. October 28, to be specific. It was the day before he went behind my back and told my parents I was pregnant to get them to put the pressure on me to marry him. I refused to kiss him ever again after that. I mean, until last Wednesday.”

Angie gave her one of those way-too-knowing looks. “October 28. Amazing. You still remember the exact date.”

Glory put up a hand. “Don’t say it, please.”

Angie put on her innocent look. “Say what, Glory?”

Glory picked up her sandwich again, resolutely bit into it and chewed. Thoroughly. “It’s been a week since it happened, okay? And there has been nothing—nothing—since then. I see him two, three, even four times a day. I have breakfast and dinner with him. Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Angie echoed, but in such a way that she implied
everything.

“Nothing.” Glory said it again because she knew that Angie was not getting the point. “It was…a fluke, that’s all. Just one of those things.”

“Was it good?”

“What do you mean was it good?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

Glory ate another potato chip. And another after that. Angie watched her, a relentless kind of watching. Finally, Glory cried, “Yes! All right? It was good. It was
really
good. And I want to kiss him again. I want to do a whole lot more than kiss him. I seriously do.” She stuffed yet another chip in her mouth and chewed it furiously. “I don’t know what it is about that man. He’s my weakness. He’s always been my weakness. All these years, everything that’s happened, and still the feeling is there. I mean, come on, that can’t be normal, can it? Everybody knows that the whole sex thing lasts only for so long between two people.”

Angie was smiling much too sweetly. “So they say.”

Glory groaned. “I’m happy for you and Brett. I mean, it’s great if you two can keep the passion going.”

“Yes, it certainly is.”

“But I would just as soon
not
have that going on with me and Bowie.”

“Well, maybe the feeling will go away. It could happen.”

“Hah. That’s not what you think, Angie. I can see on your face what you really think.”

“I’m only trying to be supportive.”

“Hmm. He’s teaching Johnny to whittle, did I tell you that?”

“Johnny hasn’t been back to the clinic for more stitches, so I’m guessing that’s working out all right.”

“Johnny loves it. He’s always in the workshop lately. As soon as he gets home from school, he rushes right through his homework so he can get out there and be with Bowie—who is whittling him a train set. Did I tell you that?”

“Yeah, you did.”

“Ah, that’s right. I guess I did.” Glory stared out the window near the table. The sky was gunmetal gray and a blanket of snow covered the ground. Sometimes lately, it seemed that it had been winter forever, that the spring would never come.

Angie asked, gently, “Is Johnny calling him dad yet?”

“Not yet. It will be a while, I think. But I can feel it coming.”

That night, after Johnny went back across the yard to the house, Bowie watched for a light in the kitchen window. The light would mean Glory had come downstairs for a last mug of tea.

She came down most nights. He would see the light in the window and make himself wait to go inside and brush his teeth until at least ten minutes after the light went out. He’d been doing that—making himself wait to go inside at night until she was settled upstairs—the whole time he’d been staying in the workshop.

The past week, though, he’d wanted to go in while she was still up, to talk to her, just the two of them, with honesty and frankness, the way they’d finally done last Wednesday night.

The night he’d kissed her.

The night she’d kissed him back.

The kiss had been amazing. Too bad it had also ruined everything. He knew she regretted it. He’d seen regret in her eyes every day since then, at breakfast and again at dinner—and any other time of the day he happened to be in the same room with her. He’d seen her regret and her worry that he was going to try and kiss her again.

Well, he wasn’t. No way. Even though the memory of that kiss would probably dog him to his grave—the memory of that kiss, and all the kisses they’d shared way back then.

He loved kissing her. He loved the feel of her small, soft body against him, the taste of her mouth, the scent of apples and rain.…

Too bad. Memories would be all he would have from now on and he accepted that.

He’d also decided that he couldn’t sit out here every night and wait for her to go to bed, all the while wanting only to be in there with her. It was silly.

Stupid.

Why shouldn’t he go in and visit with her? They were two adults who had shared a kiss when they probably shouldn’t have. It wasn’t the end of the world.

He had things to tell her. He needed to talk with her.
They
needed to get over it and move on.

That night, the minute the kitchen light popped on, he left the workshop and headed for the house. No hesitation. He wasn’t giving himself a chance to reconsider. He mounted the back-porch steps with determination and made no effort to be quiet about opening the back door, shutting it behind him and marching down the short hall to the kitchen.

She stood at the peninsula of counter next to the cooktop wearing jeans and a soft-looking sweater the reddish-brown color of cinnamon, fixing her tea. When he entered the kitchen, she whirled to face him. Her eyes went wide and worried.

“Bowie!” She actually put her hand against her throat the way women did in the movies when they were afraid the bad guy was going to jump their bones. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

Just say it. Just spit it out.
“Glory, look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kissed you. I was way out of line. It won’t happen again, okay?”

She gulped. She actually gulped. And she still had her hand at her throat. “Uh. Yeah. Sure.” She sucked in a quivery breath. “Okay…”

“I mean that. I swear that.”

“And I…I hear you. I do.” Slowly, she lowered her hand to her side. Was that a good sign? How the hell would he know?

Keep talkin’, buddy.
“Because I really do want us to get along. To be friends, like we agreed that night at Charlene and Brand’s house. I want us to be able to, you know, talk to each other like two grown-up people who have to raise their kid together, even if they
aren’t
together, even if they…” Crap. What was he babbling about? He was ridiculous. He didn’t need to
keep
talking; he needed to shut the heck up. “Crap.” He said it out loud, as if that was going to help the situation any. And then, before she could ask him to please just leave, he marched past the kitchen area to the breakfast nook where he yanked out a chair, dropped into it, braced his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. “What am I talking about?” he asked no one in particular. “I have no idea what I’m saying.…”

A silence ensued. A really long, painful one. He refused to look up and see the disgusted expression on her face.

Finally, he heard her footsteps. She pulled out the chair across from him and sat in it. He heard her put down her mug of tea on the table. “Bowie.” Did he hear a hint of laughter in her voice?

“Oh, great,” he muttered. “Now you’re laughing at me—not that I blame you. I am pretty damn laughable.”

“I am not laughing at you. And come on, you can’t sit there with your head in your hands all night.”

“Watch me.”

“Come on…”

He let his hands drop to the table. “What?” he demanded.

Glory met his eyes and told herself she did not feel bad because he was sorry that he’d kissed her. No, not at all. It was better that he regretted it. She was more than happy to hear that he wasn’t going to try and kiss her again.

“You’re right,” she said. “We should get past this.”

His scowl fell away. “You mean that?”

She wrapped her hands around her mug of tea and took comfort from the warmth. “What you said is true. We have Johnny to think about and we need to get along.”

“Whew. That is so good to hear.”

She picked up the mug, took a careful sip. “Let’s put it behind us.”

“Agreed,” he said.

“Good,” she said.

“It’s…the best thing.”

“You’re right. It is.…”

Another silence. The really awkward kind. Finally, he spoke again. “Did you hear that I made an offer on the Halstotter place?”

“No. When?”

“Yesterday.” He lifted one sculpted shoulder in a half shrug. “I wanted to be the first to tell you, but around this town, word gets out fast.”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“Well, now you have.”

She said, “That’s a nice property—a beautiful house, and that great big hangar of a shed. Lots of level ground and easy to get to.” She’d been inside that house once, for a dinner party, when Matteo was still alive. It had a gorgeous modern kitchen, both a living room and a family room and five large, bright bedrooms. “Did they take your offer?”

He chuckled. “Are you kidding? In this market? They jumped on it. I heard back from Tillie Manus this morning.” Tillie was a local Realtor. Almost everyone in town used her when they bought or sold property. “My offer has been accepted.” He looked so pleased about it.

“Wow,” she said, injecting a lot more enthusiasm than she felt into the word. Lord. She was going to miss him when he went. And not only because she’d come to count on him and all the help he gave her around the house. Oh, what was her problem, anyway? It was good, she reminded herself, that he would soon be moving to his own place. He couldn’t stay out there in her barn forever. The guy had a right to get on with his life. “When will you take possession?”