Blame It on Paradise (20 page)

* * *

Jack lay on the gray rubber yoga mat, in the aptly named Savasana, or corpse position. It was the position Jack began every yoga routine in, but this morning he couldn’t force himself out of it. He’d spent his first night without Lina since her arrival in Boston, and it had been long. Time had taken on a gooey quality, the minutes sticking together rather than separating into orderly clicks marking the passage of the seconds separating him from Lina. After fidgeting on his sheets all night, he’d been glad to see the first glimmer of dawn, because it meant that he’d gotten through the night without her to face a new day, to start over with a fresh slate. He’d lumbered downstairs, rolled out his yoga mat, and struck the Savasana.

And he hadn’t been able to move out of it. He lay on his back, his feet and knees slightly apart, his arms out and palms up. He tried to focus on centering his breathing and relaxing his body, but all he could think of was Lina and how she had looked at him when she’d said her goodbyes. There was nothing fresh or new to look forward to, now that the sun was rising. There was only the solid weight of loss and the refreshed memory of what had happened the night before.

He’d witnessed the death of whatever respect Lina had for him, followed by the birth of renewed disappointment.

Maybe that was why he couldn’t relax enough to move past Savasana.

The sun’s light was breaking into glittering shards upon the ocean when Jack managed to lift himself from the floor, roll his mat back up, and shuffle back upstairs.

He crawled into bed, his back to his million-dollar ocean view, and tugged the duvet up to his chin.
This shouldn’t be so hard,
he told himself.
She’s only in Boston.

Boston was close, but Lina still too far away. More than miles separated them this time, and he felt farther from her than he had when he was the one who’d left. Jack flung off the covers and scooted out of bed, a surge of indignation spurring him into starting his day.

“It’s not my fault she left,” he resolutely stated to the empty room. “She shouldn’t have sprung it on me…” But on the heels of that came a niggling truth: the news wouldn’t have been sprung if he hadn’t been trying to sneak up on her, to surprise her.

He sank heavily to the edge of his bed, catching his face in his hands. He missed her so much he ached with it, and the saddest part of it all was that she wasn’t even gone, not really. What would he do once she, and their baby, actually returned to Darwin?

The thought gave Jack a stomachache that nearly sent him back under the covers. For only the second time in his career, Jack took a sick day, and once again it was because of Lina.

* * *

“I see you managed to find reasonable housing,” Jack said, greeting Lina at the door to the penthouse suite of the Harborfront Regency.

“There was an actor here when I checked in last night, but apparently a guest on Coyle-Wexler’s tab trumps an actor who received the suite compliments of the hotel.” Lina stepped aside, allowing Jack to enter. Her eyes raked over him, noting his blue jeans and plain dark T-shirt.

“Do you know who the actor was?”

“I believe the hotel manager said it was Zander Baron. I’m told he’s quite popular.”

“I’ll say,” Jack agreed. “Anderson loves Zander Baron movies.”

“I’ve never seen one,” Lina said.

“He’s got one playing now,” Jack told her. “It’s probably just a lot of car chases, gunplay and sex with one sexy broad after another, but I could take you to see it, if you’re interested.”

Lina threw an amused smile over her shoulder as she led Jack into the bedroom instead of the office. A colorful assortment of thick folders, foreign newspapers and magazines and travel documents littered half the bed. The covers were rumpled on the other half, and judging by her light white cotton pants and camisole, Jack suspected that she had only just rolled out of bed. The luggage under her eyes matched his, which led him to believe that she’d done little sleeping in the big bed.

“Have a seat, if you’d like,” Lina offered with a tip of her head toward the sitting area of the room. She scurried around the bed, clearing away her papers but not before Jack caught a glimpse of the front pages of
La Repubblica
, which Jack knew to be an Italian newspaper, and
El Universo
, which Jack assumed came from a Spanish-speaking country that he couldn’t guess. He wondered if she had plans to go away again soon, and the question was on his lips when Lina, slipping out of her camisole, rushed to him and planted her lips upon his.

“I knew you’d come,” she murmured against them as she threaded her fingers in his hair. “I waited for you all night. I can’t believe it took you so long!”

His arms flattening her chest against his, he sank onto the nearest surface with her, which turned out to be the compact loveseat. The hard cushions with their stiff damask covering had little give, and Jack’s long body settled onto it uncomfortably as Lina wrapped herself around him, inviting him to fill his hands with her.

Her happiness at his arrival translated into eager desire. Refusing to break their kisses to watch what she was doing with her hands, she blindly worked at the button-fly of his jeans. She reminded herself to debate later which made her happier—that he had come to her, or that he had actually taken a day off work to do it.

He wants me,
she told herself. She gritted her teeth, savoring Jack’s touch upon her most sensitive places.
He wants
us.

Jack’s entire body ached from the effort it took to stop himself from pitching her upon the bed and diving into her. Lina rewarded his restraint after freeing him and straddled him there on the loveseat, but even when she lay temporarily sated atop him afterward, Jack wanted more of her.

“I came over here to talk, and look at us,” he chuckled.

“We talked.” Lina nuzzled his neck with her nose. “We just didn’t use words.”

Jack stroked her hair, neatly arranging it over her bare back. “You have an alarming effect on me, Ms. Marchand.”

“Good.”

“I spent most of the night tossing and turning and thinking about everything.”

Lina involuntarily stiffened. So far, Jack hadn’t said anything stupid, but his tone set warning bells ringing between her ears.

“This whole thing between us is still so new, and it came about so suddenly,” Jack went on.

She sat up, her shift in position giving him a lovely view of her. “What are you trying to say, Jack?”

The fear glittering in her pale eyes softened the hard delivery of her question, and shamed Jack into staring at her collarbones rather than her face when he spoke again.

“We both have complicated careers on top of everything else, and it’s going to be hard enough to balance a relationship involving just the two of us,” he continued, articulating his nascent thoughts about the pregnancy. “I meant what I said at the office yesterday. It wouldn’t have slipped out if it weren’t true. You and I need time to build on what we already have, and I’m not so sure about the wisdom of bringing a new life into it this soon. Maybe we should consider other options…
all
of our options…while we still have time.”

He raised his gaze to Lina’s face to see that she understood him perfectly. And her response to his suggestion was written just as clearly. Her mouth softened, her eyes glistened. A tiny muscle pulsed at the base of her jaw. She slightly bowed her head, and a lock of her hair fell to cloak half her face in shadow. She had the simple beauty of a somber Madonna, and Jack suddenly wished for a third leg with which to kick himself. Lina had told him that she loved him, and she hadn’t done it for any reason other than because it was the truth.

He studied her face, and picked out the faint scar left over from her daring rescue on Darwin. Jack wanted to kick himself once more. Lina had jumped into a killing sea to save someone else’s child. She would never, under any circumstance, dispose of her own.
Of
our
own,
Jack mentally corrected himself.

“I’m sorry.” He sat up and held her tight, peppering her with kisses and wishing that he could take back what he’d said. “We can do this. We can manage it.”

Lina gently pulled away from him. She retrieved her pants and camisole from the carpet and quickly slipped into them. After grabbing a brush from the massive dresser, Lina returned to the loveseat and handed the brush to Jack. She sat in the gap between his legs, using one of his thighs for an armrest. “You might as well make yourself useful while you try to talk me into considering
our
options,” she said icily.

“Forget I said all that.” Jack sat up a little straighter, using the armrest for back support. Never in his life had he brushed a woman’s hair, but he set about the task because it gave him another excuse to touch Lina.

“Oh right,” Lina muttered bitterly. “Instead of exercising our options, you’ve decided that we can ‘manage’ this baby. How do you propose we go about that?”

“I don’t understand why you’re being so hostile.”

“You want to discuss this as though it’s merely another legal matter for you to win at.”

“I don’t mean to.” Jack paused to collect a lock of hair that had strayed to fall alongside her face. The light from the tall, wide windows caught in her hair, making it crackle with bluish highlights. “This has never happened to me before, so you’ll have to forgive me for not knowing the precise way to react.”

Lina refused to let him off the hook. “How do you propose we go about managing this baby?”

“Well, first of all, you’d have to move here.”

“Here.” The word fell from her mouth with a dull thud. “To Boston.”

“Boston has some of the best doctors and medical facilities in the world.”

“As opposed to the tribal witch doctors who patched me up on Darwin,” she snapped.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But it’s what you think.”

Exasperated, Jack began brushing a little harder. “Darwin is a great place, but—”

“Then why don’t you move?”

“—it’s—what?”

“Move to Darwin.” She half turned. “Come home with me when the tea trials are complete.” The movement of Jack’s hand and the brush through her hair vanquished Lina’s frustrated anger, but reluctant acceptance of where she stood with him moved in to replace it when it took him a long time to respond.

“I can’t,” he said at last.

Lina bit her lip, pained by the way he’d rejected her plea with no thought at all.

Jack set the brush on a cloisonné end table before reaching around Lina to take her hands. “Even after the tea trials are done we’ll still have to evaluate how to proceed with the product. Reginald has two more acquisitions lined up for me, and—”

“You don’t have to feed me excuses,” she said over him. “You certainly don’t have to hide behind them.”

“They’re not excuses, Lina, they’re reasons.”

“Little difference.”

“They’re still legitimate.”

“Unlike our child.”

“Oh, come on, Lina.” He hugged her to his chest, fitting her head into the crook of his neck and shoulder. “That’s not fair. It wouldn’t do you, me or the baby any good to rush into marriage just because we accidentally made a baby.”

“I haven’t asked for a proposal. I’ve asked no more of you than you’ve asked of me. Why should I be the one to move here? Why can’t you move, or is your work that much more important than your child?”

“My work is what will have to support him,” Jack argued. “I won’t have my son grow up the way I did, wearing brand new secondhand clothes and eating no-name canned goods.”

With a grunt of annoyance, Lina threw off Jack’s arms and got to her feet. “You were clothed! You were fed! You had two parents and you were loved. That’s what’s important, you fool. Those are the only things you truly needed!”

“My child will know that I love him!” Matching her for volume, Jack stood to face her.

“Measured purely by the amount of money you spend,” Lina charged.

“Don’t start with me about money, Lina.”

“Don’t use that tone with me, Jack.”

He stopped short of wagging a finger in her face when he said, “Your self-righteous—”

“Not self-righteous,” Lina blurted, propping her fists on her hips, “just
right
.”

“Damn it, Lina!”

“Damn
you
, Jack, for being so blind!”

Jack stepped away from her, stopping only when he’d reached the windows on the far side of the room. He took a few deep, yoga breaths before continuing. “I didn’t come her to fight with you.”

Her arms crossed over her chest, Lina glowered at him. “Nor to fight for me, it appears.”

“I fight for you every day!” Jack whirled on her. “When people whisper about us in the corridors at C-W, or when my perverted colleagues share their sick fantasies at parties and when homeboys talk smack about you being with me. I fight! You don’t know what it’s like here for a couple like us.”

“If it’s so bad, why would you want our child to be raised here?”

Jack inwardly chastised himself for forgetting that she was a lawyer, and she could call upon reason to trump passion even when the arguments were personal. Well, he was an attorney too, and reminded her of it by saying, “Can you honestly tell me that there’s no bigotry on Darwin?”

She dropped her head and slowly walked to the windows. Darwin was paradise, but it wasn’t perfect. Errol Solomon’s family hadn’t wanted him to marry Levora. Not because she was African American, but because she was American. And in reviewing her own behavior, Lina had to acknowledge that she, like many of the islanders, had eyed Jack with suspicion because he was a foreigner. Suspicion wasn’t the same thing as bigotry, but the former had a way of leading to the latter.

Everything about his relationship with Lina had led Jack to do things he ordinarily didn’t, and shouting was one of them. He maintained a normal tone when he said, “If the baby is born and raised here, we can give him the very best start in life.”

“On Darwin, we can better insulate him from people who’ll hate him just because of the color of his skin,” she countered.