Exclusively Yours (12 page)

Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled onto her pillow, just as they had every morning she’d woken up alone.

She’d tried to convince herself she’d be okay. Rebelliously sleeping diagonally across the center of the bed, just because she could. A frilly pink bed-in-a-bag set she didn’t even like, but put on the bed anyway, just because she could.

Sometimes it worked well enough so she didn’t cry herself to sleep, but every morning when the time came to face the day alone, at least a few tears came. She’d even had to retreat to her bedroom a few times since they’d arrived, when being surrounded by happy—or at least not broken up—families was too much.

“You smell like dirty, wet dog butt!”

And her nephews were awake.

It was time to wash her face and brush her teeth so the fake smile she plastered on would be minty fresh. It was a role she’d gotten pretty good at acting out over the last three months—that of a middle-aged woman who was handling the demise of her marriage with dignity and strength.

Nobody had seen her lying on the cold tile of her bathroom floor after crying so long and so hard she’d been sick. Nobody knew she’d had to pull her car over on the way to the grocery store when the thought occurred to her Evan needed deodorant, followed by the fresh realization it wasn’t her problem anymore. He would have to buy his own because he’d left her.

“Oh yeah? Well you smell like sweaty balls!”

“Robert Joseph Kowalski!”

Terry sighed and mopped at her tears with a corner of her blanket. Time to get up and face being one more day closer to calling a divorce lawyer.

When she finally emerged from the camper, it was to find the locusts in full plague and her mother giving her the all-knowing, maternal once-over. She’d have to avoid being caught alone with the woman because she didn’t have it in her today to discuss any possibility of reconciliation with Evan.

She couldn’t say the words out loud.
He just doesn’t love me anymore and I can’t make him.

The familiar routine of feeding a horde of Kowalskis helped restore her equilibrium somewhat, but she was aware of a growing desire to slap Keri Daniels upside the head with the pancake skillet.

She thought she’d made peace with the woman, but watching her chat with Kevin and Joe so easily, their conversation punctuated with carefree laughter, was slowly killing her inside.

Of course Keri was fun. The woman had no responsibilities other than taking care of her own damn self. She didn’t even own a pet.

They wouldn’t find her so easy to kick back with if she had to nag them about dirty laundry and full trashbags and a garage so stuffed with junk she couldn’t park her car in it. Terry would be
fun
too if she didn’t have to run a household and do her job and stay on top of Stephanie’s doings and everything else that needed doing in the course of a single day.

“Setting somebody on fire with your eyeballs only works in the movies, Theresa,” her mother said.

Terry looked around, only to find herself stranded at the coffeemaker alone with her mother. Lisa was at the picnic table with the boys, fixing their plates and everybody else was eating.
Crap.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ma.”

“Don’t lie to me, girl. I see how you’re looking at her and it’s not fair. She’s not the reason you’re unhappy. That’s your own stubbornness.”

Was it a generational thing? “I didn’t leave him. He left me, so why do you keep blaming me for it?”

“I’m not blaming you. I’m disappointed that you won’t try to talk to him about it. Whatever’s wrong can be fixed.”

“I can’t…make him love me, Ma.” The hitch in her chest made her voice break and she focused on spooning sugar into her coffee so she didn’t totally break down.

“You just need to—”

“Stop.” Terry dropped the spoon with a clatter as her hands balled into fists. “I can’t do this here, Ma. Do you
want
me to fall apart in front of everybody? Do you
want
my daughter, who’s barely getting through this herself, to see me turn into a blubbering mess?”

“Of course not, honey, it’s just that—”

She walked away. It was all she could do. She walked around Mike and Lisa’s camper and straight to her own. She locked the door, sank down on the floor and cried.

“She refuses to even consider working things out with Evan. Sometimes marriage is hard and you have to work at it, but they’re not supposed to be disposable.”

“You need to leave her alone about it. She’s got that to go home to, so she doesn’t need it thrown in her face the whole time she’s on vacation.”

“Watch your tone, Joseph. I’m still the mother in this family, even if none of my rotten children think I know anything about life.” She folded her arms and gave him the same stubborn look she complained about in her daughter. “She’s unhappy and you know how she is. She’s going to make somebody else unhappy, too, and it’s not fair that she’s going to take out her temper on Keri.”

He shrugged, raising his hands in a
whaddya gonna do
gesture. “Keri can take care of herself. If there’s one thing I know about her and Terry, it’s not to get in the middle of them. If she gets sick of Terry’s shi…attitude, she’ll let her know. As for Evan, they’ll talk when they’re ready.”

“It’s been three months already.” A shimmer of tears gleamed in his mother’s eyes. “The longer it goes on, the harder it will be for them to work things out.”

“You can’t force it. All you’re doing is making Terry more unhappy and all the pushing in the world won’t make her do something she’s not ready to do.”

“You’re stubborn like that, too,” she said, slapping his arm. “All of you. You get it from your father.”

Joe grinned and wrapped his mother in a hug. “Just leave her be for a while, okay?”

After she nodded, albeit reluctantly and with a dramatic sigh, Joe wandered back to the action. The younger boys were dragging everybody’s gear out of the bins, while the older two were, under Kevin’s supervision, starting everybody’s machines and lining them up.

“You guys don’t even let breakfast settle, do you?” Keri asked from right behind him.

He turned, and then smiled at the sour expression on her face. “Daylight’s wasting.”

“You’re all sick, sick people.”

“Are you riding with me today or going solo?” Oh please, he thought, let her be in the mood to ride her own machine. If one scorching kiss in the rain had been enough to keep him awake for hours, mentally rewriting the ending of that episode, another day spent with her thighs hugging his ass would kill him.

“I’m going to ride my own. Since your parents are going, I shouldn’t be…what did you call it? LFD?”

He chuckled. “I’d never leave you for dead, babe.”

During the course of sorting thirteen helmets and goggles and twenty-six gloves, Terry rejoined the group. She was putting on one helluva show, but Joe was sure even somebody who wasn’t her twin could see she was acting.

She looked fragile. Brittle, even.

But she geared up with the rest of the family and they set off. After a lot of discussion, they decided to put Keri in line behind Terry because their machines were of a similar size. That way, Keri could watch her and take the same path. Joe would ride behind Keri, which meant, since her ATV didn’t have a passenger seat or cargo bag mounted on the rear rack, that he had an unobstructed view of her ass.

He’d enjoyed—and suffered—that choice bit of scenery for almost six miles before it all went to shit.

Terry drove into a sloppy, muddy-looking puddle and, instead of sticking toward the edges, she drove deep into the center. And high-sided herself. Hidden by the soup, a rock or a hard-packed mound of mud had hung up her ATV, lifting the wheels just enough to rob them of traction. She wasn’t getting loose without help.

He’d pulled up too close to Keri’s machine, so he couldn’t get around her unless she moved forward.

“Come give me a push,” Terry yelled over her shoulder and his stomach knotted up when he realized she was talking to Keri. Not gonna end well.

Before he could get her attention, Keri drove into the puddle.

Joe panicked, knowing he had maybe thirty seconds to choose between Keri and his sister. On the one hand, keeping his mouth shut wasn’t going to endear him any to the woman he was trying like hell to endear into his bed. On the other hand, she was going back to L.A. soon and Terry, who could be mean as a rabid wolverine, would still live two blocks from him.

Besides, they’d called a truce…hadn’t they?

Keri tentatively drove her ATV through the slop. The kids had all pulled up behind Joe, followed by Lisa and then Mike, and they all jumped off to watch the show.

“Keep coming,” Terry instructed. “Just bump into the back of mine and knock me loose.”

When Keri was a few feet behind her, Joe had a change of heart and opened his mouth, but it was too late.

Terry held the front brake and punched the throttle, causing the rear wheels to spin like crazy. Pluming up behind her came a massive, brown rooster tail of soupy muck, perfectly timed to douse Keri.

“Say cheese!” Bobby screeched.

“Oh,
shit
,” the three adults not in the middle of the muddle puddle said.

She peeled it off to wipe the grit from her mouth and then yanked her goggles off. Terry was laughing.

She could hear the cacophony of Kowalski kids behind her, and through her peripheral vision see Bobby jumping up and down with his camera. Great. One for the family scrapbook.

“What the hell, Terry?” Joe bellowed, and his reaction made one thing clear—Terry had showered her in muddy water on purpose. That bitch.

So much for their tenuous peace. Daring a look over her shoulder, she saw most of her audience enjoying various degrees of amusement, but Joe looked mad.

When he noticed her looking at him, he waved his hand. “Put it in reverse and back out.”

She’d back out, all right. Out of the mud and through the woods and back to the campground she’d go. Then she’d load up the rental car and drive straight to the airport. By nightfall she could be back in Los Angeles, where she belonged.

A facial. A massage. Real Chai. No fucking crazy-ass people making her life miserable for their own amusement.

By the time she got her machine backed out of the slop, the horde had quieted a little and she could see amusement gathering at the corners of Joe’s mouth. “This is
not
funny.”

Despite his best efforts, his dimples made an appearance. “Sorry, babe, but it kinda is. Think of it has a rite of passage. A christening.”

“I think of it as your sister being a vindictive bitch.”

“That, too. Pull off to the side so I can get around you.”

She had to pull way over to the side because Joe’s four-wheeler was a lot bigger than hers, with huge, deep-treaded tires on it, but then he was able to pass her and head into the puddle.

“Be nice, Joe!” Terry was turned around, watching his approach and Keri was gratified to see she wasn’t laughing anymore.

There were disappointed sound effects from the crowd when Joe crept up behind Terry, nicely lined his front bumper up with her machine and pushed her, knocking it loose. She started forward and Keri sulked, wiping more mud off her face.

Suddenly, Mary shouted, “Joseph Michael Kowalski, don’t you—”

The rest of whatever she had to say was drowned out by the roar of Joe’s ATV as he pegged the throttle and threw his body sideways, yanking the machine into a circle. The aggressive tires churned up, not just a plume, but a tidal wave of mud from the bottom of the puddle. It all washed over Terry with a splat Keri wished she could hear. She did hear Terry’s screech of outrage, though. Probably everybody in the northern part of the state did.

A roar of approval rose from the crowd, but it choked off pretty quickly when Terry jumped off her ATV and turned to give the look of death to her twin brother. Keri didn’t even try to hide her enjoyment and when Danny put up his hand, she gave him an enthusiastic high-five.

“You jerk,” Terry screamed over her shoulder.

“Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

And Keri had no doubt the payback wasn’t over yet. No question Terry would blame her for this, even though Joe had done the deed, and at some point find a way to exact revenge.

Totally worth it, though, to see her former best friend looking as though she’d been dipped in year-old chocolate.

“That is
enough,
” Mary declared over the din and that was the end of that.

By the time they got the rest of the family around or through the puddle, Kevin had turned back to see what the hold-up was. He glanced between Terry and Keri and laughed. “Mud wrestling? If one of you wasn’t my sister, this would be a wonderful thing.”

“Shut up,” they said in unison.

Joe’s ATV had aftermarket mirrors mounted on it, and Keri made the mistake of taking a peek. Except for the void left by the goggles, her entire face was speckled with bits of mud and everything from the helmet’s chin-strap down was plain nasty. Then Lisa insisted on showing her the same scene, only this time on the viewing screen of her digital camera.

Keri barely recognized herself. Tina certainly wouldn’t have recognized her, and neither would anybody else she knew in California.

Joe stepped up close and asked in a low voice, “You okay, babe?”

“Do I look okay? Really? I’m covered in shit, my face is filthy. Look at my fingernails, Joe. Do I look okay to you?”

“So you’ll take a shower when we get back. No big deal.”

“No big deal. Do you have any idea how much I spend on facials and manicures? It’s a
very
big deal, thank you very much. This isn’t me. None of this is me.”

“I think you look cute with mud on your face.”

She snorted. “Of course you do.”

“I’d even kiss you with mud on your face.”

“Don’t you dare.” She poked him the chest. “You are not kissing me in front of your family again.”

“Later?”

“How did we segue from my crisis to you worrying about whether you’ll get any action later?”

“Dirty face. Dirty thoughts. I’m a guy—it all ties together pretty naturally for me.”

She slapped her gloves together, trying without much success to knock some of the wet mud off. “When I get back to L.A., the first thing I’m going to do is have every pore in my body steam cleaned. And it’ll be a long damn time before I schedule another mudbath.”

“Bet you can’t wait to get home,” he said, and she looked up from her gloves at the tightness in his voice. His eyes weren’t sparkling with amusement now.

Why? Because she was talking about Los Angeles? Because she’d mentioned going home? She’d made it very clear she didn’t even want to come back to New Hampshire to see him, never mind stay.

“I can’t leave until I’ve asked all my questions,” she pointed out, purposely keeping her tone on the playful side. “I don’t give up that easy.”

“Neither do I.” She wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that and she didn’t have the guts to ask.