Exclusively Yours (13 page)

Indecision had kept her quiet just long enough so making her presence known would be awkward and embarrassing, and now she had to sit on the cushioned bench until her brother and his wife wrapped it up.

“Michael, all I said was that I could use a little help picking up after the boys before you go anywhere.”

“No, you had to get snide and tell everybody it must be nice to be me and be able to run around with the guys while my wife did all the work.”

Terry sighed and very, very slowly, so as not to make the camper shift, she leaned over and rested her head on the end of the bunk. Hopefully somebody else would show up and break up the spat soon, because this was an issue without resolution. She should know. She and Evan had fought that fight more than once when Stephanie was a baby, and they’d only had one kid.

“I wasn’t lying, was I?”

“If you’re so goddamned unhappy about the kids leaving their stuff laying around, why the hell do you keep talking about having another one?”

Oh crap. Now she could listen to her sister-in-law feed her husband more bullshit pie about wanting a baby girl. If only she’d spoken up as soon as she’d heard their voices, she could be long gone.

“I don’t even know why I bring up babies, since making them actually requires having sex once in a while.”

Oh, ouch. Terry tried to tune them out by thinking about something else. Anything else.

After she put the boys’ laundry away, she’d planned to take a walk up to the cabin. Now that everybody had made good use of the showers, she wanted to see if Keri was over being pissed enough yet, or if she was going to have to walk on eggshells when Joe was around, too. Way too much conflict for a vacation.

Apparently Mike agreed. “I didn’t come all the way up here to spend two weeks fighting with you, Lisa. And I’m sorry about the sex thing, but every time I think about it lately, I think about starting all over again with another baby.”

“Forget it. I don’t want to fight, either. I have to go get laundry out of the dryer. Go…hang out with Kevin or something.”

“Do you need help carrying the laundry down?”

Say yes, Terry thought. She knew it was Mike’s way of trying to ease the tension between them. It was an olive branch, puny though it was.

“No, I’ve got it.”

“Okay. Well…I’ll be back in a while, then.”

Terry lifted her head and peeked out, able to watch them both walk away. When they were out of sight, she hopped out of the pop-up and went back to her RV. She needed a drink before she went and scoped out the drama situation at the cabin.

Stephanie was stretched out on the couch, watching a movie Terry knew she’d already seen at least a dozen times. She didn’t even look up when the door opened.

“We didn’t come up here to sit around and watch TV, Steph. It’s not raining and it’s not cold, so you should be outside.”

“Doing what?”

Good question. “Go for a walk or something. Go see what the—”

“Boys are doing? No thanks.”

Terry sighed and resisted the urge to beat her head against the door jamb. The rules were pretty clear—the television was supposed to be off unless it was raining or after dark if it was too chilly to play on the playground.

But what, exactly, was there to do on the playground? Swing? She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was entering those in-between years when she was too old to play with the kids, but not old enough to enjoy the simple pleasure of sitting in a chair doing absolutely nothing.

Last year, she’d run with the boys, playing dodgeball and tetherball, hunting for frogs by the pond and exploring the woods. But now, whether it was her age or her gender or her general attitude about life, she was keeping herself separate. Fight it or let it go?

“I’m going to walk up and see Uncle Joe. You wanna go?”

“Not really. You’re just going to be mean to Keri, anyway.”

“That’s not fair. If it had been anybody but me who did it to anybody but Keri, everybody would have thought it was hilarious. But because I did it to her, everybody assumes I was being a b…mean.”

“Are you and Dad getting divorced?”

“Steph.” Conversational whiplash. And how much family crap did one woman have to deal with in a day? “We’ve been separated three months. You’re old enough to figure out that probably means we’re going to talk about divorce.”

“When?”

“Probably when we get back. There’s no sense in putting it off much longer.”

The combination of little girl tears in eyes that looked just like Evan’s was like a punch to Terry’s gut. She went to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, then popped a couple of aspirin while she was thinking of it. The way the day was going, a stress headache was almost inevitable. Might as well deal with the tightness in her neck and shoulders before the pain hit.

“I know I’m breaking the rules, Mom, but I don’t really wanna hang out with anybody right now.”

It was the plea for understanding in her daughter’s voice—free of any teenage attitude—that broke her. So what if she spent the day watching TV? She was on vacation, too, and it’s not like the rest of the family was exactly a barrel of laughs at the moment.

She bent down and kissed Steph’s forehead. “It’s okay, sweetie. I’m going to head up to the cabin for a while, okay?”

“Okay. Be nice to Keri, though.”

Terry ignored that last bit and stepped outside, only to run into Lisa. “Hey. Whatcha up to?”

“Did you grab the laundry out of the dryer?”

“Yeah, a while ago.” She felt bad making it sound like a longer while than it really was. “It looked like Joey and Danny’s, so I stuck it in the pop-up.”

“Oh, thanks. I thought I was going crazy. Then I was afraid somebody took it, but I can’t imagine anybody who’d want underwear my boys wore, freshly washed or not.”

“I’m heading up to the cabin. Wanna take a walk?”

“I think I’ve had enough of Kowalski men right now. Where’s Steph?”

“She’s watching a movie. She’s not feeling very sociable today, so I’m letting it slide. Everything okay?” she asked, even though she knew it wasn’t.

“Sure,” Lisa replied in a very fake voice with a very fake smile. “I think I’m going to get my book and sit in the shade for a while. Pop’s got the boys fishing at the pond, so I might have a few minutes of peace.”

“I’ll be back in a while, then, and we can start figuring out supper.”

“Sounds good. Oh, and be nice to Keri, okay?”

Jeez, what was with people today?

Wouldn’t it be a kick in the ass to go through the Kowalski version of Hell Week times two, only to end up turning in a puff piece that got her fired anyway?

“What happened to Kevin?” she asked when she couldn’t stand the silence anymore. Even though she couldn’t use the information in her article, maybe she could fake her muse into thinking they were actually working. “To make him leave the police department, I mean.”

Joe clicked, presumably on the save button and turned to look at her. “You know Kev. Perfect guy to run a sports bar, don’t you think?”

He was hiding something. Something big if her gut was right and it almost always was. “Off the record, Joe. Besides the fact I agreed to your stupid rules, you know me well enough to know I’d never deliberately hurt your family.”

“People change a lot in twenty years, babe.”

“Bullshit. You never would have let me come here if you didn’t trust me to respect their privacy.”

He grinned at her, his dimples flashing. “Got me there.”

“It’s just natural curiosity about the people I’m hanging out with. Nothing more sinister than that. And I haven’t said anything to Terry about her husband, even when she was being bitchy, have I?”

“Fine, but if you even look at him with pity in your eyes, he’ll know I told you. And he never even told me the whole story. I’ve got a friend who works for the Boston PD and he filled me in on a lot of it.”

“Jesus, Joe, do you want me to sign a confidentiality agreement?”

“Okay, fine. Kevin worked his ass off for the department, but never got ahead. Always got the shitty shifts in bad neighborhoods. He forgot something one day and stopped at home. Found out his captain had been banging his wife for God knows how long. Kev beat the holy fuck out of him.”

“Oh my God,” Keri breathed. “Did they arrest him?”

“The captain’s married to the daughter of a political heavy-hitter, so he was publicity shy, to say the least. Kevin left the department and filed for divorce. That was the end of it.”

“Poor guy.”

“No sympathy! I mean it, Keri. Just leave it alone.”

They heard the footsteps on the porch before the knock on the door, and Keri sighed and flopped back on the pillow. Knowing his family, her boredom—otherwise known as peace and quiet—was about to come to an end.

“It’s open,” Joe called, and Keri rolled her eyes when Terry entered. “Hey, sis.”

“Hey. Not much happening, so I thought I’d wander over and see what’s going on. You working?”

“A little bit,” he said, causing Keri to feel a pang of guilt.

He’d be getting a lot more work done if she’d gone wandering for something else to do rather than asking nosy questions about his family. But what was she supposed to do? She didn’t fish—even the catch and release kind—and, the last time she’d walked to the bathroom, she hadn’t seen Stephanie anywhere so hanging with her was out. Lisa had been in the big RV with Mary, and she certainly wasn’t about to seek out Terry. Though it seemed Terry had found her anyway.

“Sorry about the whole roosting thing,” Terry said to her. “It was just too good a shot to pass on.”

Since it had turned out Terry’s laundry was a lot more horrific than Keri’s at the end of the day, she could afford to be magnanimous. “Looking back, it was actually kind of funny, even though Joe won’t teach me how to do that.”

The other woman smiled. “Hold your front brake and punch it.”

“He won’t tell me which one is the front brake.”

Joe cleared his throat. “Not surprising, since I ride behind you.”

“Well, I’m going to go visit Ma for a few minutes,” Terry said, her hand on the door. “I just wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings.”

“None,” Keri assured her, and it was
mostly
true. She couldn’t resist one last shot, though. “Joe said to think of it as a
welcome to the family
kind of christening.”

The lemon-sucking face ruined the fake smile Terry offered up before going out the door and letting it slam behind her.

Joe laughed. “You said that just to piss her off.”

“I was going for mildly annoyed, but pissed works just as well.”

When he stood and stretched, reaching up over his head and twisting his back, Keri looked away. The correlation between the hot flashes and Joe’s muscles flexing was too coincidental to ignore and she was going to have to do a better job of not subjecting herself to the visual torture if she was going to make it through the time she had left without throwing herself at him.

“Mike and Kevin were talking about going for a ride in a while,” he said. “You know, like just the guys. Would you be okay with that?”

“What’s it costing you—or
us
—this time?”

When he lifted the hem of his T-shirt and scratched his stomach, she turned her attention to the urgent matter of freeing the bedspread of any trace of fuzz. “Whaddya mean?”

“The last time you went out alone with your brothers, I almost got drowned in the pool and then got to go on a dinner date with your nephews. A dinner date involving pizza sauce
and
hot fudge, I might add.”

“They were on their very best behavior,” he pointed out.

Rather than admit she’d actually enjoyed that outing, she forged on. “Oh, and let’s not leave out the s’mores. I’ve had a lot of gunk put in my hair over years of salon treatments, but never marshmallow.”

He leaned his shoulder against the bunk bed frame and crossed his arms. “I wouldn’t mind revisiting the hot fudge. Without the kids this time.”

Damn him. She could feel the heat radiating across her face and neck, which meant he could see it. Well, two could play at that game. “With extra whipped cream?”

Score! She didn’t miss the subtle little dance meant to ease the pressure on a growing erection trapped by zipped denim.

“You’re killin’ me, babe.”

“And we’re barely halfway there.”