Exclusively Yours (21 page)

Not that he blamed her. He knew as well as anybody his family could be exhausting. He’d even gone so far, once or twice, as to manufacture a deadline or agent meeting just to get a couple of days to himself.

“You awake?” he whispered. No answer, but she was faking. While Chinese water torture probably couldn’t make her admit it, she snored like a chainsaw sucking down its last drop of oil.

She wasn’t snoring. She was sniffling.

Shit
. He replayed the evening in his mind, but couldn’t come up with a single incident that would cause Keri to cry. Things had actually taken a turn for the better, what with Mike and Lisa’s tension being swept away by an overpriced vacation his brother wouldn’t let him help pay for. Terry had been engrossed in the familial drama and hadn’t even spoken to Keri that he knew of.

He stripped down to his boxers, then stood in the middle of the room feeling stupid. He couldn’t just crawl into his bed and go to sleep. But he couldn’t crawl in with her, either. Even if she hadn’t been crying, he wasn’t sure the bunk would support them.

“Do you need to walk to the bathhouse?” he asked, wishing he’d thought to ask before he got undressed.

“No,” she answered in a squeaky, quiet voice.

“Okay.” At a loss, he flipped off the light and sat on the edge of his bed. “Hey, things were so hectic this morning, what with breakfast and Brian skinning his knee and everything, you forgot to ask me a question.”

“So?”

“We don’t want Tina’s winged monkeys reporting back you’re going soft.”

She didn’t laugh. “I don’t care.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

Having reached a conversational dead end, Joe punched his pillow into shape and stretched out. To keep from dwelling on the uncommunicative woman lying a few feet from him, Joe turned his thoughts to his manuscript. He’d managed to drop his antagonist into the plot hole from hell, and he had no idea how to get him out. Considering the book was due in less than two months, he needed to start expending some energy in that direction.

“Damn you!” The bunk bed covers flew back to reveal a fully-clothed Keri. “I didn’t have to go until you brought it up.”

Joe managed not to laugh at her, but it wasn’t easy. “Do you want me to walk with you?”

“Yes, you have to walk with me. I think I saw a raccoon trying to hotwire a four-wheeler the other night.”

“If I go with you and protect you from the raccoon gang that rules the campground, will you come back to my bed where you belong?”

She snatched her sweatshirt off the back of the chair so viciously it fell over. “Just because we had a little fun under your covers doesn’t mean I
belong
there, Kowalski.”

As he watched her pick up the chair and set it right with a thud, he decided to keep his mouth shut and just walk with her before he dug the hole any deeper.

It wasn’t easy being a pushing-forty single in a big family group, and he guessed that’s what was eating at her. He knew how it felt. He slept alone and he ate alone. He watched television alone and when he was reading a book and came across an exceptionally good passage, he had nobody to share it with.

Most of the time it was okay, but being around a family like Mike and Lisa and the kids had a way of driving the loneliness home like a poison-tipped drill bit.

He waited outside the bathroom for her, noticing when she came out she’d given her face a good scrubbing. It was still obvious she’d shed a few tears, but he didn’t say anything.

“Can I sleep in the big bed even if we don’t have sex?” she asked when they were almost back to the cabin.

Maybe
she
could sleep in the big bed if they didn’t have sex, but he probably wouldn’t sleep all that well. “Sure. We’ll call it a rain check.”

She didn’t laugh, but she did manage a small smile and a big eye roll. He had to turn his back while she changed into pajamas—the same kind as the ones he’d wrecked, but a different color—and then she climbed into his bed and curled on her side.

He stripped back down to his boxer briefs and then, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped a pair of sweats over them. Just so she wouldn’t worry he was getting ideas. Not that he wasn’t getting them, but he wasn’t going to act on them.

Fifteen minutes later, with Keri’s body limp and warm against his as she slept, he pressed a kiss to the top of her head and closed his eyes. Not sleeping alone, with or without the sex, was nice. So nice, in fact, he wondered how, when she went home, he’d ever sleep again.

Joe was working his ass off putting on a happy face for the family, but inside he was as melancholy as the rest. Maybe more so. The past few days had been a whirl of laughter and lovemaking and enjoying time with the family, but it was almost at an end. Tomorrow Keri was going home to California.

He felt a tightening as he watched her walking across the field, the sunset glinting on the pond behind her, and panicked. It wasn’t the same old tightening of the jeans around his crotch he’d come to accept as a constant state of being with Keri around.

This was a tightening in his chest that made his heart beat faster and his breath catch in his throat. His palms got a little clammy and he turned to his machine so nobody could see his face. He probably had a dumbstruck expression he didn’t want to have to explain.

He wanted to keep her. It was that simple. He’d stupidly thought he’d drag her up here and spend a couple of weeks together—some of it horizontal—for old time’s sake, then send her on her way with a kiss on the cheek and a slap on the ass.

Instead he was getting slapped upside the head with the growing certainty he’d been right the night almost twenty years ago when he told his mother she was wrong—he’d never get over Keri Daniels.

He’d tried to hide his pain when she dumped him and took off for California. With two pain-in-the-ass brothers, he couldn’t afford to be seen crying over a girl. But then Ma had snuck into his room and sat on the edge of the bed. She’d rubbed his back like she had when he was little and he didn’t feel good, and somehow he’d wound up with his head in her lap, sobbing his sorry broken heart out.

She’d told him he’d get over Keri and someday he’d meet the woman he was meant to spend the rest of his life with. That if he was truly destined to be with Keri forever, she wouldn’t have broken up with him and moved as far away as she could without getting her feet wet.

So what did it say about destiny that almost twenty years later his work and her work had conspired to bring them back together? Nothing in his life had ever felt more right than sitting in front of the campfire, holding Keri’s hand. Talking to her. Sleeping with her.

Instead of someday meeting the woman he was meant to spend the rest of his life with, maybe he’d simply met her
again
.

“You gonna be okay?” His dad had snuck up behind him and he hadn’t even noticed.

“Sure, Pop.”

“You know your mother’s gonna call you every five minutes once we get home, right?”

Joe sighed and nodded. “I know, and I’ll try not to take her head off after a couple days of it. But I’m not gonna drink, Pop.”

His father wrapped his arm around Joe’s shoulders, which made him have to hunch down a little because he was taller than his father but he wanted the embrace. “You don’t think you are. But she’s still here, isn’t she? You might feel different when you’re alone in that monster house of yours tomorrow night.”

It was a good point, and there was no sense in arguing with him. If there was one thing his twenties had taught him, it was that when you hurt your family as badly as he’d hurt his, the fear was always there he’d become that person again. There was a watchfulness when they knew he was stressed. Family members randomly stopping by for trumped up reasons. Constant phone calls asking stupid questions just so they could gauge his sobriety. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a drink since the day he’d hit Kevin. They were afraid one beer would be his undoing.

And while he knew alcohol wasn’t a demon he had to battle constantly, he understood where they were coming from.

“If I think I want a beer—I won’t, but if I do—I’ll call. I promise.”

Pop slapped him on the shoulder. “Or you could talk her into staying.”

If only it was that simple. “She has to go back. She’s got a job and an apartment and a life there.”

He’d come to terms with that. She was going to leave tomorrow. It was just that he really wanted the trip to California to be for the purpose of packing up and moving back.

“If she loves you, son, she’ll come back.”

He shrugged. Maybe that was true. But only if he asked her to stay. He hadn’t last time. Not because he hadn’t wanted her to stay, but because he’d been so stunned he hadn’t said much of anything at all.

And it had bothered her, too. She’d even scribbled it in her notepad the night Mike stole his truck to save his marriage.
Why didn’t you ask me to stay?

Somehow he was going to have to find the courage to say the words out loud. And time was running out.

Beyond the lawsuit she couldn’t talk about and the alcohol, Joe didn’t have any bodies buried in the backyard and Tina only wanted the skeletons. Keri was screwed. But the last thing she wanted to do was ruin her last night with Joe, so she just kept telling herself she’d think about it tomorrow.

With little else to distract her, she focused on Kevin, who was using bungee cords to strap the small grill back on Leo’s machine. Probably would have been easier if he wasn’t doing it one-handed because he wouldn’t put down his soda, but maybe it was a guy thing.

He looked so damn well-adjusted for a man who’d lost his marriage and his career in one blow. Literally but for the fact that, knowing the Kowalski temper, there was a lot more than one blow exchanged.

So he’d bought a sports bar in New Hampshire’s capital city and seemed pretty content. On the surface. There was something about him that made her journalistic senses tingle, even though she knew he was totally off-limits where her article was concerned.

“He told you, didn’t he?”

Keri blinked, belatedly realizing she’d been staring at him. “About what?”

“My divorce.”

“Oh.” She did her best not to look guilty. And to not answer his question directly. “I was looking at your nose. It’s been broken before, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” He rubbed his finger over the bump on the bridge of his nose. “Joe did that.”

“Get a little carried away with the roughhousing?”

“Something like that.” He gave her a grin that was a paler version of Joe’s, then knocked back a slug of soda.

It was the look in his eyes, also a paler version of Joe’s, that gave him away. “You’re lying.”

“Just a little.”

“That happened while he was drinking, didn’t it? Not roughhousing.”

He took another sip of the soda, watching her over the rim of the can. “He told you about the drinking?”

“He said he had a drinking problem and he quit when the family started liking him less than he liked himself.”

“Yeah. I went over one day to see if he had Pop’s air compressor and he was just backing out of his driveway, drunk off his ass and going on a beer run. I managed to get his keys.”

“And he hit you?”

“After the mother of all shouting matches.” He smiled and shrugged. “I wasn’t expecting him to swing, of course, or he never would have gotten the drop on me.”

“Of course not.”

“Busted my nose all to shit, complete with the two black eyes and everything. When Terry showed up with some stuff for him to sign, we were both sitting on the grass, crying like a couple of girls.”

“Sounds painful.”

“Not as painful as watching my brother drink himself to death.”

Even though she knew it was true, she couldn’t picture Joe as a drunk. And Kevin made it sound a whole lot more serious than Joe had. “That’s when he quit?”

“Just like that. Hasn’t had a drop of booze since, so I figure the nose was a small price to pay.” He wrinkled it at her. “Besides, the chicks dig it.”

She’d bet they did. Adding just a touch of the bad boy to the Kowalski good looks and charm probably had the women lining up for a shot at him. “So about your divorce, you—”

“Nice try, Lois Lane.” There might have been humor in the words, but there was none in the tone.

“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she said easily. “You brought it up. All I did was check out the chick magnet on your face.”

“Gear up!” Leo bellowed, and Keri turned to see Joe walking toward her.

He looked a little sad around the eyes and she went to meet him halfway, away from the chaos of five kids scrambling to find their gloves. “You okay?”

“Sure.” He smiled, but she could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

He looked like he was going to say something more—something serious judging by the way he seemed to take a deep breath first—but Steph ran up to them with Keri’s helmet and thrust it into her hands.

“Here! I thought it was mine, but it’s too big.”

Great, not only was Keri heavier than Steph, but she had a bigger head, too. Sure, the kid was only twelve, but still.

“Let’s go,” Leo called and whatever Joe was going to say would have to wait.

She jammed her helmet on her head and buckled it as she walked to her ATV, but then she realized Joe hadn’t moved. He was still standing there, watching her.

“You okay?” she asked again.

He almost managed a full grin this time. “Really. I’m cool.”

But she knew he was lying and as she pulled her ATV into line behind his—truce or not, she wasn’t riding behind Terry ever again—she wondered what had prompted what looked like a heart-to-heart with his dad.

Sadly, she suspected she knew. They were afraid he’d be upset when she left tomorrow and get drunk. And if he got drunk once, they feared him sliding back to where he’d been before he punched Kevin in the face.

They’d discussed the situation, though, and Keri had to trust that Joe was being honest when he agreed to a vacation fling that would be over when she boarded her flight to California. He knew right up front she wasn’t staying.

She had an urge to rub her chest—the damn hot dogs were probably giving her heartburn—but they were going down a rough hill and she had to focus on braking properly and not crashing into Joe.

Would he move to California?

The thought came so suddenly from left field, she almost swerved and ran into a tree.

He’d written that on her notebook.
Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?
It was something he’d at least considered, then, even if it was twenty years ago. Trying to picture Joe in Los Angeles wasn’t easy. This was obviously his native habitat.

And, after watching him with his family for a couple of weeks, she couldn’t imagine him being separated from them by the span of an entire continent. But that’s what frequent flyer miles were for, right?

As much as she tried to remind herself what was at stake—and that it was she who’d implemented the fling-only rule—she couldn’t help but wonder if she could have her career and keep Joe, too.