Fix You (21 page)

             
“They’re not mine,”
he’d hissed at her.
“She wanted them, not me.”

             
Jo had looked like she’d been slapped.

             
Jordan had felt – still felt – like something with wicked, nasty claws was eviscerating him. He wanted to scream. He wanted to push through the double doors, go down to the operating room and pick Ellie up by her shoulders, shake her till her teeth clacked like castanets. He wanted to feel the chocolate silk of her hair under his chin and tell her how sorry he was.

             
He wasn’t equipped for this. His cold, invisible little heart was too small, and it couldn’t take this kind of beating.

             
Please
, he thought again.
Please. I’ll do anything
.

             
“Jordie.” Tam nudged him and his head weighed a thousand pounds as he lifted it.

             
Tam motioned across the waiting room. Ellie’s doctor – a gray-haired, motherly sort with little rectangular glasses – stood surveying the room, her blue scrubs splashed with blood. Ellie’s blood, Jordan realized, and listed hard to the side into Mike’s rock-solid shoulder. His heart dragged and caught as Doctor Carson’s gaze finally found his.

             
Please
…he said again.

             
Doctor Carson smiled.

**

              Maybe motherhood had softened her, or maybe she was finally just growing up, but somewhere along the line, Jo had developed a serious, sisterly love for her sisters-in-law. Hearing that Ellie was alive and in recovery sent the sort of relief surging through her that was reserved for family alone. Her brothers’ wives were her family now, and not just by marriage.

             
After Doctor Carson excused herself, Jo dabbed a stray tear from the corner of her eye, stood, and marched over to Jordan, shoulders set. He wasn’t smiling, but the tension had bled out of his narrow face

             
“Jordan,” she said forcefully, and his eyes came to hers with reluctant slowness. “We’re going to see the girls,” she ordered.

             
When he moved to protest, Tam and Mike both put elbows behind his shoulders and sent him forward. “Go,” Mike’s voice was firm, but neither he nor Tam offered to go with them, for which Jo was grateful. She didn’t know how he’d react to his daughters, but he most likely didn’t want the guys to see him lay eyes on them for the first time.

             
Jo curled her arm around his and let the world think he was the one escorting her though she was the one leading him. Her brother the gazelle, the track star, drug his toes like a crippled old man the closer they drew to the nursery. Thinking that, with Ellie out of the woods, he couldn’t possibly be rejecting the babies because of his sense of duty to their mother, she took a guess about his dread.

             
“You know,” she said as they progressed down the hall, “they don’t know I had to drag you up here. They don’t know anything except that it’s cold and they’re hungry and that someone should be holding them.”

             
She darted a glance to see how he’d taken that and saw that he was watching her the same way, his eyes, that were just like hers, hostile with guilt. He’d been fighting with Ellie for the same reason they’d all been tense with their spouses – Dylan’s treatment of Jess – and then he’d refused to see his children. He felt like shit.

             
“They’re right up front,” she said quietly as they reached the window. “Over to the right.”

             
She watched him as he rested his fingertips against the glass and his gaze probed through it, searching. She knew when he found them because he tensed; he inhaled and then didn’t exhale, his body coiled and waiting. It felt like they stood there an eternity, and Jo knew she should slip away and give him a moment. She wanted to know he was okay, though.

             
“What are their middle names?” she asked, touching his elbow.

             
His tension held, wavered, then he released it with a rush of exhaled breath. “Darcy,” he said with a sigh. “Elizabeth Darcy and Jane Bingley.”

**

              “What time do you usually go to bed?”

             
“Um…midnight,” Tyler said with a smile he failed to suppress.

             
“Nice try.”

             
He made a face. “I’m not
sleepy
.” Then he yawned.

             
“Lucky you. I’m about five minutes away from that,” Chris said, nodding toward Willa who was curled into a ball like a little cat at the opposite end of the sofa from him, a raggedy stuffed zebra serving as her pillow.

             
“When’s
your
bedtime?” Tyler asked with bald curiosity and naiveté. For six-year-olds, all the world fell victim to bedtimes and doctor appointments and lipstick-kiss prints.

             
“Hours ago,” Chris lied. “Most afternoons, I leave here and go straight home to bed. I don’t even eat dinner. Just fall right to sleep.”

             
Tyler watched him, blinking, trying to decide if he believed him. Finally he laughed. “No you don’t!”

             
“But you thought I did there for a second. It’s all in the face,” he explained, grinning. “If you’re gonna lie, you gotta make it convincing.” Gravel crunched and headlights sliced past the window. “Don’t lie to your mom, though,” he added. “Actually, don’t lie at all. Forget I said that.”
Way to be a role model, dude…

             
Tam led the way into the cottage, his tie loose, suit jacket rumpled and slung over his shoulder, shirt untucked. His face was tired, but not wrecked. “She’s doing okay,” he said in response to Chris’s eyebrow lift. “The babies are fine.”

             
Chris nodded, relieved.

             
Jo was behind her husband and her eyes went straight to Willa. “Was she good?” she asked as she crossed to the end of the couch to her sleeping baby. She scooped her up with practiced, careful ease, not waking her, and pegged him with a look that told him she’d know if he was lying.

             
Thankfully, he could be honest. “She was great.”

             
Jo nodded, seeming satisfied. “Thanks for watching her – them. I’m glad they didn’t have to be there for all the drama.”

             
He winced. “How close did she get to…” he trailed off when he realized how insensitive that sounded. You didn’t just ask someone if her sister-in-law had almost died.

             
“Closer than any of us wanted to think about,” Jess answered from the door, and Chris felt his head snap in her direction on impulse. He hoped the others didn’t notice; he wasn’t used to being so reactive and didn’t want it to become a habit.

             
She’d come in and left the door ajar, was leaning over the back of the couch and ruffling Tyler’s dark hair. “You ready to go to bed?” she asked him. Her pretty face was lined with fatigue, her eyelids flagging.

             
Tyler tipped his head back and asked, “What happened?” instead of answering.

             
“Aunt Ellie had the babies,” she told him. “And she had a hard time of it. The doctor had to take her into surgery. She’s going to be in the hospital a few days, but they should all be fine.”

             
Chris was impressed that, though she kept it G-rated, she didn’t sugarcoat it.

             
Tyler had become very solemn. “Surgery. Like when Daddy had his appendage took out?”

             
“His
appendix
was
taken out
, yes,” she corrected. “And yes, like that.”

             
He nodded and got to his feet, rubbing at an eye with his fist.

             
“Tell Chris ‘thank you’ for sitting with you,” Jess instructed and he complied with a fast, tired grin.

             
“Thank you.”

             
Chris tossed the kid a wave as his mom ushered him to the door, then he got to his feet. Tam shook his hand and thanked him. Jo wished him a good night as she slipped down the back hall to put Willa to bed. And for reasons unknown, Chris felt a touch melancholy as he left the cottage; independent all his life, he was suddenly, acutely aware that he was going home to an empty house. To dinner for one and falling asleep in front of the late night talk shows. He was in his forties, and he didn’t hit the club scene or lurk in singles bars. He lived an ordinary, solitary life, and that didn’t bother him…most of the time. Tonight, watching this large, deeply-connected family handle a crisis had left him feeling like a recluse.

             
When he walked around to the driver’s side of his truck, he glimpsed moonlight glinting silver down a waterfall of honey-colored hair and came to a halt. Jessica had her arms folded and was leaned back against the truck’s door, watching the main house; the lights were on in the kitchen and Tyler’s small head bobbed past the window on his way to his bedroom in the staff quarters. She was waiting for him, he knew, and he sensed he should wait until she worked up the courage to say whatever it was that had kept her out here. He propped his shoulder against the edge of the bed and did just that.

             
“I can’t believe you stayed with the kids,” she said at last, and he thought the barest scrap of a smile shadowed her lips.

             
He shrugged. “Glad to help.”

             
Her head turned toward him, her hair rustling, and the moon painted a layer of shine across her eyes. “Are you, though?” she asked in a quiet undertone; it was the sort of voice reserved for secrets and admissions – almost conspiratorial.

             
He wanted to ask her if she’d stopped somewhere and thrown back a drink on her way home. Instead, he said, “Yeah, I am,” and met the impossible-to-read stare she was shooting him through the shadows.

             
The lean, elegant lines of her body stayed loose, relaxed back against his truck, but her voice tightened. “Not to be rude, but I find that very hard to believe. What possible reason could you have for being ‘glad to help’?”

             
A scathing remark about her manners formed and died on his tongue. Her husband was the root cause of her bitterness, so he decided to use that in his favor. “Dylan came by while you were gone,” he said and watched her stiffen. “He wanted to take Tyler with him, but no way was I letting your kid go off somewhere while I was in charge.”

             
She let out a long, shaky breath.

             
“You should probably expect a call from his lawyer,” he went on, “because I might have…slugged him.”

             
It was silent a heartbeat – he couldn’t even hear her breathing. And then a strained sound escaped her throat that turned into a giggle. She could act as brittle and cold as she wanted, but her giggle was straight out of a schoolroom: quiet and girlish and innocent. “You
slugged
him?” she gasped. “Oh my God, maybe we should just all get in a line and take turns. Is
everyone
going to hit him?” Her laughter died with a sudden, sharp inhale. “Why?” she asked, and he didn’t need clarification.

             
“I’ll let a lot of stuff go, but he tried to say I was
interested
in kids.”

             
“God,” relief was plain in her sigh, “anyone would have socked him one for that. I just didn’t want to think…”

             
“What?”

             
She watched him; he could see the glimmer of her eyes and didn’t know what she saw. “I didn’t want to think you did it for my benefit.”

             
“You don’t want me defending your honor?” he asked, only half-joking.

             
“No.”

             
She didn’t elaborate, glancing away from him, hair shimmering, but she didn’t move away either. She could have told him goodnight and walked away – he expected her to, even – but she stayed, like there was something else she wrestled with voicing, and that was why Chris pressed her for information.

             
“Jess,” he said in a careful voice; she pulled the halves of her thin sweatshirt together and folded her arms across it. “What happened with you and him?”

             
“Do you mean,” she kicked a toe through the gravel, “why is he acting like a child throwing a temper tantrum? Or,” her voice caught, “what did I do to drive him to this?”

             
Bitter
, Chris realized, was too delicate a word for her mindset. He thought about her quiet outrage when she’d found the boots; the bewildered, haunted look in her eyes the day they returned from shopping and found Dylan surrounded by her family; the tight set of her jaw that dared him to so much as try to insult her. She was logical and practical, and those traits shielded what would have been obvious in any other woman in her position: She was devastated. She might hate Dylan, she might be doing everything within her power to carve a new life for herself from this hunk of rotting wood that was the mansion, but she was wrecked too. And afraid. And worried sick that some other man might try to treat her the same way.