Flirting With Pete: A Novel (44 page)

But she couldn’t get herself to go home yet. Another urge was even stronger.

Rising, she said quietly, “I have to visit my mom.”

Jordan was just as quickly on his feet. “I’ll take you.”

“No need. My car’s right outside.”

“So’s mine.”

“But what if someone calls to warn you about Darden?”

He pulled a cell phone from his pocket. It was smaller and far more high-tech than hers.

“Ah,” she said. “I should have guessed. Do you always carry that?”

He nodded.

She thought of the times they had stood so close that clothing was pressed to near nothing. “I never felt it,” she remarked.

He stared at her.
You were too busy feeling other things,
she could all but hear him say.

With a growing warmth on her cheeks, she turned toward the door.

Jordan guided her down the stairs and out a back door to the Jeep. Part of her wanted to ask if he didn’t have a luxury car stashed away along with all of his other secrets. The other part of her, though, was content with the Jeep. Entrepreneur, artist, gardener— it fit him.

He negotiated the traffic skillfully, knowing just where he was going. When he pulled up in front of the nursing home without a word of direction from her, she said, “Do you deliver the flowers from Connie yourself?”

“Sometimes. But I’ve never met your mother, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It was. Casey was thinking back to the discussion they’d had on a bench in the Public Garden, when she had first told him about Caroline. He had been genuinely sympathetic. He had asked appropriate questions. Nothing he’d said would have been inconsistent with his knowing Caroline’s situation. He might have indeed put those flowers on Caroline’s dresser himself, even talked with her, and still his questions would have been apt.

Casey opened the door and slid out of the Jeep. When she turned back to thank him for the ride, he was already rounding the car. Putting a light hand at her back, he guided her to the steps, and she didn’t object. She had been here many times with friends when Caroline had first been injured. The closest of Caroline’s Providence friends still came from time to time, and Brianna still came with her once in a while. But once in a while wasn’t now, and Brianna wasn’t Jordan. When she was with someone, a link to the living world, the ache inside her wasn’t so bad.

Casey smiled at the woman at the front desk and continued up the stairs with Jordan by her side. She waved at the night nurse on the third floor, and went on down the hall. When she paused on the threshold of her mother’s room, it had nothing to do with Jordan being with her, and everything to do with the IV drip, the oxygen tube, and the heart monitor. These were new.

“Oh God,” she whispered softly.

“When did you talk with the doctor last?” he asked.

“This afternoon while I was driving back from Maine. Seeing it’s something different, though.”

“Should I wait outside?”

She shook her head no. She wanted him with her. The hollow inside would be
devastating
if she was alone.

Caroline had her back to the door. Casey rounded the bed, switching on the small bureau lamp as she went. It illuminated a sweet bouquet of apricot roses. She touched them to show Jordan that she appreciated them, then went the rest of the way to be by her mother’s side. She kissed Caroline, but it was a minute before she was able to work her mother’s free hand out from under the sheet. It felt cooler than usual. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Casey warmed it against the knot in her throat.

Swallowing down the knot, she forced a brightness into her voice that she didn’t feel. Caroline’s eyes were still half open, which meant she hadn’t settled in to sleep for the night. “Hey, Mom. How’re you doing?” When Caroline didn’t respond, she said on a hopeful note, “You’ve given the doctors a scare. But the IV must be doing the trick. Your breathing’s no worse.” It was no better either— a low rasp through faintly parted lips— but Casey continued to keep her voice light. “I brought you a guest. He’s a friend of mine.” She tacked on a whispered, “I think,” and glanced up at Jordan.

He hunkered down by the side of the bed so that he might be in Caroline’s line of sight. “Definitely. Hi, Ms. Ellis.”

“Caroline,” Casey corrected.

“Caroline.”

“College graduation was the cutoff point. After that, she wouldn’t respond to my friends unless they called her by her first name. She wanted to be considered their friend, too. Didn’t you, Mom?” When Caroline offered nothing more than that low rasp in and out, Casey scolded, “You have to say hello back.”

After a prolonged silence, Casey let out a breath of her own. Heartbreak collided with frustration, producing a spark of annoyance. “Jordan worked for Connie. He designed the garden at the townhouse. It’s spectacular, Mom. So’s the art on Connie’s walls. His wife, Ruth, did a lot of it. She has a place in Rockport. I drove up there on Friday. She’s a very nice person.”

“Casey,” Jordan warned quietly.

She ignored him. “And then there’s Abbott. That’s the name of the town where Connie grew up. I was there this morning. Omigod, was it only this morning? I feel like an eon has passed since then. It was a hoot, Mom. I didn’t know which house was his, but I saw ones that might have been. I saw the ruins of the old shoe factory where his mother probably worked. And I saw where he went to school. It’s closed up now. The kids are bused.”

Casey felt Jordan staring at her. She glared back. “What? Is this wrong, Jordan? I’ve spent the last three years saying all sorts of sweet and positive things, and it hasn’t helped. Maybe this will.” She returned to Caroline. “Besides, you probably recognize me more this way, right, Mom? I was always challenging you. I was contrary more often than not. Jordan, here, is a more pleasing person.”

“My dad would argue with that,” Jordan said, dragging a chair forward. “He couldn’t stand me.” He sat in the chair.

“Just because you’re a ‘bleeding heart’?”

“The term he usually used was ‘sissy.’ “

“Excuse me?” Casey said, because she couldn’t imagine a man any less sissyish than Jordan.

“From way back when I was a kid, that was what he called me.”

“Why?”

“Because I liked to draw. Because I was happy working in the garden. These were not things that spelled M-A-N in his book.” He added a cynical, “So I gave him what he wanted.”

She heard anger in Jordan’s voice. This was no stating of fact, as he’d previously done. He was telling her what he felt inside, and it intrigued her. “Which was?”

“I played football. Beefed up the muscles, beefed up the attitude. I was a local hero. I was the talk of the town. I was the one all the girls wanted to date.”

She waited. “And?”

“I dated as many as I could, played one off against the other. A total ladies’ man. Part of me loved it.”

“The other part?”

“Hated myself. I knew how shallow the whole thing was. I hurt my shoulder in my senior year— oh, I didn’t do it deliberately, but I wasn’t sorry it happened.”

“Oh my,” Casey whispered, finding another clue that she’d missed. “Dan’s shoulder. Your scars. His ached when he was tense. You rub yours.”

“My posture changes when I’m tense. The shoulder feels stress.”

“What happened to the girls?”

“When the football was done? They hung around for a while. When I moved back to Walker, they fell to the wayside.”

“Why did you?”

“Move back? Two reasons. It was a cheap place to live while I built a portfolio. And my mother begged me to come home. My sisters had all married and left town—”

“And there’s
another
thing,” Casey broke in. “You didn’t tell me you had
sisters
.”

“You didn’t ask,” he reminded her. “It was clear you didn’t want to know anything personal. You loved the sex because it was anonymous and therefore dangerous, and because you wanted to shock Connie.”

She was vaguely aware of her mother lying there beside them. More, though, she was aware of the bitterness in Jordan’s voice. And he was right. Anonymity, danger, shock— they were a turn-on indeed, but they didn’t tell the whole story. “It didn’t feel anonymous,” she confessed. “The whole garden thing didn’t. There was a connection the first time I saw it.” More quietly, she added, “The first time I saw you.”

Eyes locked with his, she felt the connection still. It was stronger now and just new enough to frighten her. “Finish your story,” she said to ease the fear. “About Walker. About working with your dad. How’d that come about, if you two didn’t get along?”

“I needed money, and my dad needed help. I figured I could do it for a couple of years.”

“Did you really hate it?”

He looked down at his hands. When he looked up again, his voice was calmer. “Not all the time. The people in Walker are good folk. There’s definitely a sense of belonging. As boring as cruising around town could be, there was always someone who’d wave or smile or gesture you over and give you a bag of homegrown tomatoes. What I hated was the law enforcement stuff— locking up drunks, enforcing restraining orders, hunting down underage kids who’d stolen smokes from the general store. Those kids bothered me the most. They were begging for attention, begging for someone to show a little interest in them, but my father didn’t see it that way. He saw the problem as a lack of discipline and the solution as a night in the slammer. ‘Book ‘em, Dan-O,’ he’d say, like he was a TV star, like these kids even knew the phrase!” He took a tight breath. “So I booked ‘em, but then I made a point to talk with them as much as I could. Hence, I was a ‘bleeding heart.’ “

Casey was thinking that “bleeding heart” was better than “sissy,” when she recalled what Ruth had told her about Connie. “My father had a similar experience with his father.”

“I know. We shared that.”

“You told him about you and your dad?”

“He asked.”

“And he told you about him and his dad?”

“I asked.”

Casey felt a moment’s jealousy, but Jordan eased it. “He couldn’t have said those things to you, Casey. He wouldn’t have risked looking weak in your eyes. Me, I was nothing. He didn’t care how he looked. Besides, once I told him my story, he knew I’d understand his.”

She nodded and looked back at her mother. “Are you taking all this in, Mom?” she asked, but got only that low raspy sound in return. She jiggled Caroline’s hand against her neck. “You’re eavesdropping on pretty riveting stuff.” She glanced at the IV bottle, which continued its slow drip, and at the oxygen tube, which lay inert, and at the heart monitor, which beeped ever so softly and steadily.

So, what do you think, Mom?
she mused silently.
Does he have potential?

Caroline would surely say he did. She would like his looks. She would like his vulnerable side. She would like the fact that he was an artist.

What about the Connie connection?
Casey wondered, but she figured that Caroline would be too impressed with Jordan to care that Connie had been the one to hire him. Caroline would be thinking that Jordan was head and shoulders above Casey’s other beaus.

But he lied to me,
Casey might argue and amend that in the next breath.
Well, maybe he didn’t lie, but he let a misconception stand. The dark and brooding gardener? That big macho act? What does that say about his character?

Caroline would say, insightfully, that Jordan had portrayed himself as being all brawn, because he had grown up believing that machismo was more appealing to women than turpentine and oils. The message in
that,
Caroline might add, was that he had done what he did to impress Casey, which meant that he liked her.

Of course he likes me. The sex is great.

Caroline would roll her eyes. She would tell Casey to grow up, and inform her that love wasn’t only about sex, for which Casey had no comeback at all. She didn’t think this was about love. It was way, way, way too soon.

Confused and discouraged, she looked over at Jordan. “We ought to go.”

Casey didn’t even stop for her car, but let Jordan drive her straight to the townhouse. They went in the back garden gate, and for the longest time she just stood there in the dark, drawing in the smell of the woods. It had a healing quality. She welcomed its comfort.

Jordan remained by the gate. Looking back, she sensed his hesitance. So she returned to him, but there was no seductive little body slide this time, no purring or sweet taunts. She wasn’t angry at him. Oh, yes, he might have told her from the start who he was. But he hadn’t lied. He was her gardener. That was what she had needed him to be.

And she needed him to be something different now. She slid a hand into his and asked softly, “Spend the night?”

“As what?” he asked back, suggesting that the role-playing had changed for him, too.

“You,” she said and prayed he wouldn’t ask more questions, because she didn’t have any more answers.

He didn’t ask. Instead, he drew up her hand, kissed her knuckles, put an arm around her shoulder, and set off for the house.

It was a long time before they fell asleep, but Casey wasn’t concerned. Sundays were for sleeping in. Totally aside from the absorption of lovemaking, which didn’t allow for worrying about Caroline or Jenny or Darden, there was the luxury of being in bed with someone she cared about. Casey thought about this when she awoke briefly at six and nestled into the cup of Jordan’s body. Her last thought before falling back to sleep was that she could stay this way until noon.

Fate, however, didn’t allow that.

First came Angus. When he leapt up onto the bed, Casey came awake with a start. Calming quickly, she wondered if she could sit up and pet him without scaring him off. In that instant, though, he only had eyes for Jordan. Wading through the pile of covers, he climbed gracefully over Jordan’s chest to the side away from Casey, turned, and crouched. Not quite satisfied, he extended a single paw over Jordan’s ribs. Then, regal, possessive, even defiant, he squared his head and stared at her.