Going Back (23 page)

“Why hasn’t he found me?” she
rejoined with exasperating logic. “Whenever I begin to suspect that
I’ve met him, he winds up telling me he thinks of me as a
sister.”

“I don’t think of you as a sister,”
Brad told her.

Daphne’s smile grew wistful. “Not
at the moment,” she said. “Not today. But I wouldn’t be surprised
if you did yesterday, and you probably will again
tomorrow.”

“No,” he argued. “I don’t think
I’ll ever think of you as a sister.”

She shook her head. “You aren’t my
Mr. Right, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

He wanted to grab her by her
shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled. He wanted to
scream at her that she was completely off base, that she didn’t
know what she was talking about, that she was beautiful and sexy
and perfect in every respect.

But the thing that made her seem so
perfect to him right now had nothing to do with her debatable
beauty or her sexiness. It was her candor, her openness, her total
lack of guile. It was, above all, her refusal to deny the truth
about herself. Brad wasn’t her Mr. Right and he never would be.
Regardless of how fantastic making love to her had been, he wasn’t
going to marry her. She wasn’t his ideal mate, the woman with whom
he intended to build a future and a family—and she wasn’t going to
kid herself about it by pretending that she was.

He carefully removed the tray from
the bed and placed it on the floor beside the bed. Then he turned
back to her, closing his arms around her, urging her down to the
pillow with him. He slid one hand under her hair to the nape of her
neck and stroked through the soft wisps of hair there.

“You seem to be deep in thought,”
she observed quietly.

“Mmm,” he said, struggling to
clarify his mind before he spoke. “I’m thinking...I’m thinking that
you’re one of the gutsiest women I’ve ever met.”

“I’m not so gutsy,” she argued.
“I’m just realistic.”

“Whatever you are,” he whispered,
touching his lips to her brow, “it’s turning me on.”

She slipped her hand beneath the
top sheet, skimming her fingers over his abdomen and below to feel
for herself the evidence of how turned on he was. As her fingers
ringed and then ran the length of him, he moaned.

He itched to unbutton her shirt, to
kiss her breasts and inhale the lingering fragrance of her perfume.
Yet he held back, strangely protective of her. He waited for a
sign, any sign from this brave, magnificent woman that she could
possibly desire him as much as he desired her. “Do you want to make
love again?” he asked when her silence extended beyond a
minute.

“Yes.”

“I would like to spend the night
with you,” he went on, hoping he wasn’t pressuring her. “I know we
didn’t discuss that, but—”

“I’d like for you to stay,” she
assured him.

“Because—because I don’t really
think the first time was a fluke.”

“A fluke?” She laughed
hesitantly.

He probably shouldn’t have said
that, either. But he’d said so many wrong things already, he would
let this one pass. Instead of bothering to explain himself—and
risking making matters even worse—he worked open the buttons of her
shirt, slid it over her shoulders, and kissed her exactly as he’d
wanted to, touching his tongue to the dainty indentation between
her collarbones, filling his nostrils with the scent of her and his
hands with the roundness of her breasts.

As her response intensified, as her
flesh warmed and her breath shortened and her body grew damp with
readiness for him, he found himself thinking about how peculiar it
was that, just as it had been with the house Daphne had sold him,
one didn’t always realize something was the answer to a dream until
the dream was already within one’s grasp.

***

INTELLIGENT THOUGH SHE WAS, Daphne
knew that there were certain times when thought was your enemy. If
she entertained any thoughts about what was going on between her
and Brad while he was with her, she’d ruin the weekend.

So she didn’t think. She simply
allowed herself to believe that the whole thing was nothing more
than an exorcism of the past, a whimsical way to counter the
eight-year-old curse hanging over their friendship. After making
love with Brad a few times, she would be hard pressed to remember
what that wretched experience had been like back in college. And
that was the point—to replace miserable old memories with happy new
ones. That was what Brad had had in mind when he’d proposed this
weekend. That was the only thing going on between them.

She refused to be overwhelmed by
how lovely it was to wake up beside him. She refused to become
sentimental over the pleasure of his company at breakfast. They
were friends, not lovers, and friends didn’t wax rhapsodic about
how delightful it was to gaze into each other’s sleepy eyes over
the morning’s first cup of coffee.

Damn it, it was delightful, though. Sitting
across the table from him, with the morning sun streaming in
through the window and the fading scent of the flowers he’d brought
her still hanging in the air, she suffered a pang at the
understanding that this was all transient, that soon he’d be
gone.

Stifling her emotions, she lowered
her eyes from Brad’s face to her nearly empty cup and calmly asked,
“When does your plane leave tomorrow?”

He seemed startled by the
down-to-earth tone of her conversational gambit. It was the first
coherent statement either of them had made since around two o’clock
that morning, when Brad had awakened Daphne from a dream-filled
slumber to make love to her again.

She hadn’t objected. After making
love to Brad twice with the bedside lamp on, she found making love
to him in the pitch dark something of a novelty. Not that it was
any more resplendent an experience than the first two times—or any
less resplendent, for that matter—but it was different. Brad’s
kisses had been hungrier in the dark, his touch more decisive, more
demanding. When he’d rolled her on top of himself she had
accommodated his tacit request and remained there, straddling him
and taking him, dominating their motions and setting her own
pace.

Whatever it was that exploded
between them, it certainly hadn’t been a fluke.

When it was over, they’d found
themselves too invigorated to go back to sleep. They had decided to
burn off their excess energy by showering and then cleaning up the
kitchen. Brad had refused to go near the pot of clam sauce, but
he’d dutifully thrown out the overcooked pasta and the waterlogged
flowers, tied up the trash bag and lugged it to the garage, while
Daphne had scoured the pots and put away the unused dishes and
flatware. Then she’d lit the candles, restarted the Mozart CD and
served the fruit and cheese she’d purchased as a romantic dessert
for their would-be romantic dinner.

Gouda, pear slices, grapes and a
piano concerto—even at two-thirty in the morning—had proven to be
exceptionally romantic.

“My plane?” he asked after taking a
sip of coffee.

“What I was thinking,” she
clarified, nudging the box of corn flakes toward him after filling
a bowl for herself, “was that if your plane doesn’t leave until the
afternoon, you could stop by one of the banks in town and get your
mortgage application started.”

He nodded. Shaking a heaping mound
of corn flakes into his bowl, he said, “It’s a two o’clock flight.
But I thought I couldn’t apply for a mortgage without a signed
contract.”

“You can start the ball rolling
with an unsigned copy of your contract, and once it’s signed, the
bank will already have all your application materials in place.
They don’t usually like starting things without the contract, but I
have friends in the mortgage departments of some of the banks.
They’d do it as a favor for me.”

“I don’t want you using up your
favors on me.”

If she were permitting herself to
think, Daphne would have thought about how for Brad, she’d gladly
use up every favor she had coming to her. But that was the wrong
approach to take on this sunny Sunday morning, and she avoided it.
“The sooner you close on the house, the sooner I get paid my
commission. You’d be doing me a favor if you got things started
before you left.”

He nodded again. “All right. Which
bank do you recommend?”

She named a few which had branches
in the area and filled him in on which were currently offering the
lowest rates. “I’ve got a ten o’clock appointment with another
client tomorrow morning, so I may not be in the office. I’ll leave
a copy of your contract with Margaret,” she told him.

“Running off with another client,
are you?” he muttered with pretended dismay. “Love ‘em and leave
‘em, huh. Now that you’ve found me a house, you don’t want to waste
any more of your time on me.”

Daphne smiled, refusing to take his
griping seriously. “If it were just any client, I’d give you
priority, Brad. But the appointment’s with somebody who wants to
look at the estate in Upper Saddle Brook.”

“Ah,” he said, properly impressed.
“Sell that house, and you’ll be able to use your commission to pay
for your partnership.”

“Just about,” Daphne
confirmed.

A cloud passed across the sun,
causing the temperature in the kitchen to drop a few degrees.
Daphne pondered how appropriate the abruptly gray light seemed to
her mood.

Perhaps that cloud had done her a
favor. If the kitchen were too bright, she’d be forced to see Brad
more clearly than she’d care to. As it was, she couldn’t resist the
temptation to let her gaze linger on his strong, symmetrical
features, his jaw shadowed by an overnight growth of beard, his
eyes clear and lively despite his interrupted sleep last night, his
dark hair haphazardly arranged around a crooked part. He’d borrowed
Daphne’s hairbrush to groom it, but he’d rushed the job as if he
didn’t want to spend too much time with her bristles in his hair—as
if sharing her brush were too intimate an act.

Shoving those troublesome thoughts
from her mind, she faked a smile for Brad and said, “Can I get you
some more orange juice?”

An hour later, he took off. He
departed with chipper words about how great it was going to be to
have Daphne as his neighbor, how much he was looking forward to
returning east and spending more time with Eric, how eager he was
to tackle his new job and how fervently he hoped his parents would
have worked out their differences by the time he was settled in his
new home.

Daphne smiled, nodded, interjected
words of agreement at the right times, and waved him off. Then she
shut her door and released a mournful sigh.

She should have grown smarter over
the last eight years. But if she was so damned smart, how could she
have managed to make a mistake at least as catastrophic as the last
one she’d made with Brad?

She loved him. He was gone, and she
didn’t have to hide her feelings anymore. Last night had proven to
her that she loved him.

And to him, last night had
represented nothing more than an opportunity for him and Daphne to
tie up loose ends and free themselves from the past. As far as he
was concerned, they could now go their own ways, without having to
worry about any unfinished business between them. He could find
himself the beautiful wife of his dreams, and beget some beautiful
children.

As for Daphne’s dreams...well,
world peace was beyond reality’s grasp. A cure for cancer seemed
nearly as elusive, as did one for myopia. She’d undoubtedly have to
live the rest of her life in eyeglasses.

And Mr. Right...Mr. Right was
planning to move to Verona and be her pal. If Daphne hadn’t missed
her bet, he was probably already thinking of her as a
sister.

Ten

“JIM AND I are through,” said
Phyllis.

She was standing on Daphne’s front
porch, dressed in a blasted denim jacket, skinny jeans, a
pink-and-white checked shirt and white calfskin boots. Her hair was
artistically windblown and her eyes were adorned with a subtle
frosted shadow. At her feet stood a soft-sided leather valise.
Daphne found it truly amazing that, even during what was evidently
a domestic upheaval of critical proportions, Phyllis managed to
look chic.

Daphne was thankful for the
distraction offered by Phyllis’s unexpected appearance. She ushered
Phyllis inside and closed the door.

“I know I should have telephoned
you first,” Phyllis apologized. She dropped her valise onto a
chair, then paced the length of the living room in agitation,
trying to burn off her nervous energy. “But by the time I thought
about calling you I had already reached the exit off the
interstate, and I figured I might as well just come. You can throw
me out if you want.”

“Why would I want to throw you
out?” Daphne asked. “Give me your jacket, and sit down and tell me
what happened.”

“What happened?” Phyllis railed,
marching frenetically to the picture window and then spinning
around to face Daphne. “I told him I’d had it up to here,” she
said, indicating the top of her head. “I told him to get the hell
out. That’s what happened.”