Her Special Charm (15 page)

He wrapped his hands around the coffee cup, but didn't drink. “I don't have a clue how to make a relationship work.”

There was a hollow feeling in the middle of her chest, as if a cannonball had just gone through. “I thought we were doing rather well. Relationships don't come with blueprints, James. They're like snowflakes. Each one's different.”

He thought of the first complaint that Janice had hurled at him. It was something he couldn't help. “I'm a private person. I don't open up.”

“I don't plan on vivisecting you, I plan on listening if you want to talk.”

“It's not going to work,” he insisted. He had to leave now, before he couldn't. Before he watched himself destroy what they had, the way his parents had destroyed what they'd had.

Constance caught her bottom lip between her teeth. A sob bubbled up in her throat and she struggled to keep it at bay. She wasn't going to use tears to keep him, that wouldn't be fair.

She already knew that she loved this scarred man who had so much good in him. But she couldn't make him love her, couldn't make him stay. That was his decision. Anything less wouldn't count.

Just this once she wished she could fight dirty.

Feeling utterly numb, as if her body suddenly didn't belong to her, she nodded slowly. “If that's the way you feel.”

“That's the way I feel.”

That was the way he
had
to feel, he told himself as he walked out the door. For his own good. And most importantly, for hers.

 

Life before Constance had been trying at times. Life after he left her became a living hell. Both for him and, he suspected, for the people around him.

A dark mood came over him the likes of which he
was unacquainted with. It spread around him like an inky cloak, its edges touching everyone who came in contact with him. He snapped off heads wherever he went.

As his partner, Santini tried hard to kid him out of his state, then tried to lecture and nag him out of it. Nothing worked. Nothing penetrated the barrier James had installed around himself. In self-defense, Santini backed off. People in the precinct kept out of his way, waiting to ride out the storm.

The storm only intensified and gave no signs of coming to an end.

Its drastic consequences and possible immortality became evident the morning he and Santini finally caught up with the suspect in the restaurant robberies. Brought to a run-down motel in an equally run-down part of the city by a tip from an informant, James and Santini brought several uniformed police officers with them.

After hurrying up three flights, they rushed the room, guns drawn and ready. The suspect's attempt to flee via the fire escape was quickly foiled. He was taken down. Desperate, he attempted to bargain his way down to a lesser offense than murder by offering up the name of his accomplices. A statement, sanctioned by the assistant district attorney, was taken. The string of restaurant robberies known as R Squared came to an end. As far as James, Santini and the rest of the squad were concerned, the case was closed.

Every time a case was over, he'd feel some measure
of triumph over a job well done. He didn't need the chief's verbal reinforcement, he just felt it.

That feeling of accomplishment was missing this time. There was no sense of accomplishment, no sense of pride. Nothing. Only that same twisted feeling in his gut he had been living with for over a week. The same kind of feeling he'd experienced when he'd found his brother lying lifeless on the bathroom floor.

At the end of the day, he turned down Santini's invitation to celebrate at the local saloon where all the police officers converged to wind down before going home to their families. The sound of their voices would only irritate him.

Everything irritated him.

He couldn't find a place for himself and seriously began to doubt that he ever would. Began to doubt that there even
was
a place for him in the world. Ever since he could remember, he'd been essentially an emotional nomad. The only haven he'd ever found…

No, he wasn't going there, he upbraided himself. Not even mentally. He'd put that behind himself and it was going to stay there. Not wanting to go home to his apartment, but unwilling to join Santini and the others, he went to the only place he could.

Eli's.

The ancient bell heralded his entrance.

Behind the counter, Eli was trying to read a label on a can, holding it out at various lengths, searching for an elusive focal point. The sound of the bell made him look up.

The day-old whiskers on his thin cheeks spread out in a smile.

“Finally, he comes.” He put the can down. His eyebrows narrowed into a fuzzy line above his nose. “And he didn't bring her with him.”

James went over to the first aisle and took down two boxes of spaghetti. Nothing ever changed, he thought. Eli had been putting the same things in the same places ever since he could remember. There was a comfort in that. “People are going to put you away, old man, if you keep talking to yourself.”

“I wasn't talking to myself.” Eli leaned over the counter so that his voice would carry as James went down another aisle. “I was talking to you. Poetic license,” he explained. He shook his head as James approached him. “Still thin.” And then he asked almost eagerly, “How did your lady like Felicia?”

“She's not my lady and Felicia has a good home.”

Eli snorted as James deposited the jar of sauce and two boxes on the counter. “Too bad you don't. You look like hell.”

James moved his shoulders in a careless shrug. “It's the job.”

Eli seemed unconvinced. “It's something else. You and she have a fight?”

“There is no me and her.”

The warning look in James's eyes had no effect on Eli. “What happened?”

“I broke it off.”

A knowing expression came over Eli's face. He nod
ded his head. “Before she walked out on you.” James shot him a dark look. “Don't give me that look, you stand behind this counter for forty-six years, you learn a few things. Like people will do anything to avoid pain. Even cause it themselves because they think it'll hurt less. It doesn't,” he said with conviction. “It hurts just the same. More.” Without ringing the items up, he deposited them into a bag and threw in a box of chocolate-chip cookies that were on the counter. “Now stop being such a jackass and ask her to forgive you before she comes to her senses.”

Eli pushed the bag toward him, then came around the counter, concern etched on his thin face despite his flippant tone. “Contrary to popular opinion, love doesn't happen to everyone, Jimmy.”

James balked. He should have known better than to come here. Eli was worse than Santini. “Who said anything about love?”

“You did,” Eli insisted, refusing to back down despite the darkening expression on James's face. “Everything about you shouts that you're heartsick. You don't get that way unless you're in love.”

Annoyed, at the end of his rope as well as his patience, James dismissed the man's words. “That's beside the point.”

“Beside the point?” Eli cried incredulously. “Beside the point? Jimmy, that
is
the point. Of everything. Nothing else is worthwhile without that.” He pushed him toward the door. “Now go, get her back.”

James looked back at the counter. “My groceries—”

“You can come back for them later. With her.” Having delivered his final word on the subject, Eli pushed James out the door.

C
onstance blew out a long breath and then took an equally long sip of diet soda. The sides of the can had gone from chilled to warm and the bubbles inside had long since departed. She hardly noticed.

She couldn't keep her mind on her work.

It certainly wasn't because the work was taxing. But she'd reread the same seven-word sentence half a dozen times now and it just wasn't sinking in.

Nothing was sinking in.

That was because it couldn't. Disappointment had filled up every available space inside of her while making it feel as if everything was collapsing. She'd been so sure, so very sure that there was a connection be
tween James and her. So sure that despite his demeanor and his obvious desire to retain his brooding persona, he was her soul mate.

Soul mates didn't have to be identical copies of one another, they had to supply what the other person lacked. Had to make the other person feel complete just by their very existence. And he had. James had made her feel complete.

Somehow, he had been what was missing in her life. She'd felt whole with him. Safe. And so incredibly sexy, as if sensuality shot out every pore whenever she was with him. No one had ever made her feel like that before.

And no one was ever going to make her feel like that again. Because she just wasn't going to go through this a second time. The grieving, the emptiness, the pain just wasn't worth it. Better not know any of it than to stand around, torn and bleeding, waiting for the inevitable to happen. Because it always did.

The cameo was a fraud. There was no happily-ever-after, no reward for believing. She wished she'd never believed in it.

Restless, unable to fit inside her own skin, she sighed. She'd felt upset and used when she'd broken it off with Josh, but the loss, well, the loss hadn't really touched her. What she'd mourned more than anything was the idea of losing love rather than actually losing Josh. If she were being honest, he had never set her soul on fire. Not once.

But James had. Every time.

There was no other way to describe what had gone down between James and her except to say that the forces of nature were involved. This had been a whirlwind thing, taking away her breath, accelerating her heart rate. She felt the way she'd always dreamed about feeling. In love. Wildly, hopelessly in love.

And now those same adjectives could be used to describe the despair that was closing in around her. She was vainly trying to hold it at bay.

Constance knew without being told that she was facing a losing battle.

She
had
to snap out of it.

She had to stop feeling sorry for herself and get back out among the living. He wasn't going to appear magically on her doorstep to make things right. Even she wasn't naive enough to believe that.

“I suppose I'm just going to have to get on with it, go through the five stages of grief, or however many there are, right Felicia?”

The dog, curled up at her feet like a small hairy comforter, barely raised her head in acknowledgment of the words. Even the dog wasn't listening, she thought in annoyance.

“Wait, just wait until it happens to you. Wait until you meet that drop-dead German shepherd hunk who'll start you dreaming big dreams and then just when he has you in the palm of his paw, he'll walk away. Not a pretty picture, I guarantee it.”

She bent over and scratched the animal behind her ear. The simple action helped to soothe her. As for the
animal, if Felicia were any more relaxed, Constance was certain she'd have to place the dog in a bowl to keep her from floating away.

Constance frowned at the lack of support from the puppy. “I promise to be more sympathetic to you than you are to me right now.”

Felicia barely made a sound as she lowered her head back down on her paws, her body still covering her mistress's feet.

Constance did her best to rally. The evening was still young, even if she felt a million years old. “C'mon, Constance,” she said sternly. “Snap out of it. You've got book reports to read.”

The next moment, Felicia came alive as if someone had suddenly stepped on her tail. But instead of barking, Felicia made a mad dash for the front door. Her tail was wagging so wildly, it looked as if it were in danger of screwing right off.

Constance put down her pen and gave up all pretense of working. Maybe later she could get her head together, but right now, her brain cells were scattered in a hundred different directions. And somehow, they all led back to him.

Felicia was still at the front door. “What is it, Lassie? Did Timmie fall down into the well again?” The puppy began to scratch at the bottom of the door. Nobody had rung the bell. “Someone there, girl?” Constance sighed, getting up. “Okay, be that way.” Unable to concentrate anyway, she crossed to the front door to check out what had Felicia so excited.

 

He'd been standing at her door for five minutes now, mentally arguing with himself.

It wasn't going well.

Even after Eli had literally pushed him out of the store, James had had no intention of coming here. He'd meant to stick to his decision to push on with his life and try somehow to lock away all these unsettling feelings that Constance had unearthed within him.

To do that, he needed to get over Constance.

But then it struck him as he was driving away from Eli's store that if he had to spend this much energy trying to get over her, he'd already failed in his initial resolve not to fall for her in the first place. In leaving her, he wasn't protecting himself from possible future heart-ache, he was ushering it in early. Of his own volition.

Just as Eli had pointed out.

It made no sense.

Neither did being without her when she hadn't pushed him away. So he'd turned the car around and instead of going home, he'd headed uptown.

The full head of steam he'd gathered had remained with him until just a few minutes ago, when he'd found himself standing before her door. And his future.

What if she didn't want to see him anymore? What if he'd alienated her so badly that she'd gone on to see someone else, someone from that vast crowd of people she knew?

What if…?

His mind ceased raising questions whose sole pur
pose was to torment him the second the door opened and he saw Constance standing in the doorway. She was dressed in another pair of impossibly short white shorts and a nonexistent sky-blue halter top that showed off all her best features.

No, that wasn't right, he mentally corrected himself. Constance's very best feature was her heart.

Everything else ran a close second and it was all there, hiding beneath thin cotton material, daring him to touch. To take.

Constance's impossible blue eyes widened with surprise as she looked at him, trapping his soul. He wanted her so much, it hurt to breathe. Scared him. Big time.

With effort, he scrambled to cover up what he was positive had to be evident in his eyes and on his face. So he scowled at her. “You didn't even ask who was there. Do you realize I could have pushed my way into your apartment and attacked you right there, inches past your threshold?”

She could have said a lot of things in response to his verbal assault. She could have pretended to be flippant or indifferent. Or she could have shouted at him that he had no right to come in here and throw his weight around. She was entitled to all of that.

But all she could think of was how happy she was to see him. And that maybe, just maybe, her mother hadn't been wrong about the cameo after all.

“Sounds good to me,” she told him.

She was taking the wind out of his sails. “Seriously,”
he fumed even as he felt every inch of his body responding to her. Felt his very mind responding to her.

“Seriously,” she whispered. “And in the event that it wasn't you at the door, this nice police detective gave me this really fierce attack dog.” She looked down at Felicia, who was busy licking his shoes, her tail still going a hundred miles a minute, thumping against the floor like a drum soloist in the spotlight.

Because he wanted to fill his arms with her, James stooped down and picked up the dog instead. Felicia began licking his face. “What's she going to do, knock me over with the breeze created by her tail?”

“The robber would have never expected that.”

Rescuing him from Felicia and her pink tongue, which was furiously separating him from the skin on his face, Constance took the dog and pushed her door open all the way with her back.

Once he was inside, Constance put Felicia down on the floor and gently swatted the dog's behind. Trained, though reluctant, Felicia returned to the giant throw pillow in the middle of the room and lay down.

Constance struggled to contain the joy that was trying desperately to break out and take over. Knowing James, there could very well have been some miserably logical reason why he was here and it wasn't because he'd missed her one tenth as much as she had him.

She braced herself for disappointment. “So, what are you doing here?”

He'd asked himself the same question, over and over again, as he'd stared at her door. And had finally come
up with an answer just as she'd opened it. “Trying to go home.”

“And what, you lost your way?” Constance pushed her hands into her back pockets to keep from throwing them around his neck and dragging him down to her level so she could kiss him until they were both numb. “You live on the other side of town, remember?”

“No, that's where I put away the occasional groceries I buy, where I feed my dog and keep my clothes,” he told her quietly. “But that's not home. I haven't had a home. Not really.” He was saying things to her he'd never said to anyone else. And realized that he wanted her to know the truth. “Not ever.” He thought of his marriage and how he'd felt at first. “I thought I did for a while, but even then, there was this feeling that it wasn't permanent, that things would change.” He looked off into space. “And they did.”

The temptation to stop, to leave, loomed again before him.

No, he wasn't going to turn tail and run. He'd never been a coward. Never let himself be a coward, but now he knew that he had been just that with her. Because he wouldn't allow himself to admit what he'd been feeling. Wouldn't admit it to himself, much less to her.

But that was behind him now.

Constance pressed her lips together, afraid to push forward. Knowing she had to. “And this home you've suddenly found, where is it?”

He looked at her for a long moment. So long, she thought he wasn't going to answer.

And then he did.

“Wherever you are.”

The three words stole her breath away. At the very most, she'd expected him to say he regarded her apartment as his home. She'd never remotely expected him to say her. The second the words registered, Constance could feel tears welling up in her eyes. The tears she hadn't let herself shed all this last week as she'd struggled to hang on to the tiny bits and pieces of hope.

She'd even reread the dusty old diary she'd uncovered as a young girl in the attic of the house they used to live in back in Virginia. Amanda's diary. Amanda had hung on to her belief that her lover was returning to her even when everything had pointed against it. When her parents had tried to marry her off to someone else, she'd stubbornly refused to obey, saying she belonged only to Will. She'd hung on to her hope even as the days, then the months after the war had multiplied. She'd never given up.

But Will had told her he loved her. James had never made any such declaration.

Until now.

She could feel the inside of herself filling with sunbeams. They scattered the tears. “And it took you this long to realize it?”

“That,” he allowed, then added, “and a kick in the pants.” Constance looked at him quizzically. He elaborated just a little. “Everybody at the precinct began to complain.”

She laughed and he remembered how much he loved
that sound. “That you weren't your normally, sunny self?”

“That I was even a worse pain in the butt to deal with than usual.” They'd used far more descriptive, forceful words than that, but for her sake, he cleaned it up.

She was trying to connect the dots. He'd mentioned a kick in the rear. “So they escorted you here?”

“No, actually they backed off,” he admitted. “Tried to avoid me as much as possible. Even Santini gave up and he never gives up.”

“Then what gave you that kick in the pants?”

He'd spent most of his life being closemouthed, resenting having to explain himself, even to his parents on those rare occasions when they hadn't been swiping at one another. Yet answering her felt right. As if he needed to share all this with someone, finally. “Two things really. First, we closed the R-Squared cases.”

“Congratulations,” she told him, interrupting. “You must feel very relieved.”

The careless shrug rolled off his shoulders. “That's just it, I didn't. I didn't feel anything.” The next took a great deal to admit, because it made him human. And vulnerable. “It was like I was hollow inside.”

Just like me,
she thought.

“And Eli threw me out of his store.”

“Eli?” He hadn't mentioned that name to her before. It didn't belong to any of the detectives in his squad. Uncle Bob had gotten her a complete roster.

James nodded. “The old man who's responsible for everything I am. For me taking the course in life that I did.”

An uncle? A mentor? Questions popped up in her head like mushrooms on a lawn after a spring rain. But she knew she had to proceed cautiously. She had his trust for the moment and she didn't want to lose it by saying the wrong thing. But she didn't want to stay in the dark about him any longer.

“He gave you advice?”

He grinned. “No, he let me save his life. And for the first time in mine, I felt good. Really good. Like what I had done really mattered.”