Loving Jessie (22 page)

“You know I don’t think you’re shallow, Jessie.”

She heard the qualifier in his voice and her hand stilled on his chest. “But?”

“I…” Matt drew a deep breath and stepped back so that they were no longer touching.

“But?” she repeated, her fine brows drawing together.

“Look, the truth is, I come from a miserable background. Both my parents were alcoholics, Jess. The fact that they were also assholes is beside the point. There’s plenty of evidence these days to suggest that the tendency to alcoholism is hereditary.”

“I’ve never seen you drink much,” she pointed out. “And I’ve never seen Gabe drink at all.”

“That’s because we both know where we came from. I did drink quite a bit in college, but I realized it was too easy, too comfortable. Frankly, it scared the hell out of me. I was afraid I’d look in the mirror someday and see my father looking back at me.” He ran his hand through his hair, trying to find the words to say what he’d realized had to be said, what his outburst tonight had made him realize should have been said before he asked her to marry him. “You married me because you wanted a
baby, but the truth is, I might not be a really great genetic risk. You should think—wooff!”

Considering her size, she packed quite a punch, he thought as he probed his stomach with careful fingers. He eyed her uneasily. From the look in her eyes, she was not opposed to hitting him again.

“Okay, so maybe I didn’t say it quite right, but I just thought you should know what you might be getting into if we—hey!” He held up his hands and took a quick, prudent step back, putting himself—and his abdomen—out of her reach. “Okay. Fine. Forget I mentioned it.”

“I will.” Jessie glared at him, her hands still clenched into fists. “I can’t believe you could say something that stupid. I suppose you were going to offer to divorce me or send me off to a sperm bank or something.”

“Well, no, I hadn’t thought—”

“
That’s
perfectly obvious,” she said with withering sarcasm. “Because if you’d given it any thought at all, you’d know that I don’t give a…a hoot about your childhood. Well, I do. Give a hoot, I mean, because I hate it that you were unhappy, but I don’t care what your parents were or what they did, except that it wasn’t good for you. And it’s just stupid to worry about our child becoming an alcoholic, because even if he inherited a tendency that way, it doesn’t mean he’d give in to it. You haven’t. And Gabe hasn’t. Don’t!” She backed away when he started to reach for her, only then realizing that her eyes were full of tears and her voice was shaking with more than just anger. “I want to get this all out.” She swiped angrily at the moisture in her eyes and glared at him. “If you ever say anything that stupid again, if you ever even
think
anything that stupid, I’m going to…to…well, I’ll think of something really awful to do to you. Do you hear me? Something really, really awful.”

“I hear you.” Matt’s mouth quirked with tender humor. “Something really, really awful.”

“And I mean it.”

“I know you do. I’m shaking in my boots. Can’t you tell?” Ignoring her halfhearted attempts at resistance, he pulled her into his arms.

“You’re not wearing boots,” she mumbled against his chest. Her fingers curled into his shirt, and she allowed a tear or two to fall.

“Yeah, but saying that I’m shaking in my Nikes just doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

“I guess not.” She relaxed against him. “Matt, I didn’t marry you just because I wanted a baby.”

“No?” He slid his fingers through her hair, feeling oddly relaxed now that the emotional crisis was past. Maybe there was something to this whole catharsis thing. “Then why have I been working so hard to get you pregnant? Ouch!”

Jessie released her pinching fingers but didn’t bother to lift her head from his chest. “If all I wanted was a baby, I didn’t have to get married to get one. When you asked me to marry you, I realized that I liked the idea of having the whole package—a home and a family, someone to share it all with. And I couldn’t imagine anyone I’d rather have it with.”

Matt closed his eyes, his arms tightening around her as something sweet and warm unfurled in his chest. Home, he thought. This was what it meant. It wasn’t a place. It was this feeling of acceptance, of welcome, this sense of belonging. Jessie had given him that.

He slid his hands into her hair, cupping her head and tilting her face up until her eyes met his. “You know, I’ve been thinking about this whole baby thing.”

“Thinking about it?”

He brushed his thumb over the softness of her lower lip. “I was thinking maybe we should try making a baby in some really creative place.”

Jessie’s eyes widened as possibilities flashed through her mind, each more lurid than the last. “I’m not having sex on the roof,” she said firmly.

“That’s not what I meant.” One hand slid down her back, his fingers splaying open over the curve of her bottom, rocking her forward against his growing arousal. “I meant a place that encourages creativity.”

“Oh.” Jessie’s fingers curled into the solid muscles of his shoulders, her lashes drifting closed as hunger fluttered to life in the pit of her stomach. “I’m not having sex in an art supply store, either.”

Her breath left her on a sigh as Matt’s teeth caught her lower lip, worrying it gently for a moment before his tongue soothed the sensual little pain. Jessie’s knees went weak, and she sagged against him, letting him support her weight.

“I was thinking of something a little closer to home.” His mouth opened over hers, taking possession, tasting the heat of her response. Lost in his kiss, Jessie didn’t realize that he was moving her backward until she felt the kitchen counter against the small of her back. She gasped as Matt’s hands gripped her waist, lifting her and setting her down on the counter. “Something much closer to home,” he murmured wickedly.

“Here?” Sitting on the counter, her eyes were level with his, and she stared at him, caught between shock and excitement.

“I’ve always thought you were very creative in the kitchen.” His eyes gleamed with humor and need, and a dark heat that melted every bone in her body. “Let’s see
if we can’t whip up something even more interesting than a cheesecake.”

“I don’t know, Matt. I… Oh my.” Her head fell back, her nails digging into his shoulders as his hands slid under her loose sweater to cup her bare breasts. “It’s…it’s a little… Please, I can’t think when you do that,” she moaned.

“Don’t think.” The sweater landed on the floor behind him, baring her to his hands and his mouth. Oh God, his mouth.

Jessie’s hands slid into the silky darkness of his hair, her head falling back as she arched into his touch.

“Don’t think, Jessie,” he whispered against her skin. “Just feel.”

She was helpless to do anything else.

F
or the first few years after Jessie went to live with her grandfather, Leland Sinclair had labored in the kitchen each Thanksgiving and Christmas, struggling to produce a traditional holiday feast. But the same hands that could coax a desiccated stick into green and blooming life became the fingers of death in the kitchen. Dry turkeys, underdone geese, sticky-sweet hams and many a casserole composed of green beans, mushroom soup and canned onions had appeared, in all their tattered glory, on the dining-room table.

Because she loved her grandfather, Jessie had masticated her way through every painful bite. Then, with the money Reilly’s parents gave her for her eleventh birthday, she bought a copy of the latest edition of Fannie Farmer’s much-revised cookbook, and that year, with her grandfather in the role of sous chef, she prepared Thanksgiving dinner. It wasn’t a meal to make the Michelin Guide people sit up and take notice, but it was edible. Parts of it were even genuinely good. Her grandfather’s praise was lavish and sincere, and, to their mutual relief,
the kitchen became her undisputed domain. What had begun as self-preservation blossomed into a hobby and, eventually, a career of sorts.

Nearly twenty years later, she still liked cooking for Thanksgiving and Christmas better than any other meal of the year. The planning, the shopping, getting out the platters and bowls that spent the rest of the year gathering dust, and all the cooking—she loved every minute of it. This year was different. She couldn’t help but think of her grandfather and miss him, but balancing out the grief was the awareness that she and Matt were spending their first holiday together as husband and wife.

Gabe was joining them, and Lurene and Reilly and Dana were all coming. Jessie had certainly cooked for much larger groups, but this was her first Thanksgiving dinner for the people she considered her extended family, and she wanted every detail to be perfect. After what Matt had told her of his childhood, she was willing to bet that his memories of the holidays didn’t exactly have a warm and fuzzy glow. There was nothing she could do to change the past, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t create some holiday traditions and memories of their own.

She spent much of the two weeks prior to the holiday making lists and schedules, working out what needed to be done when, in order for everything to make it to the table at the same time. She made lists of serving dishes and more tentative assignments of what bowl would hold the creamed corn and which of her grandmother’s cut-glass plates would be suitable for the cranberry sauce. She made lists of pans, and checked and double-checked her schedule to make sure she wasn’t going to need her favorite sauté pan for two different dishes at the same time.

She quizzed Matt on his likes and dislikes, making
careful note of the fact that he didn’t care for giblets in the gravy or lumps in the mashed potatoes. She was so solemn that, when she asked him about Gabe’s preferences, he couldn’t resist the urge to tell her that Gabe was on a strict regimen of nothing but cooked whole grains and raw nuts. The look of horror that widened her eyes in the instant before she remembered Gabe’s open delight in the leftovers she sent home to him sent Matt into whoops of laughter. He continued to laugh even when she smacked him with her notebook and was still snickering when he caught her around the waist and pulled her into his lap to kiss her sulky mouth.

Perhaps she
had
gone a little overboard, but all the planning had paid off, Jessie thought as she surveyed the disaster that was the kitchen. Everything had turned out exactly the way she’d wanted. From the turkey to the pecan pie, the food had been perfect. It had been a Norman Rockwell kind of holiday, if Rockwell had painted palm trees and warm blue skies. Everyone had talked over one another, eaten too much and laughed just enough.

Family, she thought with satisfaction.

Late in the afternoon on what Matt had laughingly referred to as T-Day, the sunny kitchen looked as if a small bomb had exploded in it. The sinks were clear, a habit ingrained from the time she’d spent working in professional kitchens, but there was scarcely an inch of open counter space. Dirty dishes, pots and pans, and half-empty serving bowls, crowded together.

“It looks like the aftermath of an explosion in a dish factory,” Dana said as she entered the kitchen. Wearing a pair of slim black leggings and a winter-white silk shirt, she managed to look coolly elegant even with her hands
full of dirty dishes. It wasn’t fair, Jessie thought with a faint mental sigh of envy. But it didn’t bother her as much as it would have a few months ago.

Gabe and Lurene had left a few minutes ago. Matt and Reilly were watching a football game in the living room. She’d watched for a while and then decided to get started on reclaiming the kitchen.

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” she said, smiling.

Dana arched one dark brow in silent comment at her obvious satisfaction. “And this is a good thing?”

Jessie’s mouth curved in a self-deprecating smile. “It sounds silly, but I sort of like what it represents.”

“Potential dishpan hands?”

Jessie grinned and shook her head. “Not exactly. When I was growing up, it was just my grandfather and me during the holidays, and I always sort of envied my friends who had big families. You know, aunts and uncles and cousins that they didn’t see all that often. I always pictured them gathered around the holiday table, laughing and talking.”

“You mean the sort of family gathering where Aunt Mabel and Cousin Sophie have to be seated at opposite ends of the table because they haven’t spoken to each other since before the war?” Dana asked. The smile in her eyes softened her cynical tone.

“That sort of thing wasn’t allowed in my fantasy family,” Jessie admitted, laughing. She began gathering up the silverware and dropping it in the basket in the dishwasher. “You sound like you speak from experience.”

Dana shook her head. “I didn’t have an Aunt Mabel or a Cousin Sophie, but I had an Uncle Darren who was a big Barry Manilow fan.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t felt the need to
share his passion with the rest of the family by giving an impromptu concert every Christmas Eve. Did I mention he was tone deaf?” Dana asked dryly. She gave a delicate little shudder. “I still break out in hives when I hear ‘Feelings.”’

Jessie laughed. It occurred to her that this was the first time she’d really talked to Reilly’s wife. They’d certainly spoken over the years, polite exchanges about the weather or mutual acquaintances, but they’d never had this sort of easy conversation before.

“I suppose I did have a rather idealized image of what a family holiday would be like,” Jessie said.

“The Waltons meet Martha Stewart?” Dana pushed up her sleeves and turned the water on in the sink.

“Pretty much. You don’t have to do that,” Jessie said as the other woman picked up a plate and began rinsing it.

“I don’t mind.” Dana reached for another plate. “Matt and Reilly were deep into an exhaustive analysis of possible Super Bowl matchups. My interest in the defensive back end pretty much begins and ends with how good it looks in a pair of tight pants.”

Laughing, Jessie began gathering up the glasses and putting them in the dishwasher. She’d never thought of Dana as having much of a sense of humor. But she’d never imagined the former almost-Miss-America with her sleeves pushed up, standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing dirty dishes, either. It made her uneasily aware that she’d never even tried to look past that glossy surface to see if there was a real person underneath. It was not a comfortable thought.

“Do you have a large family?” she asked, realizing that she knew almost nothing about Dana beyond the fact that she’d been a beauty contestant.

“A brother and a sister. Joe and Anabeth.” Dana stacked the rinsed plates on the counter over the dishwasher, leaving them for Jessie to arrange inside.

“Are you close?”

“No.” Dana held her hand under the faucet, watching the water splash over her fingers. “I grew up pretty much separate from them.”

“I didn’t realize your parents were divorced,” Jessie said, surprised. She vaguely remembered meeting them at Dana’s wedding.

“They aren’t. But most of my time was occupied with preparing for pageants, or planning for them or discussing them. Between that and school, it didn’t leave a lot of time for family. And, of course, I always had to worry about hurting myself. They don’t give extra points for skinned knees or broken bones.”

Jessie had never given much thought to beauty pageants other than to shudder at the thought of parading around in front of thousands of people wearing nothing but a bathing suit and heels. Like a lot of people, she viewed the whole process with vague contempt. They could call it a scholarship program all they wanted, but the reality was that a bunch of nearly naked women ended up strutting around on a stage and getting points for the size of their attributes, not for their IQs. It had never occurred to her that a lot of time and preparation went into the process.

“It sounds…lonely,” she said honestly.

“It sucked,” Dana said, and then looked startled by her own words. She straightened and reached for a platter, her movements brisk. “Not that it didn’t have its upside. I got to travel a lot and meet new people. Odds are, if I’d gotten to know Joe and Anabeth better, we’d have
despised each other. Isn’t that what siblings usually end up doing?”

“I don’t know. I always sort of pictured the Walton version. You know, a sister who’d help me with makeup and clothes. Maybe an indulgent older brother with cute friends.”

Dana slanted her a curious look. “You pretty much had that with Matt and Reilly, didn’t you?”

“Not really. We were…friends.” She frowned and shook her head a little as she slid a platter into the bottom rack. “I know it sounds ridiculous that a ten-year-old girl could be friends with two nineteen-year-old boys, but we were. Not that we hung out together all the time or anything, and I suppose they did look out for me a bit when we were together, but it was a…brotherly kind of thing.”

Dana shut off the water and reached for a towel to dry her hands. “I’m surprised you didn’t fall in love with one of them,” she said without looking up. “Before now, I mean. They’re both attractive, the kind of men a young girl might develop a crush on.”

Jessie bent to pour soap into the dispenser. It was pure coincidence that the movement made her hair slip forward, concealing her expression from the other woman. For just a moment she let herself remember all the nights she’d cried herself to sleep, all the hours she’d spent wondering what she could do to make Reilly see her as a woman rather than as a friend.

It didn’t hurt the way it once had. She had Matt now. A future with him. She was no longer the kid standing outside the candy store, nose pressed up against the window. Maybe what she had wasn’t what she’d once dreamed of, but it was strong and good, and she was happy.

She closed the door of the dishwasher as she straight
ened. Her smile was easy. “I guess they were so firmly set in my mind as friends that I just never saw them any other way,” she lied.

“Maybe it’s just me but, when the score is 37 to 3 going into the fourth quarter, it’s really hard to get excited about the game,” Reilly said, frowning at the television.

“They could still pull it out.” Matt was stretched out on the sofa, eyes barely open. “They only need—what? Five touchdowns? A couple of onside kicks and a little luck, and they’ll be back on top.”

“I’m thinking a witch doctor on the sidelines poking pins into little dolls in blue uniforms is their only hope.”

Matt opened his eyes in time to see the ball pop out of a receiver’s hands. He winced. “Maybe they’re trying to set a record for widest point spread in a game.”

“Do they get a bonus for that?”

“Sure. They get bonuses for everything.”

An advertisement came on in a rush of loud music and louder voices, and Matt groped for the remote and hit the mute button. With the sound off, he could hear the muted clatter of dishes from the kitchen. It was a homey, comfortable sound.

“Maybe we should go offer to help?” Reilly asked, tilting his head toward the kitchen.

“Best leave women’s work to the women,” Matt said, settling deeper into the cushions, one hand loosely clasped around the remote.

“Women’s work? You don’t think that’s a little…politically incorrect?” Reilly propped his stocking-clad feet on the coffee table.

“Nah. It’s obvious that women are better suited to menial domestic tasks, like doing dishes. Jessie understands that. She knows her place.”

“Told you to stay out of her kitchen, did she?”

“Threatened to break my fingers if I messed with anything,” Matt admitted, grinning.

“What did you destroy?” Reilly asked shrewdly.

“A pan. It was just one little pan. I scrambled some eggs in it. It didn’t
look
like a nonstick surface. And I did
not
use an ice pick on it,” he said defensively. “It was just a plain fork. How was I supposed to know the pan was handmade by blind Tasmanian goatherds who bang the damned things out only on the night of the full moon?”

“Expensive, was it?” Reilly’s grin lacked sympathy.

“I could have bought a small third-world nation for about the same amount of money,” Matt said bitterly, and Reilly chuckled.

“So does the little woman let you in the kitchen at all?”

“As long as I don’t try to cook anything or clean anything more complicated than a cereal bowl,” Matt admitted. “She doesn’t like the way I load the dishwasher, and I’m not sure she really trusts me with the microwave.”

“Good to see a man who’s master in his own home,” Reilly commented, then grinned when Matt flipped him the bird without bothering to lift his hand from where it lay on his stomach.

The sound was still off on the television, which made the on-screen slaughter seem a little less painful. Reilly watched the game for a moment, wincing when the quarterback was sacked by what looked like half the defensive line. Considering the point spread, a sack seemed like adding insult to injury.