Nobody's Baby but Mine (34 page)

She looked down at her plate, and then up at him, her eyes full of pain. “It’s always about you, isn’t it, Jim? From the very beginning everything has revolved around you. What you deserve. How you felt. What kind of mood you were in. I’ve built my life around trying to please you, and it hasn’t worked.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion. Look, forget everything I said that night. I didn’t mean any of it. I was just—I don’t know—having some kind of mid-life crisis or something. I like you the way you are. You’ve been the best wife a man could ever have. Let’s just forget all of this happened and go back to the way things were.”

“I can’t do that because
you
can’t do it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Someplace inside you there’s this knot of resentment that formed the day we got married and has never gone away. If you want me back, it’s only out of habit. I don’t think you like me very much, Jim. Maybe you never have.”

“That’s absurd. You’re overdramatizing this whole thing. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you.”

“Right now I want to please myself.”

“Fine! Please yourself. I’m not standing in your way, and you don’t have to run away to do it.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re going to blame me for everything, aren’t you? Go ahead! You explain to your sons what a bad guy I am, then. And while you explain it, remind them that
you’re
the one who’s walking out on a thirty-seven-year marriage, not me.”

She regarded him levelly. “You know what I think? I think you walked out on our marriage the day we said our vows.”

“I knew you’d start throwing up the past at me. Now you’re going to blame me for the sins of an eighteen-year-old boy.”

“That’s not what I’m doing. I’m just tired of living with the part of you that’s still eighteen, the part of you that still hasn’t dealt with the fact that you knocked up Amber Lynn Glide and had to take the consequences. The boy who thinks he deserves something better has never gone away.” Her voice grew soft and weary. “I’m tired of living with the guilt, Jim. I’m tired of always feeling as if I have to prove myself.”

“Then stop doing it! I haven’t made you live that way. You’ve done it to yourself.”

“And now I have to figure out how to undo it.”

“I can’t believe how selfish you’re being. Do you want a divorce, Lynn? Is that what all this is leading up to? Because if you want a divorce, you just tell me now. I’m not living in this limbo forever. Just tell me right now.”

He waited to see her shock. What he had suggested was unthinkable. But there was no shock, and he began to panic. Why didn’t she tell him to stop talking so crazy, that their situation wasn’t nearly bad enough to even think about divorce? But once again, he’d miscalculated.

“Maybe that would be for the best.”

He went numb.

She got a faraway look on her face, almost dreamy. “You know what I wish? I wish we could start all over. I wish we could meet each other again with no past history, just two strangers getting acquainted. Then, if we didn’t like what we found, we could walk away. And if we did like what we found . . .” Her voice grew thick with emotion. “The playing field would be level. There’d be a—a balance of power.”

“Power?” Fear churned inside him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She regarded him with a look of pity that cut right through him. “You really don’t, do you? For thirty-seven years you’ve had all the power in our relationship, and I’ve had none. For thirty-seven years I’ve had to live with the fact that I was a second-class citizen in our marriage. But I can’t live that way anymore.”

She spoke so patiently, like an adult explaining something to a child, and it enraged him.

“Fine!” He lost his ability to think clearly and acted on raw emotion. “You can have your divorce. And I hope you choke on it.”

He threw down a wad of bills he didn’t bother to count, shot up from his chair, and stalked from the dining room without a backward look. As he hit the hallway, he realized he was sweating. She’d turned his life upside down from the day he’d met her.

She
wanted to talk about
power
! From the time she was fifteen years old, she’d had the power to twist his life out of shape. If he hadn’t met her, everything might have been different. He wouldn’t have come back to Salvation and been a family doctor, that’s for sure. He’d have gone into research, or maybe he’d have hooked up with one of the big international outfits and traveled around the world to do the work on infectious diseases he’d always dreamed about. A million possibilities would have been open to him if he hadn’t been forced to marry her, but because of her, he hadn’t explored any of them. He’d had a wife and children to support, so he’d gone back to his hometown with his tail between his legs and taken over his father’s practice.

Resentment seethed inside him. He’d had the course of his life irrevocably changed when he was still too young to understand what was happening. She’d done that to him, the same woman who’d sat in that dining room and told him she had no power. She’d fucked up his life forever, and now she blamed him.

He stopped in his track as all the blood rushed from his head. Jesus. She was right.

He sagged down on one of the couches that sat along the wall and dropped his head into his hands. Seconds lapsed, turning into minutes as all the mental barriers he’d erected against the truth grew transparent.

She’d been right when she’d said he’d always resented her, but his bitterness had become such an old, familiar companion he hadn’t recognized it for what it was. She was right. After all this time, he still blamed her.

The many ways he’d punished her over the years came flying back in his face: the fault-finding and subtle put-downs, his blind stubbornness and refusal to acknowledge her needs. All those little punishments he’d inflicted against this woman who was the closest thing he had to a soul.

He pushed his fingertips into his eye sockets and shook his head. She was right about everything.

She brushed her hair until it shone, then stared at her naked body in the mirrored wall behind the whirlpool. She tried to imagine how it would look to Cal, but all she could think about was how it wouldn’t look. It wouldn’t look like it belonged to a twenty-year-old centerfold.

With an exclamation of disgust, she stalked back into her bedroom, snatched up her prettiest robe, an apricot silk with a border of deep green laurel leaves at the hem and sleeves, and jabbed her arms into it. She was a physicist, for goodness sakes! A successful professional woman! Since when did she decide to measure her self-worth in terms of her hip size?

And since when could she respect a man who viewed her as only a body? If her measurements didn’t meet Cal’s standards, then it was long past time she found that out. They couldn’t have a lasting relationship if the only thing that kept him interested in her was the mystery of what she looked like naked.

She wanted a real relationship more than she’d ever wanted anything. It hurt too much to be afraid all the caring was one-sided. She needed to stop procrastinating and find out if anything lasting existed between them, or if she were merely another touchdown for Cal Bonner to score.

She heard the faint whir of the garage door sliding open, and her heart jumped into her throat. He was home. Misgivings shot through her. She should have picked a more convenient time, a day when he wasn’t getting ready to fly halfway across the country to a golf tournament. She should have waited until she was calmer, more sure of herself. She should have—

Her cowardice disgusted her and she resisted a nearly irresistible urge to grab every article of clothing in her closet and stuff herself into all of them until she was the size of a polar bear. Today she would begin the process of discovering whether she’d given her heart away in vain.

Taking a deep breath, she secured the robe’s sash in a bow and padded barefoot into the hallway.

“Jane?”

“I’m up here.” As she stopped at the top of the stairs, the thudding of her heart made her feel light-headed.

He appeared in the foyer below. “Guess who I—” He broke off as he looked up and saw her standing above him at one o’clock in the afternoon wearing nothing but a slinky silk robe.

He smiled and tucked the fingers of one hand in the pocket of his jeans. “You sure do know how to welcome a guy home.”

She couldn’t have spoken if she wanted to. Heart pounding, she lifted her hands to the robe’s sash while her heart whispered a silent prayer.
Please let him want me for myself and not just because I’m a challenge. Please let him love me just a little bit
. Her clumsy fingers tugged on the robe’s sash, and her gaze locked with his as the frail garment parted. With a shrug of her shoulders, she let it slide down her body and fall in a puddle at her feet.

Warm sunlight washed her body, revealing everything: her small breasts and rounding belly, her
huge
hips and very ordinary legs.

Cal looked dazed. She rested one hand lightly on the banister and moved slowly down the steps, wearing nothing but a fragile veil of almond-scented lotion.

Cal’s lips parted. His eyes glazed.

Her foot touched the bottom step, and she smiled.

He licked his lips as if they had gone very dry and spoke in a voice that held a slight croak. “Turn around, Eth.”

“Not on your life.”

Jane’s head shot up. With a gasp of dismay, she saw the Reverend Ethan Bonner standing in the archway just behind Cal.

He studied her with undisguised interest. “I hope I didn’t show up at a bad time.”

With a strangled moan, she spun around and dashed back up the stairs, all too aware of the view she presented them from behind. She scrambled for her robe and, crumpling it in front of herself, fled to her bedroom, where she slammed the door and sagged against it, more mortified than she had ever been in her life.

It seemed as if only a few seconds passed before she heard a soft rapping. “Honey?” Cal’s voice held the tentative note of a man who knew he only had a few minutes to disarm a ticking bomb.

“I’m not here. Go away.” To her dismay, tears stung her eyes. She had thought about this for so long, placed so much importance on it, and now it had ended in disaster.

The door bumped against her. “Step back now, sweetheart, and let me in.”

She moved away, too dispirited to argue. With the silk robe still crumpled in front of her, she pressed her bare back to the adjacent wall.

He entered gingerly, like a soldier expecting land mines. “You all right, sweetheart?”

“Stop calling me that! I’ve never been so embarrassed.”

“Don’t be, honey. You made poor Eth’s day. Hell, you probably made his whole year, not to mention mine.”

“Your brother saw me
naked
! I stood there on the stairs, naked as the day I was born, making a complete fool of myself.”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong. There was nothing foolish about the sight of you naked. Why don’t you let me hang that robe up for you before it gets ruined.”

She clutched it more tightly to her midriff. “He was
looking
at me the whole time, and you didn’t say a word. Why didn’t you warn me we weren’t alone?”

“You sort of took me by surprise, sweetheart. I wasn’t thinking straight. And Eth couldn’t help looking. It’s been years since he’s seen a beautiful naked woman in the flesh. I’d be worried about him if he hadn’t looked.”

“He’s a minister!”

“It was a blessed event. You sure you don’t want me to hang that robe up?”

“You’re making a joke out of this.”

“Absolutely not. Only an insensitive jerk would think something this traumatic was funny. Tell you what. I’ll go downstairs right this minute and kill him before he gets away.”

She refused to smile. Instead, she decided to pout. It was something she’d always wanted to do, but until that moment, she’d never quite been able to figure out how to. Now it seemed to come naturally. “I’ve just received the shock of my life, and you’re treating it as a big joke.”

“I’m a pig.” He drew her a few inches away from the wall and rubbed his hands along her bare spine. “If I were you, I’d tell me to get lost because I don’t even deserve to breathe the same air as you.”

“That’s so true.”

“Honey, I’m really getting worried about that pretty robe. Squashed up between us, it’s getting ruined. Don’t you think you should let me have it?”

She pressed her cheek to his chest, enjoying the warm stroking of his hands along her back, but still not quite done with her pout. “I won’t ever be able to look him in the eye again. He already thinks I’m a heathen. This will prove it.”