Think About Love (25 page)

Cal said, "I don't like leaving Sam with a dodgy car." He was looking at Samantha now, his face stern.

"I'm fine," she said impatiently. "If the car won't go, there's a taxi service on the island. Your sister is getting Dorothy in with a specialist she'd probably have to wait months to see, and she's welcome to my car—to your car, I mean."

He didn't like it. "You'll call a taxi if you need to go somewhere?"

"I won't need—"

"Sam!"

She gritted her teeth. He could be the most infuriating man. "Yes, all right. Now go, get back to Seattle."

"Not yet," he said and pulled her into his arms.

She should have pushed him away, should have closed her lips because she was irritated with him for perpetually trying to run the details of her life. If she let him, he'd be choosing her friends, making her appointments, taking her over.

She knew better, but she met his mouth with hers open and hungry, and they kissed each other breathless in seconds.

"I'll see you tomorrow night," he said when he pulled away from her. "If I'm late, don't wait up. Get some sleep."

She flushed, because neither one of them had got much sleep in the last forty-eight hours. She told herself she wouldn't watch him leave, but she was still staring when the helicopter disappeared over the trees to the south.

Kippy hadn't woken from her nap when Dorothy and Adrienne left to drive to the ferry. Samantha walked back into the house, hoping Adrienne was right and the doctor who'd diagnosed Dorothy's heart condition wrong.

In Kippy's bedroom, she stared down at the baby. She hoped she could be as good a mother as Dorothy, as good as Sarah would have been if she'd lived. Cal would be a good father—he'd promised, and, growing up in a family filled with love and security, he'd learned how.

"Kippers," she whispered. "This scares me. Marriage. Motherhood. I'm not sure I know how to do any of it."

Kippy woke cranky when Samantha was halfway through the flood of e-mail messages that had accumulated since Friday afternoon. Samantha walked her, murmuring soothing sounds that seemed to get Kippy's attention.

She had decisions to make, and Kippy seemed to sense her impatience. Stacey in accounting had just asked for a six-month leave of absence because she and her husband had been called up on an adoption list—babies everywhere! Stacey had recommended her assistant Elaine for the job, but Sam wasn't sure Elaine would be up to it. Tremaine's had more than a hundred employees now, and Cal's plans to promote the company as a major application service provider meant the next six months to a year would be a constant round of recruitment challenges.

Jallison, the developer she'd hired to look after contracting their new premises, had sent a series of five e-mails over the weekend. Problems with delivery of office furniture for the new developers. Problems with the security system. These were exactly the things Samantha had hired Jallison to look after. She needed to have a serious talk with Cal before he signed the agreement with Jallison for the second stage.

She needed to be back in Seattle, now, today.

Kippy wouldn't settle to play on the blanket Samantha spread on the floor, wouldn't sit happily in the high chair, bashing her plastic spoon on the tray. Samantha tried typing a reply to one e-mail while holding the baby in her lap, but Kippy thought bashing on the computer keys was a great idea and Samantha gave up.

Why hadn't she talked with Cal about Jallison over the weekend?

Because I spent most of the weekend in bed. Because whenever he touched me, looked at me, I couldn't think of anything else.

Still couldn't.

"Gaa-gaa," said Kippy.

"You're right." She had a baby to look after, Dorothy to worry about, a court appearance coming up Wednesday, and a few million work details to look after by remote control.

"Gaa," said Kippy.

"Yes, you're right. You come first." She propped Kippy on her hip and went to get the baby pack out of the linen closet. "Things might get more organized after we arrive in Seattle, but meanwhile, let's both take a long walk and clear our heads."

When the baby saw the pack, she gurgled and rammed her fist into her mouth. As Samantha laced Kippy against her breasts, she felt an overwhelming surge of tenderness. Such a miracle, tiny feet and hands, laughing eyes. Alive. She remembered Sarah eight months into her pregnancy, the baby big in her belly. Samantha had placed her hand on Sarah's belly, had felt the strong, living kick of this small human being. She'd asked Sarah what it felt like to have a child growing inside.

"It feels like a miracle."

One day, if she and Cal had a child....

Perhaps even now. They'd practiced birth control, but not that time in the shower.

With Kippy at her breast, her own hands laced over her belly, Samantha felt the memory of an embryonic Kippy kicking against her palm when Sarah invited her to feel the baby in her womb. She couldn't shake the image, couldn't outwalk it, even though she and Kippy walked all the way to Peterson Road and beyond, down the hill to Drumbeg Bay.

"Your mommy loved you so much, Kippy."

Tears kept surging behind her eyes, pressure in her throat. Fear, joy, hope—she couldn't seem to find her way through the tangle. Cal....

I need you to know that I'm in love with you.

She couldn't be in love with him, could she? Fantasies of Cal's baby, growing inside her. Heaven knew she melted every time he touched her, every time he looked at her in a way that showed desire. Maybe that wasn't love, but it seemed to be a lot more than just sex.

Jeanette had been in love a dozen times, maybe more. Over-the-rainbow love that swept everything in her world along... especially her children, who were dragged along, always leaping off cliffs with their mother, always leaving people and places behind.

Samantha wasn't Jeanette. She didn't have her mother's magnetism, her charm, her fast hot rages, and she certainly didn't have her urge for turning life upside down every eighteen months. Every time Jeanette threw one life out the window and leaped for another, the child Samantha had become more careful, more aware that if she didn't look after Sarah, no one would.

Jeanette hated responsibility, and that wasn't Samantha by a thousand miles. By the time she'd put time in on a couple of summer jobs, working her way through college, she'd recognized her own desire to create order, stability. Recognized, too, that she was good at it.

"Early training," she told Kippy, who nodded against her chest. Walking like this often put Kippy to sleep, but not today. The baby was wired, full of energy, kept lifting her head and commenting in gurgles and incomprehensible words about their surroundings.

She hadn't talked like this when Samantha first arrived last week, and Dorothy hadn't mentioned it. The talking must be new.

"By the time you're ten, you're going to be running things." That image made Samantha laugh, because, face it, Kippy was running things right now. Wasn't Samantha here, walking a baby instead of sitting down with her email? Between Kippy and Cal, in the space of a week Samantha's life had slipped out of her control.

"That's not true."

The words she spoke echoed off the rock face beside her, and a raven picking at something on the ground paused. Kippy might be running her life, but a baby had a right to. Certainly Jeanette hadn't let her children rule her life, which had been part of the problem. Yet Dorothy had willingly accepted responsibility for two young girls at a time when she could reasonably expect to have her home to herself. She'd let her life be torn upside down by her grandchildren, although Samantha had never seen any sign of resentment.

Neither would Kippy. She promised herself that.

Cal was a different matter. She'd stood her ground with him well enough at Tremaine's, but up at Haida Sunset, she'd lost her footing. Their lovemaking had softened something deep inside her, awakening need. It was easy to imagine Cal's power over her growing, spreading. He was always making decisions, telling her what to do, and she'd got to the point now where she reacted to every word he said, she was so aware of the risk.

The bossiness had started when he flew her to Nanaimo last week had extended into almost every part of her life, to the extent that he'd managed to make her promise to call a taxi if she needed to go somewhere, even though Dorothy's old clunker was perfectly safe.

Last week, she'd been a competent woman he respected, but today he didn't trust her to choose her own transportation. He'd used the helicopter and his sports car to take over her transportation. He'd brought in his medical family to take over Dorothy. Right now Adrienne was at the university hospital with Dorothy, when it should be Samantha standing at her grandmother's side.

Cal had taken over Samantha's right to decide where she worked, and how, by getting her to sign a prenuptial agreement that committed her to eighteen years as Tremaine's second-in-command. Eighteen years as Calin Tremaine's wife.

She stumbled as she stepped off the road and onto Drumbeg Bay's wharf.

He'd already done it, had already taken over every part of her life except this, her care of Kippy. And he meant to take that over, too. He'd be Kippy's father, and as the weeks went on, Samantha would find herself controlled more and more.

Didn't she know the pattern? Hadn't she been here before? She'd been so sure she wouldn't repeat her mother's life, so different from her mother. And she was right, she was different, because there may have been far too many men in her mother's life, but somehow Jeanette had always picked good, secure men.

Not that Cal wasn't secure. But he was also a man who needed to control everything he got near. Damn it, she'd known that about him, had recognized it. At work, it had been a challenge, because she knew she was strong, knew she wouldn't knuckle under. She'd done that once, with Howard, and she'd learned her lesson forever.

Maybe it was excusable for a woman to fall in love once, to make one major mistake. After all, control had never really been an issue with the men Jeanette chose. As far as Samantha had been able to see from her child's view of Jeanette's relationships, it was her mother who ran the men ragged, not the other way around. So she'd had no way of knowing that Howard would be different.

He'd been strong, affectionate, in love with her, and she'd fallen for it. She'd ignored her own warning voice, because Howard was a young man who obviously loved her, wanted to care for her, to shelter her. She didn't need sheltering, she'd learned to stand in the rain, but she was seduced by affection and sex and a dream of enduring partnership. She'd fallen in love.

In January of her senior year, she'd become Howard's lover. In March, she'd accepted his ring of engagement, and they'd planned the wedding for June. A week later, he urged her to move in with him because he couldn't wait, and at the end of March, she did.

Janice and Maggie, her roommates, disappeared from her life. It was only later that she discovered Howard had intercepted messages from her friends, had failed to pass on messages from Sarah, and had opened her mail and held back letters from Dorothy, who wanted her to come visit in May before she took a summer job. She didn't know about his interference with her friends and family at the time, but every day she felt him taking over another piece of her.

At first it thrilled her, proof of his love that he met her for lunch every day, brought her flowers several times a week. Until the morning she told him she was meeting Janice, and he began shouting at her. Stress, he said later, stress over upcoming exams, and he needed her to help him prep for his statistics exam.

When she went to the library to work on her management term paper, he followed because he needed her at home. She barely slept through April, studied in the night when he slept because there never seemed to be time in the day. Having a relationship was work, in ways she hadn't expected. It would be better after exams, because the stress was telling on Howard.

They had their first real fight over her application for graduate school. Looking back, she knew she'd given in on everything else he wanted, until that day. He'd interviewed for a job with Microsoft, and if he got it, she wasn't going to need a graduate degree. Howard Demmer's wife didn't need to work. He'd support her.

She ran away from the shouting, walked the streets and knew it wasn't going to work, that she was drowning. But when she returned at one in the morning, she met a different Howard. He offered to help her fill out her application for graduate school, and even delivered it for her.

A week later, when one of her professors called to ask if she'd decided not to take postgraduate studies, she discovered that Howard had never delivered the application. She should have known it was over then, but she'd struggled through another two weeks—lost a job that she'd been accepted for when he didn't deliver the message, lost the keys to the old car Wayne had bought for her to drive.

Howard helped her search for the keys, without success, but when she lay in bed that night she couldn't stop the suspicion that filled her. Finally, she slipped out of the covers and walked to the chair where he'd draped his pants. In the left front pocket, she'd found her keys.