A Marriage Worth Fighting For
A Marriage Worth Fighting For
Lilian Darcy
“Do you love me now?”
What answer could she possibly give? “I don’t know.”
Incredibly, they were still touching. Hands joined, bodies brushing lightly together.
Marriage did that, apparently. It made you so familiar with each other’s bodies that you could hold each other and talk about divorce and the non-existence of love at the same time.
“Let me prove it doesn’t have to take seven minutes,” he said softly.
“No …”
“Why not?” Before she could say anything, he added quickly, “No, don’t answer. I know what you’ll say. That if we make love, I’ll think it’s more proof that I’ve won. I don’t want to prove anything.”
“Then what do you want?”
A thick beat of silence, while he struggled to strip back the layers. “I just want you.”
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the final book in the MCKINLEY MEDICS trilogy! If I had to pick a favorite out of the three, it would be this one. Alicia and MJ are in such a different situation to that of most romance heroes and heroines, and it was both a challenge and a huge satisfaction to write their story successfully. I really hope you enjoy it.
It’s such a great time to be a reader. Even just a few years ago, if you’d loved this book and were looking for more of my work, it would have been a tedious process of searching the internet, clicking through an order system and then waiting for the books to arrive in the mail, or the hit-and-miss of browsing second-hand bookstores. Let’s not even talk about how we found books before the internet!
Now, though, when you find an author you love, much of their backlist is just a couple of mouse-clicks away, whether on the Mills & Boon website or elsewhere. So if you did love this book, take a look at my website, www.liliandarcy.com, where you can find out more about my backlist, and join me in celebrating the feast of books we can now read, from all our favorite authors.
Lilian
About the Author
LILAN DARCY has written nearly eighty books. Happily married, with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at PO Box 532, Jamison PO, Macquarie ACT 2614, Australia, or e-mail her at lilian@liliandarcy.com.
A Marriage
Worth
Fighting For
Lilian Darcy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Chapter One
Dr. Michael James McKinley Junior’s life came crashing down around him at seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening in October.
Ironically, he was home considerably earlier than usual. He was feeling content. Happy, even.
Entering the lavishly lit and decorated lobby of his building, he anticipated the moment of homecoming at a level of detail that he would have been embarrassed about if anyone had known.
It would unfold something like this:
Alicia would hear his key in the door and come to meet him, giving a little cry of pleasure and surprise. He’d suggest a meal out, and she would hurry away to change and freshen her makeup and hair. The kids would still be awake. He could spend some time with them, while Alicia readied herself.
The procedure always took a while, but the results were worth it. She was just about the most stunning woman he had ever seen. After nearly seven years of marriage he still thought so, and when he entered a social gathering with her on his arm, he felt the aura of success around both of them like a magnetic field.
So, yes, he would have to wait for Alicia to work her beauty magic, and that would be fine. He could help Nanny Maura with … well, with whatever she did with the children at this time of the evening. Their bath. Their bedtime story.
He felt he ought to know what they would be up to in their routine, but it seemed to change every few months, and it was hard to keep track of such things when he was so rarely home at an hour when they were still awake. Kids grew so fast. He had the idea Alicia had told him recently that Tyler was on the verge of giving up his daytime nap.
Or maybe he already had. MJ couldn’t remember.
He took the elevator, thinking that he had better be quiet when he entered, in case Tyler was already settling into sleep. While the thought of his two-year-old son bouncing excitedly out of bed to greet him was a pleasing one in his own head, he realized that Alicia and Maura might not think of it the same way. Tyler was an exhausting little dynamo, and if he became overtired or overstimulated he was even worse.
No, he absolutely must not disrupt the sleep routine with Tyler purely for a father’s selfish reasons.
At the apartment door, he registered that things were indeed pretty quiet in there. He slipped his key silently into the lock, turned the handle slowly so that it didn’t make a sound and tiptoed inside.
There were no lights switched on against the gathering night, and no sounds. Still convinced that he was arriving at his children’s bedtime, he crept through to the sitting room, expecting to see the night-light glowing in its socket in the hallway, or to hear the soft voices of Alicia and Maura telling Abby and Tyler good-night.
But the apartment was dark and silent. The sunset fading in the sky outside provided the only source of light, and the traffic in the canyons of the Manhattan streets below made the only sounds. No one was here. His pleasing fantasy of a warm greeting, twenty minutes of parental quality time and a relaxed evening out evaporated and left a feeling of fatigue and irritation.
He’d been at the hospital at six this morning, in surgery at six-thirty. He’d eaten lunch on the move, hadn’t had a break all day, and then when he’d glimpsed the possibility of an early departure, he’d tied himself in knots to make it happen. As a reward, he could easily have accepted fellow surgeon Oliver Marks’s casual suggestion of a quick drink instead of hurrying home to his family. Would it really have been too hard for Alicia to text him with a warning that she and the children might not be home? His arrival at this hour wasn’t that rare, was it?
He checked his phone to see if he’d missed something, but, no, she really hadn’t left a message. What the hell was she thinking? He didn’t ask much of her in that regard, for heck’s sake, and he gave her a truckload in return.
Anger rising, he went into the kitchen and flicked on a light. His gut ached with hunger, he registered, and it probably wasn’t helping his mood. There’d be something in the refrigerator to hold the hunger at bay until he knew if his dinner plan with Alicia was going to come off.
He actually had his hand on the refrigerator door handle when he saw the note on the gleaming black granite countertop, pinned down by his favorite coffee mug. He swung away from the prospect of food and picked it up. Okay, Alicia, so you did leave me an explanation, but why on earth didn’t you text, so I could—
It’s not working, MJ. And you’re never here. There’s no point saying this in person, and I doubt you’ll care. I’ve taken the kids to Vermont for some time out. I’ll talk to a lawyer in the next few days about a divorce. A.
He stood with the piece of paper in his hand. His empty stomach dropped like a stone and his temples throbbed in shock and disbelief.
Alicia had left him.
“You see, there’s green fields and little towns in Ireland, just like this,” Nanny Maura explained to Alicia in the same tone she might have used to explain her preference for coffee over tea. Her Irish accent was strong. “I came to America for a taste of city life, like. I don’t want to be stuck in the country. You didn’t tell me you were gettin’ a divorce when we were packin’ to come up here. I thought ’twas just for a few days.”
Alicia felt a weird and close-to-hysterical desire to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. Tell her nanny she wanted a divorce before she told her husband? Good plan! Add “Oh, by the way, I’m leaving my husband” to her daily list of instructions about activities and errands? No problem! Be fair to the nanny, while her life was in tatters and her children didn’t understand what was going on? Easy peasy!
But she recognized that Maura had a point. There was a huge difference between New York City and rural Vermont.
And maybe she didn’t even need a nanny now that she was here. It would be better, really. Maura was just another person she didn’t want seeing her cry. And she’d left her schedule of beauty treatments and shopping trips and charity lunches behind in Manhattan. She would have plenty of time for hands-on child care.
“When would you like to leave?” Alicia asked, not sure of the answer she wanted to hear.
This had already been a painful interview, conducted once the children were safely asleep upstairs. She’d broken the truth to Maura—that there was a reason for the larger-than-usual amount of luggage they’d brought, and for the lack of the text messages to MJ that she would normally have sent if she was going up to his brother Andy’s with the kids for a few days, as she’d done once or twice. Leaving now … on the thruway.
Maura had hidden any shock—or possibly lack of shock—behind the well-schooled facade that low-level, expendable employees learned to wear when confronted by difficult or irrational behavior from their employers. Alicia remembered the expression well from the countless times it had appeared on her own face. Maura had asked how long they would be here in Vermont, and on learning that it might be months, she’d come out with her explanation for not wanting to stay.
“When can you spare me?” Maura asked now, in response to Alicia’s question.
“It doesn’t matter.” Because nothing much did. She’d left MJ. That was all that counted. “Whenever you want.”
“Tonight?” Maura suggested hopefully. “If I check the schedule, could you drive me to the bus? A friend texted me about getting together tomorrow for—”
“Tonight is fine. I’ll give you cab fare to get you to the bus station.” Why go through an awkward evening? This way, Maura wouldn’t even need to unpack.
“I’m sure there’d be some lovely girls up here looking for child-care work,” Maura told her in an encouraging way.
“I’m sure, yes.” No point in telling this girl that she didn’t intend to replace her.
“You were going to give me those clothes that you didn’t want anymore….” Maura offered next, referring back to a conversation from a week or two ago that Alicia had totally forgotten.
“Give me a forwarding address, as soon as you have one, and I’ll mail them.”
This apparently dealt with the last of Maura’s concerns. Cast-off designer outfits, yippee! Her eyes lit up, and she gushed her thanks in the Irish accent that Abby and Tyler were both starting to pick up. They spent far more time with Maura than they spent with Alicia.
Well, that was about to change, big-time.
She looked at the clock.
Eight.
MJ was probably still at the hospital, or maybe winding down with a drink on the way home, with a couple of fellow doctors. When you added it up, she only saw him a few hours each week, and even those weren’t spent the way she would have chosen.
He was either dog-tired and silent, wanting only to sprawl on the couch eating the tired leftovers of a meal that had been fresh two or three hours ago, or else they went out to a charity event or a gallery opening or dinner at a smart restaurant. He always touched the small of her back as they moved through one of those public spaces together, as if to say to any other man who caught his eye, “Look what I’ve got. Pretty special, huh?” He rarely touched her when they were alone.
It was her own fault. She hated herself for it. She’d done her best—busted her gut—to marry for money and status. She’d worked her looks and her fashion sense and her hard-won poise for all they were worth, and her strategy had succeeded.
She’d snared MJ.
She hadn’t put a foot wrong.
She’d seized on that stupid, unforgettable night in Vegas when they’d gotten a little tipsy and stumbled into a garishly themed wedding chapel, and she’d gotten MJ over the line before he could sober up enough to rethink.
Brass ring, Alicia.
Married to a rich man with no prenup.
Not bad for a waitress from the wrong side of the tracks.
She’d been so goal-oriented about it that she hadn’t even stopped, before the ceremony, to think whether she loved him, or whether he loved her or whether they could possibly make each other happy.
She’d done her best for almost seven years to fulfill her side of the bargain. She’d given him two children. She’d kept her looks and her figure with an almost obsessive number of gym visits and spa sessions. She’d spent his money in all the ways he wanted her to. Everything they owned, from the children’s clothes to the hand-crafted dining table and matching chairs, was the product of hours of research on quality and brand names.
She’d said as little as possible about the foster homes she’d grown up in, from age ten to seventeen after Grammie died, and she’d never, ever, ever even hinted at the desperate straits she’d been in when he’d walked into her restaurant that first morning and given her the eye.
It wasn’t going to happen. It just wasn’t.
MJ’s first sizzling state of shock switched quickly to anger and an absolute refusal to accept his marriage was over. He found some chicken nuggets and oven fries in the freezer and nuked them in the microwave. While they were heating, he went into the bedroom and threw a couple of days’ worth of clothing into an overnight bag. The microwave pinged and he ate directly from the plastic dish, while he got on the phone and called his junior attending surgeon.
“Raj, something’s come up, and I won’t be available tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. McKinley. I hope nothing’s wrong.” The deep and slightly accented voice at the other end of the line strove to find the midpoint between professional distance and courteous concern.
“Everything’s fine. Family stuff. But let me catch you up on the schedule.” He switched quickly to the common language of their profession—the medical jargon and shorthand that safely took away any sense of the personal. In a couple of minutes, he covered from memory and electronic notes on his phone every patient going in for surgery tomorrow, as well as hitting the major points on several more cases that were either pre- or post-op. “Call me from the O.R. if you have any trouble with the Parker girl, because she’s going to be tricky,” he instructed. “You have the scans and the X-rays. But call me.”
He hated delegating. He was a better surgeon than most of the orthopedic specialists he knew, and that wasn’t arrogance; it was simply a fact.
Okay, correction: it was arrogance and fact.
He shoved the phone in his pocket, debating making another call or two—his office manager first, and then Oliver Marks, because they had a lunch plan in the works—but he could call later, or text. He wasn’t texting Alicia. She’d given no warning. He’d do the same. It would be midnight or later by the time he arrived, but too bad. When your whole world turned upside down, time ceased to count.
By seven-twenty he was down in the building’s underground parking garage, with his overnight bag in the trunk and his engine warming.
His marriage was not going to end with an arid little note from Alicia and divorce lawyers blazing their legal guns at fifty paces. He needed to confront her face-to-face, find out what was behind this, make her see.
See what?
His gut churned as he gunned the car in Reverse and squealed the tires on the echoing concrete.
See that this was impossible. Wrong. Just … impossible.
He seemed to have no other words for it than those two. Impossible and wrong. After almost five hours driving, with clenched hands aching on the wheel and jaw wired tight, he pulled into one of the twin driveways of his brother Andy’s elegant and cleverly subdivided Victorian house in Radford, Vermont, with no more idea of what he wanted to say to his wife than he’d had when he started.
The hammering on the door wrenched Alicia out of her restless, unhappy sleep. For about ten seconds, her heart thumped so hard in her chest that it interfered with her breathing and her skin prickled and stung with fear, but then she knew what was happening.
MJ.
Of course.
Why hadn’t she thought that he would race up here for a confrontation the moment he read her note? He had a highly developed need to win in any situation he encountered, and the prospect of a divorce was no exception.
She looked at the clock. Five minutes to midnight. It seemed appropriate. He must have gotten home from the hospital early tonight. Either that or he’d driven up here way too fast.
Probably both.
She felt sick at the thought of the imminent clash between them, and was only glad that Andy and Claudia were in New York City for a few days and weren’t around to hear anything through the walls.
She had called them to ask if she and the children could use the rental apartment, “just to get away for a short break and see the fall colors,” and they’d said of course she could, given her some practical instructions and told her where she could find the key. She dreaded their return four days from now, when she would have to tell them the truth.
She dreaded the next few minutes far more.
MJ hammered at the door again. Much more of it and he would wake the children, and that was the last thing she wanted. She rolled out of bed, grabbed a robe from where she’d left it on a chair in the corner of the room and hurried down, her bare feet chilling quickly on the wooden stairs and her whole body aching with reluctance and dread.
She snatched the door open just as he was about to batter his fist against it once more, so she caught him with it raised in the air, then saw the strong surgeon’s fingers slowly uncurl and drop back to his side.
He hadn’t showered or changed after his day’s work. He was still wearing the dark suit pants and one of the crisp white business shirts he favored whenever he wasn’t wearing scrubs. There was a bright moon in the sky and it picked out the white of the shirt and made it glow against the darker matte of his skin.
He’d taken off his tie and opened the shirt at the top for comfort, and his hair was windblown from driving with the car window cracked open. He liked to drive that way in all weather except the dead of winter, said it was bracing. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow and the shirttail had come untucked at one side, so for once—unusually—there was something rakish about him.
His breathing was heavier than usual and ragged at the edges. His high, square brow was pleated in a tight frown, and there was an odd, numb look to his mouth, even in the low light spilling onto his face from inside the house.
He looked a mess.
He opened his mouth to speak, but then nothing came out and Alicia didn’t have the words for this situation, either, so they just stared at each other, helpless and hostile and so painfully far apart.
In the end, they both spoke in the same moment.
“I’m not inviting you in.”
“You can’t do this, Alicia.”
They went silent again. Despite what she’d just said, she almost moved aside to let him across the threshold. The patterns of seven years were hard to kick. She expected him to force the issue, simply barge past her with or without her consent, but he didn’t.
He actually stepped back, spread his hands a little and conceded her victory. “All right, if you don’t want me in the house, then that’s your right and your choice.”
“Thank you. Yes.”
“But I hate that you’re doing this. That you left a note.”
“You wanted us to talk about it in front of Abby and Tyler?”
“You’ve taken them from their home.”
“I— What was the alternative?”
“Kick me out,” he said, harsh and bitter. “That’s what Anna did to James.”
It shocked her that he could make this reference. Anna and James had been part of their wider circle of friends until they’d divorced, after one of the most poisonous marriages Alicia had ever seen. They were still fighting mercilessly over custody of their five-year-old daughter, who was caught in the cross fire and would bear the scars.
Before Alicia could find words to protest any comparison with such a couple, MJ asked her, “Does Andy know why you’re here?”
“No, not yet. He’ll have to, of course, and Claudia, and everyone else.”
“If you go through with the whole stupid—” he began, but he must have seen something in her face. Whatever this was on her part, it wasn’t stupid. He didn’t finish. He just stood there, a look of loss and uncertainty carved painfully deep into his even, good-looking features. When had she ever seen MJ look like that?
“I’d better go to a motel,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not sleeping on my brother’s front lawn. If you want me to make an appointment to talk to you in the morning, Alicia, I’ll do that. Just tell me where and what time. But I’m not going back to the city until we have talked, and I think you owe me that, at least. When I saw your note—” He swallowed hard, lifted his clenched hand to his throat for a moment and didn’t finish.
She saw goose bumps on his forearms. Vermont nights were getting chilly at this time of year and he wasn’t dressed for it. Neither was she, with her feet bare on the hardwood of the front hall.
The idea of an “appointment” in the morning seemed worse than having him here right now. She knew she wouldn’t sleep all night, and the prospect of facing down her husband at some kind of formal meeting across a café table—but who would look after the children?—made her stomach drop.
“No,” she said. “Let’s talk now.”
“Here?” He gestured at the front porch and the yard and almost seemed willing, despite the chill and dark.
This time, she did step back. “Inside, of course.”
He came across the porch and through the door, and his shirtsleeve would have brushed the front of her robe if she hadn’t leaned a crucial inch closer to the hallway wall. “Where’s Maura? I don’t want her—”
“She left.”
“Left?”
“Quit. She didn’t want to be in Vermont. Too rural. I gave her money for a cab and a bus ticket back to the city. You probably crossed paths with her somewhere near Albany.”
She closed the heavy wooden door and followed him toward the front living room, but he turned suddenly while they were still in the hall and pulled her into his arms, with a disturbing mix of authority and hesitation. “Don’t—don’t do this.”
“What?”
His muscles were hard around her, all knotted and demanding. “Any of it! This gesture. We have two children. A partnership.”
“It’s not a gesture.”
“Forgive me if I get the semantics wrong,” he almost yelled.
“You’re right. There’s so much else wrong. Semantics is not even the tip of the iceberg.”
“What else is wrong?”
“Everything, MJ. What’s right? Tell me one thing that’s right about our marriage?” She pushed at his arms. They were so rigid they were almost painful, and she had no desire whatsoever to soften into them when they were like that.
But then she caught the drift of scent from his skin, a mix of soap and nuttiness, and for a moment it made her crumble inside. The scent of safety, she’d thought when it first became familiar to her, seven years ago. A precious, desperately valued scent that said everything was going to be okay now. She didn’t need to be scared anymore. She didn’t need to be alone.
It was such a powerful memory. It almost undermined her resolve. Unconsciously, she relaxed a little and felt his hold on her grow closer, but at the same time softer, a little less like a vise. His hands slipped down the back of her robe, warming her spine, coming to rest in the inward curve of her waist.
He laced his fingers together, leaned back a little and looked at her, eyes raking over her as if taking inventory or examining a precious possession in search of flaws. Hell, he couldn’t possibly think he’d won this already, could he?
She’d left him, left her marriage, and it wasn’t a mere gesture. She meant it. She was serious.
And yet, why shouldn’t he think he’d won? He won so many things, so often. Discussions about where and when to go for their vacation, inevitably choosing status destinations that they could talk about with their friends. The decision about building his medical career in New York City, following his father’s and grandfather’s tradition. She hadn’t even dared to suggest that somewhere else might be a worthwhile choice. The debate about when they should start trying for a baby, when Alicia would have preferred to wait another year or two—and then of course she had gotten pregnant the first month.
But if Alicia thought she was winning this one, why wasn’t she pushing him away? she wondered. She should be!
“You have a beautiful apartment,” he said, still angry but softer about it. “You have a platinum credit card. I buy you gifts. I take you out. When do I ever say no to any of it? Your personal trainer, your wardrobe, the help we pay top dollar for.”
There.
Right there.
That was the whole problem.
In a nutshell.
She was bitterly unsurprised that he’d come out with such a catalog of material benefits, too. Of course it was the first thing he would think of, and the fault lay as much at her own door as at his. More so. The only thing that surprised her—always surprised her, in a guilty, self-doubting way—was that he seemed satisfied with his side of the bargain. What did he get out of the arrangement? There must have been hundreds of women who would have been worth more to him and who would have married him for better reasons.
This was the thing that made it impossible for her to continue their marriage.
He thought she’d married him for what he could give her. The money. The status. The pampered lifestyle. And for whatever reason, he was content with that.
Worse, when she searched her heart and searched her memories, she couldn’t find the proof to tell him he was wrong. She’d been too desperate at the time to even think about love or the deeper levels of a partnership.
She wrenched herself out of his arms, sick with shame and disappointment at herself and at him. Of course their marriage had failed. How could either of them expect any other outcome, given its flawed foundations?
“Go back to New York, MJ,” she said on a harsh whisper, while she wondered if she was a different person from that terrified twenty-three-year-old seven years ago, or if she would soon discover that she hadn’t changed at all.
Chapter Two
Seven years earlier …
“Mail,” Alicia’s boss said shortly, tossing her a handful of envelopes, which made her heart sink as soon as she saw them. “Came yesterday.”
The last time she’d moved apartments, she’d won Tony Cottini’s permission to use his restaurant address for her mail delivery, since her job seemed a more stable entity than her place of residence, but she regretted it every time these letters came.
It was so obvious what they were. Overdue account notices, containing increasingly strident demands for payment. They were cold things, echoing the cold of the November day outside.
“Thanks,” she told him quickly, then stuffed the mail in the battered purse hanging on a hook in a dingy alcove and hurried to the serving window in front of the kitchen to line four plates of hot food along her arm.
Tony wasn’t a bad boss—if he had been, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into her current trap with the mailing address, because she wouldn’t have dared to ask—but he still had a healthy interest in her attaining maximum productivity levels at all times.
She delivered the food with a smile, took the order from the next table and skimmed back to the kitchen to slap it in front of the short-order cook, calling it out as she did so. “Three specials, two eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, one on whole wheat, one scrambled, sausage and home fries, white toast.”
Okay, now Table Three.
It was only seven in the morning. Her feet had already begun to ache, but that would taper off after the rush hit its peak at around eleven. By the time she finished her double shift twelve hours after that, the rest of her would be so tired that the old reliable feet almost wouldn’t care.
Table Three had a doctor at it, eating by himself. She could tell he was a doctor because a) the restaurant was only a block from a major Manhattan hospital, so doctors grabbed a quick meal here quite often, b) he was reading a gigantic medical textbook and c) he’d forgotten to take off his name badge, which read Dr. Michael McKinley, Jr.
“What can I get you?” she asked him, coffeepot in hand.
At Tony’s, they didn’t bother with all that hi-my-name’s-Alicia-and-I’ll-be-your-server-today stuff. Again, he was a decent boss that way. He just growled at them every now and then, “Say whatever greeting you like to the customer. Just be sincere and say it with a smile.”
Oops, she’d forgotten the smile.
She put it on.
The one she’d practiced.
The one she’d paid for.
Or rather, borrowed the money for, at the kind of horrible interest rate you had no choice about when you had an unimpressive credit history.
The one she was, in other words, still paying for.
Dr. Michael McKinley Junior looked up from the giant book in response to her question, and his gaze arrived at her face in time to see the smile—its dutiful dawning, its practiced beauty and its slow fade when she thought about how much she still owed for these perfect straight white teeth.
He ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu and held out his cup for coffee like a thirsty man in the desert, which made her think he’d probably been working all night. She filled it neatly, to the perfect height.
There was a pride in doing good work. She’d learned that as an actress—okay, wannabe actress—and she’d always tried to carry it through into the rest of her life. Look at it this way: What if she had to play a waitress in a major movie someday? What if she was chosen to front a lifestyle TV show? Or feature in a national ad campaign for a top-selling brand of coffee? Or if a modeling photo shoot called for her to pose with a steaming cup in her hand?
Those fantasies didn’t come very often anymore. They’d been scoured away by six years of struggling to survive in Manhattan, since she’d arrived here off a bus from Tennessee at the age of seventeen. Six years of fitting acting classes and auditions around restaurant shifts. Six years of scraping together the money to eat and sleep, as well as updating her modeling portfolio and fixing her damned teeth.
She’d been told to do this by several modeling agencies, and it had seemed like an investment in her future, the one key piece of the puzzle that was missing. Once she had straight white teeth, the work would start to flow and the money would pour in.
But it still wasn’t happening, and there was this horrible slippery slope where you paid off the loan for the teeth with a credit card and then got another credit card to cover the maxed-out balance on the first one, and it was so hard to get ahead.
When did something stop being an investment and start being money poured down the drain? She hadn’t taken any of those expensive acting and voice and movement classes for a while, and her photo portfolio was more than three years old.
“You’re a beautiful girl,” she’d been told a thousand times. “But …”
Fill in the blank.
You’re two inches too short. You’re too big in the bust. You don’t have the voice. You’re too small in the bust. You don’t have the dance training. You’re a model and we’re looking for an actress. You’re an actress and we’re looking for someone who can sing … who can speak French … who can ride a unicycle … who can dance with bears while wrapping a flaming cobra around her neck and juggling ten chain saws.
Yeah, and don’t even go near the X-rated ways to complete the “someone who can” equation. This was one of her few sources of pride. She’d never stooped to porn videos or the casting couch.
But she was scared sometimes. Scared every day. She had nothing to fall back on. No close family, since Grammie’s death. Some distant cousins she didn’t even know. Friends in only a little less bad shape than she was. She could never call on them to bail her out. Most of them, she didn’t even know if they really were friends. More like fellow prisoners in the same trap. Maybe every single one of them would scramble over her dead body if it gave them a route to success. How much scrambling would she be prepared to do herself?
The desperate plans went around and around in her head. Work more double shifts so she could pay off the debt and get some money saved. Abandon her dreams of success, leave the city and find somewhere cheaper to live, take some night courses to earn a more realistic qualification.
She had nothing in that area, because she’d been so sure that the “You’re so beautiful” she’d heard since the age of nine would be enough.
There it was, right now, on Dr. Michael McKinley Junior’s face. You’re so beautiful. He didn’t say it out loud, but she’d learned to read it even when it wasn’t spoken. It was like the twenty-seven supposed Eskimo words for snow, so many variants of the same thing.
You’re so beautiful, but you’re out of my league.
You’re so beautiful, but you’re not my type.
You’re so beautiful, and I’m such a sleaze I’m not going to even hide than I’m looking down your uniform blouse.
In Dr. McKinley’s case, it seemed to be more like “You’re so beautiful, wow, you’re actually distracting me from my coffee,” and he looked so exhausted and bowled over and unaware of his own reaction that it was quite cute, because he was a good-looking man himself. Aged around thirty, she thought, with an imposing height and build, darkly even features and a warm, well-shaped mouth. So it was no hardship to meet his eye and lift the wattage of the smile a notch or two higher.
She gave him his breakfast perfectly.
And then he went, and that was that.
Or not.
Because he appeared again for supper just before she clocked off for the night, and he remembered her and told her, “You work longer hours than I do.”
“But your work is more important,” she answered, which was from-the-heart to a stupid extent, considering Dr. McKinley’s casual comment.
She had a complex, sentimental feeling about doctors, dating from Grammie’s illness, when a couple of them had been so good and thoughtful and kind, and yet they hadn’t been able to make Grammie better. That was thirteen years ago now, when she was ten, but it still colored her reactions sometimes. Colored her life always.
“Thank you,” Dr. McKinley said. “It’s nice to hear that.”
And she could tell he had a healthy ego, but there was a sincerity to the words all the same, and the you’re-so-beautiful in his eyes had an extra something to it, a little spark.
And suddenly, right there while she poured his coffee, some instinct told her she needed to nurture and fan that spark more carefully and strategically and hardheadedly than she’d ever nurtured anything in her life.
Because maybe, just maybe, there might be something in it for her.
Chapter Three
She meant it, MJ could tell.
Go back to New York.
Even though Alicia had only whispered the words, they had more force for him than if she’d yelled them and physically pushed him toward the door.
She never fought him. On anything. It drove him crazy sometimes. He wanted to tell her, “I’m not asking for that from you. I don’t need such perfect agreement and acquiescence with everything I say and everything I want. That’s not why I married you. You are allowed to be a person, Alicia. An independent person, not just my wife. Your total obedience was never part of the bargain.”
So why didn’t he say it?
Standing here right now, in the hallway of the rental apartment attached to his younger brother’s house, looking at his beautiful blonde wife, the question reared up at him like a snake and made him paralyzed.
Why didn’t he ever say it?
Because he was scared, he realized. He was bloody terrified that if he pulled their marital bargain out into the bright light of day—or rather the bright light of words—the things they said to each other would shatter any possibility of keeping the life they had.
The life he wanted.
Really, MJ?
Hell, yes, he wanted what he had! Stellar career, beautiful, capable wife, happy children, well-organized home life.
Which brought him back to square one. Out of the blue, Alicia wanted a divorce and was standing in his brother’s hallway in Vermont, telling him to leave.
I’m exhausted.
Another inconvenient and powerful realization. She wanted him to go, and he was tempted to do just that—fling himself angrily out of here and tear back down the highway he’d just driven. But he didn’t think he would be safe on the road for another five-hour stint. He probably hadn’t been particularly safe driving up.
“I’ll check in to a motel,” he told her for the second time tonight.
“Will you find one, at this hour?”
“That’s not your concern, is it?” The words were sour and harsh with anger, and he saw her flinch.
“MJ—”
“There’ll be something. I won’t have to go beyond Albany. I can drive that far, without going off the road.”
She said nothing to this, and he thought it was because they had no precedents to go on. They’d never argued. There was never anything to argue about. She did what he wanted, said what he wanted, kept quiet.
Didn’t see him all that much.
Didn’t see enough of him for the two of them to rub against each other the way a married couple usually did.
That was one of the things she’d said in her note, which he discovered he already knew by heart. You’re never here. What did she want with that? He was one of the most successful orthopedic specialists in Manhattan. The kind that A-list celebrities came to after a skiing accident or when their kid broke an arm in the playground. The kind who put together seriously broken bodies flown in from a radius of hundreds of miles, or fixed limbs made hopelessly dysfunctional through trauma or genetic accident. He worked ninety hours a week.
And she benefited from those ninety hours with every breath she took. The beauty treatments, the shopping trips, the time for charity work that was far more about being seen at $3,000-a-plate fundraiser dinners than it was about the Amazon rain forest or the tigers in Bengal.
He suddenly came upon a bitter place inside himself where crouched this ugly little belief that she liked seeing so little of him. Shoot, it hurt to think that, but he realized he’d thought it for a while.
Thought it but never allowed the thought any space, kept the ugly little thing in a small, murky cave deep inside himself and was too busy and too in-demand as a surgeon to remember it was there, most of the time.
Now it knifed through him with a sharp awareness that almost made him gasp out loud. He controlled himself with the same iron will that helped him survive round-the-clock stints of surgery, and told her, “We both need some time. This has hit me from left field, Alicia.”
“Yes,” she replied briefly, as if she wasn’t surprised.
“Maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe you’ll say that’s a huge part of the problem. That I didn’t see it coming.
That I didn’t—”
Hell, he couldn’t go on. He was going to break down if he did. The degree of his emotion appalled him. And her blank, distant reaction appalled him more. She was just standing there, as if she was made of marble. As pale as marble, too, almost. But if this was painful to her, it wasn’t the same kind of pain he felt himself.
“I’m sorry.” The words were wrenched out of him as if a mystical hand had just reached inside his throat and pulled. He didn’t know what he was apologizing for, and he didn’t wait to see how she would react, just tore out through the front door, across the porch and down the steps to the car, where the engine still ticked as it cooled in the chilly night.
He knew he’d be back, and soon, but he didn’t know what he would say or do when he came.
Alicia felt shaky and sick as she heard the car drive away into the silent dark of the sleeping street. She’d expected to feel angry.
Oh, it was so strange!
She’d been so completely unsurprised to find him banging on that front door, demanding entrance in the middle of the night, but everything after that hadn’t gone the way she’d thought it would at all.
At some level, she’d wanted all the ego and impatience and one-sided demands. MJ so rarely betrayed any sense of vulnerability. Just those tiny glimpses in his last few words tonight had rocked her and undermined her certainty far more than he could have done with undiluted anger.
And then he’d listened to her.
She’d asked him to go, and he’d done so, and now she was left knowing she wouldn’t sleep tonight. He had talked about the two of them needing time. Writing that note to him this morning, she would have said that time was the last thing she needed. She’d had a ton of that.
She’d been thinking for months about leaving him. Flirting with the idea at first. What if I just took the children and left? Not meaning it, just playing with it. But then the thoughts had grown more serious, the plans more detailed.
She would have to leave the city, she’d decided, so that there was some physical distance between the two of them and so that neither of them had to face pressure from his father.
Who would hate this, she knew, because he expected perfection and order from his children.
She would have to soften the reality for Abby and Tyler, and leaving the city would help, there, too. They were so small; she didn’t want them to witness the ugliness and conflict. She had to find a secure, happy environment for them from the beginning, even if there was a later transition to a different, permanent home. Andy’s rental apartment checked all the boxes.
When she’d reached a concrete decision, there hadn’t been any momentous last straw to make it happen; it was simply a long, gradual accumulation, with a handful of moments that stood out from the rest.
Like the night Andy and Claudia had announced their engagement and their plans for the small, informal wedding that would be taking place in New York City just a couple of weeks from now. Alicia had urged Claudia to go for something bigger, even if it meant waiting, and when she thought back, she realized that MJ’s sister, Scarlett, had probably interpreted that in the worst way.
Alicia knew that at least some members of the McKinley family believed she’d married MJ for his money and status.
Well, they were right, weren’t they?
It was stupid and pointless to regret the rush of their Las Vegas wedding. Would their marriage have been any healthier and happier if they’d started it off with a well-organized splash, months in the planning? Would it have happened at all?
Doubtful.
MJ would have been bound to see sense and realize he could do so much better.
She shivered. It really was cold in the house. She’d tried the heating earlier tonight, but nothing happened when she touched the controls on the electronic thermostat. Apparently Andy hadn’t yet turned on the furnace, although he hadn’t mentioned it during their short phone call. Maybe he shared MJ’s preference for bracing doses of fresh air at a temperature of fifty degrees or less.
She crept upstairs and back to bed, but her churning feelings, her blank sense of the future and her freezing feet wouldn’t let her sleep, and when Abby and Tyler came bouncing into the room at just after six-thirty, she wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the day.
MJ checked out of the cheap motel on the outskirts of Albany at seven in the morning. His colleagues would be surprised to see him in surgery at eleven-thirty, after what he’d said to Raj on the phone last night, but it wasn’t their business.
Later, at his office, he would have to grab Carla, his office manager, and go through his schedule with her. He had to be realistic. If he and Alicia were going to give themselves a chance, then he needed to give them time. Time to talk. Time to compromise. Time to mine down to the depths of what was wrong.
It hit him again as he drove.
He did not want a divorce.
His throat hurt over it. His whole body hurt, knotted with the tension of rebellion and pain and refusal to accept his marriage was over.
He was not getting a divorce. He didn’t damn well believe in it! Not when you had kids. Not when you had a partnership that should have worked.
He accepted that Alicia wasn’t doing this on a shallow whim, and so he was going to have to work at changing her mind, and if she wasn’t expecting a fight from him over this, then she didn’t know him very well.
Did she know him well?
The question struck him suddenly, as if he had a passenger sitting beside him, grilling him on the issue. Did he know her?
Well, of course they knew each other! They each knew what the other ate for breakfast. They knew the sounds each other made in bed. He knew she liked diamonds and sapphires but not emeralds. She knew he detested reality TV.
Did any of that count as real knowledge?
They’d rushed into their marriage. He recognized that. He’d even recognized it at the time. He hadn’t thought it mattered, because in the moment he’d felt so incredibly, exhilaratingly sure. He’d had this all-seeing, all-knowing confidence—arrogance, let’s face it—that he could see the whole picture and that he understood what would make their marriage work better than anyone else.
How wrong had he been?
Chapter Four
Seven years earlier …
“Want to dress up tonight?”
Alicia gave MJ a questioning look and tucked the fluffy white hotel towel a little tighter between her breasts, and he thought that the gesture was an unconscious betrayal.
Of her increasingly urgent inner questions about where this relationship was going. Of the fact that the variety in her wardrobe was getting thin.
“I want to go someplace really special,” he added, so that she’d know he had plans.
“I’d love that,” she said, then warned him with a slow and almost cheeky smile. “But you’ve seen the dress before.”
“That’s okay. Gives me confidence. You’ve never yet worn anything I didn’t like.”
He suspected that most of her wardrobe came from charity stores, because even he, with no interest in fashion, could see that her carefully put-together outfits weren’t at the forefront of style. But she wore them with the aura of an Oscar-winning actress on the red carpet, as if she knew that she looked stunning, and as if she was wearing fifteen thousand dollars worth of fabric and design on her upper body alone.
He admired the bravado of the performance, and that she was successful at it. She was an astute shopper, and you had to really look closely to see that she wasn’t wearing a designer label after all, or that if it was, it was “vintage,” aka secondhand, rather than new.
Few people, male or female, did look that closely. They were too busy being struck dumb by her lush bow of a mouth, her dazzling blue eyes, her dynamite figure and her perfect bone structure.
With the towel still carefully wrapped around her, she walked across the carpet to the mirror-fronted closet that ran along one side of the narrow entrance to their hotel room, and he couldn’t take his eyes from her prettily manicured bare feet, which appeared to react with a sensual delight to the lush thickness, as if they were more accustomed to walking on nails.
This was rapidly becoming one of MJ’s favorite leisure-time activities—lying on a king-size bed surrounded by a heap of snowy pillows while he watched Alicia dress. The hair and makeup routines he could skip. Those took place in the secrecy of the bathroom, they were too arcane and technical, and the blow dryer was noisy. In any case, he considered that she looked just as good with no makeup, bed hair and a pillow-crease mark across her cheek.
But the way she shimmied her breasts into a pushup lace bra, or let a sheath of silky fabric slide down her body …
In the month since they’d started sleeping together, Alicia getting dressed was a process that frequently reversed itself before it was even finished and transformed into a completely different activity in a very satisfactory way.
Not today.
Today she was a little coy.
She did that sometimes—went inexplicably distant as if she didn’t want him to have too much of a good thing. When he reached out his arms for her—now, for example—she did that smile again and shook her head. “Later.”
“Why?” he lazily asked.
“Because later I’ll taste of chocolate.”
He didn’t point out that they could have now as well as later. He thought he understood why she needed to keep a hold of the reins in their relationship sometimes, and it didn’t bother him.
Tonight, especially, he’d been quite sincere in what he’d told her. He did want this to be a really special, unforgettable evening. He’d bought her something. His anticipation about seeing her face when she opened the gift almost outweighed his anticipation about her tasting of chocolate.
Forty-five minutes later, she was ready to go, wearing a splashy, strappy floral dress that showed off the light golden glow of her newly tanned shoulders. She’d spent most of the afternoon out by the pool, catching the March sunshine that was so much stronger here than it would have been in New York, while he’d gone off on his covert shopping mission.
While she was in the bathroom just now, he’d slipped the gift into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and he hoped the bulge didn’t show. He didn’t want to give it to her yet. Before dessert, maybe, when they were both replete with good food and just pleasantly mellow from a glass or two of wine.
He curved his arm around her bare shoulders as they walked into the five-star restaurant together. Her shoulders were sun-warmed and touched with pink and perfectly smooth. He wanted to pull her close, but this was a public place and he hadn’t been raised to feel comfortable about full-on displays of affection in front of strangers. Instead, he let his hand slide down to the small of her back and recognized his own sense of proud possession.
She turns every head in the room, and she’s with me.
He was dizzy about it. Even dizzier an hour and a half into their meal, after a little more wine than he’d planned.
“I’m having a great time,” he told her.
“Me, too.” She smiled. “You can be pretty funny, do you know that?”
“So can you.”
He’d never felt like this before. An ambitious young doctor didn’t have much time to devote to finding the right woman. Of course he’d dated. During his internship, three years ago, he’d been quite serious about a fellow doctor whom he’d met on his rotation through the E.R.
But it had been a nightmare, in the end. Adrienne was a single mother. She did a really great job with it but juggled the most horrific schedule. The deeper he went into the relationship, the more it appalled him. They went weeks without spending any kind of quality time together, and he wasn’t comfortable in the role of instant dad. As the eldest son in the McKinley family, he shared his father’s perception that they were building a dynasty, and he wanted kids of his own.
If Adrienne hadn’t had her own mother close at hand, she couldn’t possibly have managed motherhood and the demands of medical study, but it meant that MJ felt as if he was taking her mom on board as well as her son. Cynthia was a nice woman, but the countless hours of help she gave her daughter made her feel entitled to comment and judge and interfere at will about everything. He couldn’t blame her for that, but it didn’t mean he liked it.
To cut a long story short, the relationship hadn’t worked, and he’d come away from it after six months feeling as if there just wasn’t room for both people in a partnership to have such a full schedule and so many emotional demands.
He’d made a conscious decision at that point only to get involved with women who had a little less ambition and drive, and preferably not much baggage. A relationship shouldn’t be harder and more demanding than his career, for heck’s sake. A relationship was about downtime and emotional nourishment.
He’d only known Alicia for four months and wasn’t yet asking himself any questions about the future, but so far she gave him more emotional nourishment than any woman he’d ever met.
Just that smile …
“Dessert menu?” she asked.
“Wait a moment. I have something.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the square, dark blue velvet box.
She saw it in his hand, went completely still as if in shock, put her fingertips against her mouth and swallowed. “Oh, MJ …” she breathed.
“Open it,” he said softly and passed it to her. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, and cradled it in her hand as if it was as fragile as a quail’s egg.
“Yes,” she said, half-laughing, almost in tears. “Oh, yes!”
Her fingers were shaking. It took her a good thirty seconds to get the box open, and there it was, the diamond hair clip dazzling white and gold against the deep blue. He’d had a private, hour-long session in the back room of the very exclusive Vegas jewelry store this afternoon, where he’d been shown tray after tray of bracelets, necklaces and earrings, but this was what he’d settled on because of her beautiful hair.
“Ohh,” she said abruptly and put the box down. “Oh, wow. Wow. It’s—it’s beautiful.”
“Do you like it?” Rather an ego-driven question, he realized at once. But it was sincere, too. He wanted to know. He wanted her to love it. “They’re diamonds.”
In case she was in any doubt.
Six figures’ worth. He wasn’t going to reveal the exact price he’d paid, but she would have to realize it was a lot.
She was staring down at it, hadn’t moved to touch it again, wasn’t speaking. He took a too-large gulp of wine and regretted it. He already felt a little hazy. Focusing on her face more closely, he realized she wasn’t reacting quite the way he’d expected.
“I—I can’t accept this, MJ.”
“Of course you can. Why not?”
She groped for words, while the velvet box sat on the table in front of her, untouched. Why didn’t she take out the clip and look at it more closely? Trace those pretty fingertips over the diamonds and gold? Why was she having such trouble? He could almost see the wheels turning in her head.
Stupidly, he took yet another gulp of wine, and then he looked at the square velvet box again and suddenly he knew. She had thought there was going to be a ring in there. She was convinced. It was the right shape, maybe a tiny bit larger, such an easy mistake to make. What had she said to him before she’d opened it?
“Yes. Oh, yes!”
Ah, hell, and there should have been a ring.
In an instant, it was startlingly clear to him. She’d thought at first that he was proposing, but she’d quickly realized her mistake. Anything less than a ring looked to her like a payment for sex, like the beginning of the end. She was a waitress. It was probably what she thought she deserved.
Now she was trying to calculate whether the gift was worth—literally worth—taking, whether it was all she was ever going to get from the relationship, whether he was using it to start the process of kissing her off and what room she had to maneuver in all of this.
It made him wince and it made him ache.
He’d wanted so much to make her happy with the expensive gift, not send her into a spin of desperate calculation and doubt like this. He cared about her happiness, he realized. Cared far more than he’d thought.
“Let’s get married.” He said it before he knew he was going to, and it was crazy and impulsive and the exact opposite of his usual considered decision-making, but he didn’t want to take it back. He took her hands across the table. “Alicia, it’s not a ring. You thought it was going to be, but it’s not and that’s my fault, but let’s get married anyhow, and we’ll get a ring for you later.”
She laughed, not daring to believe him now, when she’d been wrong before. “Married, MJ?”
“Yes, why the hell not? Tonight. This is Vegas. If we skip dessert, we can probably be married in half an hour.”
“Half an hour? Married?”
“I want to, Alicia. I really, really want to!”
Now she was laughing and crying. The tears sparkled on her lashes, and he didn’t regret what he’d said for a moment. “Yes, MJ. If you really mean it, yes!” she said.
It took a little longer than half an hour but not by much. At ten in the evening, there they were in the glitzy chapel, wearing their dinner clothes, still pleasantly mellow and happy from the wine, and saying their sketchy vows.
Alicia wore her strapless dress, a kiss of sunburn on her shoulders, and the glittering diamond barrette in her gorgeous piled-up hair, while MJ’s whole body buzzed with a giddy sense of triumph and rightness that almost took his breath away.
Chapter Five
But that was then.
He arrived home from the hospital at nine o’clock. It was now twenty-six hours, 520 miles of driving, four hours of surgery and five hours of medical admin and patient care since he’d first found Alicia’s note.
The kitchen was just the way he’d left it, with the microwave dish still sitting on the countertop, containing some crumbs and half a shriveled chicken nugget. It was, what, Thursday? Their housekeeper, Rosanna, came on Mondays and Fridays. She usually replenished their grocery supplies on a Friday, he understood, so there was probably not much food left in the place.
He’d never needed to think about this kind of thing in his life. Mom was a great cook. In college and medical school, he had the full meal plan. Later, living on his own, he’d eaten out or ordered in for almost every meal that he hadn’t grabbed at the hospital café. On his marriage, he’d given Alicia a free hand and she’d set everything up. Most of the time, he never even knew where it came from—if Rosanna had cooked it, or Alicia herself, or if it came from a deli or a caterer. This was New York City. Food just … was.
Except when it wasn’t.
His gut felt terrible, a mix of physical hunger and emotional wrenching that he didn’t know how to damp down. He didn’t want to go out. He didn’t want to hunt up take-out menus and get on the phone. He didn’t really want to eat at all but knew he should.
Life went on.
He needed to have some semblance of a brain in place, in order to talk to Alicia about what happened next.
In the end, he found a couple of eggs and a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer, and made an inept version of scrambled eggs on toast. He didn’t think to put butter in the skillet, so the eggs stuck, and when he tried adding water to unstick them, he ended up with unappetizing eggy slush ladled onto toast that went soggy in seconds.
He ate it anyhow, disguised with some chunks of cheese and a too-liberal shake of pepper and salt.
Then he called his wife.
She would know it was him before she even had the phone to her ear. MJ would have come up on her phone screen. And she must have expected a call from him, anyhow. She knew he wasn’t going to let this go. She sounded guarded and polite, and he fought for the right tone.
“How’re the kids?” he heard himself ask. Heard the scratch in his voice, too.
Hell, it hurt not to be with them. Alicia would have said he barely saw them, but, shoot, that didn’t mean he didn’t care. His awareness of their peacefully sleeping presence when he came home to the apartment at night or left in the early morning nourished him at a level he’d never tried to put into words. The times he did see them were incredibly precious, if demanding, and for all the times when he wasn’t around, he had enormous confidence in Alicia as a mother.
Damn, did he not tell her that enough, or something?
He tried to remember the last time he had, and couldn’t. To him it was so obvious—why did she need to hear it?
“They’re asleep,” she said. “Tired.”
“What did you do today?”
“Went to a park. We had a picnic. Which ended up taking place in the car because it began to rain. But we had fun anyway.” The forced cheeriness in the word fun reminded him that he wasn’t the only one who’d had to carry on as usual today, despite the upheaval of their separation.
“I’m glad,” he answered her mechanically, then cut to the chase. “What have you said to them, Alicia? What do they know?”
“I haven’t said anything yet. For them, we’re on vacation, that’s all. At some point, of course—”
He jumped in. “You can’t just spring it on them. And you can’t do it when I’m not around. We have to tell them together. I will not have my children exposed to that kind of conflict or have them doubt my role as their father in any way.” In his urgency, he spoke with more anger than he’d intended.
Hell, he was so unused to anything like this!
He wasn’t thinking of the prospect of divorce, there—of course he wasn’t used to that!
But he wasn’t accustomed in any area to having his will thwarted. This seemed almost shameful on his part, certainly nothing to be proud of, but that’s how it was. He was a top surgeon. People did what he wanted. Always.
Alicia, too. Maura and their previous nanny, Kate, another two nannies before that. And Rosanna, the rare times he saw her.
Abby and Tyler were almost the only human beings who ever defied him.
“Time to get out of the bath now, sweetheart. Both of you.”
“No! Not yet!”
“No, no, no!”
He realized he wasn’t comfortable when that happened. He tended to opt out and have Alicia or the nanny take over. “Here, they’re unmanageable tonight, and I’m tired.”
But Alicia was speaking now. He focused quickly on her voice down the line. “Of course I won’t just spring it on them, MJ. Is that really who you think I am? Someone who would risk destroying my own children’s sense of emotional security that way, like Anna and James are doing? Someone who would use them as a weapon against you?”
“No … No, I’m not suggesting that.”
“You seemed to be.”
“Look, it wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t. Our marriage is nothing like what Anna and James had. If you’re saying it is—”
“No, no, I’m not. You’re right. There’s no comparison.” Something they agreed on! He felt a brief moment of relief.
“All I’m saying is that I want us to do this right. If we have to do it at all. I don’t want it, Alicia. If there’s anything I can do, anything I can say, any way I can change, or we can both change, talk so that—” He stopped.
Hell, was he begging?
She stayed silent at the end of the phone, after he’d broken off. He waited, head pounding, jaw tight. Should he seize the window opened up by her silence? Take the initiative? He didn’t know how.
She spoke again before he had any answers. “You’ll have to come up here again.” The words were slow and careful. “I do know that. Maybe it’s best not to put it off. Can you get some time?”
“This weekend,” he said quickly, while the back of his mind buzzed, rearranging his schedule, working out a few favors he could call in. In his position, it wasn’t easy to get a chunk of time off at short notice.
Alicia knew that, and he hoped she would see his willingness as a step toward—
Toward having this whole thing just go away!
But he’d begun to accept that this wasn’t going to be an easy fix.
“If you could, that would be great,” Alicia said, still with that slow, careful way of talking, as if she was having to bite her tongue not to yell at him or blurt out a hundred deeply felt grievances. “It doesn’t need to be the whole weekend….”
“It’s going to be the whole weekend. I’ll drive up Saturday morning, back down Sunday night.” Another ten hours in the car. He didn’t care.
“All right, if you want. I think you’d better book into a motel.”
“What will the children think of that?”
Thick silence. “Make a reservation, please, MJ. It—it may turn out that you can cancel it …” He felt a rush of relief and hope. Short-lived.
“… if we can stay civilized enough for you to sleep in the study.”
“In the study?”
“I made up a folding bed there for Maura—of course, she never used it—and I haven’t put it away yet. There are really only the two bedrooms. Abby and Tyler are sharing. But they don’t need to know where you’re sleeping. Anyway, they’re not going to see our choice of sleeping arrangements—” a pause “—the way an adult sees it.”
“No.”
So this was how she saw the physical side of their marriage, as a “choice of sleeping arrangements.” It felt like a body blow. Like a kick in the—
Yeah. There.
“Was there anything else you wanted to say?” Alicia asked him carefully.
“Uh, no. Face-to-face, of course. But not now. Could you call and cancel Rosanna for tomorrow? I don’t want her—”
“Yes, okay, that’s probably a good idea.” She took a breath. “So can you text me with a rough arrival time? In case I’m out with the kids?”
“Sure.” He got through another couple of rounds of practical back-and-forth, then flipped the phone into the breast pocket of his shirt, his mind still snagged on the “sleeping arrangements” thing like ripped skin snagged on a rusty nail.
In other words, it hurt. Bad.
Did she mean it that way? Was she completely dismissing the sex life he’d always viewed with such satisfaction and pleasure and pride?
They were great in bed together. They were. They were dynamite.
But even as he thought this, he realized his attitude was a little out-of-date. He was thinking back to that sizzling week in Las Vegas and the vacations they’d taken together early in their marriage, before they’d decided to try for a baby. Those times stood out in his memory like a series of magazine-perfect honeymoons, four or five of them, some only a couple of days, others a week or more. Las Vegas, Bermuda, Paris, Aspen, Martinique.
He could call up a thousand pictures. Alicia in a red bikini with her luscious breasts bouncing as she walked along a tropical beach and her blond hair shining brightly in the sun. Himself taking the bikini off in the privacy of their suite, by pulling at that saucy string bow that only just held things together in the front. Lying back in a foaming private spa together, champagne within reach. Sitting across the softly lit table from her at a three-star restaurant, anticipating the moment when they would get back to their Paris hotel room and he could pull her into his arms.
At home, lately, sex had been different, he realized. They were both tired. He needed the release but didn’t need the slow, sensual build. It was over in minutes, and even though he was vaguely aware that she didn’t show the abandonment she once had, he put this down to the same priorities that dampened his own performance—just do it and get some sleep.
While he was burning with the knowledge that he would miss her body in his bed the way he would have missed air or gravity, she seemed to be implying that she wouldn’t miss their lovemaking at all. For the first time, it occurred to him that maybe she’d left him for the worst and hardest reason of all.
She’d found another man.
At the very thought, he felt as if someone had knifed him in the gut.
When he dragged himself into bed at ten o’clock, he felt her absence like an illness, and when he woke up at three after a couple of hours of unrestful sleep, he found he was holding her pillow in his arms as if he was cradling his own pain.
It smelled of her hair and her shampoo … it just smelled of her … and he was surprised that she’d left it behind now that he thought about it. Very surprised. She almost always took it with her when they went away, cramming it into a suitcase or nestling it into the corner of the backseat in the car. Its presence in their marital bed spoke to him, helped him, even though he couldn’t work out what it said.
He almost slid the pillow back to its rightful position on her side of the bed, but then in a moment of … he didn’t know—weakness? hope?—he pulled it closer again and hugged it like a child, or like an ardent lover, until sleep came over him.
Chapter Six
“What’s happening today, Mommy?” Abby wanted to know, five minutes after she woke up.
“Well, we need to go to the store. And I thought we might check out the library. Then we’ll come home and make cookies, hey?”
“Cookies!” Tyler said.
“Won’t that be fun?” Alicia agreed brightly.
It would. And also a nightmare. Faking having fun with your kids was harder than faking an orgasm, and, yes, Alicia had done both.
Like a good wife and mother, she felt guilty about both, also.
But, oh, yesterday had been so hard!
All she’d wanted to do was curl up into a tight ball of misery and sleep for about six months, in the hope that when she woke up again, the pain would have gone away and the rest of her life would miraculously make sense.
But you couldn’t do that. Children didn’t let you.
She loved Abby and Tyler so much, and since leaving MJ she’d been feeling it in her heart and her stomach and her bones to an almost feverish extent. She wanted to hug them against her body fifty times a day. She wanted to gaze and gaze at them. Her marriage to MJ had been worthwhile a hundred times over, no matter how ugly their divorce might be, because of these two.
She’d been saying “I love you” so often that at one point yesterday Abby had sighed theatrically, put her hands on her hips and told her, “We know that, Mommy.”
She loved them, but they were exhausting, and the little guilt monitor in the back of her brain kept telling her that she’d taken the easy way out, until now.
Taken the trophy wife way out, by leaving the kids with Maura or, before her, Kate and Robyn and Sveta, for hours and hours at a stretch, paying for endless mommy-and-me classes and toddler gym classes and toddler swim classes, so that—whether it was mommy and me, which it was sometimes, or Nanny and me, which it was too often—the kids were packaged into organized activities that left most of the real work to someone else.
Since leaving MJ was so much about not wanting to be a trophy wife anymore, she couldn’t take the easy way out now.
Oh, she wasn’t such an idealistic fool as to be attempting this without MJ’s money behind her. She’d married him in the first place as an escape from the grinding poverty trap, and she had no intention of taking a step backward into the trap’s evil jaws. But she was going to be as honorable about it as she could, taking only enough from him to ensure that his children were raised in the comfort and security he would want for them. Would insist on, in fact.
She wasn’t awarding herself very many points for this attitude, right now, but, still, it was something. It was better than she’d seen from some of the other women in her circle—like Anna, for example, who’d openly spoken of taking her ex to the cleaners, whether to anyone else’s eye the man deserved it or not.
The day went by.
Slow.
Boring.
Exhausting.
Punctuated by tiny diamond moments of rightness that she tried to lock into her memory to treasure later on. Abby singing a cheesy pop song to Tyler in the backseat of the car on the way to the store, her little four-year-old vocal cords valiantly attempting to mimic the electronic yodeling sound. Both of them with dabs of cookie dough on their noses when she let them lick the spoon and the bowl. The short-lived interlude of peace when they sat down at the table and ate the cookies, with milk for the children and a mug of steaming coffee for herself.
When Tyler went down for a nap, her first thought was simply “Thank heaven!” but when she turned to look back at him in the twin single bed that seemed so big for him and found his eyes already drifting shut, she had to pause and just watch him for a few moments because he was so precious and beautiful. His taffy-brown hair was so silky and fine on the pillow. His cheeks were so plump and pink.
They were so easy to love when they were asleep. Tyler would be giving up the daytime nap soon, because it had begun to push his bedtime at night later and later. For now, the time was precious. He was adorable … and thank goodness she had a break from him.
At six in the evening, just as she’d managed to get a home-cooked meal of spaghetti with meat sauce onto the table, there was a text from MJ. Coming tonight. Away early. Get to you nine-ish.
Tonight?
“There are bits in this,” Abby said. She was frowning and indignant about it, and her blond ponytail needed refastening or she would end up with dinner in her hair.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Alicia said as she jumped up to rewind the bright pink elastic.
“Bits,” Abby repeated, as she submitted to the procedure. “Of stuff. In the sauce.”
So much for Alicia’s attempt to insert stealth vegetables by chopping them up small. The weird thing was, Abby and Tyler both liked raw vegetable sticks with store-bought dips.
“It’s just carrot and celery,” she said, sitting down again. “I don’t like sara-lee.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Not cooked.”
“Well, how about I put a blindfold on you, and then you won’t know it’s there.” She jumped up again—even though her legs didn’t want to move for a second time, with MJ’s text still echoing through her mind and draining her strength—and pretended to get a dish towel to tie over Abby’s face.
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Lilian Darcy
“Do you love me now?”
What answer could she possibly give? “I don’t know.”
Incredibly, they were still touching. Hands joined, bodies brushing lightly together.
Marriage did that, apparently. It made you so familiar with each other’s bodies that you could hold each other and talk about divorce and the non-existence of love at the same time.
“Let me prove it doesn’t have to take seven minutes,” he said softly.
“No …”
“Why not?” Before she could say anything, he added quickly, “No, don’t answer. I know what you’ll say. That if we make love, I’ll think it’s more proof that I’ve won. I don’t want to prove anything.”
“Then what do you want?”
A thick beat of silence, while he struggled to strip back the layers. “I just want you.”
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the final book in the MCKINLEY MEDICS trilogy! If I had to pick a favorite out of the three, it would be this one. Alicia and MJ are in such a different situation to that of most romance heroes and heroines, and it was both a challenge and a huge satisfaction to write their story successfully. I really hope you enjoy it.
It’s such a great time to be a reader. Even just a few years ago, if you’d loved this book and were looking for more of my work, it would have been a tedious process of searching the internet, clicking through an order system and then waiting for the books to arrive in the mail, or the hit-and-miss of browsing second-hand bookstores. Let’s not even talk about how we found books before the internet!
Now, though, when you find an author you love, much of their backlist is just a couple of mouse-clicks away, whether on the Mills & Boon website or elsewhere. So if you did love this book, take a look at my website, www.liliandarcy.com, where you can find out more about my backlist, and join me in celebrating the feast of books we can now read, from all our favorite authors.
Lilian
About the Author
LILAN DARCY has written nearly eighty books. Happily married, with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at PO Box 532, Jamison PO, Macquarie ACT 2614, Australia, or e-mail her at lilian@liliandarcy.com.
A Marriage
Worth
Fighting For
Lilian Darcy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Chapter One
Dr. Michael James McKinley Junior’s life came crashing down around him at seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening in October.
Ironically, he was home considerably earlier than usual. He was feeling content. Happy, even.
Entering the lavishly lit and decorated lobby of his building, he anticipated the moment of homecoming at a level of detail that he would have been embarrassed about if anyone had known.
It would unfold something like this:
Alicia would hear his key in the door and come to meet him, giving a little cry of pleasure and surprise. He’d suggest a meal out, and she would hurry away to change and freshen her makeup and hair. The kids would still be awake. He could spend some time with them, while Alicia readied herself.
The procedure always took a while, but the results were worth it. She was just about the most stunning woman he had ever seen. After nearly seven years of marriage he still thought so, and when he entered a social gathering with her on his arm, he felt the aura of success around both of them like a magnetic field.
So, yes, he would have to wait for Alicia to work her beauty magic, and that would be fine. He could help Nanny Maura with … well, with whatever she did with the children at this time of the evening. Their bath. Their bedtime story.
He felt he ought to know what they would be up to in their routine, but it seemed to change every few months, and it was hard to keep track of such things when he was so rarely home at an hour when they were still awake. Kids grew so fast. He had the idea Alicia had told him recently that Tyler was on the verge of giving up his daytime nap.
Or maybe he already had. MJ couldn’t remember.
He took the elevator, thinking that he had better be quiet when he entered, in case Tyler was already settling into sleep. While the thought of his two-year-old son bouncing excitedly out of bed to greet him was a pleasing one in his own head, he realized that Alicia and Maura might not think of it the same way. Tyler was an exhausting little dynamo, and if he became overtired or overstimulated he was even worse.
No, he absolutely must not disrupt the sleep routine with Tyler purely for a father’s selfish reasons.
At the apartment door, he registered that things were indeed pretty quiet in there. He slipped his key silently into the lock, turned the handle slowly so that it didn’t make a sound and tiptoed inside.
There were no lights switched on against the gathering night, and no sounds. Still convinced that he was arriving at his children’s bedtime, he crept through to the sitting room, expecting to see the night-light glowing in its socket in the hallway, or to hear the soft voices of Alicia and Maura telling Abby and Tyler good-night.
But the apartment was dark and silent. The sunset fading in the sky outside provided the only source of light, and the traffic in the canyons of the Manhattan streets below made the only sounds. No one was here. His pleasing fantasy of a warm greeting, twenty minutes of parental quality time and a relaxed evening out evaporated and left a feeling of fatigue and irritation.
He’d been at the hospital at six this morning, in surgery at six-thirty. He’d eaten lunch on the move, hadn’t had a break all day, and then when he’d glimpsed the possibility of an early departure, he’d tied himself in knots to make it happen. As a reward, he could easily have accepted fellow surgeon Oliver Marks’s casual suggestion of a quick drink instead of hurrying home to his family. Would it really have been too hard for Alicia to text him with a warning that she and the children might not be home? His arrival at this hour wasn’t that rare, was it?
He checked his phone to see if he’d missed something, but, no, she really hadn’t left a message. What the hell was she thinking? He didn’t ask much of her in that regard, for heck’s sake, and he gave her a truckload in return.
Anger rising, he went into the kitchen and flicked on a light. His gut ached with hunger, he registered, and it probably wasn’t helping his mood. There’d be something in the refrigerator to hold the hunger at bay until he knew if his dinner plan with Alicia was going to come off.
He actually had his hand on the refrigerator door handle when he saw the note on the gleaming black granite countertop, pinned down by his favorite coffee mug. He swung away from the prospect of food and picked it up. Okay, Alicia, so you did leave me an explanation, but why on earth didn’t you text, so I could—
It’s not working, MJ. And you’re never here. There’s no point saying this in person, and I doubt you’ll care. I’ve taken the kids to Vermont for some time out. I’ll talk to a lawyer in the next few days about a divorce. A.
He stood with the piece of paper in his hand. His empty stomach dropped like a stone and his temples throbbed in shock and disbelief.
Alicia had left him.
“You see, there’s green fields and little towns in Ireland, just like this,” Nanny Maura explained to Alicia in the same tone she might have used to explain her preference for coffee over tea. Her Irish accent was strong. “I came to America for a taste of city life, like. I don’t want to be stuck in the country. You didn’t tell me you were gettin’ a divorce when we were packin’ to come up here. I thought ’twas just for a few days.”
Alicia felt a weird and close-to-hysterical desire to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. Tell her nanny she wanted a divorce before she told her husband? Good plan! Add “Oh, by the way, I’m leaving my husband” to her daily list of instructions about activities and errands? No problem! Be fair to the nanny, while her life was in tatters and her children didn’t understand what was going on? Easy peasy!
But she recognized that Maura had a point. There was a huge difference between New York City and rural Vermont.
And maybe she didn’t even need a nanny now that she was here. It would be better, really. Maura was just another person she didn’t want seeing her cry. And she’d left her schedule of beauty treatments and shopping trips and charity lunches behind in Manhattan. She would have plenty of time for hands-on child care.
“When would you like to leave?” Alicia asked, not sure of the answer she wanted to hear.
This had already been a painful interview, conducted once the children were safely asleep upstairs. She’d broken the truth to Maura—that there was a reason for the larger-than-usual amount of luggage they’d brought, and for the lack of the text messages to MJ that she would normally have sent if she was going up to his brother Andy’s with the kids for a few days, as she’d done once or twice. Leaving now … on the thruway.
Maura had hidden any shock—or possibly lack of shock—behind the well-schooled facade that low-level, expendable employees learned to wear when confronted by difficult or irrational behavior from their employers. Alicia remembered the expression well from the countless times it had appeared on her own face. Maura had asked how long they would be here in Vermont, and on learning that it might be months, she’d come out with her explanation for not wanting to stay.
“When can you spare me?” Maura asked now, in response to Alicia’s question.
“It doesn’t matter.” Because nothing much did. She’d left MJ. That was all that counted. “Whenever you want.”
“Tonight?” Maura suggested hopefully. “If I check the schedule, could you drive me to the bus? A friend texted me about getting together tomorrow for—”
“Tonight is fine. I’ll give you cab fare to get you to the bus station.” Why go through an awkward evening? This way, Maura wouldn’t even need to unpack.
“I’m sure there’d be some lovely girls up here looking for child-care work,” Maura told her in an encouraging way.
“I’m sure, yes.” No point in telling this girl that she didn’t intend to replace her.
“You were going to give me those clothes that you didn’t want anymore….” Maura offered next, referring back to a conversation from a week or two ago that Alicia had totally forgotten.
“Give me a forwarding address, as soon as you have one, and I’ll mail them.”
This apparently dealt with the last of Maura’s concerns. Cast-off designer outfits, yippee! Her eyes lit up, and she gushed her thanks in the Irish accent that Abby and Tyler were both starting to pick up. They spent far more time with Maura than they spent with Alicia.
Well, that was about to change, big-time.
She looked at the clock.
Eight.
MJ was probably still at the hospital, or maybe winding down with a drink on the way home, with a couple of fellow doctors. When you added it up, she only saw him a few hours each week, and even those weren’t spent the way she would have chosen.
He was either dog-tired and silent, wanting only to sprawl on the couch eating the tired leftovers of a meal that had been fresh two or three hours ago, or else they went out to a charity event or a gallery opening or dinner at a smart restaurant. He always touched the small of her back as they moved through one of those public spaces together, as if to say to any other man who caught his eye, “Look what I’ve got. Pretty special, huh?” He rarely touched her when they were alone.
It was her own fault. She hated herself for it. She’d done her best—busted her gut—to marry for money and status. She’d worked her looks and her fashion sense and her hard-won poise for all they were worth, and her strategy had succeeded.
She’d snared MJ.
She hadn’t put a foot wrong.
She’d seized on that stupid, unforgettable night in Vegas when they’d gotten a little tipsy and stumbled into a garishly themed wedding chapel, and she’d gotten MJ over the line before he could sober up enough to rethink.
Brass ring, Alicia.
Married to a rich man with no prenup.
Not bad for a waitress from the wrong side of the tracks.
She’d been so goal-oriented about it that she hadn’t even stopped, before the ceremony, to think whether she loved him, or whether he loved her or whether they could possibly make each other happy.
She’d done her best for almost seven years to fulfill her side of the bargain. She’d given him two children. She’d kept her looks and her figure with an almost obsessive number of gym visits and spa sessions. She’d spent his money in all the ways he wanted her to. Everything they owned, from the children’s clothes to the hand-crafted dining table and matching chairs, was the product of hours of research on quality and brand names.
She’d said as little as possible about the foster homes she’d grown up in, from age ten to seventeen after Grammie died, and she’d never, ever, ever even hinted at the desperate straits she’d been in when he’d walked into her restaurant that first morning and given her the eye.
It wasn’t going to happen. It just wasn’t.
MJ’s first sizzling state of shock switched quickly to anger and an absolute refusal to accept his marriage was over. He found some chicken nuggets and oven fries in the freezer and nuked them in the microwave. While they were heating, he went into the bedroom and threw a couple of days’ worth of clothing into an overnight bag. The microwave pinged and he ate directly from the plastic dish, while he got on the phone and called his junior attending surgeon.
“Raj, something’s come up, and I won’t be available tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. McKinley. I hope nothing’s wrong.” The deep and slightly accented voice at the other end of the line strove to find the midpoint between professional distance and courteous concern.
“Everything’s fine. Family stuff. But let me catch you up on the schedule.” He switched quickly to the common language of their profession—the medical jargon and shorthand that safely took away any sense of the personal. In a couple of minutes, he covered from memory and electronic notes on his phone every patient going in for surgery tomorrow, as well as hitting the major points on several more cases that were either pre- or post-op. “Call me from the O.R. if you have any trouble with the Parker girl, because she’s going to be tricky,” he instructed. “You have the scans and the X-rays. But call me.”
He hated delegating. He was a better surgeon than most of the orthopedic specialists he knew, and that wasn’t arrogance; it was simply a fact.
Okay, correction: it was arrogance and fact.
He shoved the phone in his pocket, debating making another call or two—his office manager first, and then Oliver Marks, because they had a lunch plan in the works—but he could call later, or text. He wasn’t texting Alicia. She’d given no warning. He’d do the same. It would be midnight or later by the time he arrived, but too bad. When your whole world turned upside down, time ceased to count.
By seven-twenty he was down in the building’s underground parking garage, with his overnight bag in the trunk and his engine warming.
His marriage was not going to end with an arid little note from Alicia and divorce lawyers blazing their legal guns at fifty paces. He needed to confront her face-to-face, find out what was behind this, make her see.
See what?
His gut churned as he gunned the car in Reverse and squealed the tires on the echoing concrete.
See that this was impossible. Wrong. Just … impossible.
He seemed to have no other words for it than those two. Impossible and wrong. After almost five hours driving, with clenched hands aching on the wheel and jaw wired tight, he pulled into one of the twin driveways of his brother Andy’s elegant and cleverly subdivided Victorian house in Radford, Vermont, with no more idea of what he wanted to say to his wife than he’d had when he started.
The hammering on the door wrenched Alicia out of her restless, unhappy sleep. For about ten seconds, her heart thumped so hard in her chest that it interfered with her breathing and her skin prickled and stung with fear, but then she knew what was happening.
MJ.
Of course.
Why hadn’t she thought that he would race up here for a confrontation the moment he read her note? He had a highly developed need to win in any situation he encountered, and the prospect of a divorce was no exception.
She looked at the clock. Five minutes to midnight. It seemed appropriate. He must have gotten home from the hospital early tonight. Either that or he’d driven up here way too fast.
Probably both.
She felt sick at the thought of the imminent clash between them, and was only glad that Andy and Claudia were in New York City for a few days and weren’t around to hear anything through the walls.
She had called them to ask if she and the children could use the rental apartment, “just to get away for a short break and see the fall colors,” and they’d said of course she could, given her some practical instructions and told her where she could find the key. She dreaded their return four days from now, when she would have to tell them the truth.
She dreaded the next few minutes far more.
MJ hammered at the door again. Much more of it and he would wake the children, and that was the last thing she wanted. She rolled out of bed, grabbed a robe from where she’d left it on a chair in the corner of the room and hurried down, her bare feet chilling quickly on the wooden stairs and her whole body aching with reluctance and dread.
She snatched the door open just as he was about to batter his fist against it once more, so she caught him with it raised in the air, then saw the strong surgeon’s fingers slowly uncurl and drop back to his side.
He hadn’t showered or changed after his day’s work. He was still wearing the dark suit pants and one of the crisp white business shirts he favored whenever he wasn’t wearing scrubs. There was a bright moon in the sky and it picked out the white of the shirt and made it glow against the darker matte of his skin.
He’d taken off his tie and opened the shirt at the top for comfort, and his hair was windblown from driving with the car window cracked open. He liked to drive that way in all weather except the dead of winter, said it was bracing. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow and the shirttail had come untucked at one side, so for once—unusually—there was something rakish about him.
His breathing was heavier than usual and ragged at the edges. His high, square brow was pleated in a tight frown, and there was an odd, numb look to his mouth, even in the low light spilling onto his face from inside the house.
He looked a mess.
He opened his mouth to speak, but then nothing came out and Alicia didn’t have the words for this situation, either, so they just stared at each other, helpless and hostile and so painfully far apart.
In the end, they both spoke in the same moment.
“I’m not inviting you in.”
“You can’t do this, Alicia.”
They went silent again. Despite what she’d just said, she almost moved aside to let him across the threshold. The patterns of seven years were hard to kick. She expected him to force the issue, simply barge past her with or without her consent, but he didn’t.
He actually stepped back, spread his hands a little and conceded her victory. “All right, if you don’t want me in the house, then that’s your right and your choice.”
“Thank you. Yes.”
“But I hate that you’re doing this. That you left a note.”
“You wanted us to talk about it in front of Abby and Tyler?”
“You’ve taken them from their home.”
“I— What was the alternative?”
“Kick me out,” he said, harsh and bitter. “That’s what Anna did to James.”
It shocked her that he could make this reference. Anna and James had been part of their wider circle of friends until they’d divorced, after one of the most poisonous marriages Alicia had ever seen. They were still fighting mercilessly over custody of their five-year-old daughter, who was caught in the cross fire and would bear the scars.
Before Alicia could find words to protest any comparison with such a couple, MJ asked her, “Does Andy know why you’re here?”
“No, not yet. He’ll have to, of course, and Claudia, and everyone else.”
“If you go through with the whole stupid—” he began, but he must have seen something in her face. Whatever this was on her part, it wasn’t stupid. He didn’t finish. He just stood there, a look of loss and uncertainty carved painfully deep into his even, good-looking features. When had she ever seen MJ look like that?
“I’d better go to a motel,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not sleeping on my brother’s front lawn. If you want me to make an appointment to talk to you in the morning, Alicia, I’ll do that. Just tell me where and what time. But I’m not going back to the city until we have talked, and I think you owe me that, at least. When I saw your note—” He swallowed hard, lifted his clenched hand to his throat for a moment and didn’t finish.
She saw goose bumps on his forearms. Vermont nights were getting chilly at this time of year and he wasn’t dressed for it. Neither was she, with her feet bare on the hardwood of the front hall.
The idea of an “appointment” in the morning seemed worse than having him here right now. She knew she wouldn’t sleep all night, and the prospect of facing down her husband at some kind of formal meeting across a café table—but who would look after the children?—made her stomach drop.
“No,” she said. “Let’s talk now.”
“Here?” He gestured at the front porch and the yard and almost seemed willing, despite the chill and dark.
This time, she did step back. “Inside, of course.”
He came across the porch and through the door, and his shirtsleeve would have brushed the front of her robe if she hadn’t leaned a crucial inch closer to the hallway wall. “Where’s Maura? I don’t want her—”
“She left.”
“Left?”
“Quit. She didn’t want to be in Vermont. Too rural. I gave her money for a cab and a bus ticket back to the city. You probably crossed paths with her somewhere near Albany.”
She closed the heavy wooden door and followed him toward the front living room, but he turned suddenly while they were still in the hall and pulled her into his arms, with a disturbing mix of authority and hesitation. “Don’t—don’t do this.”
“What?”
His muscles were hard around her, all knotted and demanding. “Any of it! This gesture. We have two children. A partnership.”
“It’s not a gesture.”
“Forgive me if I get the semantics wrong,” he almost yelled.
“You’re right. There’s so much else wrong. Semantics is not even the tip of the iceberg.”
“What else is wrong?”
“Everything, MJ. What’s right? Tell me one thing that’s right about our marriage?” She pushed at his arms. They were so rigid they were almost painful, and she had no desire whatsoever to soften into them when they were like that.
But then she caught the drift of scent from his skin, a mix of soap and nuttiness, and for a moment it made her crumble inside. The scent of safety, she’d thought when it first became familiar to her, seven years ago. A precious, desperately valued scent that said everything was going to be okay now. She didn’t need to be scared anymore. She didn’t need to be alone.
It was such a powerful memory. It almost undermined her resolve. Unconsciously, she relaxed a little and felt his hold on her grow closer, but at the same time softer, a little less like a vise. His hands slipped down the back of her robe, warming her spine, coming to rest in the inward curve of her waist.
He laced his fingers together, leaned back a little and looked at her, eyes raking over her as if taking inventory or examining a precious possession in search of flaws. Hell, he couldn’t possibly think he’d won this already, could he?
She’d left him, left her marriage, and it wasn’t a mere gesture. She meant it. She was serious.
And yet, why shouldn’t he think he’d won? He won so many things, so often. Discussions about where and when to go for their vacation, inevitably choosing status destinations that they could talk about with their friends. The decision about building his medical career in New York City, following his father’s and grandfather’s tradition. She hadn’t even dared to suggest that somewhere else might be a worthwhile choice. The debate about when they should start trying for a baby, when Alicia would have preferred to wait another year or two—and then of course she had gotten pregnant the first month.
But if Alicia thought she was winning this one, why wasn’t she pushing him away? she wondered. She should be!
“You have a beautiful apartment,” he said, still angry but softer about it. “You have a platinum credit card. I buy you gifts. I take you out. When do I ever say no to any of it? Your personal trainer, your wardrobe, the help we pay top dollar for.”
There.
Right there.
That was the whole problem.
In a nutshell.
She was bitterly unsurprised that he’d come out with such a catalog of material benefits, too. Of course it was the first thing he would think of, and the fault lay as much at her own door as at his. More so. The only thing that surprised her—always surprised her, in a guilty, self-doubting way—was that he seemed satisfied with his side of the bargain. What did he get out of the arrangement? There must have been hundreds of women who would have been worth more to him and who would have married him for better reasons.
This was the thing that made it impossible for her to continue their marriage.
He thought she’d married him for what he could give her. The money. The status. The pampered lifestyle. And for whatever reason, he was content with that.
Worse, when she searched her heart and searched her memories, she couldn’t find the proof to tell him he was wrong. She’d been too desperate at the time to even think about love or the deeper levels of a partnership.
She wrenched herself out of his arms, sick with shame and disappointment at herself and at him. Of course their marriage had failed. How could either of them expect any other outcome, given its flawed foundations?
“Go back to New York, MJ,” she said on a harsh whisper, while she wondered if she was a different person from that terrified twenty-three-year-old seven years ago, or if she would soon discover that she hadn’t changed at all.
Chapter Two
Seven years earlier …
“Mail,” Alicia’s boss said shortly, tossing her a handful of envelopes, which made her heart sink as soon as she saw them. “Came yesterday.”
The last time she’d moved apartments, she’d won Tony Cottini’s permission to use his restaurant address for her mail delivery, since her job seemed a more stable entity than her place of residence, but she regretted it every time these letters came.
It was so obvious what they were. Overdue account notices, containing increasingly strident demands for payment. They were cold things, echoing the cold of the November day outside.
“Thanks,” she told him quickly, then stuffed the mail in the battered purse hanging on a hook in a dingy alcove and hurried to the serving window in front of the kitchen to line four plates of hot food along her arm.
Tony wasn’t a bad boss—if he had been, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into her current trap with the mailing address, because she wouldn’t have dared to ask—but he still had a healthy interest in her attaining maximum productivity levels at all times.
She delivered the food with a smile, took the order from the next table and skimmed back to the kitchen to slap it in front of the short-order cook, calling it out as she did so. “Three specials, two eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, one on whole wheat, one scrambled, sausage and home fries, white toast.”
Okay, now Table Three.
It was only seven in the morning. Her feet had already begun to ache, but that would taper off after the rush hit its peak at around eleven. By the time she finished her double shift twelve hours after that, the rest of her would be so tired that the old reliable feet almost wouldn’t care.
Table Three had a doctor at it, eating by himself. She could tell he was a doctor because a) the restaurant was only a block from a major Manhattan hospital, so doctors grabbed a quick meal here quite often, b) he was reading a gigantic medical textbook and c) he’d forgotten to take off his name badge, which read Dr. Michael McKinley, Jr.
“What can I get you?” she asked him, coffeepot in hand.
At Tony’s, they didn’t bother with all that hi-my-name’s-Alicia-and-I’ll-be-your-server-today stuff. Again, he was a decent boss that way. He just growled at them every now and then, “Say whatever greeting you like to the customer. Just be sincere and say it with a smile.”
Oops, she’d forgotten the smile.
She put it on.
The one she’d practiced.
The one she’d paid for.
Or rather, borrowed the money for, at the kind of horrible interest rate you had no choice about when you had an unimpressive credit history.
The one she was, in other words, still paying for.
Dr. Michael McKinley Junior looked up from the giant book in response to her question, and his gaze arrived at her face in time to see the smile—its dutiful dawning, its practiced beauty and its slow fade when she thought about how much she still owed for these perfect straight white teeth.
He ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu and held out his cup for coffee like a thirsty man in the desert, which made her think he’d probably been working all night. She filled it neatly, to the perfect height.
There was a pride in doing good work. She’d learned that as an actress—okay, wannabe actress—and she’d always tried to carry it through into the rest of her life. Look at it this way: What if she had to play a waitress in a major movie someday? What if she was chosen to front a lifestyle TV show? Or feature in a national ad campaign for a top-selling brand of coffee? Or if a modeling photo shoot called for her to pose with a steaming cup in her hand?
Those fantasies didn’t come very often anymore. They’d been scoured away by six years of struggling to survive in Manhattan, since she’d arrived here off a bus from Tennessee at the age of seventeen. Six years of fitting acting classes and auditions around restaurant shifts. Six years of scraping together the money to eat and sleep, as well as updating her modeling portfolio and fixing her damned teeth.
She’d been told to do this by several modeling agencies, and it had seemed like an investment in her future, the one key piece of the puzzle that was missing. Once she had straight white teeth, the work would start to flow and the money would pour in.
But it still wasn’t happening, and there was this horrible slippery slope where you paid off the loan for the teeth with a credit card and then got another credit card to cover the maxed-out balance on the first one, and it was so hard to get ahead.
When did something stop being an investment and start being money poured down the drain? She hadn’t taken any of those expensive acting and voice and movement classes for a while, and her photo portfolio was more than three years old.
“You’re a beautiful girl,” she’d been told a thousand times. “But …”
Fill in the blank.
You’re two inches too short. You’re too big in the bust. You don’t have the voice. You’re too small in the bust. You don’t have the dance training. You’re a model and we’re looking for an actress. You’re an actress and we’re looking for someone who can sing … who can speak French … who can ride a unicycle … who can dance with bears while wrapping a flaming cobra around her neck and juggling ten chain saws.
Yeah, and don’t even go near the X-rated ways to complete the “someone who can” equation. This was one of her few sources of pride. She’d never stooped to porn videos or the casting couch.
But she was scared sometimes. Scared every day. She had nothing to fall back on. No close family, since Grammie’s death. Some distant cousins she didn’t even know. Friends in only a little less bad shape than she was. She could never call on them to bail her out. Most of them, she didn’t even know if they really were friends. More like fellow prisoners in the same trap. Maybe every single one of them would scramble over her dead body if it gave them a route to success. How much scrambling would she be prepared to do herself?
The desperate plans went around and around in her head. Work more double shifts so she could pay off the debt and get some money saved. Abandon her dreams of success, leave the city and find somewhere cheaper to live, take some night courses to earn a more realistic qualification.
She had nothing in that area, because she’d been so sure that the “You’re so beautiful” she’d heard since the age of nine would be enough.
There it was, right now, on Dr. Michael McKinley Junior’s face. You’re so beautiful. He didn’t say it out loud, but she’d learned to read it even when it wasn’t spoken. It was like the twenty-seven supposed Eskimo words for snow, so many variants of the same thing.
You’re so beautiful, but you’re out of my league.
You’re so beautiful, but you’re not my type.
You’re so beautiful, and I’m such a sleaze I’m not going to even hide than I’m looking down your uniform blouse.
In Dr. McKinley’s case, it seemed to be more like “You’re so beautiful, wow, you’re actually distracting me from my coffee,” and he looked so exhausted and bowled over and unaware of his own reaction that it was quite cute, because he was a good-looking man himself. Aged around thirty, she thought, with an imposing height and build, darkly even features and a warm, well-shaped mouth. So it was no hardship to meet his eye and lift the wattage of the smile a notch or two higher.
She gave him his breakfast perfectly.
And then he went, and that was that.
Or not.
Because he appeared again for supper just before she clocked off for the night, and he remembered her and told her, “You work longer hours than I do.”
“But your work is more important,” she answered, which was from-the-heart to a stupid extent, considering Dr. McKinley’s casual comment.
She had a complex, sentimental feeling about doctors, dating from Grammie’s illness, when a couple of them had been so good and thoughtful and kind, and yet they hadn’t been able to make Grammie better. That was thirteen years ago now, when she was ten, but it still colored her reactions sometimes. Colored her life always.
“Thank you,” Dr. McKinley said. “It’s nice to hear that.”
And she could tell he had a healthy ego, but there was a sincerity to the words all the same, and the you’re-so-beautiful in his eyes had an extra something to it, a little spark.
And suddenly, right there while she poured his coffee, some instinct told her she needed to nurture and fan that spark more carefully and strategically and hardheadedly than she’d ever nurtured anything in her life.
Because maybe, just maybe, there might be something in it for her.
Chapter Three
She meant it, MJ could tell.
Go back to New York.
Even though Alicia had only whispered the words, they had more force for him than if she’d yelled them and physically pushed him toward the door.
She never fought him. On anything. It drove him crazy sometimes. He wanted to tell her, “I’m not asking for that from you. I don’t need such perfect agreement and acquiescence with everything I say and everything I want. That’s not why I married you. You are allowed to be a person, Alicia. An independent person, not just my wife. Your total obedience was never part of the bargain.”
So why didn’t he say it?
Standing here right now, in the hallway of the rental apartment attached to his younger brother’s house, looking at his beautiful blonde wife, the question reared up at him like a snake and made him paralyzed.
Why didn’t he ever say it?
Because he was scared, he realized. He was bloody terrified that if he pulled their marital bargain out into the bright light of day—or rather the bright light of words—the things they said to each other would shatter any possibility of keeping the life they had.
The life he wanted.
Really, MJ?
Hell, yes, he wanted what he had! Stellar career, beautiful, capable wife, happy children, well-organized home life.
Which brought him back to square one. Out of the blue, Alicia wanted a divorce and was standing in his brother’s hallway in Vermont, telling him to leave.
I’m exhausted.
Another inconvenient and powerful realization. She wanted him to go, and he was tempted to do just that—fling himself angrily out of here and tear back down the highway he’d just driven. But he didn’t think he would be safe on the road for another five-hour stint. He probably hadn’t been particularly safe driving up.
“I’ll check in to a motel,” he told her for the second time tonight.
“Will you find one, at this hour?”
“That’s not your concern, is it?” The words were sour and harsh with anger, and he saw her flinch.
“MJ—”
“There’ll be something. I won’t have to go beyond Albany. I can drive that far, without going off the road.”
She said nothing to this, and he thought it was because they had no precedents to go on. They’d never argued. There was never anything to argue about. She did what he wanted, said what he wanted, kept quiet.
Didn’t see him all that much.
Didn’t see enough of him for the two of them to rub against each other the way a married couple usually did.
That was one of the things she’d said in her note, which he discovered he already knew by heart. You’re never here. What did she want with that? He was one of the most successful orthopedic specialists in Manhattan. The kind that A-list celebrities came to after a skiing accident or when their kid broke an arm in the playground. The kind who put together seriously broken bodies flown in from a radius of hundreds of miles, or fixed limbs made hopelessly dysfunctional through trauma or genetic accident. He worked ninety hours a week.
And she benefited from those ninety hours with every breath she took. The beauty treatments, the shopping trips, the time for charity work that was far more about being seen at $3,000-a-plate fundraiser dinners than it was about the Amazon rain forest or the tigers in Bengal.
He suddenly came upon a bitter place inside himself where crouched this ugly little belief that she liked seeing so little of him. Shoot, it hurt to think that, but he realized he’d thought it for a while.
Thought it but never allowed the thought any space, kept the ugly little thing in a small, murky cave deep inside himself and was too busy and too in-demand as a surgeon to remember it was there, most of the time.
Now it knifed through him with a sharp awareness that almost made him gasp out loud. He controlled himself with the same iron will that helped him survive round-the-clock stints of surgery, and told her, “We both need some time. This has hit me from left field, Alicia.”
“Yes,” she replied briefly, as if she wasn’t surprised.
“Maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe you’ll say that’s a huge part of the problem. That I didn’t see it coming.
That I didn’t—”
Hell, he couldn’t go on. He was going to break down if he did. The degree of his emotion appalled him. And her blank, distant reaction appalled him more. She was just standing there, as if she was made of marble. As pale as marble, too, almost. But if this was painful to her, it wasn’t the same kind of pain he felt himself.
“I’m sorry.” The words were wrenched out of him as if a mystical hand had just reached inside his throat and pulled. He didn’t know what he was apologizing for, and he didn’t wait to see how she would react, just tore out through the front door, across the porch and down the steps to the car, where the engine still ticked as it cooled in the chilly night.
He knew he’d be back, and soon, but he didn’t know what he would say or do when he came.
Alicia felt shaky and sick as she heard the car drive away into the silent dark of the sleeping street. She’d expected to feel angry.
Oh, it was so strange!
She’d been so completely unsurprised to find him banging on that front door, demanding entrance in the middle of the night, but everything after that hadn’t gone the way she’d thought it would at all.
At some level, she’d wanted all the ego and impatience and one-sided demands. MJ so rarely betrayed any sense of vulnerability. Just those tiny glimpses in his last few words tonight had rocked her and undermined her certainty far more than he could have done with undiluted anger.
And then he’d listened to her.
She’d asked him to go, and he’d done so, and now she was left knowing she wouldn’t sleep tonight. He had talked about the two of them needing time. Writing that note to him this morning, she would have said that time was the last thing she needed. She’d had a ton of that.
She’d been thinking for months about leaving him. Flirting with the idea at first. What if I just took the children and left? Not meaning it, just playing with it. But then the thoughts had grown more serious, the plans more detailed.
She would have to leave the city, she’d decided, so that there was some physical distance between the two of them and so that neither of them had to face pressure from his father.
Who would hate this, she knew, because he expected perfection and order from his children.
She would have to soften the reality for Abby and Tyler, and leaving the city would help, there, too. They were so small; she didn’t want them to witness the ugliness and conflict. She had to find a secure, happy environment for them from the beginning, even if there was a later transition to a different, permanent home. Andy’s rental apartment checked all the boxes.
When she’d reached a concrete decision, there hadn’t been any momentous last straw to make it happen; it was simply a long, gradual accumulation, with a handful of moments that stood out from the rest.
Like the night Andy and Claudia had announced their engagement and their plans for the small, informal wedding that would be taking place in New York City just a couple of weeks from now. Alicia had urged Claudia to go for something bigger, even if it meant waiting, and when she thought back, she realized that MJ’s sister, Scarlett, had probably interpreted that in the worst way.
Alicia knew that at least some members of the McKinley family believed she’d married MJ for his money and status.
Well, they were right, weren’t they?
It was stupid and pointless to regret the rush of their Las Vegas wedding. Would their marriage have been any healthier and happier if they’d started it off with a well-organized splash, months in the planning? Would it have happened at all?
Doubtful.
MJ would have been bound to see sense and realize he could do so much better.
She shivered. It really was cold in the house. She’d tried the heating earlier tonight, but nothing happened when she touched the controls on the electronic thermostat. Apparently Andy hadn’t yet turned on the furnace, although he hadn’t mentioned it during their short phone call. Maybe he shared MJ’s preference for bracing doses of fresh air at a temperature of fifty degrees or less.
She crept upstairs and back to bed, but her churning feelings, her blank sense of the future and her freezing feet wouldn’t let her sleep, and when Abby and Tyler came bouncing into the room at just after six-thirty, she wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the day.
MJ checked out of the cheap motel on the outskirts of Albany at seven in the morning. His colleagues would be surprised to see him in surgery at eleven-thirty, after what he’d said to Raj on the phone last night, but it wasn’t their business.
Later, at his office, he would have to grab Carla, his office manager, and go through his schedule with her. He had to be realistic. If he and Alicia were going to give themselves a chance, then he needed to give them time. Time to talk. Time to compromise. Time to mine down to the depths of what was wrong.
It hit him again as he drove.
He did not want a divorce.
His throat hurt over it. His whole body hurt, knotted with the tension of rebellion and pain and refusal to accept his marriage was over.
He was not getting a divorce. He didn’t damn well believe in it! Not when you had kids. Not when you had a partnership that should have worked.
He accepted that Alicia wasn’t doing this on a shallow whim, and so he was going to have to work at changing her mind, and if she wasn’t expecting a fight from him over this, then she didn’t know him very well.
Did she know him well?
The question struck him suddenly, as if he had a passenger sitting beside him, grilling him on the issue. Did he know her?
Well, of course they knew each other! They each knew what the other ate for breakfast. They knew the sounds each other made in bed. He knew she liked diamonds and sapphires but not emeralds. She knew he detested reality TV.
Did any of that count as real knowledge?
They’d rushed into their marriage. He recognized that. He’d even recognized it at the time. He hadn’t thought it mattered, because in the moment he’d felt so incredibly, exhilaratingly sure. He’d had this all-seeing, all-knowing confidence—arrogance, let’s face it—that he could see the whole picture and that he understood what would make their marriage work better than anyone else.
How wrong had he been?
Chapter Four
Seven years earlier …
“Want to dress up tonight?”
Alicia gave MJ a questioning look and tucked the fluffy white hotel towel a little tighter between her breasts, and he thought that the gesture was an unconscious betrayal.
Of her increasingly urgent inner questions about where this relationship was going. Of the fact that the variety in her wardrobe was getting thin.
“I want to go someplace really special,” he added, so that she’d know he had plans.
“I’d love that,” she said, then warned him with a slow and almost cheeky smile. “But you’ve seen the dress before.”
“That’s okay. Gives me confidence. You’ve never yet worn anything I didn’t like.”
He suspected that most of her wardrobe came from charity stores, because even he, with no interest in fashion, could see that her carefully put-together outfits weren’t at the forefront of style. But she wore them with the aura of an Oscar-winning actress on the red carpet, as if she knew that she looked stunning, and as if she was wearing fifteen thousand dollars worth of fabric and design on her upper body alone.
He admired the bravado of the performance, and that she was successful at it. She was an astute shopper, and you had to really look closely to see that she wasn’t wearing a designer label after all, or that if it was, it was “vintage,” aka secondhand, rather than new.
Few people, male or female, did look that closely. They were too busy being struck dumb by her lush bow of a mouth, her dazzling blue eyes, her dynamite figure and her perfect bone structure.
With the towel still carefully wrapped around her, she walked across the carpet to the mirror-fronted closet that ran along one side of the narrow entrance to their hotel room, and he couldn’t take his eyes from her prettily manicured bare feet, which appeared to react with a sensual delight to the lush thickness, as if they were more accustomed to walking on nails.
This was rapidly becoming one of MJ’s favorite leisure-time activities—lying on a king-size bed surrounded by a heap of snowy pillows while he watched Alicia dress. The hair and makeup routines he could skip. Those took place in the secrecy of the bathroom, they were too arcane and technical, and the blow dryer was noisy. In any case, he considered that she looked just as good with no makeup, bed hair and a pillow-crease mark across her cheek.
But the way she shimmied her breasts into a pushup lace bra, or let a sheath of silky fabric slide down her body …
In the month since they’d started sleeping together, Alicia getting dressed was a process that frequently reversed itself before it was even finished and transformed into a completely different activity in a very satisfactory way.
Not today.
Today she was a little coy.
She did that sometimes—went inexplicably distant as if she didn’t want him to have too much of a good thing. When he reached out his arms for her—now, for example—she did that smile again and shook her head. “Later.”
“Why?” he lazily asked.
“Because later I’ll taste of chocolate.”
He didn’t point out that they could have now as well as later. He thought he understood why she needed to keep a hold of the reins in their relationship sometimes, and it didn’t bother him.
Tonight, especially, he’d been quite sincere in what he’d told her. He did want this to be a really special, unforgettable evening. He’d bought her something. His anticipation about seeing her face when she opened the gift almost outweighed his anticipation about her tasting of chocolate.
Forty-five minutes later, she was ready to go, wearing a splashy, strappy floral dress that showed off the light golden glow of her newly tanned shoulders. She’d spent most of the afternoon out by the pool, catching the March sunshine that was so much stronger here than it would have been in New York, while he’d gone off on his covert shopping mission.
While she was in the bathroom just now, he’d slipped the gift into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and he hoped the bulge didn’t show. He didn’t want to give it to her yet. Before dessert, maybe, when they were both replete with good food and just pleasantly mellow from a glass or two of wine.
He curved his arm around her bare shoulders as they walked into the five-star restaurant together. Her shoulders were sun-warmed and touched with pink and perfectly smooth. He wanted to pull her close, but this was a public place and he hadn’t been raised to feel comfortable about full-on displays of affection in front of strangers. Instead, he let his hand slide down to the small of her back and recognized his own sense of proud possession.
She turns every head in the room, and she’s with me.
He was dizzy about it. Even dizzier an hour and a half into their meal, after a little more wine than he’d planned.
“I’m having a great time,” he told her.
“Me, too.” She smiled. “You can be pretty funny, do you know that?”
“So can you.”
He’d never felt like this before. An ambitious young doctor didn’t have much time to devote to finding the right woman. Of course he’d dated. During his internship, three years ago, he’d been quite serious about a fellow doctor whom he’d met on his rotation through the E.R.
But it had been a nightmare, in the end. Adrienne was a single mother. She did a really great job with it but juggled the most horrific schedule. The deeper he went into the relationship, the more it appalled him. They went weeks without spending any kind of quality time together, and he wasn’t comfortable in the role of instant dad. As the eldest son in the McKinley family, he shared his father’s perception that they were building a dynasty, and he wanted kids of his own.
If Adrienne hadn’t had her own mother close at hand, she couldn’t possibly have managed motherhood and the demands of medical study, but it meant that MJ felt as if he was taking her mom on board as well as her son. Cynthia was a nice woman, but the countless hours of help she gave her daughter made her feel entitled to comment and judge and interfere at will about everything. He couldn’t blame her for that, but it didn’t mean he liked it.
To cut a long story short, the relationship hadn’t worked, and he’d come away from it after six months feeling as if there just wasn’t room for both people in a partnership to have such a full schedule and so many emotional demands.
He’d made a conscious decision at that point only to get involved with women who had a little less ambition and drive, and preferably not much baggage. A relationship shouldn’t be harder and more demanding than his career, for heck’s sake. A relationship was about downtime and emotional nourishment.
He’d only known Alicia for four months and wasn’t yet asking himself any questions about the future, but so far she gave him more emotional nourishment than any woman he’d ever met.
Just that smile …
“Dessert menu?” she asked.
“Wait a moment. I have something.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the square, dark blue velvet box.
She saw it in his hand, went completely still as if in shock, put her fingertips against her mouth and swallowed. “Oh, MJ …” she breathed.
“Open it,” he said softly and passed it to her. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, and cradled it in her hand as if it was as fragile as a quail’s egg.
“Yes,” she said, half-laughing, almost in tears. “Oh, yes!”
Her fingers were shaking. It took her a good thirty seconds to get the box open, and there it was, the diamond hair clip dazzling white and gold against the deep blue. He’d had a private, hour-long session in the back room of the very exclusive Vegas jewelry store this afternoon, where he’d been shown tray after tray of bracelets, necklaces and earrings, but this was what he’d settled on because of her beautiful hair.
“Ohh,” she said abruptly and put the box down. “Oh, wow. Wow. It’s—it’s beautiful.”
“Do you like it?” Rather an ego-driven question, he realized at once. But it was sincere, too. He wanted to know. He wanted her to love it. “They’re diamonds.”
In case she was in any doubt.
Six figures’ worth. He wasn’t going to reveal the exact price he’d paid, but she would have to realize it was a lot.
She was staring down at it, hadn’t moved to touch it again, wasn’t speaking. He took a too-large gulp of wine and regretted it. He already felt a little hazy. Focusing on her face more closely, he realized she wasn’t reacting quite the way he’d expected.
“I—I can’t accept this, MJ.”
“Of course you can. Why not?”
She groped for words, while the velvet box sat on the table in front of her, untouched. Why didn’t she take out the clip and look at it more closely? Trace those pretty fingertips over the diamonds and gold? Why was she having such trouble? He could almost see the wheels turning in her head.
Stupidly, he took yet another gulp of wine, and then he looked at the square velvet box again and suddenly he knew. She had thought there was going to be a ring in there. She was convinced. It was the right shape, maybe a tiny bit larger, such an easy mistake to make. What had she said to him before she’d opened it?
“Yes. Oh, yes!”
Ah, hell, and there should have been a ring.
In an instant, it was startlingly clear to him. She’d thought at first that he was proposing, but she’d quickly realized her mistake. Anything less than a ring looked to her like a payment for sex, like the beginning of the end. She was a waitress. It was probably what she thought she deserved.
Now she was trying to calculate whether the gift was worth—literally worth—taking, whether it was all she was ever going to get from the relationship, whether he was using it to start the process of kissing her off and what room she had to maneuver in all of this.
It made him wince and it made him ache.
He’d wanted so much to make her happy with the expensive gift, not send her into a spin of desperate calculation and doubt like this. He cared about her happiness, he realized. Cared far more than he’d thought.
“Let’s get married.” He said it before he knew he was going to, and it was crazy and impulsive and the exact opposite of his usual considered decision-making, but he didn’t want to take it back. He took her hands across the table. “Alicia, it’s not a ring. You thought it was going to be, but it’s not and that’s my fault, but let’s get married anyhow, and we’ll get a ring for you later.”
She laughed, not daring to believe him now, when she’d been wrong before. “Married, MJ?”
“Yes, why the hell not? Tonight. This is Vegas. If we skip dessert, we can probably be married in half an hour.”
“Half an hour? Married?”
“I want to, Alicia. I really, really want to!”
Now she was laughing and crying. The tears sparkled on her lashes, and he didn’t regret what he’d said for a moment. “Yes, MJ. If you really mean it, yes!” she said.
It took a little longer than half an hour but not by much. At ten in the evening, there they were in the glitzy chapel, wearing their dinner clothes, still pleasantly mellow and happy from the wine, and saying their sketchy vows.
Alicia wore her strapless dress, a kiss of sunburn on her shoulders, and the glittering diamond barrette in her gorgeous piled-up hair, while MJ’s whole body buzzed with a giddy sense of triumph and rightness that almost took his breath away.
Chapter Five
But that was then.
He arrived home from the hospital at nine o’clock. It was now twenty-six hours, 520 miles of driving, four hours of surgery and five hours of medical admin and patient care since he’d first found Alicia’s note.
The kitchen was just the way he’d left it, with the microwave dish still sitting on the countertop, containing some crumbs and half a shriveled chicken nugget. It was, what, Thursday? Their housekeeper, Rosanna, came on Mondays and Fridays. She usually replenished their grocery supplies on a Friday, he understood, so there was probably not much food left in the place.
He’d never needed to think about this kind of thing in his life. Mom was a great cook. In college and medical school, he had the full meal plan. Later, living on his own, he’d eaten out or ordered in for almost every meal that he hadn’t grabbed at the hospital café. On his marriage, he’d given Alicia a free hand and she’d set everything up. Most of the time, he never even knew where it came from—if Rosanna had cooked it, or Alicia herself, or if it came from a deli or a caterer. This was New York City. Food just … was.
Except when it wasn’t.
His gut felt terrible, a mix of physical hunger and emotional wrenching that he didn’t know how to damp down. He didn’t want to go out. He didn’t want to hunt up take-out menus and get on the phone. He didn’t really want to eat at all but knew he should.
Life went on.
He needed to have some semblance of a brain in place, in order to talk to Alicia about what happened next.
In the end, he found a couple of eggs and a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer, and made an inept version of scrambled eggs on toast. He didn’t think to put butter in the skillet, so the eggs stuck, and when he tried adding water to unstick them, he ended up with unappetizing eggy slush ladled onto toast that went soggy in seconds.
He ate it anyhow, disguised with some chunks of cheese and a too-liberal shake of pepper and salt.
Then he called his wife.
She would know it was him before she even had the phone to her ear. MJ would have come up on her phone screen. And she must have expected a call from him, anyhow. She knew he wasn’t going to let this go. She sounded guarded and polite, and he fought for the right tone.
“How’re the kids?” he heard himself ask. Heard the scratch in his voice, too.
Hell, it hurt not to be with them. Alicia would have said he barely saw them, but, shoot, that didn’t mean he didn’t care. His awareness of their peacefully sleeping presence when he came home to the apartment at night or left in the early morning nourished him at a level he’d never tried to put into words. The times he did see them were incredibly precious, if demanding, and for all the times when he wasn’t around, he had enormous confidence in Alicia as a mother.
Damn, did he not tell her that enough, or something?
He tried to remember the last time he had, and couldn’t. To him it was so obvious—why did she need to hear it?
“They’re asleep,” she said. “Tired.”
“What did you do today?”
“Went to a park. We had a picnic. Which ended up taking place in the car because it began to rain. But we had fun anyway.” The forced cheeriness in the word fun reminded him that he wasn’t the only one who’d had to carry on as usual today, despite the upheaval of their separation.
“I’m glad,” he answered her mechanically, then cut to the chase. “What have you said to them, Alicia? What do they know?”
“I haven’t said anything yet. For them, we’re on vacation, that’s all. At some point, of course—”
He jumped in. “You can’t just spring it on them. And you can’t do it when I’m not around. We have to tell them together. I will not have my children exposed to that kind of conflict or have them doubt my role as their father in any way.” In his urgency, he spoke with more anger than he’d intended.
Hell, he was so unused to anything like this!
He wasn’t thinking of the prospect of divorce, there—of course he wasn’t used to that!
But he wasn’t accustomed in any area to having his will thwarted. This seemed almost shameful on his part, certainly nothing to be proud of, but that’s how it was. He was a top surgeon. People did what he wanted. Always.
Alicia, too. Maura and their previous nanny, Kate, another two nannies before that. And Rosanna, the rare times he saw her.
Abby and Tyler were almost the only human beings who ever defied him.
“Time to get out of the bath now, sweetheart. Both of you.”
“No! Not yet!”
“No, no, no!”
He realized he wasn’t comfortable when that happened. He tended to opt out and have Alicia or the nanny take over. “Here, they’re unmanageable tonight, and I’m tired.”
But Alicia was speaking now. He focused quickly on her voice down the line. “Of course I won’t just spring it on them, MJ. Is that really who you think I am? Someone who would risk destroying my own children’s sense of emotional security that way, like Anna and James are doing? Someone who would use them as a weapon against you?”
“No … No, I’m not suggesting that.”
“You seemed to be.”
“Look, it wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t. Our marriage is nothing like what Anna and James had. If you’re saying it is—”
“No, no, I’m not. You’re right. There’s no comparison.” Something they agreed on! He felt a brief moment of relief.
“All I’m saying is that I want us to do this right. If we have to do it at all. I don’t want it, Alicia. If there’s anything I can do, anything I can say, any way I can change, or we can both change, talk so that—” He stopped.
Hell, was he begging?
She stayed silent at the end of the phone, after he’d broken off. He waited, head pounding, jaw tight. Should he seize the window opened up by her silence? Take the initiative? He didn’t know how.
She spoke again before he had any answers. “You’ll have to come up here again.” The words were slow and careful. “I do know that. Maybe it’s best not to put it off. Can you get some time?”
“This weekend,” he said quickly, while the back of his mind buzzed, rearranging his schedule, working out a few favors he could call in. In his position, it wasn’t easy to get a chunk of time off at short notice.
Alicia knew that, and he hoped she would see his willingness as a step toward—
Toward having this whole thing just go away!
But he’d begun to accept that this wasn’t going to be an easy fix.
“If you could, that would be great,” Alicia said, still with that slow, careful way of talking, as if she was having to bite her tongue not to yell at him or blurt out a hundred deeply felt grievances. “It doesn’t need to be the whole weekend….”
“It’s going to be the whole weekend. I’ll drive up Saturday morning, back down Sunday night.” Another ten hours in the car. He didn’t care.
“All right, if you want. I think you’d better book into a motel.”
“What will the children think of that?”
Thick silence. “Make a reservation, please, MJ. It—it may turn out that you can cancel it …” He felt a rush of relief and hope. Short-lived.
“… if we can stay civilized enough for you to sleep in the study.”
“In the study?”
“I made up a folding bed there for Maura—of course, she never used it—and I haven’t put it away yet. There are really only the two bedrooms. Abby and Tyler are sharing. But they don’t need to know where you’re sleeping. Anyway, they’re not going to see our choice of sleeping arrangements—” a pause “—the way an adult sees it.”
“No.”
So this was how she saw the physical side of their marriage, as a “choice of sleeping arrangements.” It felt like a body blow. Like a kick in the—
Yeah. There.
“Was there anything else you wanted to say?” Alicia asked him carefully.
“Uh, no. Face-to-face, of course. But not now. Could you call and cancel Rosanna for tomorrow? I don’t want her—”
“Yes, okay, that’s probably a good idea.” She took a breath. “So can you text me with a rough arrival time? In case I’m out with the kids?”
“Sure.” He got through another couple of rounds of practical back-and-forth, then flipped the phone into the breast pocket of his shirt, his mind still snagged on the “sleeping arrangements” thing like ripped skin snagged on a rusty nail.
In other words, it hurt. Bad.
Did she mean it that way? Was she completely dismissing the sex life he’d always viewed with such satisfaction and pleasure and pride?
They were great in bed together. They were. They were dynamite.
But even as he thought this, he realized his attitude was a little out-of-date. He was thinking back to that sizzling week in Las Vegas and the vacations they’d taken together early in their marriage, before they’d decided to try for a baby. Those times stood out in his memory like a series of magazine-perfect honeymoons, four or five of them, some only a couple of days, others a week or more. Las Vegas, Bermuda, Paris, Aspen, Martinique.
He could call up a thousand pictures. Alicia in a red bikini with her luscious breasts bouncing as she walked along a tropical beach and her blond hair shining brightly in the sun. Himself taking the bikini off in the privacy of their suite, by pulling at that saucy string bow that only just held things together in the front. Lying back in a foaming private spa together, champagne within reach. Sitting across the softly lit table from her at a three-star restaurant, anticipating the moment when they would get back to their Paris hotel room and he could pull her into his arms.
At home, lately, sex had been different, he realized. They were both tired. He needed the release but didn’t need the slow, sensual build. It was over in minutes, and even though he was vaguely aware that she didn’t show the abandonment she once had, he put this down to the same priorities that dampened his own performance—just do it and get some sleep.
While he was burning with the knowledge that he would miss her body in his bed the way he would have missed air or gravity, she seemed to be implying that she wouldn’t miss their lovemaking at all. For the first time, it occurred to him that maybe she’d left him for the worst and hardest reason of all.
She’d found another man.
At the very thought, he felt as if someone had knifed him in the gut.
When he dragged himself into bed at ten o’clock, he felt her absence like an illness, and when he woke up at three after a couple of hours of unrestful sleep, he found he was holding her pillow in his arms as if he was cradling his own pain.
It smelled of her hair and her shampoo … it just smelled of her … and he was surprised that she’d left it behind now that he thought about it. Very surprised. She almost always took it with her when they went away, cramming it into a suitcase or nestling it into the corner of the backseat in the car. Its presence in their marital bed spoke to him, helped him, even though he couldn’t work out what it said.
He almost slid the pillow back to its rightful position on her side of the bed, but then in a moment of … he didn’t know—weakness? hope?—he pulled it closer again and hugged it like a child, or like an ardent lover, until sleep came over him.
Chapter Six
“What’s happening today, Mommy?” Abby wanted to know, five minutes after she woke up.
“Well, we need to go to the store. And I thought we might check out the library. Then we’ll come home and make cookies, hey?”
“Cookies!” Tyler said.
“Won’t that be fun?” Alicia agreed brightly.
It would. And also a nightmare. Faking having fun with your kids was harder than faking an orgasm, and, yes, Alicia had done both.
Like a good wife and mother, she felt guilty about both, also.
But, oh, yesterday had been so hard!
All she’d wanted to do was curl up into a tight ball of misery and sleep for about six months, in the hope that when she woke up again, the pain would have gone away and the rest of her life would miraculously make sense.
But you couldn’t do that. Children didn’t let you.
She loved Abby and Tyler so much, and since leaving MJ she’d been feeling it in her heart and her stomach and her bones to an almost feverish extent. She wanted to hug them against her body fifty times a day. She wanted to gaze and gaze at them. Her marriage to MJ had been worthwhile a hundred times over, no matter how ugly their divorce might be, because of these two.
She’d been saying “I love you” so often that at one point yesterday Abby had sighed theatrically, put her hands on her hips and told her, “We know that, Mommy.”
She loved them, but they were exhausting, and the little guilt monitor in the back of her brain kept telling her that she’d taken the easy way out, until now.
Taken the trophy wife way out, by leaving the kids with Maura or, before her, Kate and Robyn and Sveta, for hours and hours at a stretch, paying for endless mommy-and-me classes and toddler gym classes and toddler swim classes, so that—whether it was mommy and me, which it was sometimes, or Nanny and me, which it was too often—the kids were packaged into organized activities that left most of the real work to someone else.
Since leaving MJ was so much about not wanting to be a trophy wife anymore, she couldn’t take the easy way out now.
Oh, she wasn’t such an idealistic fool as to be attempting this without MJ’s money behind her. She’d married him in the first place as an escape from the grinding poverty trap, and she had no intention of taking a step backward into the trap’s evil jaws. But she was going to be as honorable about it as she could, taking only enough from him to ensure that his children were raised in the comfort and security he would want for them. Would insist on, in fact.
She wasn’t awarding herself very many points for this attitude, right now, but, still, it was something. It was better than she’d seen from some of the other women in her circle—like Anna, for example, who’d openly spoken of taking her ex to the cleaners, whether to anyone else’s eye the man deserved it or not.
The day went by.
Slow.
Boring.
Exhausting.
Punctuated by tiny diamond moments of rightness that she tried to lock into her memory to treasure later on. Abby singing a cheesy pop song to Tyler in the backseat of the car on the way to the store, her little four-year-old vocal cords valiantly attempting to mimic the electronic yodeling sound. Both of them with dabs of cookie dough on their noses when she let them lick the spoon and the bowl. The short-lived interlude of peace when they sat down at the table and ate the cookies, with milk for the children and a mug of steaming coffee for herself.
When Tyler went down for a nap, her first thought was simply “Thank heaven!” but when she turned to look back at him in the twin single bed that seemed so big for him and found his eyes already drifting shut, she had to pause and just watch him for a few moments because he was so precious and beautiful. His taffy-brown hair was so silky and fine on the pillow. His cheeks were so plump and pink.
They were so easy to love when they were asleep. Tyler would be giving up the daytime nap soon, because it had begun to push his bedtime at night later and later. For now, the time was precious. He was adorable … and thank goodness she had a break from him.
At six in the evening, just as she’d managed to get a home-cooked meal of spaghetti with meat sauce onto the table, there was a text from MJ. Coming tonight. Away early. Get to you nine-ish.
Tonight?
“There are bits in this,” Abby said. She was frowning and indignant about it, and her blond ponytail needed refastening or she would end up with dinner in her hair.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Alicia said as she jumped up to rewind the bright pink elastic.
“Bits,” Abby repeated, as she submitted to the procedure. “Of stuff. In the sauce.”
So much for Alicia’s attempt to insert stealth vegetables by chopping them up small. The weird thing was, Abby and Tyler both liked raw vegetable sticks with store-bought dips.
“It’s just carrot and celery,” she said, sitting down again. “I don’t like sara-lee.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Not cooked.”
“Well, how about I put a blindfold on you, and then you won’t know it’s there.” She jumped up again—even though her legs didn’t want to move for a second time, with MJ’s text still echoing through her mind and draining her strength—and pretended to get a dish towel to tie over Abby’s face.
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Lilian Darcy
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A Marriage Worth Fighting For, электронная книга автора Lilian Darcy на английском языке, в жанре современные любовные романы