Little Secrets

Once she was satisfied that all of her cannoli were lined up like soldiers, Rita checked on two more bowls of rising dough, punched them down, then covered them again, so they could do a second rise.

She’d be making bread before the bakery closed because her customers liked picking up a fresh loaf on the way home from work. Then she checked the meticulously aligned steel racks against one wall and made a note to have Casey get someone back there to box up the maple-nut biscotti.

“And I’m stalling,” she said aloud to the empty room.

“Question is, why?”

Her eyes closed on a sigh as Jack’s deep voice echoed all around her. Of course he wouldn’t be ignored. He was the kind of man who got exactly what he wanted when he wanted it. A trait that was both sexy and annoying.

“You shouldn’t be back here, Jack.”

“Your friend Casey said you weren’t feeling well.”

She rolled her eyes and told herself to have a little chat with Casey. Wouldn’t do any good, of course. If a gorgeous man asked Casey to stand on her head, the girl would. And they just didn’t come more gorgeous than Jack, so Casey really had been putty in his hands.

Rita surrendered to the inevitable and turned around to face him. “I don’t have time for you right now, Jack. I’m working.”

She walked to the tray of fresh cannoli, but before she could pick it up, Jack swooped in and snatched it from her. “You shouldn’t be carrying this. It’s heavy.”

A thread of pleasure whipped through her at his instinctive urge to protect, even as it irritated her that he clearly thought she was either helpless or a delicate blossom.

“I carry heavy things all the time. I’m pregnant, not an invalid.” He opened his mouth to argue the point, but she rushed on before he could. “I’m careful, too. I don’t take chances with my baby—”

“Our baby.”

“The baby,” she corrected meaningfully. “Now, give me the tray.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said and turned for the door into the front of the shop.

“I’m stupid now?” she said to his retreating back.

“I said don’t be stupid. There’s a difference.”

When the door swung open, snatches of conversation rushed toward her, along with Casey’s prolonged sigh of “Thank you so much.”

Rolling her eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t simply pop out of her skull and skitter across the floor, Rita pulled down the decorative biscotti boxes. She’d pack them herself and that would give her yet another reason to stay back here and keep her distance from Jack. Of course she should have known that wouldn’t work.

He came back through the swinging door, holding an empty tray and shook his head at her. “Do you have to do everything around here personally?”

“My business, my responsibility.” She lifted a tray of biscotti off the rack and turned for the counter, dodging Jack when he would have taken it from her. “So yes, I do. I want things done a certain way and I can’t expect everyone else to do all the work.”

She expertly folded the box into shape, slid a dozen biscotti inside then closed the box and slapped a gold Italia sticker in place. Automatically, she started on the next one while Jack came closer. Rita didn’t even look up from her task when she asked, “Why are you here again, Jack?”

He picked up a biscotti and took a bite, shrugging when she gave him a hard look. “I’m here because you are. Because my baby is. And I’m not leaving until we work this out between us.”

“Fine.” She continued boxing the biscotti in the bright red Italia containers, keeping her eyes on the job, rather than him. If she looked at Jack again she’d feel that torn sensation—yearning and betrayal.

He’d allowed her to mourn. Let her believe he was dead. How did you forgive someone for that when they wouldn’t even explain why they’d done it? And how did you get past those old feelings that continually slipped in despite the pain that should have smothered them?

“You want to talk, let’s talk,” she said. “I’ll start. I want to know why you disappeared.”

“That’s not on the table.”

Now she did risk a quick glance at him and his features were tight, closed, his eyes cold and icy.

“So we talk, but only about what you’re willing to discuss?” Shaking her head, she sealed another box and set it aside, automatically reaching for the next.

“I’m not looking to recapture anything here, Rita.”

A sharp stab of pain stole her breath at the blunt honesty. She looked into his eyes. “Wow.”

He flinched slightly, but otherwise remained stoic. “I’m not saying that to hurt you.”

“And yet...”

He looked down at the biscotti in his hand and then lifted his gaze to hers again. “This isn’t about us, Rita. It’s about the baby.”

A sinking sensation opened up in the pit of her stomach. Her mouth went dry and her hands shook, so she set the box she was holding down onto the counter so he couldn’t see it. How had they come to this, she wondered. Where had it all gone so terribly wrong?

What had made him shut her out when he left her to go back to his duties? What had turned him away from what they’d found, what they’d been to each other for one amazing week?

And how had he become so cold that he could stand just inches from her and look at her as if she wasn’t really there?

“What is it you want, Jack?”

He set the biscotti down, planted both palms on the counter and said, “I want you to marry me.”

Four

Rita actually felt shock slam into her like a physical blow. Whatever she’d been expecting hadn’t been this. She knew she was staring. Knew she should say something, but for the first time in her life she was absolutely speechless. He was serious, that much she could see. But surely he didn’t expect her to agree.

He laughed shortly, but it was merely a harsh scrape of sound against his throat. There was no humor in his eyes and no easing of the tightness of his mouth. “Not the usual reaction when a man proposes.”

Finally she found her own voice. “It’s not the usual situation, is it?”

“No,” he admitted solemnly, “it’s not.”

“Jack, you don’t want to be married to me.” God, how it hurt to say that, because six months ago, at the end of their week together, Rita had had dreams. She’d believed that when he came home from war, they would get married, have kids, live happily ever after. All the normal fantasies that women spin when they meet a man who makes their blood burn and their heart sing.

But that dream had died with him, or so she’d believed at the time. Now he was here, but it was a different Jack who faced her asking her to marry him. It was a colder, harder man than she’d once known and the loss of that rang deep and true inside her.

He pushed one hand through his hair then scrubbed the back of his neck. “No,” he admitted, looking directly into her eyes. “I don’t want to be married. To anyone.”

“Then what is this about?”

“I also don’t want my kid born without my name.”

Rita sighed heavily. “Of course you’ll be on the birth certificate, listed as the father.”

He frowned. “Not what I’m talking about. I want us married when the baby’s born,” he told her firmly. “After that, we can divorce and I won’t bother you again.”

Just when she thought the shocks couldn’t be more earth shattering, he said something else that ripped away what was left of the earth beneath her feet. “Seriously?”

Moments ago, she’d worried about a custody battle, but in reality he wanted nothing to do with his own child? What kind of man was he?

He blew out a breath, shoved his hands into his slacks pockets and admitted, “I’m not asking you to understand—”

“Good,” she interrupted. “Because I don’t. If you don’t want me, then fine. I get it. But how can you not want anything to do with your own child? My God, who are you?”

“Still me,” he insisted, but she didn’t believe him.

When she first met him, he’d been more quiet than chatty, more solemn than happy, but there hadn’t been such a marked coldness about him. Now it was as if he’d submerged his old self under a layer of ice.

“Think whatever you like about me. Can’t change it. But I want my kid born into the Buchanan family.” His mouth tightened and the muscle in his jaw twitched as if he were grinding his teeth together. “After that, you can raise it.”

It. So impersonal. So distancing. Rita hadn’t wanted to know what her baby was, preferring to be surprised. But now, at her next appointment, she would ask. Because she wanted Jack to see their child as a person. But that was for later. “So you’ll just put your baby aside like you did me and move on, is that it?”

He scrubbed one hand across his jaw. “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“Because you’re not explaining any of this.”

“Damn it, Rita, you don’t have to make this harder than it already is.”

“No, I don’t,” she said sadly. “Because you did that just fine on your own.”

“I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

Her eyes nearly popped out of her head at that insult on top of everything else. Rita had reached her limit. She walked around the edge of the counter, leading with her belly, and didn’t stop until she was standing in front of him. “You think I want money from you?”

He met her gaze and Rita would have given anything to be able to read what he was thinking, feeling. But there was no clue there for her. He was a blank slate. Deliberately. This new Jack had such a tight handle on his emotions, she couldn’t see past the facade.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I know you don’t want money.”

“That’s something, anyway,” she muttered, still looking up into his eyes, still looking for some shred of the man she’d loved.

“Do this, Rita,” he said quietly.

“Why would I marry you knowing you don’t want me?”

“Because I need it,” he admitted and it looked as though it cost him to give her that much. “I need to know my kid has my name. That I did the right thing.”

“The right thing.” She huffed out a breath and folded her arms across her growing middle. “This isn’t the ’50s, Jack. Single mothers do just fine on their own and so can I.” She didn’t believe in what he was saying, but Jack clearly did.

Rita knew she would be fine raising her child alone. She had her family’s support. She had her own business, a home and the strength to do whatever she had to do to succeed.

“It’s not a matter of that,” Jack argued. He picked up the biscotti again and when his hand fisted around it, let crumbs fall to the marble counter. “I know you could do it. I don’t want you to. I get you don’t owe me a damn thing and I’ve got no right to ask for this. Still, this is important to me, Rita. I don’t want my kid knowing his parents weren’t married.”

“Oh, for heaven’s—”

“Look, this is the best answer for all of us,” Jack said quickly.

“How is a meaningless marriage the best for anyone? You’re crazy.”

“That’s been said before,” he admitted wryly. “But not about this. This is important enough to me that I’m not going to back off or give up until you agree.”

She laughed shortly, turned her back on him and went back to boxing biscotti. “Good luck with that.”

“I’m a rich man, Rita,” he said and brought her up short.

Money again? What was he getting at? A tiny nugget of fear settled in the pit of her belly as, wary now, she asked, “How rich?”

“Very.”

She took a breath. He was watching her, waiting for her reaction and she wasn’t sure what that should be. Rita didn’t care if he had all the money in the world or nothing at all. So what was the point of this?

“Congratulations to you,” she finally said. “But why should I care?” Even as she asked that question, though, her brain was racing. A very rich man? She’d had no idea.

But then, there was so much she didn’t know about him. He hadn’t talked about himself a lot during their week together and she’d told herself that the information would come. That they could learn about each other in letters, phone calls. But that had never happened, so she was as much in the dark now as she had been then.

A very rich man, though, had power. The question was now, would he use that power to manipulate her, to take custody of her child?

“I can take care of the baby,” he said.

She stiffened. “So can I.”

“Rita, you live above a bakery,” he snapped. “I can get you a nice place. On the beach.”

“Are you trying to bribe me?” she asked, astounded at the turn this conversation was taking.

“No. Look, it’s my kid, too.” He took a moment to gather his thoughts and said, “We get married, I get you a house and after the baby’s born, we split up.”

“And if I don’t want to marry you?”

“You will.”

“Don’t take any bets on it.”

“I will bet on it.” He held out one hand. “Five bucks.”

“For a very rich man, you don’t have much faith in your ability to persuade me.” She shook his hand and deliberately ignored the zip of heat she felt. “Twenty dollars.”

“Even better,” he said and completely knocked her feet out from under her.

Even better. It reminded her of that first night, of his smile, his kiss, their eagerness to be together. And when she looked into his eyes, she saw a gleam of amusement and knew he was remembering, too. Her heart turned over at the tiny glimpse of her Jack. Maybe he wasn’t as lost as she’d thought. Maybe he was reachable.

He let go of her hand but the heat engendered remained. The tiny moment of shared memory was over, the hint of humor gone from his eyes and she was left with this gorgeous stranger again. How could he make her feel so much while apparently feeling nothing himself? How could she allow herself to marry a man for all the wrong reasons when she once would have given anything to marry him for love?

“It won’t work, Jack.”

“We’ll see, Rita.”

It took her only a week to surrender.

A week of Jack coming to the bakery daily, helping out, making sure she got off her feet. He ignored his own business and showed up in jeans, scuffed cowboy boots and T-shirts, making her heart skip just looking at him. He stacked pallets of supplies, carried trays of cookies, rang up sales and won Casey over. That last part wasn’t hard at all, Rita allowed. But as for the rest, he wore her down with his relentless pursuit and dogged determination.

“You owe me twenty bucks,” he said when she told him she’d marry him.

“This isn’t funny.” Should she have held out? Refused him? Possibly. But in the last week, she’d caught repeated glimpses of the old Jack, and though they were brief, they’d given her enough hope to think that just maybe it was worth trying to get past the ice he’d packed around his heart.

“No one’s laughing.”

“I’ll marry you, but I can’t get married without my family there,” she said. “They’d never understand.”

They weren’t going to understand a quickie wedding or a divorce so soon after that wedding, either, but one problem at a time.

“Fine. Us. Our families. Small ceremony,” Jack said like he was ticking things off a to-do list.

“And I don’t want anyone to know this is a...business deal,” she said for lack of a better way to put it. “Also, I don’t want you to buy me a house.”

“Nonnegotiable,” he said. “When we split, you can pick something out or I will.”

It didn’t make sense to argue with him now, but Rita could be as stubborn as Jack. And she wouldn’t be bought off or given a “going away gift.” But this, too, was a worry for another day. God knew she had enough for today already.

“Okay, then,” she said, sighing heavily. “I guess we’re getting married.”

He grabbed a black leather jacket off a hook by the back door and shrugged into it. “I’ll take care of the details. I’ll send packers to get your stuff out of your apartment. Bring it to the penthouse.”

She blinked at him. “Packers?”

He stopped, looked at her. “You want this to look real, then we’ll be living together at my place.”

At his place? She didn’t even know where he lived! Oh, this wasn’t something she’d even thought about.

Before she could say anything to that, though, he was gone.

* * *

“It’s a surprise, that’s all I’m saying,” Jack’s sister, Cass, said for the tenth time in the last hour. “I’m glad you found someone, but it would have been nice to meet her before the wedding.”

He looked at Cass and read the worry in her eyes. God, would he ever get used to seeing that emotion on his family’s faces? And if not accustomed to it, could he please, God, reach a point where it wouldn’t tear at him? “It was sudden. I met her six months ago—”

“Clearly,” Cass said wryly.

“Right.” The baby. His family had been shocked not only with the announcement that he was getting married, but that he was going to be a father. Soon.

Cass flipped her long brown hair behind her shoulder, threaded her arm through his and watched Rita with her family. “I like her already.”

“Good. That’s good.” Jack nodded thoughtfully and kept his gaze locked on his wife. Wife. He swallowed hard and told himself it would be all right. The important thing here was that he’d done the right thing by his kid. He could survive three months of marriage and then his life would go back to what it had been. Quiet. Alone.

“Jack?”

He looked at his sister and nearly sighed. She was watching him so closely, trying to read every expression on his face, he might as well have been under a microscope. But judging by her own expression, she wasn’t happy with what she was seeing. In fact, she was giving him the serious, concerned look he was pretty sure she gave her patients.

As a general practitioner, Cass was adept at cutting through the bull to make a diagnosis and it was clear to him she didn’t like what she was seeing in him.

“Relax, Cass,” he said, “I’m fine.”

“Sure. It’s what you’ve been saying for months.”

“Then you should believe me,” he said, patting her hand on his arm.

“No, you remind me of this one patient. He’s ten. And he always insists he’s fine even when his fever is spiking or his throat is sore.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t want me asking questions, you see. And neither do you.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, giving her a tired smile. “But I’m not one of your patients.”

“Good thing,” she told him. “We’d butt heads even more than we do now. Jack, I have to ask you something. Will you let her in?”

“What?” He looked down at her and tried to hide his impatience. It wasn’t the family’s fault that he couldn’t give them what they wanted. Be who they wanted.

Cass moved to stand in front of him and put both of her hands on his forearms. “I’m asking you. You’re married now. Going to be a father. And yet I still see that distance in your eyes.”

He let his head fall back and he stared unseeing at the overcast gray sky for a second or two. The steady roar of the ocean was a constant white noise in the background. The sea itself was as gray as the sky and the waves rolling to shore just a few feet away were edged with foam that looked like lace.

“Cass...”

“Don’t bother to deny it. We all know it’s true. You’ve shut down, Jack and we don’t know how to reach you.” She leaned in and looked up into his eyes. “Will you let Rita try?”

What no one understood was, he couldn’t allow himself to be reached. Couldn’t be pulled from the shadows because the darkness was where he belonged now. He felt his own helplessness rise as he watched his sister’s face.

Jack wished he could reassure his whole family. Wished that this marriage was changing something. But the truth was, nothing had changed for him. He was who he was now and everyone would eventually accept what he already had.

The old Jack Buchanan died on his last tour.

Cass must have read the resignation on his features because she sighed, went up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “I love you, Jack. Give yourself a chance to be happy.”

He nodded again, gave her a quick hug, and then sighed in relief when she walked off to join her family. Jack looked to his father and brother as they stood with Rita’s parents, laughing and talking. There was no respite for Jack today. He’d dropped himself into a crowd. Yet he was still a man on the sidelines, watching as life went on around him.

Both families were gathered and they seemed to be getting along fine. His sister’s family, husband and two kids and his brother Sam’s group, wife and three kids, actually looked small compared to Rita’s.

Her parents, her sister and two brothers with all of their kids and spouses made quite a crowd. Her sister’s four kids, each brother had five and one of the wives was as pregnant as Rita. The Marchettis were clearly devoted to family and Jack was glad to see it. When this marriage ended, when he was out of her life, Rita would have their support to help her through.

Another straw of guilt dropped onto his shoulders and he nearly winced at the added weight. Had he done the right thing here? Marrying her with the promise to divorce in three months? Setting her up to have to explain what went wrong to a loving family who were assuming she was marrying for love? Wouldn’t it have been better to just tell everyone the truth up front?

Easier for him, maybe, he acknowledged. But for Rita? His gaze went to her and locked on with a laser focus. Tension gripped him as every cell in his body tightened, buzzing with the kind of need only she had ever awakened in him. He wanted her with every breath and knew he couldn’t have her because he had nothing to offer her. Not now.

All he could give her was this marriage and a house and the promise to stay the hell out of her way once this was done and over. She deserved at least the pretense of a real marriage for her family’s sake, he told himself. Hell, she deserved so much more than he had.

Her curly brown hair was pulled up on top of her head to cascade down past her shoulders in a riot of wind-tossed curls. She wore a long dress of some filmy material that almost seemed otherworldly. The color was a soft lavender so pale it made him think of moonlit fog. Her eyes were bright, her mouth curved in a smile as she hugged her sister. Then those aged, whiskey eyes found his and his insides fisted. He was caught in a trap of his own making.

Married to a woman he wanted and couldn’t have. Living in a shadow world, yearning for light. Wanting to bury himself inside her warmth to ease the cold that was always crouched within him. He was outside a window staring in at what he most desired, but unable to reach out and touch it.

And maybe that was his penance, he thought. The price he had to pay for living.

“You look too solemn for a man on his wedding day.”

Somehow Jack’s father had sneaked up on him. Damn. He’d been hyperalert for months, but looking at Rita was enough to distract him from everything but her.

“Just thinking,” he said.

Thomas turned to follow Jack’s gaze to Rita. “Well, I don’t know how you can look at your bride and be thinking thoughts dark enough to put a scowl on your face.”

Chagrined, Jack realized he hadn’t been paying close enough attention. He’d let his mask slip and shown people what he was feeling and that wasn’t something he wanted to happen. No point in those he loved worrying even more than they already were.

He forced a smile and hoped it looked more real than it felt. “You like her?”

Thomas smiled and slapped his back. “What’s not to like? She’s beautiful, kind and she’s giving me another grandchild.” His voice trailed off. “I only wish your mother was still here to enjoy all of these kids running around.”

Jack smiled wistfully. His mother had died five years before and had only seen a few of the grandchildren she would have enjoyed so much. “She would have loved this.”

“Yes, she would,” his father said. “But I have a feeling she’s here, somehow. I can’t imagine your mother not being around when something big was happening to one of her kids.”