A Mother in the Making

“Here’s the doctor’s building coming up on the right, after the next light. There’s parking out front. You can wait in the pickup, if you want. Hopefully this won’t take long.”

“Hmm, wait in the pickup… Does this doctor have good magazines? Or just ones with fish and cars on the covers?”

“What’s wrong with fish and cars?”

“Despite the toolbox, I am actually a girl, Jack,” she drawled. “I believe we’ve already covered that? I gotta catch up on my celebrity gossip or I grow forests of unwanted body hair overnight.”

He laughed. “No forests. He has good magazines.”

“Then I’ll come in and read.”

They waited five minutes before Dr. Seeger called him in, and he left Carmen with her pile of glitzy reading.

“Okay,” the doctor said, sounding way too eager. “Let’s see if I can cause some pain.”

Bottom line, he could.

Other than that, the news was good.

“I don’t think you’ve caused any further damage,” Dr. Seeger said. “Your blood pressure is normal and your temperature, your heart. There’s no sign of infection or swelling. It wasn’t hurting until I poked at it just now?”

“No, but if I twist…”

“Don’t twist. You’re, what, ten days out of surgery? You’re still healing. Go easy on this.”

“Do I have to lie down?”

“Not unless you want to. Have you been taking your pain medication?”

“I stopped it. Made my head too fuzzy and I hated it.”

The doctor fixed him with a thoughtful look. “It’s probably good that you’ve stopped, although I wouldn’t recommend that strategy to every patient. You’re the type who thinks he’s cured if he can’t feel actual pain. The hero type. If you pop painkillers, who knows what you’ll do to yourself and never realize.”

They negotiated Jack’s exact level of permitted activity for a couple more minutes, and Jack wondered if maybe this “hero-type” thing had some truth to it. Dr. Seeger certainly seemed able to predict a few of his recent behavior patterns with a high degree of accuracy. There was also the lingering suggestion that the “hero” label wasn’t one hundred percent complimentary.

He left the doctor’s office with mixed feelings.

“He says I can keep painting,” Jack reported when he got back to Carmen in the waiting room. He looked pleased and a little thoughtful.

“Is that good?”

“Hell, yeah!”

“What else did he say?” She put down her magazines and stood up, sensing he was eager to get out of there. The car keys in his hand provided a tiny clue. He was jiggling them impatiently, even though they belonged to his own car, not the C & C pickup that they’d arrived in, and he wasn’t even driving.

“What else?” he echoed. “Good blood pressure, no infection or swelling. And he says I should go easy on the painkillers because I’m the—” He stopped.

“The what?” she prompted.

“Nah. Nothing.”

“Go on. Worst patient he’s ever had? Rarest blood group on the planet?”

He shrugged, tucked in the corner of his mouth and spread his hands. “The hero type. For what it’s worth.”

What was it worth?

Carmen didn’t know.

She didn’t have a lot of experience with heroes.

Chapter Three

Four days of solid work later—a lot of splintered wood, a lot of paint fumes, a lot of dirt and mess, the occasional presence of Rob to help with the heavy work, not much conversation—Carmen flipped her cell phone shut and announced to Jack, “That was Cormack. He and Rob should be here with the new kitchen cabinets in about a half hour. They’ve hit a delay at the warehouse, but they’re sorting it out.”

“No problem,” Jack answered easily.

He had seemed more relaxed as each day passed. His side looked to be hurting him less, and he’d told her that Ryan was coming tonight, for the first of his more-frequent weekends here. Carmen could see Jack was happy about it, but a little wound up at the same time. He’d looked at his watch several times over the past hour.

“At least, it’s no problem for me,” he added. “Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

“No, I’ll wait. We won’t get any of the cabinets put in tonight, but they’ll take a while to unload from the truck, and we’ll want to check them for any damage or anything that’s wrong. Will it be a problem if we’re still here when Ryan arrives, though?”

He looked at his watch again. “Shouldn’t be.”

But he frowned. Carmen already had the impression that his ex’s reactions could be unpredictable.

It was late Friday afternoon and almost dark out. Chilly, too, with so many windows open to air out the smell of fresh paint. Jack had almost finished the sunroom. He’d been working with a roller at the far end, rapidly filling in the last sections with long, smooth strokes.

Carmen watched him as he returned to the work. He leaned down to the roller tray, still favoring his injured side a little. He put the roller against the wall and pushed up and down, and the muscle in his upper right arm went a little harder and rounder, below the loose band of that frayed old T-shirt, which was now splattered with paint. The color went onto the wall with a hissy, splishy kind of sound, and Jack hummed a couple of bars of a classic rock riff under his breath, sounding a little on edge after the mention of Ryan’s arrival. “Dunh, dunh, da, dunh, dunh, dunh-da.”

She recognized what he was humming. Deep Purple. “Smoke on the Water.”

He’d done a good job, her professional eye told her. Most amateur painters skimped on the prep work. They didn’t spend enough time sanding or filling in holes, didn’t tape the windows, and ended up with sloppy edges and rough spots. Jack hadn’t even opened his paint cans until yesterday evening, after she and Rob had gone for the day. He must have worked for hours last night on the ceiling, and today he’d done the main wall color, a buttery cream. There was a contrasting trim to go on later, in a pale Wedgwood-blue.

“I like it,” she told him. Then she fought a yawn, which Jack fortunately missed.

If he’d spent half last night painting, she’d spent at least as much time worrying about Kate being out late again, and listening for the sound of her coming through the front door. She’d heard her sister’s key in the lock at almost two, and then unsteady footsteps stumbling up the stairs.

“Yeah? You do?” He turned. “I wanted to prep it well enough so it didn’t need a second coat. Really wanted it done today, before—” He stopped. “Well, just done today. What do you think?”

“You’ll have to wait for brighter light, but I can’t see any patchy spots. You may have some touching up, that’s all.”

“And it’s not too yellow?”

“Not at all,” she reassured him.

“And not too, you know, girly?”

“Not to my eye.”

“Good.”

He wanted the new paint job to be finished enough to show off to Ryan, she realized, and he wanted Ryan to like it. This was no bachelor pad he was creating for himself, here. He wanted it to be a home.

“A sunroom has to be sunny,” she said. “You can tone down the cheeriness with some darker furnishings. It’s not girly.” His concern for Ryan’s opinion reminded her of her own concern over Kate, and that she should call and let her know she’d be late home for dinner, because of Cormack’s delay. “And of course when the trim and floor are done it’ll look so different, and so much better,” she told him. “Really impressive. Great room for a kid’s computer and study desk.”

“You think so?” He looked happy at the idea.

“Definitely, when it’s all finished.”

He grinned. “I’m going to enjoy throwing this carpet into a Dumpster.”

“I’ll bet!”

She made the call to Kate but was asked to “Please leave a message” on both the land line at home and Kate’s cell. “Hi, Kate, it’s me,” she told the cell phone. “Wanna cook something, if you get in? There’s pasta and salad fixings, deli pasta sauce in the refrigerator. I’ll be there for it, but late. Cormack won’t be. Anyhow, call me when you get this, okay? Let me know what’s happening.”

She’s eighteen, she’s college age, she’s not a child, ran the familiar mantra in her head, after she put down the phone. The mantra didn’t help. Nothing helped. Kate was a mess. She’d broken up with her boyfriend a month ago, and even though Mitchell had been a jerk and bad news and not nearly good enough for Kate, she still had a wounded heart. Carmen was scared. Their talks achieved nothing.

Cormack had no solutions to offer, either. He tended to opt out by spending his evenings elsewhere, leaving Carmen to fret and yell and try a new strategy with Kate every week. Sometimes she got angry with her older brother and business partner, but he was probably right when he said that there was nothing they could do. Kate had to ride out her own problems, deal with her own heartaches and learn from her own mistakes.

Restless and concerned, Carmen wandered into the sunroom to watch Jack fill in the last unpainted rectangle of wall. “Want some help cleaning your gear?” she asked him, unhappy about the circular motion of her thoughts about her sister. “There’s nothing more I can do until Cormack and Rob get here.”

“You don’t have to help. You look pretty wiped.”

“I hate sitting around.”

Because then I’m just going to either A, worry about Kate or B, spend too much time watching the way Jack’s butt looks in those old jeans when he moves.

Yeah, definitely she was in trouble.

And though a part of her sang out a warning that she should run a mile, because she had no time for a man, especially a man with a nine-year-old son, when she had Kate to worry about and Melanie and Joe only just grown and gone, another part of her insisted, Isn’t it time I had something for me?

Jack Davey would most definitely be something for her.

Which part of herself did she listen to? The sensible, nurturing part, or the part that wanted to take a leaf out of Kate’s book and throw caution to the four winds, right along with her tender heart?

“If you’re serious, start on the trim brushes,” Jack said, pulling them from the plastic bag he’d stored them in to stop them from drying out. “I’m done with them. Use that old sink in the basement.”

“Sure.” She reached out and he gave them to her, the two handles inevitably sticky with paint drips that had run down them. She was accustomed to messy hands. His were stained and sticky, also, and when their fingers touched as she took the brushes, the stickiness glued them together for a moment. She didn’t try too hard to pull away.

“How fast does this stuff dry?” she murmured, and he favored her with his blink-and-you-miss-it grin.

“Fast,” he said. “Better go wash it off.” He dropped his voice. “Your hands are too pretty to have paint all over ’em.”

Yep. Serious trouble. What kind of signal had she sent just then?

Down in the basement she ran water over the brushes and squeezed the thick bristles, knowing she’d probably still have paint traces on her hands a couple of days from now, despite the industrial-strength soap she and Cormack kept at home.

The water was beginning to flow clearer when Jack came down with the roller. She heard his footsteps on the old wooden stairs and her heart began to beat faster. It was pretty shadowy down here. Atmospheric. A little more dangerous, in all sorts of ways, than being alone with him in the kitchen and sunroom while they worked.

She stepped sideways to give him room, and he used her almost-clean waste water to rinse away the thickest of the paint on the roller. “Those are about done, aren’t they?” he said, after a while.

She looked at her brushes. They were. For a good minute she’d just been standing here wondering why it felt so nice to have Jack Davey this close, and what one of them might do about it. She knew he felt this chemistry, too…

“Here’s a rag for drying them.” He reached up to a nail sticking out from the wooden floor beam above their heads and pulled down what had to be another one of his old T-shirts. Their arms bumped. He shut off the faucet.

When she took the rag from him, he didn’t let it go. She pulled. He tugged gently back. She looked up at him. “Thanks for saying the right things about the paint,” he said.

“That’s okay. It does look good.” She added, “But I know why it’s important. You want Ryan to like it.”

“Oh, I’m that transparent?”

“Maybe because I’m that way with my baby sister, sometimes. Thinking—oh, too much, probably—about what I can do to make her happy. I recognized what you felt. Ryan comes first.”

“That’s right. I say that to myself all the time. In exactly those words.”

He still hadn’t let go of the rag. Carmen stopped pulling. They both just stood and looked at each other, while he dried their wet hands on the soft, stretchy fabric. Finally, he dropped the rag into the sink and looked at what he’d done. Two sets of clean, dry, pink hands, the big, strong pair cradling the smaller, work-hardened pair.

“Much prettier,” he said softly.

“They’re not,” she stammered. “They’re not proper girl hands at all. They have cuts on them, sometimes, and scars. I use creams and stuff, but—”

He cut her off. “They’re sexy as hell.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Because they’re real. Sexiest girl hands I’ve ever seen.”

As if to prove it, he lifted them and kissed them, then took his lips away, laced his fingers through hers and kissed her mouth. It was the second time in three days that she’d found herself in Jack Davey’s arms, only this time no one was crying.

He kept his fingers threaded in hers, dropping their arms to their sides. His lips brushed her mouth, taking it slow. “Is this okay?” he muttered.

“Yes,” she whispered back. Because it was most definitely okay, so why pretend differently?

The single word was all it took. He deepened the kiss at once, pulling her hard against him, parting her lips with his, tasting her, turning her mouth delectably numb and tingling. He kissed like a dream, kissed from the heart, kissed as if the world might end tonight, and that was just the way she wanted it. Good, and unashamed.

Instinctively she lifted one hand into his hair and caressed the clean, silky strands. She’d done this four days ago. Different reason. Just as good. They knew each other better now. How did that happen to two people? It was strange. Making coffee for each other while they worked. A few casual lines about measurements and cabinets and paint colors.

But somehow, thanks to tears and embarrassment and coffee and paint colors, she knew him and he felt right. Right beneath the touch of her fingers, right to her sense of taste and smell, the right heat radiating from his strong body, the right words whispered in her ear.

“On Monday morning…” he said. Kisses and words. She could barely tell the difference. “Even when I was…” his breath touched her lips. His mouth was like poetry “…sobbing like a baby on your shoulder, I loved how you felt. I hit you with all of that emotion…”

“It was okay. I could see how it just washed over you.”

“You were great. The fact that you didn’t run screaming…”

“I’ve had some practice.”

“Yeah?”

“Family.”

“Why are we talking about this?”

“We’re not.”

“Good…” he said, and the word drowned itself against her mouth.

He kissed her hard, ran his hands down her back and over her rear end, shaping her curves, coming up to lift her hair from her neck and make sensual touch patterns against her nape and behind her ears. She felt the press of her breasts against him, and the growing ridge of his arousal against her stomach. They were the wrong size for each other but it didn’t matter a bit. They still fit, somehow. He bent and she stretched. It was just…right.

And then it was interrupted.

Carmen heard the pop of car tires on the tarred driveway at the side of the house, right next to the windows above the old sink.

Cormack and Rob, with the cabinets.

Jack muttered something under his breath, and if it was a curse word, then Carmen fully agreed.

She didn’t want this to stop. How could she stop?

But the sound of the arrival had cut jaggedly into their kiss like a knife cutting tough steak, and she felt Jack start to let go. His hands showed his reluctance. So did his mouth. She felt his hot touch, first against her back then dropping to her hips. His kiss trailed across her jaw and down her neck, warm and giving and alive, promising more, promising later.

It was only the promise of later that allowed her to let go now. How crazy was that?

“This must be Cormack,” she said, breathless.

And maybe his timing was fortunate because the implications of kissing Jack were looming larger by the second. That other part of her was talking louder, the part she hadn’t listened to before, the part that said nothing about how this could possibly work, when Ryan came first in his life, and Kate’s current problems came first in hers, and what Carmen wanted most in the world right now was to be free of such a heavy weight of respon sibility.

“I guess,” he said, about Cormack.

“Finish cleaning the roller?” she prompted him. “We’ll be a while, unloading.”

He grabbed her hand and squeezed it and they looked at each other helplessly for a moment.

“Jack, maybe we should…”

“Go,” he said. “We can’t talk now.”

“No. I know.” Her body throbbed and burned as she hurried up the stairs. She smoothed her hair and her shirt, knowing Cormack would have questions about her flushed face and bright eyes. He’d probably think Difficult client, not Kissing by the basement sink, because difficult clients were far, far more common than clients who even looked as if they might touch a woman the way Jack Davey did.

Would her brother ask her about it?

Cool down, she coached herself. Don’t let him see that something happened.

She went directly to the side entrance, where Cormack and Rob should just about be standing by now. There was no one there, so she went to the front of the house, yanked the big, ill-fitting door open and found a petite, blue-eyed blonde standing on the porch with her mouth already pursed in impatience at how long she’d had to stand waiting.

Oh. Right.

“You must be Terri,” Carmen said, sounding a little too abrupt.

Jack’s ex.

She saw a boy with Jack’s dark hair and a slight but wiry build coming up the saggy old steps with a backpack slung on one shoulder. Ryan—number-one priority in Jack Davey’s life. To both mother and son she said, “Come in.”

The purse on Terri’s lips gathered tighter, as she looked Carmen up and down. “Jack didn’t say he’d have someone here.”

She said someone as if it meant call girl, or at the very best, sleazy new squeeze, but Carmen understood how a mother might have concerns about a possible unknown new girlfriend in her son’s father’s life. She explained quickly, “I’m not someone. I’m completely not anybody at all. I’m just remodeling his kitchen.” And if my cheeks are on fire, then they’re lying! “I actually thought you were going to be the rest of the team, bringing the new cabinets.”

Terri didn’t seem interested in the new cabinets, let alone Carmen herself, now that she’d turned out to be the hired help. “But he’s home?” She didn’t wait for an answer, just marched into the house. “Jack?” she called sweetly. “This is a little inappropriate, isn’t it?”

Inappropriate. Such a falsely sanitary word. It came out of Terri’s mouth with vinegar flavoring, and Carmen already understood quite a lot about why Terri and Jack were divorced.

She focused on Ryan, instead. He looked so much like Jack, down to the same expression on his face—a mix of anticipation and wariness. It melted her heart. This was a fresh start for him, too, in his relationship with his dad, and he was a little wary. “Hi,” she said brightly. She knew about fresh starts in families. “I’m Carmen. Want to put your backpack by the stairs or something? It looks heavy.”

Terri turned back to her. “Didn’t you say you were from the construction crew?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Carmen confirmed helpfully, since apparently she hadn’t been clear enough before.

“Hmm.” Terri’s look said that a kitchen remodeler making suggestions to a nine-year-old about where he could put his backpack was almost as “inappropriate” as the remodeler answering the door in the first place.

Jack had appeared. “We thought you were the cabinets,” he said to Terri.

“Didn’t I say we’d be here by six?”

He looked at his watch. “And it’s a quarter after. Which was about when we were expecting Cormack and Rob with the cabinets.”

Carmen heard another vehicle engine outside. “This is Cormack and Rob,” she said quickly. “No problem.” She went out to the porch and found that Terri’s car was blocking the truck’s continuation down the driveway. For convenience and speed, they needed to unload directly through the side door. She added apologetically, “Um, Terri, unless you’re leaving right away, I’ll have to ask you to move your car.”

With exaggerated patience, Terri held the keys out to Carmen at arm’s length. “Have you ever driven a BMW?” Her face said she doubted it, and she turned away without waiting for a reply.

Carmen held the keys, thinking sarcastically, Oh yeah, I run around in them all the time, stick shift and automatic, all makes and models, every color of the rainbow.

It was official.

She didn’t like Jack’s ex.

She was tempted to say out loud, I’m pretty good in a Mercedes or a Lamborghini, too. But she heroically managed to keep the lines purely in her thoughts.

Terri must be a mind-reader, however, because she almost looked as if she was about to snatch back the keys. On the way out the door to move the vehicle, Carmen heard her say, “I really don’t think this is appropriate for Ryan, Jack, for you to have a work crew in the house while he’s here.”

“It’s six-fifteen on a Friday. They won’t be here long.”

In the driveway, Carmen signaled to Cormack and Rob that she was moving the car, reversed out toward the mailbox, then angled the vehicle onto the unkempt stretch of grass in front of the house. They drove the truck farther in and began to unload the cabinets, keeping the protective packaging in place and setting everything down in the dining room. Cormack was still taking cold and flu medication, but he was a lot better than he’d been earlier in the week.

In the living room Terri and Jack were still talking.

“Go on upstairs, Ryan, honey,” Carmen heard Terri say, and, as soon as his footsteps sounded overhead, in quite a different tone, “This arrangement can be changed if it doesn’t work out, Jack, you know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I know that. And it cuts both ways.”

“What could you possibly mean by that?”

“Never mind, it’s nothing.”

“No, Jack. I want an explanation.”

“Well, let’s just say if you open a nude-mud-wrestling venue in your pool cabana, I might have a case for full-time custody.”

“That’s ridiculous! And totally inappropriate!”

“No, it’s a joke, because I’m trying to keep this light. Terri, I really don’t think that having a couple of people here unloading kitchen cabinets on a Friday evening is going to traumatize our son.”

“No, but it’s going to rob him of your attention.”

“Which you’ve been doing ever since we first separated three years ago, by not letting me have more time with him, so please don’t try that argument.”

Carmen went back out to the truck to bring in the new stainless steel sink, but her cell phone rang in her back pocket on the way.

Kate.

She came around to the front of the house and sat on the porch steps for some privacy and tried to sound as upbeat as possible. “Hi, Katie-girl!”

“I’m home and there’s no dinner, so I’m—”