FROM HOUSECALLS TO HUSBAND Page 21

  "How?"

  "I don't know yet. I haven't figured that out. But I'm not going to bed with you again. That's the part that's complicating everything."

  She didn't trust the stillness that stole over him, or the way his eyes narrowed on her face. She didn't know what he was looking for, either, but she knew he wasn't at all pleased with what he found.

  "Just what is it that you want from me, Katie? The signals I'm getting from you are totally screwed up."

  "Don't be angry—"

  "I'm not angry," he insisted, eyes flashing. "I'm confused. Last night you wanted me as much as I wanted you. It was the same way the first time. And now you're pushing me away again."

  "Forget last night," she begged, well aware of how mixed her signals had been. "And I'm not pushing you away. All I want is for us to be the way we were before. I want us to be comfortable with each other. I want us to be able to call each other and ask for help or to talk or to have dinner or watch a movie or … or … borrow something." Her voice caught on a plea. "I want my old friend back."

  The pleading in her eyes confounded Mike even more than what he was hearing. He didn't care what she said—she was pushing him away. Yet, he could swear she didn't look as if that was what she wanted to do at all.

  "Let me make sure I have this right." He stepped back, shoving his hand through his hair in disbelief. Having come from her bed less than twelve hours ago, her responses to him fresh in his mind, he'd had an entirely different agenda than the one she was proposing. "You want to be friends. You want to go back to the way things were between us a couple of months ago. And you want to forget last night. Right?"

  Though clearly wary of his terse summation, she nodded.

  "Well, you know what, honey? That's not going to happen."

  "Mike—"

  "It can't possibly be the way it was," he insisted, frustration with her logic goading him on. "I don't understand how you can even think it could be. It would be like trying to turn a flower back into a bud. Or making a tree viable after it had been burned to ash. Some changes are just plain irreversible, and this happens to be one of them."

  "We could try."

  "Why do we even have to?" he insisted, amazed by how naive she was being. "I know you've said you'd never marry a doctor because you don't want a man who won't be there for you and your children, but you won't even give me a chance to prove what kind of a husband and father I'd be. And you know what?" he demanded, ignoring the way he'd just barreled over what he'd intended to talk to her about, "I think that's just an excuse, anyway. You've said for years that you want marriage and a family, but you've made it next to impossible to meet any man who could qualify as a husband. You're either at the hospital around the very sort of man you say you don't want, or you're working at the free clinic with pregnant women and their kids. Don't you see anything wrong with that picture?"

  Katie opened her mouth, but all she could do was stare at him before she closed it again. Totally stunned by what she was hearing, incredibly confused herself, she had no idea where to begin.

  Mike didn't give her a chance anyway.

  "What is it you're really afraid of?" he demanded, his voice lowering to a near whisper. His eyes searched hers, their intensity burning clear to her soul. "Is it just me, Katie? Or is it every man?"

  The moon was playing hide-and-seek with the clouds.

  Mike stood in the dark in his living room, watching the disk of pale light slowly disappear and listening to the recording on Katie's answering machine. He'd called every fifteen minutes for the past two hours and still there was no answer.

  He pushed the Off button on the portable phone and set it on the edge of the flagstone hearth. Since she hadn't picked up on either of the two messages he'd left, he could safely assume she either wasn't home, or she simply didn't want to talk to him.

  Considering the way he'd left her standing alone in the park, he was pretty convinced it was the latter.

  "Jerk," he muttered, using one of the less inventive names he'd called himself that evening.

  Instead of coming down on her, he should have talked with her about why she felt as she did, not gotten in her face and demanded an explanation. It was obvious she had hang-ups he didn't understand. But he was a reasonable man. He was a patient man. He'd even been known to be sympathetic on occasion. Yet he'd reacted to her request with nothing but anger.

  What he'd actually felt was fear, because he was deathly afraid of losing her, but the knee-jerk emotion was so much easier for a man to deal with. The reaction wasn't like him at all, either. He could usually keep his emotions in check. He demanded it of himself, in fact. But she pushed buttons he didn't know he had and he couldn't hold much of anything back where she was concerned. He couldn't distance himself. He'd tried, and it simply hadn't been possible. With her, he had no choice but to feel.

  She kept him human.

  He wanted her.

  And he needed her as more than just a friend.

  He turned to the window, resting his hand on the cool metal cylinder of the telescope and thought about losing his thoughts by searching for stars. The clouds continued to part, leaving huge sections of clear, velvet black sky. But escape wasn't possible just now. He couldn't conveniently block the thoughts clamoring in his brain any more than he could block the love in his heart.

  And he did love her. He'd been falling in love with her for the past year. He didn't know the exact moment he'd realized it. It could have been when they were working together on a patient. Or when she'd been nagging him about getting furniture. But he suspected it had been the moment he'd realized she could be pregnant. He'd never been able to shake the feelings he'd experienced that night. Beneath the initial apprehension, there had existed a profound sense of rightness about creating a child with her. He'd never felt that with any woman before. Not even his ex-wife. If he'd let himself think about it, he might even have acknowledged the same sense of disappointment, however ill-timed the event, that Katie had said she'd felt when she'd learned she wasn't going to have a baby. A baby.

  The thought had him dragging his hand down his face and looking back at the telephone. A moment later, the chime of the doorbell drifted through the house.

  It was nearly ten o'clock, rather late for his brother to be dropping by. Moving through the dark of the still-empty room, he flipped on the light in the foyer and opened the door.

  Katie stood with her arms wrapped around her raincoat, her unruly hair pulled up in a listing ponytail and uncertainty clouding her lovely pale features.

  "I was driving around and noticed your porch light."

  "Come on in."

  "You sure?"

  Katie watched Mike step back, his expression guarded as he motioned her in. Tightening her hold on herself, she stepped across the threshold and heard the door close behind her with a quiet click.

  "I've been trying to call you."

  "I haven't been home. I mean I went home to change clothes after work and to feed Spike," she added, inanely. "But I … left."

  She'd been driving around for the past couple of hours, too agitated for the confines of her house and too upset to talk to anyone else. She had no idea how she'd made it through the afternoon; how she'd handled work and her mom's heavy-handed hints about how perfect she and Mike were for each other. But she had made it. Just as she'd made it through countless other days when life threw her a curve.

  Running a glance over Mike's dark slacks and the rolled-up sleeves of his sapphire dress shirt, she swallowed hard and let herself meet his eyes. There was an uncharacteristic uneasiness in those seductive blue depths. Judging from the hesitation she could see there, too, he appeared no more certain of what to expect at the moment than she did.

  "Do you want to take off your coat?"

  For a moment, the only sound in the quiet house was the rustle of fabric as she slipped out of her coat and handed it to him. Crossing her arms over her long navy sweater, she watched him turn away to toss the garmen
t over the empty planter. As he did, her glance slid past him to the living room.

  Had it not been for the light in the foyer the space would have been completely dark, but it was still easy enough to see that nothing was there.

  "Where's your furniture?"

  "It hasn't been delivered yet." His rich sable hair looked as if it had been combed with his fingers. Beneath the locks falling over his forehead, his brow pleated in a frown. "How did you know about it?"

  "Your mom told me. The night of Dad's party," she added, when the frown didn't go away. "She said you ordered nutmeg and oatmeal."

  She'd said he needed natural colors, and that was what he'd got. But he was clearly no more interested in discussing furniture than she was. He didn't even respond. He just stood an arm's length away, looking as if he didn't know if he should touch her to invite her farther in, or if he should just let her come in on her own.

  His office was the only room with anywhere to sit. But he made no move toward it. Thinking he was waiting for her to go first, she started past him, but two steps were all it took for her to see that it was as black as pitch in that direction. There were no lights on behind them in the kitchen, either. There wasn't a light on anywhere except for where they stood.

  "Were you in here in the dark?"

  He was as unreadable to her as Sanskrit when he nodded toward the tall windows in the corner of the living room. "I was over there," he said. "Looking out the window."

  If that was where he'd been, then that was where she wanted to go now. She wasn't sure why. Maybe it was because she really didn't want the glare of lights herself. Having spent a considerable portion of the day and the evening pulling herself apart and examining all the pieces, she wasn't up to much more close scrutiny.

  With a knot of anxiety coiled in her stomach and her heart beating in her throat, she silently crossed the expanse of plush carpet to where two walls of window intersected. Normally, she would have been able to see the deck from there, but he'd even turned off the security lights.

  Because the angle of the windows didn't directly reflect the diluted light from the foyer, the pale winter moon and a scattering of stars were visible beyond the tree tops. Katie scarcely noticed them, though. Mike had stopped a step behind her.

  "It isn't all men," she said, because that was the only answer she'd been totally sure of when he'd turned and walked away. "It's just you."

  She heard his slow intake of breath, but she didn't wait for any sort of response. There were also a couple of other things she'd known—along with a couple she'd just discovered—that she needed to tell him before she lost her nerve.

  "It's really always been you," she admitted, hugging herself as she slowly turned to face the broad expanse of his chest. "You're the reason my dad thinks I don't need anyone. And you're the reason my mom thinks I'm too independent to let myself commit to a relationship. I've just never wanted anyone the way I've wanted you."

  He lifted his hand toward her. "Katie—"

  "Please." She stepped back before he could touch her, her glance barely skimming his chin. "I need to just say this. Okay?

  "You asked what I was afraid of," she reminded him, hurrying on. "I think there's only one thing that truly frightens me, and that's being abandoned by people I love. But, with you, it's always been more frightening, because I don't just love you, I'm in love with you. I have been since I was nine years old. But you never saw me as anything but a friend, so keeping you as my friend was the only way I had of never losing you.

  "That's why I didn't want us to get involved." She spoke quickly, quietly, wanting her admission to sound more like simple fact than anything that required a response on his part. "Affairs end, and you want your life the way it is. You don't want a wife and children. At least, that's what you said," she added, afraid to believe what he'd alluded to in the park, "and I didn't want to be an ex-girlfriend because then I wouldn't have you at all.

  "That's why you've been getting so many mixed signals," she concluded, feeling more vulnerable than she ever had in her life. "And that's why I didn't want us to get involved any more than we already are. I don't know if that makes any sense to you or not, but I don't know how to explain it any other way."

  She blinked at the front of his shirt, listening to the sound of her pulse pounding in her ears and wishing he'd say something now, but half-afraid of what she might hear. He didn't say a word. He just lifted his hands, curving them at the sides of her neck, and tipped her chin up with his thumb.

  In the dim light, the beautiful angles and planes of his face looked sculpted from stone. His glance swept over her, his eyes searching hers. "Since you were nine?"

  All she could do was lift one shoulder in a faint shrug, "Maybe I was nine and a half."

  Mike wasn't sure what he was feeling at the moment. Disbelief, amazement, wonder—they were all in there somewhere, along with a heavy dose of hesitation. What she'd feared most was being emotionally abandoned, and she'd spent most of her life denying herself what she wanted because of it. He knew where the fear had come from. It had begun with not having the father she'd needed. But what bothered Mike more was that he'd contributed to her fears himself. The thought that she'd always been afraid of losing him made his heart hurt.

  He tucked a curl behind her ear, his touch as cautious as his expression.

  "I had no idea," he said, threading his fingers into her hair. The gathered piece of fabric holding it atop her head fell to the floor, leaving her curls to tangle in his hands. "But then, it's taken me a while to figure out that I'm in love with you, too." He brushed his thumb over her mouth, his pulse feeling a little erratic. "I really did think I was happy with my life the way it was, but that was only because you were already a part of it. It wasn't until things started falling apart that I realized nothing was the same without you."

  Her fingers curled over his wrist, her heart so full she could barely speak. "So what do we do now?"

  He answered her by drawing her closer and slanting his mouth over hers. A heartbeat later, he'd gathered her in his arms and she was sinking against him, absorbing the hunger, need and longing in his kiss. He wasn't going to let her go. He left no doubt of that in her mind in the long moments before he pulled back and pressed her head to his chest.

  "What we do is work this out," he murmured.

  "How?" she asked, echoing the demand he'd often made himself.

  "Well," he began cautiously, "I was thinking about that baby."

  Her head came up. "What baby?"

  "The one we didn't have. I'm not your father, Katie," he said, not giving her a chance to resurrect her old arguments. "My children will not grow up to be strangers. I'm sure I'll make plenty of mistakes, but something else I've learned from your dad is that I'm not raising my children the way your parents raised you. I might not be there for every soccer game or ballet recital, but I'll put in my share of time in the stands or wherever it is they need me. I'm scaling back on the research, and what projects I do take on we can do together. We'll just bring the playpen into the office."

  He pulled her closer, his glance darting to his right. "We can even teach him how to use a telescope."

  Katie's eyes narrowed on the light in his eyes as she tipped her head. The idea of Mike going over statistics with their toddler in his lap was a sight she couldn't wait to see. But the thought of him showing their child the stars the way he'd once shown them to her nearly lodged her heart in her throat.

  "The playpen would work," she agreed mildly, pretty certain her heart was in her eyes, too, as she skimmed her hands over his strong shoulders. "But there's just one little detail I'm curious about."

  "What's that?"

  "Did you by any chance propose to me yesterday?"

  He grinned, the expression feeling rare, but amazingly good. "I was going to. Yes," he amended, her smile warming him clear to his soul. This woman was as vital to him as the oxygen he breathed; as necessary to his existence as the blood pumping through his heart
. From the moment he'd first kissed her, he simply hadn't been the same. "I suppose I did."

  Looping her arms around his neck, she grinned back.

  "Then I suppose I'd better say yes," she murmured, pulling his head toward hers.

  With her mouth a breath away from his kiss, she whispered, "I can't imagine anything better than being married to my best friend."

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