Swept Away Read online

  She bent over to pick up more books, her hair sweeping across her face. Not until the next batch was in place did she say, “Would you think any worse of me than you already do to find out that I’ve never really been ‘in love’ at all?”

  Her admission sliced right through him. Not because he was shocked—he’d realized some time ago that his daughter’s romances were about as substantial as soap bubbles—but because of the sadness weighting her words.

  “Honey, believe me…I have never thought badly of you.”

  She shoved the next few books onto the shelf with a breathless, “Yeah, right.”

  “Lee?” After a long moment, she finally turned to him, her hands slipped into her back pockets, a defiant “I’m fine” pose she’d affected before she’d finished elementary school. “Maybe it’s hard for me to hear that you’ve confused sex with love—”

  “Oh, jeez, Dad…”

  “Hey, you brought it up, not me. But you’re missing the point. It’s your having reached the ripe old age of thirty-seven without making any real connection with another human being that’s giving me pause, not the other. For your sake, not mine. Seeing you unfulfilled and unhappy is far more likely to keep me awake at night than anything else you might have done.” When she averted her eyes, he added, “I’m aware of more than you probably realize. And yes, I worried about you. Still do. Because I’ve had the feeling for a long time there’s something deeper behind some of your choices I just don’t understand. That you’re…I don’t know…” Lane hesitated, struggling for the right words, any words that might make sense of something that didn’t. Finally he settled on, “It’s almost as if you’re a prisoner to something inside you I’m not sure you understand yourself.” He waited, then said, “No comment?”

  “I…” Her brow knotted. “No.”

  Lane leaned forward, his hands loosely gripping the arms of his chair. “Just for the record? You’re not nearly the badass you’d like the world to think you are.”

  A startled laugh burst from her throat, cracking the tension. Somewhat, anyway. Lane stood and crossed the still-bare, uneven floor to his little girl, cupping her bony shoulder. “But the thing is, I have been in love. Deeply. And I know the difference between love and infatuation. Yes, I’m infatuated with Ivy Gardner. And no, I couldn’t tell you why. Sometimes, there’s just no rational explanation for these things. But I can ‘handle it,’ too. If it doesn’t work out, I promise you I won’t fall apart.”

  “But after Mom…”

  “We were married for nearly forty years, honey,” he said softly, gently squeezing her shoulder. “I’ve been out with Ivy exactly once. Big difference.”

  “So…this isn’t just some desperate attempt to stave off loneliness?’

  Lane dropped his hand from her shoulder and thought about that for a second or two. “It’s no secret I’ve been lonely since your mother died. But desperate?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Even though I’ve never really bought into the idea that staying lonely somehow honored the person who’d gone on. I know some people prefer their own company, but I happen to get pretty tired of talking to myself all the time.” She smiled. “I’ve also never thought much of sitting around and waiting to see what comes my way. You’ve gotta grab opportunities, girl. Or make them, if it comes down to that. Be an active participant in your own destiny, if you will.”

  One side of her mouth hiked up. “How very New Agey of you.”

  “Oh, wait. One of the first things I’m going to do is change the location of the front door—the feng shui is terrible in this house.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, laughing.

  “You think I’m kidding?” he said, then left the room before she could find her voice.

  Ivy’s first thought when she opened her door to Lane Stewart ran along the lines of, nope, her mind hadn’t embellished on her memory of his good looks one bit over the past two weeks. Followed immediately by one of those vague This is not good kind of thoughts that usually happens right before the plane begins its plummet to earth. She wasn’t sure what it said about her that she let the man in anyway.

  Let alone that she allowed him to pull her into his arms and kiss her.

  Her mind hadn’t embellished on that memory, either.

  “It’s been a long two weeks,” he whispered into her hair, loose tonight, hanging nearly to her waist over her favorite sweater. She thought she might have agreed with him, except her brain was too busy processing the glorious sensation of being held and wanted—very obviously wanted, she thought with a smug smile—by this man to be sure of much.

  “Smells good,” he whispered, nuzzling her neck.

  “I made coffee—”

  “Not talking about the coffee.”

  “Oh. Must be the skin cream Dawn gave to me for Mother’s Day, then.”

  The nuzzling got more serious. “Tell Dawn I said ‘thank you.’”

  “Like hell,” she said, and they both laughed.

  That they would end up in bed, as they had on their first “date,” wasn’t even a question. At their ages, there seemed little point in playing coy. Or in kidding herself that years without a man’s touch hadn’t made her…not desperate, exactly, that sounded too, well, desperate. But anxious would do nicely. Or that there had been lot of leftover grief, blended with a soul-sucking loneliness that had blistered her own soul, in Lane’s frantic, but thorough, lovemaking. In other words, it was all about convenience and timing, as far as she could tell. Maybe not what she’d envisioned for herself, once upon a time, but a helluva lot more than she’d had in a very long time.

  “There’s pie, besides the coffee,” she said, taking him by the hand and leading him to the kitchen of her little bungalow a block or so off Main Street. “Apple.”

  “Homemade?”

  “Yep. But not by me.” He sat at her table, exuding the skin-tingling, potent masculinity of a man who no longer feels any need to prove himself; she cut a big slab of pie and set it on a handpainted plate she’d picked up at some garage sale probably twenty, twenty-five years ago now.

  “You know, I haven’t had homemade apple pie since Dena passed. She was one helluva cook, let me tell you.”

  Ivy looked away. It really felt like fall tonight, the wind rattling her loose windowpanes as if seeking refuge in her house. Time to weatherproof for the winter, she guessed. “A local gal makes ’em for Ruby’s,” she said. “Although she’s so busy, between her new baby and more orders than she can handle, that she’s got two other women working for her now.” Lord, she was making small talk like some nervous young girl. And here the man had already seen her naked, for heaven’s sake! She set the pie down in front of him, then went to fix him a cup of coffee—she already knew he took it black with one spoonful of sugar.

  Lane picked up his fork and sighed in obvious anticipation. Of the pie, for now, she thought. “How’s the campaign coming?”

  “Far as I can tell,” Ivy said, pouring out two mugs of coffee, “it could go one of two ways. Either I win or Arliss does. So Carly decided to come back with you, after all?”

  “She did…oh, God, that’s good,” Lane said of the pie, and Ivy puffed up as though she had made it herself. “But not just to get me moved in.”

  Halfway to the table with the coffee, she halted in her tracks. “She’s stayin’?”

  “For now.”

  “She okay with that?”

  “Not really,” he said with that weariness common to all parents with grown children who still haven’t found themselves.

  Ivy set the coffee on the table, then tugged out her full, long skirt to sit down at right angles to Lane. “She okay with this?” she said, pointing back and forth between them, never mind that she wasn’t sure she was okay with it, yet.

  “Not really,” Lane said again, but this time with a soft chuckle. “She’s afraid for me. That you’ll throw me over and I’ll die of a broken heart.”

  “Well, you never know. I just might at that.�
��

  For a moment, heated, amused blue eyes lanced hers; then he resumed putting away the pie. “I told her I’d take my chances.” He glanced up, then back down at his plate. “She thinks it’s too soon. After Dena’s passing.”

  “Maybe it is,” Ivy said softly, but he didn’t appear to have heard her.

  “You know what she told me tonight?” he said, his fork suspended in midair. “That she’s never been in love. Not even once.”

  The pain in his words echoed inside her, as she remembered her own daughter’s terror of falling in love, a terror finally healed through Cal Logan’s infinite patience not all that long ago. Whatever had kept Carly Stewart from finding whatever it was she needed, Ivy had no idea, since she didn’t know the woman. But she understood all too well Lane’s feeling of helplessness about the situation. An understanding which prompted her to reach over and intertwine their fingers. Lane lifted her knuckles to his lips, then said, “It’s hard not to wish her mother were here to help translate some of this for me.”

  Ivy removed her hand, reminding herself that this was only about coffee and apple pie and sex. And if a third person happened to show up in bed with them later, she’d just as soon not be overtly reminded of that fact.

  Chapter 8

  Three days after they’d moved in, Carly was still sweeping up piles of crusty, weightless bug bits from behind appliances and scrubbing mildew from the grout between the yellowed bathroom tiles. Fine time to discover her father’s meticulousness had apparently rubbed off on her when she wasn’t looking.

  Not that she was complaining. Exactly. If nothing else, each scrubbed out cabinet and scoured sink and newly sparkling window nudged awake a sense of belonging she hadn’t experienced since she couldn’t remember when. Nothing like reducing her hands to the same state as her pointe-shoe-ravaged feet, she thought, frowning at her chapped, callused hands, all the nails broken but one, to bond you to a place. But besides that, she thought as she wrestled the Eisenhower-era fridge back into place, her frenzied cleaning was keeping her too busy to worry about anything.

  Like her dad, who obviously wasn’t going over to Ivy’s every night to watch TV. Please—either that was an afterglow or the woman’s house had a serious radon problem. Or about her and Dad’s conversation about her not ever having really been in love before, and all that stuff about there being something inside her keeping her from…

  From what? Panting, on high alert against any unsuspecting, lurking filth as she stripped off the zipper-fronted sweatshirt she’d thrown on this morning over a tank top and yoga pants, Carly let her gaze dart around the room. Her eyes burned—from the dust, no doubt—as she tried, for the thousandth time, to finish that damn sentence. At least, finish it without Sam trying to wedge itself in there somewhere.

  He’d stayed out of her way, thank God. Of course, she imagined he had a few more pressing things to tend to than playing cootchie-coo with her. One or another of the boys had wandered over on occasion—Frankie, the first-grader, had an obvious crush on her, which she had to admit was kind of a hoot—and she’d found herself standing out back, barely able to make out Sam messing around with the tractor or something in the distance, the sun glinting off his pale hair when he’d yank off his ball cap and dash it to the ground in frustration. The way he moved, lean muscles effortlessly obeying his brain’s signals…

  She could imagine his grin, almost hear his laughter with his boys as they tended to the livestock each morning and evening.

  But other than that, she thought as she hauled her skinny booty up onto the stepladder to attack the grease-caked soffit, she hardly ever thought of him.

  And certainly not in conjunction with whatever it was her father had been talking about.

  Definitely not.

  She’d no sooner begun her assault on the sludge of the ages when the doorbell rang. Out in the middle of freaking nowhere and the doorbell rings. At ten o’clock in the morning. Her father and Sam had gone off to Claremore to inflict serious damage on the local Home Depot, all the kids should be in school, and, as far as she knew, pigs hadn’t yet developed the ability to push doorbell buttons, Libby’s testaments to their remarkable intelligence notwithstanding.

  Grumbling, she climbed down and trekked out to the living room, letting out a small “Oh!” of surprise when she swung open the door to see the girl herself standing there, shivering slightly in her bulky, boxy sweater and bell-bottomed jeans, her grin a little unsure. “Hey.”

  “Why aren’t you in school?” Carly said, cringing at the accusatory sound of her own voice, as the chilly air raised goose bumps over her damp skin.

  “Cramps,” Libby said, inviting herself inside, her head swinging in a wide arc as she took in the room. “Wow. You’d never know this was the same place. Cool furniture.”

  “Too much furniture, is more like it,” Carly said as her gaze followed the girl’s. “The funky stuff is mine, the nice stuff my father’s. Left over from the house I grew up in.”

  “All you need now is a cat.”

  “I think not. Libby…why are you here? And pardon me, but you don’t seem all that crampy to me.”

  “I took like four Midols, so I don’t feel too bad. Other than feeling a little loopy.” She flopped down onto the overstuffed gold brocade sofa that had been Carly’s mother’s pride and joy, shrouded in plastic all through her high school days, much to her profound mortification. Then Carly caught sight of the girl’s big amber eyes and thought, Uh-oh. “I’ve been tryin’ to figure out a way to talk to you without Daddy finding out ever since Sunday—”

  “Libby, please—I really don’t want to be dragged into the middle of this.”

  Her dark brows crashed together. “I’m not trying to put you in the middle, I just need somebody to talk to. Somebody at least reasonably objective.” On a dramatic sigh, she crashed back into the cushions, then winced, rubbing her belly.

  “Tummy or back?”

  “What?”

  “The cramps.”

  “Oh. A little of both.” She sat forward, as if trying to get comfortable. “So much for the Midol.”

  “You want some hot herbal tea? Sometimes that helps.”

  “Yeah, okay.” She followed Carly into the kitchen. “You get cramps?”

  “Not anymore,” Carly said over the sound of water thrumming into her mother’s old silver-colored kettle. “But I used to when I was your age. Until I went on the Pill.”

  Damn.

  “Oh, wow—you went on the Pill when you were a teenager?”

  “The doctor said—” Carly commended herself on her sangfroid “—it would help lessen the flow so my period wouldn’t interfere with my dancing.”

  “You still on it?”

  She clunked the filled kettle up onto the burner and turned on the flame. “Yeah.”

  “Doesn’t it, like, really mess with your system and stuff?”

  “Not if you’re careful.” A chill skated up Carly’s nearly bare back; she plucked the sweatshirt off the pine kitchen table where she’d discarded it earlier and slipped it on again.

  Libby took a leisurely tour of the kitchen, poking inside cabinets and drawers, one foot clearly still in childhood, even as her body was rushing toward adulthood at an alarming rate. “Daddy caught me and Sean kissing and stuff the other day and nearly came unhinged.”

  After several seconds, Carly said, “I know.” When the girl whipped around, she added, “Actually I was there. I saw you before your dad did.”

  “God! Did half the world see us or what?”

  Carly smiled. “No. Just your father and me.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “I didn’t figure it was any of my business.”

  The kettle shrieked; Carly poured the boiling water over chamomile tea bags in a pair of mugs, nearly dropping the teakettle when Libby asked, “How old were you when you lost your virginity?”

  Steaming water sloshed all over the newly disinfected counter. Which was st
ill butt-ugly, but at least it was clean. And now it was sterilized, to boot. Carly grabbed a sponge to wipe up the water, her eyes meeting the teenager’s. “And I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

  Libby smirked, then carried one of the mugs back out into the living room. After a moment, Carly followed, folding herself up onto a brown velvet chair-and-a-half she’d found in some thrift shop. Her boyfriend of the moment had hauled it home for her in his truck; that she couldn’t remember his name was a little disconcerting.

  “I’m not ignorant about how stuff works,” Libby said. “In case you were wondering.” She took a sip of her tea, then made a face, although whether due to the tea or the subject matter, Carly couldn’t be sure. “Mama and I had ‘the talk’ when I was like ten or something. And I’ve been reading romance novels for years. Not that I believe it really happens like that or anything. But I definitely get the general idea.” Her eyes veered to Carly’s. “Mama swore she and Daddy didn’t do it until after they got married, but I’m not sure I believe them.”

  “Some people do wait, Libby.”

  “Yeah, well, if you could’ve seen the way they couldn’t keep their hands off each other…there’s a reason I’ve got five brothers.”

  Carly hid her smile behind the rim of her mug, then sobered enough to say, “I thought you told me you weren’t going to do anything before you were ready?”

  “That’s the problem. I’m not sure I’m not.”

  “Oh, Libby…” Carly lowered her mug. “You’re fourteen.”

  “Fifteen next week. And I really love Sean, no matter what Daddy says. I mean, when he kisses me and stuff—”

  “Define ‘and stuff.’”

  “It’s just an expression. He hasn’t even touched me.” Carly’s brows lifted. “Not with his hands or anything. I mean, when he holds me really close, um…” Pink swept across her cheeks. “That doesn’t really count, does it?”

  “Trust me. It counts,” Carly said, thinking, I am so dead. Then she said, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  The girl’s brow puckered. “See, that’s what I can’t figure out. I mean, if I love him, and we’re careful…but then…I don’t know. I want to, but I don’t want to, you know what I mean?”