Нора Робертс - Happy Ever After

This is what had put that look in his eyes, that tone in his voice.

He’d come to her, she thought. Closed in, yes, but he’d come to her.

So, as soon as she could, she’d go to him.

MALCOLM BLED THE NEW, LONGER BRAKE LINES FOR THE JEEP THE customer ordered lifted. He suspected the kid wanted the modification more for looks and peer status than any serious offroading.

Whatever the reason, Malcolm figured he got paid the same.

Working methodically with his iPod blasting out his playlist from its port on a workbench, he replaced the front shock absorbers and the coil springs with their taller counterparts. The customer’s requirement meant modifying the control arms, the track bars, and lengthening the brake lines.

The kid would end up right this side of legal—barely.

It wasn’t a rush job, nothing he had to dig into after closing. But then neither was the oil change he’d slated to take care of next instead of passing the basic job to Glen.

Busywork, he admitted as the Killers rocked out. Well, he wanted to keep busy.

The time he spent jacking up the kid’s ride, doing an oil change, then a brake job, meant he wouldn’t spend that time thinking.

Mostly.

Thinking about what was screwed up in the world, and currently his life, wouldn’t fix it.The world would continue to screw up no matter how long and hard he thought about it.

And his life? A little time and space was probably in order.The Parker thing had gotten pretty intense, and maybe a little crowded—and that was on him, no question.

He’d pushed, he’d pursued, he’d plotted the course. Somehow he—she—they, he wasn’t entirely sure—had navigated that course a lot speedier and into much deeper territory than he’d expected.

They’d been spending nearly every free moment together, and plenty of moments that weren’t exactly free. Then boom, he’s thinking about next week with her, and the next months—and okay, beyond even that. It just wasn’t what he’d banked on.

Plus, before he knows what’s happening, he’s taking her to dinner at his mother’s, asking her to stay the night in his bed.

Both of those particular events broke precedent. Not that he had hard-and-fast rules about it. It was more a cautionary avoidance to keep things at a comfortable level.

Then again, Parker wasn’t comfortable, he thought as he installed a skid plate for the oil pan. He’d known that going in.

She was complicated and nowhere near as predictable as she looked on the outside. He’d wanted to know how she worked, he couldn’t deny it. And the more he’d examined the parts, the more caught up he’d become.

He knew those parts now, and how she worked. She was a detail-oriented, somewhat—hell, extremely—anal, goal-focused woman. Mixed in there she had a talent and a need to arrange those details into a perfect package and tie them with a bow.

If that, plus the money and pedigree, had been it, she’d have probably been a beautiful pain in the ass. But inside her was a deep-seated need for family, for stability, for home—and God knew he understood that one—and an appreciation for what she’d been given. She was unflinchingly loyal, generous, and, being hardwired to be productive and useful, had a work ethic that kicked ass.

She was complicated and real, and like the image he had of her mother on the side of the road in a pretty spring dress, he thought she defined what beauty was. In and out.

So he’d ended up breaking those not-exactly rules because the more he’d learned, the more caught up he’d become, the more he’d known she was exactly what he wanted.

He could deal with wants. He’d wanted plenty. Some he’d gotten, some he hadn’t. And he’d always figured things averaged out in the end. But he’d realized the night before, when he’d gone to her because he’d been edgy and unsettled and just fucking sad, that want had merged with need.

He’d needed to be with her, just be there, with her, in that ordered space she created where somehow everything just made sense.

Needing something—someone—that was jumping off a building without a safety harness. He’d learned the hard way he was better off taking care of himself, dealing with himself and what was his. Period.

Except he’d started thinking of her as his. He’d already told her bits and pieces of things he’d never told anyone else, and didn’t much see the point in thinking about.

So . . .

Better he’d pissed her off, he decided. Better she’d tossed him out. They’d both take a couple of breaths, simmer down. Reevaluate.

He checked the modifications, moving from the front end to the rear.

And over the music of the Foo Fighters he heard the distinctive sound of high heels on concrete.

He only had to angle his head, and there she was, wearing one of her sexy business suits, that arresting face unframed, a bag the size of a Buick on her shoulder.

“The door wasn’t locked.”

“No.” He pulled the rag out of his back pocket to wipe his hands.

She shouldn’t be here, he thought.The place smelled of oil and engine and sweat. And so, he imagined, did he.

“I thought you had a thing tonight.”

“I did. It’s finished.” She gave him that cool-eyed stare.“But we’re not, so would you mind turning that down?”

“I’ve got to get the wheels and tires on this thing.”

“Fine. I’ll wait.”

She would, he concluded. She was good at that.

So he figured the Foo Fighters would have to learn to fly without him. He put down his tools, shut down the iPod, then opened the cooler he’d put on the bench beside it. He took out one of the two beers he’d packed. “Want one?”

“No.”

He opened it, took a long pull while he eyed her.“Something on your mind, Legs?”

“Quite a bit, actually. I heard about the accident, about those three girls.Why didn’t you tell me about it last night?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it.” The image—shattered glass, blood, blackened metal on a rain-slicked road—flashed back into his mind. “Still don’t.”

“You’d rather let it eat at you.”

“It’s not eating at me.”

“I think, I really think, that’s the first lie you’ve told me.”

It infuriated him, unreasonably, that she was right.

“I know what’s going on inside my gut, Parker. And talking about it doesn’t change squat. It doesn’t make those girls any less dead, or keep the couple in the other car from a fucking world of hurt. Life goes on, until it doesn’t.”

The heat he spewed did nothing to ruffle her cool.

“If I really believed you were that fatalistic and callous, I’d feel sorry for you. But I don’t.You came to me last night because you were upset, but you couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me why. Maybe getting mad at me helped, maybe you could displace the upset with anger. But I don’t deserve that, Malcolm, and neither do you.”

Chalk up another in the She’s Right column.The score, Brown: 2; Kavanaugh: 0, just pissed him off.“I shouldn’t have come by last night when I was in a crappy mood.You want an apology? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you know me at all, Malcolm?”

“Christ.” He muttered it and took another swig of the beer he didn’t really have the taste for.

“And don’t take that dismissive male attitude with me.”

“I am a male,” he shot back, pleased he’d scraped away a layer of that calm, revved to scrape away more.“I have a male attitude.”

“Then you can stuff this in your attitude. If I’m with you, I’m with you when you’re doing flips and handsprings, and I’m with you when you’re in a crappy mood.”

“Yeah?” Something choked him, twisted in throat, in gut. “Couldn’t prove that by last night.”

“You didn’t give me—”

“What part of ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ don’t you get? And how the hell does this get turned around into being about you and me? Three kids are dead, and if they were lucky, they died fast. But it wouldn’t have been fast enough. Five, ten seconds of knowing what’s coming is forever. That and never getting to grow up, never getting to push the rewind button and say ‘let me do that different this time’ is a hell of a price for some girl who barely had her license a year and two of her friends to pay for being stupid.”

She didn’t jolt when the bottle he heaved smashed against the wall, but let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a hum of sympathy. “I nearly did that same thing last night after you left. Then I thought what good would it do, and I’d just have to clean it up. Did it help?” she wondered.

“God, you’re a piece of work. Not everything has a neat, practical answer. Everything doesn’t always add the fuck up. If it did, three girls wouldn’t be dead because they were driving too damn fast and texting friends.”

Her heart hurt at the waste of it all. “Is that what happened? How do you know?”

“I know people.” Damn it, he thought, and shoved at his hair as he struggled to box in the rage that had blindsided him. “Listen, they’re keeping that under wraps until they finish the investigation.”

“I won’t say anything. Mrs. Grady knows the driver’s mother, and it’s hit her pretty hard. Maybe listening to her, making her tea, holding her hand didn’t help all that much. Maybe it wasn’t a neat, practical answer, and maybe it doesn’t all add the fuck up. But I had to do something. When someone I care about is hurting or upset or just sad, I have to do something.”

“Whether they want you to or not.”

“Yes, I suppose so.To my mind, reaching out, reaching for one another doesn’t make what happened to those girls less of a tragedy, or make anyone less heartsick for them and their families. But point taken.You don’t want me to listen.You don’t want me to hold your hand. So that makes the need to do those things about me, not you.”