For Her Son's Sake (7 page)

Gotten what he wanted?

Not gotten it? She knew he’d come so it had nothing to do with the physical side of things.

What if he was as emotionally wrecked as she was? He said he’d grown up only with his grandfather and from what she’d seen of him he wasn’t exactly good at relationships.

Anger was fading as she started to wonder if he was hiding in her bathroom. But that was dumb. When had Kell Montrose ever hid from anything? Never. He’d even let her grandfather humiliate him so that he could learn how to run a games company. Maybe that hadn’t been his intention but Emma had always suspected that Kell had taken her grandfather’s disdain as the price he had to pay to learn about gaming from the inside out.

She heard the door open and turned to see him standing on the threshold. She realized that she knew even less about him now that they’d been so intimate than ever before.

He didn’t say anything as he stood there. He’d turned the lights in the bathroom off so only the flickering light from the television revealed him. She really couldn’t read his expression or see him that well, but one thing was certain: something had changed in him. Something that felt as though it should be important but that she was afraid to believe in.

Seven

K
ell knew that Emma was trouble from the first moment they’d met. He hadn’t planned on sleeping with his longtime enemy but he had. Now he was paying the price. He wasn’t the best when it came to relationships but he did know that a guy couldn’t have soul-sex with a woman and then just walk out.

Not only was that death to the relationship—wait a minute, was this a relationship? Was that what he wanted? He felt as if he was on dangerous new ground and had no idea what to do next.

He’d spent too long in the bathroom staring into the mirror over the sink and hoping he’d see something other than his reflection, but he’d still been the same guy he’d always been. Someone who just didn’t seem to feel emotions the way other people did.

The plan he’d concocted in the bathroom as he’d washed up seemed stupid now. There were no two ways about it. Faking a casual feeling he didn’t feel wasn’t going to work. For one thing he’d never been built that way. He wasn’t any good at pretending.

He stood there feeling awkward and it had nothing to do with his nakedness. It had to do with letting Emma down easy. Even though he knew that she didn’t love him, it was impossible for her reaction to be anything other than a type of heartbreak.

She didn’t give herself easily or cheaply the way he did. He’d made love to a lot of woman without ever feeling a single thing for most of them. But Emma had that soft look in her eyes that told him she was starting to let herself care for him.

“Are you going to say something?”

“I’m not sure what to say,” he admitted, rubbing his hand over his chest and walking farther into the room. She’d folded his clothes and put them on the end of the bed. He found his boxer briefs and pulled them on and then turned to face her, hands on his hips.

“We both know that I’m not the man you’d pick to sleep with,” he said at last.

“Yet here you are in my bedroom,” she said, trying for a lightness that failed.

“Indeed. I’m not sure if I should apologize. Hell, Em, I’m not sure at all what to do.”

She sat up, curling one leg underneath her and leaning forward. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

He wanted to share—no, he didn’t. He wanted to beat a hasty retreat but turning tail and running away wasn’t part of his make-up any more than faking it was.

“You’ve confused me,” he said.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Yes, it’s about time I figured out how to shake the great Kell Montrose.”

“Is that what this is about?” he asked. Was she playing some kind of game with him to get some sort of intimate revenge given that he’d taken over her company?

She shook her head and tipped her head down a little, breaking eye contract with him. “I wish. Then I’d be able to just wave toward the door and tell you to hit the road.”

“But you want me to stay?”

He turned away from her, shoving his hands in his hair. Should he want to stay? Was that the proper thing? He’d had affairs, so he shouldn’t feel this conflicted. This attached. But he did.

She was different. She was complicated. Ugh!

“I don’t know,” he admitted, turning back to face her.

“Then leave,” she said. “It can just be sex.”

It would never just be sex. He’d be haunted by this night and the way she’d made him feel, by the emotions she’d awakened, for the rest of his life. He knew it. He could deny it and make a break for it. Leave Malibu and go back to his chic apartment in downtown L.A. Or he could man up and face this. Face her and all the tough implications that sleeping with his enemy brought for him.

Because he couldn’t separate the sexy woman who set fire to his body and his soul with the deep-seated hatred he held for the Chandlers.

“I don’t think so,” he said at last.

He couldn’t help but think that his entire world was going to be shaped by this. He’d thought that if they slept together he’d be able to clear his head. Stop the fantasies and random sexy images that had been popping up at uncomfortable times. But he’d been wrong. So damned wrong.

“I’m making a hash of this.”

“You are. But I think it’s safe to say that our situation is odd to begin with. Our pasts are so entwined that it’s hard to separate that and think of a future where we could be anything other than strained friends.”

“Is that what you think?” he asked.

“I really don’t know what to think. I haven’t slept with a man since Helio and I am feeling more chaotic than I’d like to. One minute I want to cry, the next I want to yell, and tied up in that—in the middle—is you. Kell Montrose. The man who took everything I built in the last four years and tore it to the ground.”

Her words were stark and honest. She didn’t cower or hide or pretend that this wasn’t one of the craziest things that either of them had ever found themselves facing.

“Fair enough. I’m the same way. I suck at relationships and have no idea how to act now.”

“There isn’t an etiquette book for this,” she said. “There’s no right or wrong way to behave.”

“There is, though. Women have an unspoken checklist in their heads and a guy is left guessing what it is and how he should act,” he said.

“Do you want to stay?” she asked again.

He looked at her sitting at the head of her bed with one leg curled underneath her, her hair tangled around her shoulders and a faded Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt on, and felt his answer in his gut.

“Yes.”

* * *

She let out the breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Then she moved around on her bed and pulled back the covers, opening them toward him as she slid underneath them.

He hesitated again and she wondered why. He’d said he didn’t know how to react, and she remembered the things she knew about his upbringing. The comments her sisters had made about how bitter Thomas Montrose had always been and how his influence on his grandsons had left them broken. It was clear to her that Kell hadn’t grown up surrounded by people who loved and cared for him. The stories of old Thomas had painted him as a bitter man.

She tried to steel her heart because she wanted to fix him. She was a fixer. Part of it she could attribute to being the oldest and always having to protect her younger sisters. But she knew a bigger factor was that she liked working on someone else’s problems because it made it easier to ignore her own.

She knew that there had to be something more going on in her psyche. How else could she explain that the first man she’d been interested in since her husband’s death was the one man she knew there was no chance of forever with?

They might have had fun tonight, and the sex had blown her mind, but she didn’t kid herself that it would ever be more than a short-term affair. She guessed a part of her felt like justifying it by saying he was broken. Because he’d never known love. That was so much easier than admitting that she was broken, too.

He put his clothes on the padded bench at the end of the bed and then slid into bed next to her. He punched the pillows on his side of the bed and moved around before settling down. The television still played quietly in the corner.

He turned his head on the pillow to face her. She was lying next to him in what she thought of as the death pose: feet crossed at the ankles and her hands folded together over her stomach.

“Mind if I put on SportsCenter?” he asked.

Just like that, the tension she’d felt disappeared. Maybe she was reading too much emotion into the situation because she was a girl. But he was a guy. And nothing made her feel more normal than his request to watch sports.

“Sure.”

He grabbed the remote, fiddled with the channels and then put it back down once he’d found his station. Then he lifted his arm and looked over at her. “Cuddle?”

It was the last thing she’d expected from him and she hesitated for a second. Hugging him in her bed in the middle of the night seemed more of an emotional risk than sex had.

But she had slept alone snuggled up with a pillow for too many nights to resist his tempting offer. He’d never have to know how much she needed this. As she slid down next to him, putting her head on his shoulder and wrapping one arm over his stomach, she felt surrounded by his warmth and the scent of his aftershave. Tears burned the back of her eyes as she was forced to confront the fact that she wanted this to be real. Wanted this to be forever. Wanted him to stay in her bed and hold her for the rest of her nights.

She knew it had nothing to do with love. It was motivated by loneliness, which made her face the truth behind why she’d been so willing to invite him to spend the night in the first place. Admitting to herself that it could be motivated by the fact that she was single while her sisters were nicely paired up and finding a kind of happily ever after was hard.

But there it was.

“Settle down,” he said.

“What?”

“I can practically hear you thinking,” he said. “Let’s just call this a one-off. For tonight you aren’t a Chandler and I’m not a Montrose. We’re not scarred by our pasts, we’re just Emma and Kell and we wanted each other so we took a chance.”

She nodded against his chest and he rubbed her back. She let her fears and worries slip away, and the first fingers of sleep wrapped themselves around her consciousness. She drifted off to the thought that denying the real world was a dumb thing to do.

But she had a solid night’s sleep until the alarm went off and she woke to find Kell gone. He’d left a note on her nightstand saying he left early to avoid traffic. A decent excuse, and he’d saved her from having to explain to Mrs. Hawking about her overnight guest.

She turned off her alarm just as Sammy came running into her bedroom and jumped up on the bed.

“Morning!” he yelled before launching himself at her. She wrapped her arms around him and held him close, understanding for the first time that her life was never going to be easy or uncomplicated but she’d always have this sweet little guy by her side. They snuggled under the covers for ten minutes and talked about the fun things Sammy would do at day care today and how she had a big meeting at work. Sammy hugged her and said, “I love you.” And then she put on
Arthur,
one of his favorite shows on PBS Kids, while she went and got ready for her day.

It felt like a normal morning. She was able to pretend that nothing extraordinary had happened right up until the moment she got in her Land Rover to head downtown to her meeting with the board. She felt a tingling in the pit of her stomach at the thought of seeing Kell again.

She knew his cousins and the rest of the board would be there and she had to be on her A game but she felt far away from that. She had changed. In twenty-four hours her entire world had shifted and suddenly she wondered if bowing out gracefully wasn’t the only solution left to her.

* * *

“Where were you last night?” Allan asked as he entered Kell’s office. His cousin had a grande Americano in one hand and a latte in the other. He handed the Americano to Kell and then sat down in the leather guest chair facing Kell’s desk.

Allan draped his ankle over his knee as he sprawled in the chair. He looked different. It wasn’t the clothing—he still dressed like a hipster accountant. But something was different. Then it hit Kell: Allan was content, relaxed...happy.

Not that his cousin had ever been truly miserable. As the son of Thomas Montrose’s only daughter, Allan had been raised away from the bitterness of their grandfather and as far as Kell could tell had had a fairly normal upbringing. Of course, losing his best friend, John McCoy, in a car accident less than six months ago had shaken Allan. It had also brought him closer to Jessi Chandler—her best friend, Patti, had been married to John and died with him in the accident. The couple had left Allan and Jessi as guardians of their nine-month-old baby, Hannah. Now Allan and Jessi, who’d long hated each other’s guts, were engaged.

“I had a dinner,” Kell said. He didn’t want to call it a date or mention Emma. He wasn’t entirely sure what would happen next. He’d stayed last night, hadn’t slept a wink as he’d held her. He’d felt how soundly she’d slept and realized how much the young widow must have missed having her husband by her side.

It didn’t mean he was especially intuitive but he was certainly getting to know Emma better than he’d ever expected to.

“A dinner? Some kind of meeting?” Allan asked.

“Yeah. Why were you checking up on me?” Kell never did anything but business and in the spring and summer played beach volleyball in an amateur league. He supposed it would seem odd to Allan that he hadn’t been home.

“Jessi had a book club thing last night and took Hannah with her so I stopped by your place to see if you wanted to hang out.”

“Why not just call?” Kell asked. He knew that Allan hadn’t tried his cell phone because he’d cleared his messages last night.

“Her book club was in your neighborhood,” Allan said. “Just thought I’d drop by and see you. I haven’t had a guys’ night out in a while.”

“And John’s not around for you to talk to,” Kell said gently, realizing his cousin was missing his friend. “I’m free tonight. Want to see if Dec is free? We can go to the Staples Center. The Lakers have a home game.”

“I’ll have to check with Jessi, but that sounds good,” Allan said. “I do miss John. I can’t tell you how many times I reach for the phone to just chat about Hannah or being with Jessi and a couple times I even dialed his old number.”

Kell nodded and once again found himself wishing he knew the right way to react to this. He was sad that John had died. But his own father had died young and Kell had grown up realizing that fate was fickle in terms of those it chose to take. Kell knew his own life would have been so much better if his father had lived.

Hannah was luckier in that respect than he’d been. Jessi and Allan loved her and were providing a stable home for the orphaned baby. Kell had no idea if he could ever provide anything like that for anyone. Least of all Emma—not that they were anywhere close to that type of relationship.

Just once he wanted to be normal. To have the same things that everyone else did. The things that other men took for granted. Like the fact that they’d meet someone and fall in love and have a family.