The essence of that thought rang false, but she ignored the warning signs. Sam wasn’t hers to keep. He deserved someone who wanted the things he wanted. A woman who could create a home and a family with him. Annalise was unable to do either of those things. There were still secrets between them. But that was okay. Because after this weekend, they would be something they hadn’t been in many years. Friends.
She pulled out her laptop and perched on a stool in the downstairs room Sam’s grandmother had used as a sewing nook. Colors and patterns buzzed in her head, each jockeying for favor. This was her favorite part of the job…choosing palettes, accents, lighting. Already she was falling in love with the farmhouse.
Sam was right. It was too far from the city to be practical as a main residence, but how wonderful it would be to get away on a warm spring weekend, a lazy summer month in August, a crisp, colorful autumn retreat. She could almost see the children playing outside, hear their high-pitched laughter.
Several ancient oaks provided the perfect spot for tire swings. In summer, the generous shade would accommodate impromptu picnics, as well. And the house was big enough for lots of company. Even the burgeoning Wolff clan.
That thought brought her up short. Surely she wasn’t weaving improbable daydreams about her and Sam. She hadn’t been lying when she told him she didn’t really like romance. Romance was what had led her to throw herself at him when she was twenty-one.
Romance made people stupid, and Annalise was not stupid. Besides, even if by some miracle she and Sam fell in love and managed not to drive each other nuts, the truth remained. She was not wife material.
His long-ago words still rang in her ears:
Men like gentle, feminine women…soft, self-effacing.
Perhaps he hadn’t really meant that. He said he’d been trying to let her down easy and keep her from doing something stupid with another man who might have accepted her artless invitation and tossed her aside afterward.
But even so, he’d said the words out loud, and their power lingered. Annalise wouldn’t change herself even if she could. She liked who she was. But she had to accept that there were some things her upbringing had cost her. And having a family was one of those.
“There you are. Have you had breakfast?”
Sam’s voice startled her so badly she nearly dropped her computer. She closed it and stood, clutching it to her chest like armor. “I had some toast and coffee.”
“Did you sleep well?” His topaz and chocolate eyes searched her face, his sculpted mouth unsmiling.
She squirmed inwardly. “Yes, thank you.” Good Lord. This was a man who had seen her naked, who had done exquisitely intimate things to her and with her. Why was the aftermath so damned difficult?
He lounged in the doorway, his hands shoved in the pockets of faded jeans. Another flannel shirt, this one gold with a navy windowpane pattern, strained across his broad shoulders. His eyelids drooped and his hair was mussed. He looked like a man who had been up all night.
Her prim response amused him. His lips quirked, and he cocked his head, studying her with an intensity that seemed to strip the clothes from her body. “I think we need some exercise.”
The color in her face deepened as her thighs clenched. “Well, I…uh…”
“Outside,” Sam clarified. “In the fresh air. The temperature has come up considerably. Gram and Pops have all sorts of winter gear in the mudroom. How about it?”
She glanced out the window to the world of white. Suddenly, nothing sounded more appealing. “I’d like that.”
In twenty minutes they were bundled up in layers of warm clothing. Fortunately for Annalise, Gram had left behind a pair of yellow galoshes that were close enough to the right size to keep her feet warm and dry.
The first bite of cold air as they stepped outside took her breath away, but when they rounded the house to the side sheltered from the wind, where Sam had scraped a partial path, it wasn’t bad at all. The sun shone down valiantly, doing its best to melt the snow. Annalise lifted her face to the sky and inhaled the smell of wood smoke drifting from the chimney.
The farm was somnolent, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Sam’s grandparents had sold off all the livestock years ago when they decided they no longer wanted the responsibility of actually running a dairy farm. Any farmhands had long since been let go. Though the barn was in good shape and the outbuildings were sturdy, the place was a ghost town. Only the house itself showed any signs of life.
Annalise turned to Sam. “Do you think you’ll ever turn this back into a working farm? You’ve talked about how much you loved it as a kid. It seems a shame to use only the house.”
He shaded his eyes with one hand and looked out across the fields that had once supported acres of corn and herds of cows. “I’ll bring the horses back, at some point. And maybe lease the land so it will be producing as it should. But I doubt the farm will ever be what it once was. Unless one of
my
children takes an interest in agriculture.”
The way he said the word
children
hurt something deep in her chest. “How many do you want? Kids, I mean.”
He shrugged. “That will depend on my wife, I guess. But at least three. Maybe four.”
Four?
Annalise felt faint.
When she was silent, he continued. “I have the means to support a big family. And I want a noisy house, not like where I grew up. By the time I was eleven, Mom quit making me go to a babysitter after school. I got off the bus and let myself in with a key we kept hidden under a rock in the backyard. She always left me snacks ready…lemonade in the fridge, fresh fruit and cookies. But I hated the silence when I went inside.”
He visibly shrugged off his preoccupation with the past. “I don’t want you to think it was a terrible childhood, ’cause it wasn’t. My mom is a great person, and she did the best she could with a rambunctious son who was pretty mischievous. I had plenty of friends in the neighborhood. So I spent a lot of time at their houses.”
“Tell me something, Sam,” she said, touched with compassion by the picture he painted. “How can you be so sure you won’t end up divorced like your parents? The statistics aren’t in your favor.”
He picked up a stick and hurled it into the distance, an almost palpable sense of frustration in the jerky motion. “For one thing, I’ve learned the difference between lust and love. And how important compatibility is. That’s where people go wrong when they marry too young. They ignore the fact that attraction and wild sex are not a sound basis for long-term commitment. I guess I can’t be one-hundred-percent certain, but the reason I’ve waited this long to get married is so I can be sure of as many variables as possible.”
“Sure how?” Annalise kicked at a stone with her boot. This was an odd place for a serious conversation, but at least out here they weren’t likely to strip off their clothes and attack each other. Just the thought of it made her layers of clothing far too warm.
“My parents weren’t a great match from the beginning. I’m going to pick someone who shares my values, who wants what I want.”
“No offense, Sam, but you said that your dad’s workaholic nature was partly to blame for the divorce. Aren’t you like him in that way?” She wasn’t being mean. It was a fair question.
He unzipped his coat partway, pulled the hood back and ran his hands through his hair. In the bright sun she could see glints of red in his thick chestnut waves. “It’s true,” he said. “I work long hours. But that’s because I can. If I had a wife and kids at home, things would be different.”
“Mmm…”
His eyes snapped with displeasure. “You don’t believe me?”
“I think you’re pretty set in your ways. Are you expecting this paragon of a wife to stay home with the kids?”
“I hope she’ll want to…since finances won’t be an issue. The two of us will share responsibility for child-rearing, but it seems to work best when one parent stays home to give the kids security.”
She couldn’t argue with that. Her mother had not been around, and her dad, though she loved him dearly, wasn’t the cuddly type. The Norman Rockwell existence Sam described was very appealing. As long as he acknowledged that his wife would surely have dreams outside of simply being a mother. Somehow, she thought he would. Despite any evidence to the contrary, Sam was not a chauvinist.
“Well,” she said, feeling depression settle like a pall over the day, “I wish you luck.” Any last glimmer of hope that Sam might care for her in a deeper sense withered and died. The two of them were not compatible. They fought like cats and dogs. She’d be a lousy mother. Even if she were willing to put her career on hold and give him multiple babies, the picture would fall apart rapidly.
When he wasn’t looking, she scooped up a handful of snow and shaped it into a ball. Pool wasn’t the only game she knew how to play. She wandered a few yards away, ostensibly to look at an old doghouse covered in snow.
Sam was gazing up at the eaves of the farmhouse, probably wondering about things like dry rot and bats and other homeowner headaches. Taking careful aim, remembering everything her brothers had taught her, she reared back and flung the sphere of snow as hard as she could.
Thwack!
It couldn’t have been a more perfect bull’s-eye. The snowball caught the side of Sam’s neck, disintegrated from the force of the hit and slid messily into the open collar of his shirt.
“Hey,” he shouted indignantly. “No fair.”
The childhood rejoinder made her grin. “You’re the one who said we needed exercise.” Rapidly, she scooped up more handfuls of snow, creating her ammunition and using the doghouse as cover.
Sam’s glare promised retribution. He amassed an arsenal as well, only instead of huddling behind a pitiful barrier like her abandoned pet shed, he stacked his snowballs on a windowsill and climbed up beside the house to stand on an old stump. Now he had the advantage of higher ground.
When he turned to put one last projectile on his growing pile, Annalise shot to her feet, threw three snowballs in quick succession and crowed when every one of them hit the intended target. Sam’s hair was coated in white, and he had to wipe snow from his mouth.
Revenge was swift and targeted. Too late, she remembered that Sam had pitched for his college baseball team. A hailstorm of snowballs descended on top of her, ricocheting off the roof, the walls and the corners of her shelter. At least half of the shots arced perfectly over the small building and landed smack on her head. She huddled into her coat, pulled the hood down tight and waited him out.
Inevitably, he ran out of ammo. Now it was her turn. Standing with impunity, she mimicked his blitzkrieg, pelting him unmercifully. This time she played dirty, aiming for his masculinity. The snow was too wet and she was too far away to do any real damage, but watching Sam hop and curse and try not to fall off the stump had her laughing until tears ran down her face.
Unfortunately, she, too, eventually ran out of steam and snowballs. Ducking back down, her heart pounding, she waited for the answering volley. Nothing happened. Surely he had managed to make a new pile of ammo by now. Dead silence reigned, broken only by the faraway raucous cry of a crow.
What was happening? Why wasn’t he firing back? Tentatively, she peeked around the corner of the doghouse, expecting any moment to be hit in the face with icy, wet snow.
The stump had been abandoned. No sign of Sam anywhere, though messy footprints led in all directions. Surely he wouldn’t have gone back into the house without her. Inside her gloves, her fingers started to go numb. And the knees of her pants were getting wet. Where in the hell was he?
Without warning, snow crunched behind her and what felt like a shovelful of snow slithered down her back. She yelled in shock, flailing wildly and knocking Sam’s head with hers in the process. He had made a wide circle, sneaking up behind her in a creditable ambush attack.
Before she could recover, he flipped her onto her back and shoved more snow up under the front of her coat. “Stop, you big goof,” she cried. “I’m freezing.”
He unzipped her parka and massaged the snow into her chest. “I want to hear you cry uncle,” he said, grinning evilly.
She tried to ignore the fact that her body was heading for hypothermia. Smiling sweetly to disarm him, she waited one click…two…and then kneed him dangerously close to the groin before rolling away, reversing their positions and landing on top of him with her forearm over his windpipe.
Sam’s eyes crossed and he coughed out a weak imprecation. “I should have known better,” he groaned. “Martial arts. Not Barbie dolls. Rookie mistake on my part.”
Annalise knew he could overpower her. Despite her considerable skill, he outweighed her by at least seventy pounds. And he was strong and powerful. But for the moment, he allowed her a victory.
He held up a hand. “I surrender.”
“Hah.”
“You don’t believe me?” His lifted eyebrow was all innocence.
* * *
She stood up and shivered as melted snow ran down her back and belly. “I don’t trust you one tiny bit. You’re a schemer and a conniver.”
“Only in sports,” he said gravely. “Not in real life.”
She had been teasing him, nothing more, but his sudden, soft-spoken vow seemed to be aimed at communicating something significant. “Well, duh, I know that,” she said. “Eagle Scout. Outstanding young alumnus, president of the United Way campaign. I suppose I’m the only person to ever leave the Sam Ely fan club. Right?”
He stood up and winced when he realized his entire backside was covered in snow. Brushing himself off, and not even looking at her, he shrugged. “I was rather hoping you’d ask for a new membership card.” When she didn’t say anything, mainly because her heart had lodged uncomfortably in her throat, he faced her. “Or am I way off base? Do you still hate my guts?”
How had they gone from playful to deadly serious so quickly? The words she wanted to say trembled on her tongue.
I never stopped loving you, Sam
. But good Lord, she couldn’t say that. And see the pity and compassion on his face? She’d rather go to her grave an old maid.