An Unexpected Love (3 page)

“Did you get your hair cut?”

“What? Yes. Would you get to work?”

I skulked to my desk, bumping some papers from the credenza behind his large leather chair along the way. I was feeling rebellious, so I didn’t stop to pick them up. In a few minutes, after I’d reined in my temper and my weird panic over not knowing where he was, I turned to ask him a question about some price and volume forecast that was giving me fits. I stopped when I realized he was staring blankly at the coffeepot across the room, his brown eyes glassy and lifeless, his shoulders slumped.

“Dan…”

“Huh?” I’d startled him.

“Is everything okay?”

He sighed, to show me how patient he was. “Yes, Lexi. Please get going—they want that stuff on the divestiture by lunch. Do you need me to help you?” His tone couldn’t have been more scornful if he’d offered to help cut my meat at the dinner table.

And suddenly, inexplicably, I was on the verge of tears. My throat closed up, my nostrils flared, my bottom lip quivered. What the hell was my problem? I swiveled my chair quickly, busied myself refilling the bottom tray of my laser printer. I heard Dan take a deep breath.

“I was moving my mother into a nursing home. Although now they’re called assisted living facilities.” I closed the printer drawer and turned to him. He looked grimly at the floor. “She has Alzheimer’s, and it’s gotten to be too much for the woman who checks up on her.” He kicked an invisible spot on the carpet with his toe. “I can’t…I mean, I’m an only child. I’m here twelve hours a day. Last week she dropped a hot iron on her bare foot. The day after Christmas her neighbor found her burning trash in the backyard, wearing nothing but a housecoat. I just…”

He stopped. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to justify his decision to me, but I didn’t know how. Speaking to Dan about anything other than financial models made me nervous.

“When I left, she started crying. She wanted to go home. She wanted my dad.” I tried to see his face, but he was still looking down, his chin buried in his neck, arms crossed tightly over his chest.

“Where’s your dad?” I whispered.

“He died when I was in high school. She keeps forgetting.”

We sat in silence for a long moment. My tearfulness had subsided, thank God, but my heart felt heavy, unbearably low in my chest. I thought about my own mother, in Cincinnati with my dad, healthy and happy, training for a triathlon, of all things. Even when I was a child, her energy had exhausted me. I thought of Brooklyn, tried to imagine her as an adult, hovering over a doddering Jack, trying to make the same decision that Dan faced today. I wondered if she’d pick the worst facility she could find, as revenge for the stupid name she’d been saddled with.

I wished I could find the perfect words to ease Dan’s guilt.

“When you’re done with the report, call a courier and have it sent to Kevin over at HCA. I’m up to my eyeballs in this Kellogg crap, so I don’t have time to look it over. Make sure there are no errors.”

“Dan…” I searched for something comforting and adult to say but came up with nothing.

“What?” he spat, as if his moment of personal weakness had left a bad taste in his mouth.

“Are you going to keep acting like this, or are you going to get nicer?”

His lips twitched a bit. “I’m going to get nicer.”

“When?”

“Next week, possibly the week after. I can’t be sure.”

“Well, I look forward to it.”

“Shut up and get to work.”

We were on our way home from dinner, and Jack was in no small hurry to get there, if his hand resting lightly on my lap was any indication. I grinned in the dark and pretended to be disinterested, looking out the window and chatting about the upcoming weekend. He squirmed a bit in his seat and took the last turn towards his apartment a little faster than he should have, his tires squealing in protest.

His index finger had inched below the hem of my skirt and began creeping up the inside of my thigh when we both heard the siren and looked in the rear-view mirror to see the flashing lights behind us.

“
Crap,”
Jack said under his breath as he began to slow down and pull over to the side of the road. “
Crap, crap, crap…”

“Were you speeding?” I looked over my shoulder at the squad car behind us.

“Probably…I don’t know, I was distracted.” He leaned over my lap to grab his insurance card and registration form from the glove compartment. He rolled down his window and waited as the trooper walked slowly towards the car. I pulled my sweater tight against my chest.

“Good evening… May I see your license and registration, sir?” I heard, although I was blinded for a second by the policeman’s flashlight. Oh, it was a police
woman
—she looked to be in her early forties, with sandy blonde hair tucked neatly into her hat. Jack handed over his papers and license silently. She took them and wrote a few things down on her pad.

“Is there a reason you were driving so fast, Mr. Brogan?”

“I’m sorry, I must have been distracted…” He paused for a long second, then sighed deeply. “I guess I’ve just been a little…spacey lately, you know. This is embarrassing, but…I’m in the middle of a divorce, and…” He looked up shyly, blinked a few times, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear all this, I apologize…”

What the…? Oh my God!

I cleared my throat softly and looked at him sharply out of the corner of my eye, my lips drawn in a thin line. Jack ignored me, focusing completely on his story and the policewoman in front of him. I wondered who the policewoman thought
I
was, but Jack was doing such a good job of charming her, I was halfway convinced the woman hadn’t even noticed me in the passenger’s seat.

She stopped writing in her pad. Unbelievably, she and Jack began to talk about breakups and agreed that the first few weeks after the end of a relationship were always the hardest. I turned my head and bit my lower lip when the officer brought up her own divorce, while Jack nodded sympathetically at her story.

“Well, Mr…umm…Brogan,” she said finally, glancing down at his license to confirm his name, “I’m going to issue you a warning this time, but try to pay more attention in the future, okay?” She returned his documents, and Jack thanked her and gave her a charming smile. It took everything I had not to groan in disbelief.

As soon as he rolled up the window, I slapped his arm. He shrugged away from me and held up his hand in self-defense.

“You did
not
just do that!” I huffed.

“Do what?” he asked, the picture of innocence, except for the hint of a grin on his face as he pulled back on the road and carefully merged with traffic.

“Oh, please…flirting your way out of a ticket? Batting those eyelashes around?”

“Hey, everything I said was true,” he said defensively.

“Still, you knew what you were doing,” I argued, crossing my arms over my chest tightly.

“Like you’ve never talked your way out of a ticket?” I didn’t answer. “Women do it all the time, but guys hardly ever get the chance. We can’t cry. We usually can’t flirt, since most cops are guys. I just saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.” He grinned smugly as he pulled into the driveway of his house. “Sooo…” he drawled, “you wanna…you know…take me upstairs and punish me?” He wiggled his eyebrows and grinned lasciviously. “Tie me up, handcuff me, you know…whatever it takes,” he continued as he got out of the car and walked around to open my door.

When we reached the house, he grabbed my wrist and dragged me quickly to the couch, pulling me on his lap as he sat down with a
thud
. His lips captured mine, and I felt the urgency in his kiss immediately, his lips and tongue and hot breath hitting me like a steamroller, knocking the breath right out of my chest.

“Jack,” I gasped, when I could finally speak.

“This…this is what I’ve been waiting for all night,” he panted against my neck feverishly. “I couldn’t let a stupid speeding ticket get in my way.”

It was becoming increasingly obvious that nothing ever got in Jack’s way.

Chapter Four

I woke up in Jack’s bed at midnight and couldn’t go back to sleep. I had a sudden but urgent need to sleep in my own bed, by myself. I’ve always been kind of a loner, and my body longed for the solitude of my saggy double bed, with the quilt that was rubbed soft and shiny around the edges. I knew if I woke up Jack, the possibility of more sex far outweighed that of a ride home.

And so it was that I found myself on the streets of Jack’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, walking six blocks to the Charles Street Station to take the subway back to my apartment. I felt the ice crunch under my heels and began to regret not calling a cab. I’d lived in Boston for six years, but I couldn’t seem to throw off my penny-pinching Midwestern roots.

I turned the corner off Jack’s street and heard footsteps behind me, but before I could even turn around to look, I felt my purse being ripped off my shoulder. I stumbled a bit but stayed on my feet. By the time I could focus in the dark, I saw two men who were already halfway down the block, surprisingly sure-footed on the icy sidewalk.

“Hey!” I yelled, and started to run, more out of instinct than a belief that I could actually catch them. The irony of being robbed in posh Beacon Hill, by thugs who probably lived in my neighborhood, was not lost on me. “Stop! Please, I don’t even live here, I’m from Savin Hill… The damn purse is from JC Penney, for Christ’s—”

And then I was facedown in the street, my heel stuck in a drainage grate. I froze for a moment, catching my breath, taking inventory of my body. My ankle throbbed, and I tasted blood from where I’d bitten the inside of my cheek, but I wasn’t badly hurt. I heard a dog bark from across the street and tried to sit up. When that didn’t work, I just buried my head in the crook of my elbow and moaned, feeling the grit of dirt and ice under my fingers.

In what seemed like seconds, but was probably closer to five minutes, a squad car pulled up with an ambulance close behind. I finally sat up and begged them not to take me to the hospital, but the paramedic
really
thought someone should look at that ankle. I wanted to tell her that someone should
really
shut their goddamn mouth, but I was so cold even the warmth of the ambulance sounded good. A cop took my statement, and then a man from the ambulance asked if I wanted to call anyone, and I stared at him blankly.

Logic said to call Jack—he could come to the hospital with me, then take me home or back to his place. But when I tried to imagine him, dressed in his Brooks Brothers camel coat, seeing me bruised and filthy, I just couldn’t. His presence would be more nerve-wracking than comforting, and don’t think that realization didn’t make my heart hurt more than my ankle.

So I took the cell phone and called April. But it was one am, and she didn’t answer. I left a voicemail, forcing levity into my voice so she wouldn’t worry—I was such a klutz, I fell off the sidewalk, could she swing by and pick me up at Mass General? Hopefully she’d get the message in the next few hours, because I had nothing—no cell phone, no purse, no money. I felt tears of self-pity rising as I hung up the phone and focused on the blinking monitors in the ambulance as we drove the few short blocks to the hospital. The overly cautious paramedic busied herself applying ice to my ankle, which actually stemmed my tears and made me laugh, because they’d found me in the damn snow.

In the unique time-continuum found in all emergency rooms, it took three hours for them to x-ray my ankle and determine it was sprained. I nodded off as a sullen nurse wrapped my foot and awakened a few minutes later to a hand on my shoulder, and a deep voice saying, “Lexi…
Lexi…
look at me…”

And I opened my eyes and saw Dan.

“Lexi, are you all right?”

“What are you doing here?”

He put his hand over mine. “I just popped by to see what was up.”

I tried to smile but started crying instead. I knew it would piss Dan off so I tried to stop, but the tears had a mind of their own, so I just sat there, gulping and sobbing. “Shit,” I whispered.

“It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“Shit,” I repeated, but he helped me sit up, and I managed to get my wits about me.

“Seriously, what are you doing here? Who called you?”

“Your friend April. She got your message, but she’s in Schenectady.”

“Oh God, her stepbrother’s wedding, I totally forgot.”

He called the nurse and got a wheelchair, and I sat there like an overgrown baby in a stroller as they wheeled me to the check-out desk. When we got to Dan’s car, he helped me slide into his front seat, then reached across and fastened my seatbelt. He was being so nice it made me nervous, as if they’d told him they discovered a brain tumor when they were checking the dilation of my eyes.

“You’ll have to tell me where you live—somewhere in Dorchester, right?”

“Yeah, Savin Hill… But it’s the middle of the night, Dan, you can just drop me at the T if you want. It’s a straight shot on the red line.”

“Jesus, Lexi, shut up.”

Okay, so there was no brain tumor. I felt slightly better and tipped my head back on the seat cushion behind me. I must have fallen asleep, because before I knew it he was shaking my shoulder gently. “Hey, Lex,” he whispered.

“Mmm?”

“What’s your address? I need to put it in the GPS.”

I told him and went immediately back to sleep. When I woke again, he was pulling me out of the front seat, carrying me to my front door.

“Dan.”

“What?”

“Put me down, I can walk”

“Yeah, but you’re slow as hell, and it’s freezing out here.”

I buried my head in his shoulder. “I’m too heavy.” He didn’t speak, just grunted a bit. “Am I too heavy?”

“Yes, you weigh a ton, okay?”

We made it to the front door, and he balanced me on one foot while retrieving my spare key from under the potted plant on the porch. Once inside, he led me to the couch and took my coat.

“Do you want something to drink?” he asked, standing in front of me like a waiter.

“No, no…you can go, I’m fine.” I looked at my lap. I didn’t want him to see my face, because then he’d know that I really wanted him to stay. But he must have sensed something anyway, because he sat down beside me on the couch.