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By eight-thirty, Annie was fast asleep, her outfit chosen for tomorrow and hanging from her closet door knob, her arm clutching Mr. Snuffy firmly, and her lunch box filled with a cup of yogurt, a sprig of grapes, carrot sticks, whole-wheat pretzels, and a big oatmeal cookie. She smelled like a honey-lemon drop, the scent of her bubble bath, and for all her fierce objections about having to go to bed, she’d drifted off to dreamland before Gwen had finished reading her a poem from Now We Are Six.
Gwen was also tired. It had been a long day. All her days were long, though: twenty-four hours packed with demands and activities and things to worry about. But she wasn’t ready for bed yet. If she showered and crawled beneath the sheets, she’d only lie awake for hours, thinking about Dylan.
She hated having no control over what was happening in her life. Becoming a mother had meant ceding some control—the nerve of Annie, having a mind of her own!—but the decision to continue her pregnancy and give birth to a child had been hers alone. The decision to remain in Brogan’s Point after Adam had left, and to buy out the owner of the Attic, and to purchase this house—it had all been her doing, her choice.
Dylan’s plan to move to Brogan’s Point was his choice, not hers. His desire to be a father to Annie was his choice. And if he decided, after a while, that he’d rather return to Hollywood and forget about the little girl he’d helped to create... Well, that would be his choice, too. Gwen wouldn’t be able to prevent him from doing whatever the hell he wanted.
All she could do was try to protect Annie.
She wandered into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of chardonnay. Carrying it into the living room, she glimpsed the moon through the window overlooking her front yard. It was a sharp crescent, a silver smile tilted sideways in the starlit autumn sky. The street was quiet, the night tranquil. Five years after Annie’s birth, Gwen continued to be amazed at how peaceful the world seemed when her daughter was asleep.
She pulled her barn jacket from the coat closet, slipped it on, and stepped out onto the front porch, wine glass in hand. The night was cool but not cold, the air crisp with the tart scent of apples and pine. Lowering herself to sit on the porch steps, she gazed upward, picking out the Big and Little Dippers, the three stars of Orion’s belt, the bright white dot of Venus.
Sitting beneath the vast night sky, Gwen felt her worries settle inside her, growing still. Everything would work out somehow. She’d figure things out with Mike. She’d let Annie get to know Dylan—that would have probably happened in some form, sooner or later—and she’d be the best mother she knew how to be. At least that was something she could control.
She took a sip of the cold, dry wine, then sighed. Then spotted the car parked across the street from her, the door opening, the man emerging. The dome light inside the vehicle illuminated his face, but she would have recognized him by nothing more than the faint light of the moon catching in the dense curls of his hair.
Had Dylan remained seated in his car in front of the Nolan house while Gwen had been monitoring Annie’s bath time and packing her lunch box? Or had he driven somewhere for the past hour and a half, and then come back?
She’d have the chance to ask him, because he closed the car door and ambled across the street and up her front walk. He offered a hesitant smile as he joined her on the porch, lowering himself to sit beside her.
“Have you been parked in front of my neighbor’s house all this time?” were the first words out of her mouth.
He shrugged, then nodded. “I’ve been busy. My manager sent me a bunch of stuff to read. Contracts for a Galaxy Force computer game and app.”
“You could have gone back to...wherever it is you’re staying to do your reading.”
“I could have.” He rested his forearms on his knees and stared out into the dark. “It’s a nice night.”
“That’s not why you sat reading contracts in your car.”
“No.” He shot a fleeting look her way. “I wanted to talk to you. I feel like there’s so much we have to talk about, and I don’t even know where to start.”
That he was willing to reveal his confusion touched her. Dylan Scott—the successful hot-shot movie star—looked lost and vulnerable, his expression an intriguing blend of hope and fear. “You could start by telling me if you thought Maggie was brave,” she joked, trying to put him at ease.
He chuckled, then grew solemn. “The way you talked to Annie about the movie—I wouldn’t know how to do that. I’ve got nieces and a nephew, but—I mean, how to you know what to ask? How to you draw her ideas out of her?”
“She’s my daughter,” Gwen said. She’d never really had to contemplate how to engage Annie in a conversation. She’d been talking to Annie from the moment Annie had been born, when the midwife had swaddled her in a soft cotton blanket and handed her into Gwen’s eager arms.
Before then, actually. Gwen used to whisper to her swollen abdomen when she was pregnant, promising the tiny life inside her that she loved it and would take care of it, no matter what.
“I need to learn so much.” Dylan sighed. “I feel completely ignorant.”
“Not ignorant. Inexperienced,” Gwen told him. “You’ll learn.” She realized she’d just conceded that Dylan would be a fixture in Annie’s life. How else would he gain experience, if not by talking to Annie as often as possible, the way Gwen did?
He sent her another look, his expression dubious and tinged with panic. She handed him her glass of wine. He smiled and took a sip. “Liquid courage,” he joked. “Why did you name her Annie?”
“You don’t like the name?”
“It’s a great name. I’m just curious why you chose it.”
“It’s my grandmother’s name. Gwendolyn was my mother’s grandmother’s name. That’s how we do things in my family.”
He nodded. “Better than my family. I was named after Bob Dylan. My sisters are Janis—as in Janis Joplin—and Grace—as in Grace Slick. My parents loved Sixties rock music.”
“I guess you’re lucky they didn’t name you Elvis,” she teased.
He handed back her wine glass. It occurred to her that sharing her wine with him was an intimate thing to do. As was sharing her porch step, which was small enough that there were only a few inches of air between his shoulder and hers. His smell mixed with the smells of autumn, a warm, male scent. When they talked like this, seated on the hard concrete of a suburban porch, he didn’t seem like a famous actor at all. He seemed just like...a man.
“You never considered getting an abortion?” he asked. “I mean, after you realized I wasn’t going to step up.”
“I thought about it.” She lapsed into silence, remembering those dark days when Dylan’s manager had threatened to bring charges against her if she attempted to reach him again. By then, she’d been closing in on her twelfth week of pregnancy, and she hadn’t had time to linger over the decision. So she’d sat down and written a list of pros and cons.
Raising a child herself, far from her parents. Running the store as a single parent. Dealing with the repercussions once her child learned that she was the daughter of a famous actor, because by then, Dylan Scott was famous. Financial concerns. Social concerns. The cons list had been pretty long.
The pros list had been short: I want this baby. Period. And that had decided her.
“It was your choice to make,” Dylan said, shifting so he could look at her. “I’m glad you chose to keep her. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t, but I’m glad you did.”
“I’ve never had a moment’s regret,” she told him.
He continued to gaze at her. The dim moonlight drained the color from him; his face was an arrangement of angles and shadows, his eyes as dark as the sky above them. He eased her wine glass from her hand, and she expected him to take another sip. But he only placed it on the porch, then slid his hand under her hair until his palm covered her cheek, warming it. He dipped his face to hers.
She shouldn’t do this. But they were sharing wine, and the porch, and the starlit sky. They were sharing a daughter.
When his lips touched hers, she sighed.
In her memory, the night they’d spent together so long ago had been a rowdy, energetic affair. He’d been exhilarated by the completion of his work in Sea Glass, and she’d been rejuvenated by the comprehension that this cool, gorgeous guy found her attractive, that she could think of herself not as the victim of a painful break-up, not as a cast-off ex, but as a healthy, physical woman who could enjoy sex.
Just as she’d had no regrets about continuing her pregnancy, she’d had no regrets about her night of love-making with Dylan.
If that had been an exuberant celebration, this kiss was nothing of the sort. It was quiet, tender, questioning. Without words, he was asking her if kissing her was allowed, if it was acceptable.
For heaven’s sake—he’d seen her naked. He’d kissed and licked and nipped every square inch of her body. She couldn’t very well insist she was a modest, proper lady now.
Besides, his mouth felt good on hers. Warm. Sweet. His kiss stirred a longing deep inside her, a need she’d suppressed ever since...
Ever since his manager had slammed the door on her. That virtual slam had obliterated the woman who enjoyed sex, who had embraced Dylan as eagerly as he’d embraced her, who had acknowledged her needs and wants and desires. From that moment on, she’d viewed herself as someone Dylan wanted to forget, a bit-part actor in a scene left on the cutting room floor. She’d edited out a part of herself, too—the carefree, reckless, sensuous part—and cast herself in the role of a responsible mother.
Now she was more. She was a woman, reveling in the sensations Dylan aroused within her.
His hand remained warm against her cheek, his fingers twirling gently through her hair. She lifted her hands to his shoulders, and he tilted his head slightly, deepening the kiss. His tongue slid along the seal of her lips, and she parted them to allow him in. A soft groan escaped him.
Oh, God, this felt good. It felt luscious. It felt right.
But as unexpectedly as the kiss began, he ended it, leaning back, twisting away, tilting his head until he was staring straight up at the sky. “Sorry,” he said.
Really? He was sorry?
“I shouldn’t—I mean, I’ve already messed your life up in more ways than I can count,” he said, addressing the moon as much as Gwen. “You’ve got a life here, you’ve got a boyfriend... It’s just...”
He might be an actor, but he didn’t have any rehearsed lines. His struggle to articulate his thoughts touched her almost as much as his kiss had.
“I had a good time today. With you and Annie. But—I mean, let’s face it. It was damned presumptuous of me, just sweeping in, imposing myself on you like this.”
Did he want to leave? Not just her porch but her world—did he want to back out, return to Hollywood, run away?
“I just barged in, uninvited. Ta-dah, here I am, let me in. Drinking your wine, building spaceships with your daughter. Yeah, presumptuous. And ...” He gestured vaguely toward her face, then traced her lower lip with his thumb before turning away. “That. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Whatever he’d been thinking when they kissed, now he was probably thinking he wanted out. This entire day had been way too domestic for him, way too un-Hollywood.
If that was his choice, Gwen wouldn’t stop him. She and Annie had survived without him all these years. They could survive without him again, if they had to.
Yet the thought of Dylan’s vanishing upset her more now than it had six years ago. Then, she’d been prepared for him to vanish. It had been understood, part of the deal. They’d never spent a day together, gone to a movie together, eaten pizza together. They’d never been an actual family together.
Today, they had been a family, at least for a few hours. It had felt that way to her, anyway.
Probably not to him. Today might have been nothing more than a performance to him. He’d take his curtain calls—did movie stars do that? Did they bow and bask in the applause?—and he’d hop on the next plane back to Los Angeles, and Gwen and Annie would be on their own.
Maybe, if she asked, he’d help out with some child support payments every now and then. In the meantime, though, she’d have to forget how lovely his kiss had been. How appealing she’d found his smile. How ridiculously attractive he was.
She could do that. She was old enough to face the dawn.
Where had that thought come from? A melody echoed faintly inside her skull. Just call me angel of the morning... That song from the jukebox at the Faulk Street Tavern. A song about letting someone go. Kissing him, making love with him, and then watching him turn away.
“It’s getting cold,” she said, shrugging her jacket more snugly around herself. “And late. I should go in.”
Dylan looked rueful. When she stood, he hoisted himself to his feet as well. “Gwen—”
“No, really. I’m going in. Good night, Dylan.” Abrupt, yes. But she’d be damned if she’d watch him turn away. She was the one who was going to turn away. Let him be the one who watched.
