Constance blew out a long breath and then took an equally long sip of diet soda. The sides of the can had gone from chilled to warm and the bubbles inside had long since departed. She hardly noticed.
She couldn’t keep her mind on her work.
It certainly wasn’t because the work was taxing. But she’d reread the same seven-word sentence half a dozen times now and it just wasn’t sinking in.
Nothing was sinking in.
That was because it couldn’t. Disappointment had filled up every available space inside of her while making it feel as if everything was collapsing. She’d been so sure, so very sure that there was a connection between James and her. So sure that despite his demeanor and his obvious desire to retain his brooding persona, he was her soul mate.
Soul mates didn’t have to be identical copies of one another, they had to supply what the other person lacked. Had to make the other person feel complete just by their very existence. And he had. James had made her feel complete.
Somehow, he had been what was missing in her life. She’d felt whole with him. Safe. And so incredibly sexy, as if sensuality shot out every pore whenever she was with him. No one had ever made her feel like that before.
And no one was ever going to make her feel like that again. Because she just wasn’t going to go through this a second time. The grieving, the emptiness, the pain just wasn’t worth it. Better not know any of it than to stand around, torn and bleeding, waiting for the inevitable to happen. Because it always did.
The cameo was a fraud. There was no happily-ever-after, no reward for believing. She wished she’d never believed in it.
Restless, unable to fit inside her own skin, she sighed. She’d felt upset and used when she’d broken it off with Josh, but the loss, well, the loss hadn’t really touched her. What she’d mourned more than anything was the idea of losing love rather than actually losing Josh. If she were being honest, he had never set her soul on fire. Not once.
But James had. Every time.
There was no other way to describe what had gone down between James and her except to say that the forces of nature were involved. This had been a whirlwind thing, taking away her breath, accelerating her heart rate. She felt the way she’d always dreamed about feeling. In love. Wildly, hopelessly in love.
And now those same adjectives could be used to describe the despair that was closing in around her. She was vainly trying to hold it at bay.
Constance knew without being told that she was facing a losing battle.
She had to snap out of it.
She had to stop feeling sorry for herself and get back out among the living. He wasn’t going to appear magically on her doorstep to make things right. Even she wasn’t naive enough to believe that.
“I suppose I’m just going to have to get on with it, go through the five stages of grief, or however many there are, right Felicia?”
The dog, curled up at her feet like a small hairy comforter, barely raised her head in acknowledgment of the words. Even the dog wasn’t listening, she thought in annoyance.
“Wait, just wait until it happens to you. Wait until you meet that drop-dead German shepherd hunk who’ll start you dreaming big dreams and then just when he has you in the palm of his paw, he’ll walk away. Not a pretty picture, I guarantee it.”
She bent over and scratched the animal behind her ear. The simple action helped to soothe her. As for the animal, if Felicia were any more relaxed, Constance was certain she’d have to place the dog in a bowl to keep her from floating away.
Constance frowned at the lack of support from the puppy. “I promise to be more sympathetic to you than you are to me right now.”
Felicia barely made a sound as she lowered her head back down on her paws, her body still covering her mistress’s feet.
Constance did her best to rally. The evening was still young, even if she felt a million years old. “C’mon, Constance,” she said sternly. “Snap out of it. You’ve got book reports to read.”
The next moment, Felicia came alive as if someone had suddenly stepped on her tail. But instead of barking, Felicia made a mad dash for the front door. Her tail was wagging so wildly, it looked as if it were in danger of screwing right off.
Constance put down her pen and gave up all pretense of working. Maybe later she could get her head together, but right now, her brain cells were scattered in a hundred different directions. And somehow, they all led back to him.
Felicia was still at the front door. “What is it, Lassie? Did Timmie fall down into the well again?” The puppy began to scratch at the bottom of the door. Nobody had rung the bell. “Someone there, girl?” Constance sighed, getting up. “Okay, be that way.” Unable to concentrate anyway, she crossed to the front door to check out what had Felicia so excited.
He’d been standing at her door for five minutes now, mentally arguing with himself.
It wasn’t going well.
Even after Eli had literally pushed him out of the store, James had had no intention of coming here. He’d meant to stick to his decision to push on with his life and try somehow to lock away all these unsettling feelings that Constance had unearthed within him.
To do that, he needed to get over Constance.
But then it struck him as he was driving away from Eli’s store that if he had to spend this much energy trying to get over her, he’d already failed in his initial resolve not to fall for her in the first place. In leaving her, he wasn’t protecting himself from possible future heart-ache, he was ushering it in early. Of his own volition.
Just as Eli had pointed out.
It made no sense.
Neither did being without her when she hadn’t pushed him away. So he’d turned the car around and instead of going home, he’d headed uptown.
The full head of steam he’d gathered had remained with him until just a few minutes ago, when he’d found himself standing before her door. And his future.
What if she didn’t want to see him anymore? What if he’d alienated her so badly that she’d gone on to see someone else, someone from that vast crowd of people she knew?
What if…?
His mind ceased raising questions whose sole purpose was to torment him the second the door opened and he saw Constance standing in the doorway. She was dressed in another pair of impossibly short white shorts and a nonexistent sky-blue halter top that showed off all her best features.
No, that wasn’t right, he mentally corrected himself. Constance’s very best feature was her heart.
Everything else ran a close second and it was all there, hiding beneath thin cotton material, daring him to touch. To take.
Constance’s impossible blue eyes widened with surprise as she looked at him, trapping his soul. He wanted her so much, it hurt to breathe. Scared him. Big time.
With effort, he scrambled to cover up what he was positive had to be evident in his eyes and on his face. So he scowled at her. “You didn’t even ask who was there. Do you realize I could have pushed my way into your apartment and attacked you right there, inches past your threshold?”
She could have said a lot of things in response to his verbal assault. She could have pretended to be flippant or indifferent. Or she could have shouted at him that he had no right to come in here and throw his weight around. She was entitled to all of that.
But all she could think of was how happy she was to see him. And that maybe, just maybe, her mother hadn’t been wrong about the cameo after all.
“Sounds good to me,” she told him.
She was taking the wind out of his sails. “Seriously,” he fumed even as he felt every inch of his body responding to her. Felt his very mind responding to her.
“Seriously,” she whispered. “And in the event that it wasn’t you at the door, this nice police detective gave me this really fierce attack dog.” She looked down at Felicia, who was busy licking his shoes, her tail still going a hundred miles a minute, thumping against the floor like a drum soloist in the spotlight.
Because he wanted to fill his arms with her, James stooped down and picked up the dog instead. Felicia began licking his face. “What’s she going to do, knock me over with the breeze created by her tail?”
“The robber would have never expected that.”
Rescuing him from Felicia and her pink tongue, which was furiously separating him from the skin on his face, Constance took the dog and pushed her door open all the way with her back.
Once he was inside, Constance put Felicia down on the floor and gently swatted the dog’s behind. Trained, though reluctant, Felicia returned to the giant throw pillow in the middle of the room and lay down.
Constance struggled to contain the joy that was trying desperately to break out and take over. Knowing James, there could very well have been some miserably logical reason why he was here and it wasn’t because he’d missed her one tenth as much as she had him.
She braced herself for disappointment. “So, what are you doing here?”
He’d asked himself the same question, over and over again, as he’d stared at her door. And had finally come up with an answer just as she’d opened it. “Trying to go home.”
“And what, you lost your way?” Constance pushed her hands into her back pockets to keep from throwing them around his neck and dragging him down to her level so she could kiss him until they were both numb. “You live on the other side of town, remember?”
“No, that’s where I put away the occasional groceries I buy, where I feed my dog and keep my clothes,” he told her quietly. “But that’s not home. I haven’t had a home. Not really.” He was saying things to her he’d never said to anyone else. And realized that he wanted her to know the truth. “Not ever.” He thought of his marriage and how he’d felt at first. “I thought I did for a while, but even then, there was this feeling that it wasn’t permanent, that things would change.” He looked off into space. “And they did.”
The temptation to stop, to leave, loomed again before him.
No, he wasn’t going to turn tail and run. He’d never been a coward. Never let himself be a coward, but now he knew that he had been just that with her. Because he wouldn’t allow himself to admit what he’d been feeling. Wouldn’t admit it to himself, much less to her.
But that was behind him now.
Constance pressed her lips together, afraid to push forward. Knowing she had to. “And this home you’ve suddenly found, where is it?”
He looked at her for a long moment. So long, she thought he wasn’t going to answer.
And then he did.
“Wherever you are.”
The three words stole her breath away. At the very most, she’d expected him to say he regarded her apartment as his home. She’d never remotely expected him to say her. The second the words registered, Constance could feel tears welling up in her eyes. The tears she hadn’t let herself shed all this last week as she’d struggled to hang on to the tiny bits and pieces of hope.
She’d even reread the dusty old diary she’d uncovered as a young girl in the attic of the house they used to live in back in Virginia. Amanda’s diary. Amanda had hung on to her belief that her lover was returning to her even when everything had pointed against it. When her parents had tried to marry her off to someone else, she’d stubbornly refused to obey, saying she belonged only to Will. She’d hung on to her hope even as the days, then the months after the war had multiplied. She’d never given up.
But Will had told her he loved her. James had never made any such declaration.
Until now.
She could feel the inside of herself filling with sunbeams. They scattered the tears. “And it took you this long to realize it?”
“That,” he allowed, then added, “and a kick in the pants.” Constance looked at him quizzically. He elaborated just a little. “Everybody at the precinct began to complain.”
She laughed and he remembered how much he loved that sound. “That you weren’t your normally, sunny self?”
“That I was even a worse pain in the butt to deal with than usual.” They’d used far more descriptive, forceful words than that, but for her sake, he cleaned it up.
She was trying to connect the dots. He’d mentioned a kick in the rear. “So they escorted you here?”
“No, actually they backed off,” he admitted. “Tried to avoid me as much as possible. Even Santini gave up and he never gives up.”
“Then what gave you that kick in the pants?”
He’d spent most of his life being closemouthed, resenting having to explain himself, even to his parents on those rare occasions when they hadn’t been swiping at one another. Yet answering her felt right. As if he needed to share all this with someone, finally. “Two things really. First, we closed the R-Squared cases.”
“Congratulations,” she told him, interrupting. “You must feel very relieved.”
The careless shrug rolled off his shoulders. “That’s just it, I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything.” The next took a great deal to admit, because it made him human. And vulnerable. “It was like I was hollow inside.”
Just like me, she thought.
“And Eli threw me out of his store.”
“Eli?” He hadn’t mentioned that name to her before. It didn’t belong to any of the detectives in his squad. Uncle Bob had gotten her a complete roster.
James nodded. “The old man who’s responsible for everything I am. For me taking the course in life that I did.”
An uncle? A mentor? Questions popped up in her head like mushrooms on a lawn after a spring rain. But she knew she had to proceed cautiously. She had his trust for the moment and she didn’t want to lose it by saying the wrong thing. But she didn’t want to stay in the dark about him any longer.
“He gave you advice?”
He grinned. “No, he let me save his life. And for the first time in mine, I felt good. Really good. Like what I had done really mattered.”
He supposed his narrative had left some gaping holes. He tried to fill them in quickly. Later he’d give her more details, but for now, he just wanted to get on with his story. And reach his conclusion.
“I’d left home, worked my way cross country and was living in doorways. Eli and his wife owned this little mom-and-pop grocery store on the Lower East Side. I was in it for the first time one night, contemplating robbing him when someone beat me to it. The guy had a gun and he was threatening to shoot Eli’s wife. I was around the corner and nobody saw me,” he explained. He loved the way she listened, as if every inch of her were intent on finding out what he had to say. “I don’t even remember thinking about it, I just jumped the guy. Eli said I’d saved their lives. But he and his wife gave me a place to stay and sent me to school. So I guess they pretty much saved my life.” He was convinced of that. “And now you’ve joined the club.”
She blinked. It was some leap from there to here. “I have?”
It was going to be all right, he told himself. Somehow, he was going to make this right if it wasn’t at this very moment. He took her into his arms. And realized just how acutely he’d missed the feel of having her against him.
“Yeah, because being with you kept me from just giving way to despair. You added colors into my life, Constance. Blues and reds, yellows and pinks.”
Her eyes crinkled. She hooked her arms around him. “You don’t strike me as a pink kind of guy.”
“Not on its own, but in concert with the other colors…” He realized that she’d taken him off course. Again. She had a way of making him forget everything else except her. “The point is, you make me feel alive. You make me want to stay alive. It didn’t much matter before.”
She could feel her heart swelling with happiness. But she needed more. She needed to hear every single word he had to spare. “And it does now?”
He inclined his head. “It does as long as I can stay alive around you.”
“I highly recommend it,” she told him with enthusiasm, then made a face. “Keeping dead people around is kind of creepy.”
He laughed and shook his head. Life with her was never going to be dull. But she had to be made aware of something before he went any further. Before he allowed himself to believe it was all going to be good. That was a trap too many people fell into. Not being prepared.
“You know, what I said the other day’s still true. I don’t know how to make a relationship work.”
She took his face between her hands and lightly kissed him on the mouth. Sweetness spiraled right through him, boring down to his very core.
“That’s because it’s not a one-man job. It’s like a seesaw,” she explained. “One person can’t make it work properly. It takes two to make it work right. And I’m more than willing to take my place on the other end of the seesaw.”
Humor quirked his mouth. “I thought you said relationships were like snowflakes.”
She waved her hand, dismissing what he presented as a discrepancy. “That was before. This is now. Keep up.”
“I’ll try, Constance, I surely will try.” He toyed with her hair, then let the strand drop. The side of her neck, just above the cameo’s black velvet ribbon, presented a very tempting target. He could almost taste her skin. “I’d like to think I have forever to do it, though.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked startled. Was he wrong after all? Was this just temporary to her? No strings, no rules? “That didn’t come out right, did it?”
She knew better than to shoot him down. “That depends on what you’re trying to say.”
Okay, this one was for all the marbles, he thought. All or nothing. He didn’t know how to play any other way. “I’m trying to say I love you and I want you to marry me, Constance.”
It took her a moment. She had to drag the air back into her lungs again. “I think you just said it.”
He looked at her, waiting. “Aren’t you supposed to say something here?”
Her expression was innocent. “You mean like I love you and I want to marry you, too?”
He nodded, trying not to let her see how he was hanging out on a limb until she gave him the answer he needed. “That sounds about right.” He paused. She was doing this to him on purpose. “Well, do you?”
Rather than answer, she made an observation. “Always the interrogator.”
“Can’t help it.” If she was going to say no, he decided, she would have done so by now. She was just stretching this out to get even with him. “It’s my police training.”
“For the record, Detective, I love and want to marry you, too.” She threaded her arms around his neck, bringing her body in to his. “We’d better get started on your husband training then.” She grinned at him. “Lesson one, always follow up proposals with a kiss.”
He pretended to think before answering. “I can do that.”
“You’d better,” she laughed. “Or I’ll have to trade you in.”
He ran his finger over the oval at her throat. “Sorry, only one hit from the cameo per customer.”
Amusement danced in her eyes. “Since when did you become such an expert on my family heirloom?”
“Not an expert, exactly. I just write some of the rules as I go along.”
She raised her eyes to his expectantly. “About lesson one…”
He pulled her to him, feeling very nuance, every curve. And telling himself that from here on in, his life was finally going to take a turn for the better. Because she was going to be in it.
He blessed the day he found that cameo. Or rather, the woman he’d stumbled over who’d found the cameo. “Coming up.”
As he began to lower his mouth to hers, an image registered on his brain and he stopped just short of kissing her.
“Change your mind?” she asked.
“Constance, who’s that?” He pointed to the portrait of an older woman she had hanging on the far wall. He’d never noticed it before.
Turning, Constance glanced to where James was pointing. “Oh, that’s Amanda Deveaux. The original owner of the cameo. It was done a few years before she died.” Puzzled, she looked at him curiously. “Why this sudden interest?”
To his trained eye, that the woman in the portrait was a dead ringer for the old woman he’d run into the morning the cameo had come into his life.
But to his logical mind, he knew it was impossible.
As impossible as finding someone to love when he wasn’t looking.
He realized this was how a believer was born. But all that was for another time. He had something better to do with his lips right now than tell tales.
“No reason,” he told her. “Just getting to know the family.”
Before she could ask anything more, he kissed her. And everything else faded away.