Cate had cast a surreptitious glance at her father. “Better think it over, miss,” he’d warned. “The way I see it, you don’t have any other options.”
Stunned by Larry’s proposal and unable to imagine herself married to anyone but Danny, Cate had asked for a little time. To her astonishment her parents had granted it, provided she didn’t draw out the decision-making process too much. The following day, a Sunday, she’d borrowed her mother’s car without asking permission while her parents were at church and driven out to the Finn place, determined to find out whatever she could concerning Danny’s whereabouts. It had been then that Ned Finn had made his taunting remarks, then that Danny’s grandmother had snatched up a broom and chased her from the premises.
A few days later, at her parents’ urging, she’d accepted Larry’s proposal during an oddly formal meeting in the McDonough living room. Though she hadn’t known him well or even given him much thought, Larry had always seemed like a decent person to her—the kind of principled young man who would make some young woman a good husband. They’d been married shortly afterward, in a bare-bones ceremony at the Catholic rectory in Ryersville flanked by both sets of parents, and left immediately for Minneapolis.
Unaware of the true situation, their neighbors in the lower-middle-class neighborhood where they’d landed had befriended them. One of the men had helped Larry find a job and fix up their rental house. The women had rounded up baby clothes and dispensed advice on how to have a healthy pregnancy.
At its inception, Cate’s married life had been a quiet one. No one but she, Larry and her parents had known she was carrying another man’s baby. Or that their union hadn’t been consummated. Later, it had been, of course. Aware that eventually, intimacy would be part of the bargain, she’d submitted to Larry’s gentle lovemaking without complaint. And after a while it hadn’t felt so strange to her. To her surprise she’d even enjoyed the closeness it brought. But she’d never climaxed, never felt the sweet, self-annihilating pleasure Danny had taught her to crave.
The McDonoughs had insisted Cate and Larry mustn’t tell his parents they were expecting a child until a few months had passed. Similarly, they weren’t to send out birth notices until their baby was at least five or six months old. People could count and, if they wanted to move back to Beckwith someday without revealing their child’s true parentage, it was essential to falsify his or her age. That way, people wouldn’t talk. Should he ever return, it wouldn’t occur to Danny Finn to seek the child’s custody.
Larry had decided for the sake of keeping peace in the family, that they should comply with the McDonoughs’ wishes. And Cate had deferred to him, though she’d been uncomfortable about the subterfuge. For as long as she lived, she would never forget the embarrassment she’d felt over the Andersons’ exclamation about what a big boy Brian was for his age the first time they’d visited.
She and Larry had remained in the Minneapolis area until Brian was officially ten years old. At that juncture, recently diagnosed with leukemia, Larry had broached the subject of “going home.” He liked small-town life and wanted Brian to finish growing up near his parents, given the fact that he himself might not be around to help raise the boy to adulthood.
Loath to return to a place where memories of Danny might catch her by the throat, yet with a heart aching for her husband, Cate had allowed him to talk her into it. Though Brian’s height had caused some comment about a possible starring role on the local basketball team when he reached high school age, it wasn’t so far out of range that anyone guessed their secret.
By that time, Cate had long since finished high school and gone on to college, where she’d earned her baccalaureate degree in English and qualified for her teaching certificate. Beckwith High School had been only too happy to hire her. His health as yet only moderately compromised, Larry had taken a sedentary job as a police dispatcher.
No one had mentioned Danny to Cate. And Cate hadn’t asked about him. Pleased to be near Brenda again, she’d discouraged any mention of him in their private conversations. Settling back into a life she’d once hoped to escape, and doing her best to be a good wife to a man she liked a great deal but could never love the way she’d loved Danny, she’d focused on making a home for him and Brian. Helping him deal with his illness. The everyday routine of their life together.
I can’t start over with Danny now, even if I’m still wild about him and Larry’s gone, Cate told herself miserably for the second time that evening. If I did, Danny would have to know the truth about Brian. And that might be more than Brian and Larry’s parents could accept. Somehow she’d have to make Danny understand that the past was past—not to be tampered with.
If only she could make herself believe it. The sensations that flooded her body as she relived his kisses didn’t help.
Chapter Three
Cate was in her neat yellow-and-white kitchen by 9:00 a.m. the following morning, pouring out glasses of orange juice and making blueberry pancakes for Brian, who was upstairs showering. As she worked, turning the pancakes on an electric griddle and transferring them to a warm, covered plate, snatches of an erotic dream she’d had just before waking drifted through her head.
Try as she would to dismiss them, the dream fragments wouldn’t leave her alone. Ultimately she gave in and let them come flooding back. In the dream she’d been lying naked beneath a breeze-scented top sheet and soft, old quilt in the small upstairs bedroom at her parents’ bungalow where she’d slept as a teenager. Though in real life Danny had never set foot in that house, he’d walked into the room as if he owned it. Without a word, but with a brazen look that had touched off ripples of longing in her deepest places, he’d stripped off his clothes and turned back the bedcovers.
Like her, he’d appeared in his present-day incarnation, as the vibrant, thirty-five-year-old man who’d kept his promise of “no hands” the night before, yet managed to leave her quivering with arousal. To feel him stroking her sleep-warmed flesh, if only in the ephemeral pleasure of a dream sequence—to imagine him caressing her, relearning every curve and hollow of her body as he kissed her senseless—had been to inhabit a deeply missed paradise where she suddenly longed to dwell.
She hadn’t realized how much she’d continued to crave his touch, the soul-satisfying intimacy they’d once shared. I’ve been like a zombie without him, she thought. A virtual sleepwalker, just going through the motions. Without Larry’s quiet affection and support, all she had was Brian, and she didn’t want to lean on him too much. Meanwhile, the sensuous woman in her was hurting.
If only I dared to let Danny make love to me, she yearned. He seems to want that, too. As she removed several pancakes from the griddle that had scorched as a result of her inattention and put them down the garbage disposal, she could feel her nipples tighten beneath her sweatshirt. Loving Danny would be like wetting her face with rain after trudging through a scorching desert. It would be manna to her starvation.
In her real, everyday life, with its demands and obligations, nothing even remotely similar to what she was imagining could be allowed to take place. Though her attraction to Danny was as powerful as ever, it was effectively trumped by her concern for Brian’s welfare and her deep unwillingness to hurt the Andersons.
She tensed when the phone rang. Danny? she wondered, excitement and anticipation prickling her skin as she reached for the receiver. Would he call here and risk getting Brian? The answer, of course, was that he would if he wanted to—unless she forbade him the privilege. Not knowing what he might propose if he were on the other end of the line was tying her stomach in knots.
“Hello?” she said, picking up the receiver, her tentative greeting in the form of a question.
The unexpected rasp of her father’s voice in her ear almost made her jump.
“I suppose you’ve heard your ex-lover’s back in town,”