She caught him looking and smiled. He smiled back. The awkwardness between them had eased up and she wasn’t dodging his gaze anymore. He liked that. A lot.
“Much more of this and I’ll take everything you own,” Donnie Cox said, laying down his cards and sweeping the pile of paper clips into his own growing pile.
“Dammit.” Brody tried to force his attention back to the game.
“That’s a bad word,” Jason said. Really loudly.
“Sorry,” Brody said in the general direction of all the heads that swiveled to glare at him.
Most of the younger kids had grown bored with all the thinking that went into playing poker and were, probably much to Delaney’s delight, off playing Go Fish along with some game that seemed to consist of the kids slapping each other’s hands every time a jack turned up in the pile.
Once Jason moved on, probably lured away by the idea of slapping his brother, the guys played a few more hands before they lost interest. Brody shuffled the cards, strangely comforted by the familiar feel and motion in his hands, but he didn’t deal again.
“Becks is after me to pump you for information, you know,” Donnie said. “Took you guys quite a while to find paper clips considering every room in this building is, you know, a school room.”
“Delaney wasn’t comfortable taking them from just anybody’s classroom. One of the first grade teachers is a friend of hers, so we had to walk all the way to her room. And back.”
“Not judging. I wouldn’t mind a little alone time with my wife right about now.”
Brody wanted to point out he and Delaney hadn’t had that kind of alone time, but he figured it would go in one ear and out the other. People seemed to have made up their minds they were a couple again and nothing he said was going to keep the speculation down. It would only make them more determined to be right.
Maybe they were. He really wasn’t sure what was going on with them, but whatever it was felt right to him. It felt natural to kiss her and hold her hand in the hallway. What hadn’t felt natural was ending things in the classroom before it got any more physical. He’d wanted her badly—hell, he still did—but he hadn’t packed condoms for his less-than-two-days trip back to his hometown.
He glanced up again and caught Delaney looking at him. She was pretending to listen to the women around her talking, but the steamy look in her eyes almost made him flub his shuffle and blow cards everywhere.
“You two have to stop making eye contact,” his dad said, “or your mother’s going to get all kinds of ideas in her head.”
Brody jerked his attention back to the cards and dealt them out, without even asking if his dad and Donnie wanted in. He needed the distraction because he was starting to get ideas of his own in his head.
And those ideas were going to get him into nothing but trouble.
CHAPTER SIX
THINGS WERE QUIET in the gym on Wednesday morning. Nobody was sleeping soundly and it was starting to take a toll on people. And the sense of adventure was wearing off for the kids. They wanted their video games and favorite foods and their freedom. Everybody was doing their best to stay upbeat, if only for the children, but spirits were flagging.
Even if it came with an air of depression, Delaney was thankful for the quiet. She’d seen so much of Brody from a distance. He played with the kids and talked with the adults. Helped out wherever he could. Nobody would ever guess he’d been dragged back into the community against his will.
But she liked sitting on the floor with him in a quiet corner, on small cushions he’d made by folding up their blankets. They were side by side, and he had a sleeping Noah cradled in his left arm and the fingers of his right hand were laced through hers.
She’d be lying if she said it didn’t tug at her heart, the way they were sitting there like a little fake family. He was so good with Noah—and with the other kids—and she’d done a lot of thinking about what a good dad he’d be. Way too much thinking, actually. Images of him as a dad were getting all tangled up with her increasingly ticking biological clock and leading her down an imaginary path to heartbreak.
He’d been telling her about his early days on the poker circuit, when he was scrimping and saving every dollar he could make at odd jobs to pay his way into tournaments. It didn’t sound as glamorous as she’d first imagined, and she wondered how she would have fared if he’d taken her with him. Probably not very well. She wasn’t much of a risk-taker and never had been.
“I thought about you a lot in those days,” Brody said. “Correction—I still think about you a lot. I’ve missed you.”
“Not enough to pick up a phone and give me a call?” It was hard for her to reconcile all the times he’d told her he missed her and thought about her with the fact he’d never reached out to her.
“Sandy’s never forgiven me for the way I left, so she never mentions you on the phone and I was too proud to ask, but whenever I thought about you, I wanted to imagine you married, with some cute kids. A dog and a picket fence and a minivan.” There was a hint of sadness and maybe regret in his voice.
“Haven’t gotten there yet. Seems a little odd, though, if you missed me so much, that you’d imagine me living happily ever after with somebody else.”
“I needed you to be happy in my head, Delaney. If you were happy and had a good life, it made missing you worth it.”
She leaned her head against the wall and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “You felt less guilty, you mean.”
“That, too. But mostly I’d picture you living a life I couldn’t give you and know I made the right decision.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Tell me about your life now,” she said, because she was tired of rehashing the past. Maybe it was a little like rubbing salt in old wounds, but she wanted to picture him in his world.
“I work a lot. Actually, that’s pretty much all I do. If I’m not on a site dealing with a remodel, I’m meeting with real estate agents or financial backers. When I’m home, I’m usually on the computer, researching foreclosure lists and property values and a whole lot of boring stuff.”
“So what you do now is as risky as poker. You’re just gambling with properties instead of on cards.”
He chuckled, then bounced his arm gently up and down when Noah squirmed. “Maybe, but luck gets less of a say. I have good instincts, but I also do my research. Flipping real estate might be a gamble, but I stack the deck in my favor.”
“Where do you live?” It felt ridiculous, having to ask that question, but at least it was a reminder he’d made a life for himself somewhere else, and it didn’t include her.
“I have a condo in Connecticut, but I travel a lot. I don’t have an office to speak of, even though Marjorie picked the title office manager for herself. She runs things for me, but out of her house.”
He lived in Connecticut. Only a couple of states away. She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around that. She wanted to ask him what his condo looked like, maybe so she could picture him in it, but she didn’t want to sound weird.
“Sandy doesn’t tell me much about your life,” she said. “I think she’s afraid to say something that might hurt me, so I know almost nothing about the last five years of your life.”
“Just work, like I said.”
What about women? Of course he’d dated. He was young and attractive and he’d never wanted for female attention, even when she’d been on his arm. But had he been in love since Delaney? She didn’t think a marriage