She saw it in his hand, went completely still as if in shock, put her fingertips against her mouth and swallowed. “Oh, MJ …” she breathed.
“Open it,” he said softly and passed it to her. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, and cradled it in her hand as if it was as fragile as a quail’s egg.
“Yes,” she said, half-laughing, almost in tears. “Oh, yes!”
Her fingers were shaking. It took her a good thirty seconds to get the box open, and there it was, the diamond hair clip dazzling white and gold against the deep blue. He’d had a private, hour-long session in the back room of the very exclusive Vegas jewelry store this afternoon, where he’d been shown tray after tray of bracelets, necklaces and earrings, but this was what he’d settled on because of her beautiful hair.
“Ohh,” she said abruptly and put the box down. “Oh, wow. Wow. It’s—it’s beautiful.”
“Do you like it?” Rather an ego-driven question, he realized at once. But it was sincere, too. He wanted to know. He wanted her to love it. “They’re diamonds.”
In case she was in any doubt.
Six figures’ worth. He wasn’t going to reveal the exact price he’d paid, but she would have to realize it was a lot.
She was staring down at it, hadn’t moved to touch it again, wasn’t speaking. He took a too-large gulp of wine and regretted it. He already felt a little hazy. Focusing on her face more closely, he realized she wasn’t reacting quite the way he’d expected.
“I—I can’t accept this, MJ.”
“Of course you can. Why not?”
She groped for words, while the velvet box sat on the table in front of her, untouched. Why didn’t she take out the clip and look at it more closely? Trace those pretty fingertips over the diamonds and gold? Why was she having such trouble? He could almost see the wheels turning in her head.
Stupidly, he took yet another gulp of wine, and then he looked at the square velvet box again and suddenly he knew. She had thought there was going to be a ring in there. She was convinced. It was the right shape, maybe a tiny bit larger, such an easy mistake to make. What had she said to him before she’d opened it?
“Yes. Oh, yes!”
Ah, hell, and there should have been a ring.
In an instant, it was startlingly clear to him. She’d thought at first that he was proposing, but she’d quickly realized her mistake. Anything less than a ring looked to her like a payment for sex, like the beginning of the end. She was a waitress. It was probably what she thought she deserved.
Now she was trying to calculate whether the gift was worth—literally worth—taking, whether it was all she was ever going to get from the relationship, whether he was using it to start the process of kissing her off and what room she had to maneuver in all of this.
It made him wince and it made him ache.
He’d wanted so much to make her happy with the expensive gift, not send her into a spin of desperate calculation and doubt like this. He cared about her happiness, he realized. Cared far more than he’d thought.
“Let’s get married.” He said it before he knew he was going to, and it was crazy and impulsive and the exact opposite of his usual considered decision-making, but he didn’t want to take it back. He took her hands across the table. “Alicia, it’s not a ring. You thought it was going to be, but it’s not and that’s my fault, but let’s get married anyhow, and we’ll get a ring for you later.”
She laughed, not daring to believe him now, when she’d been wrong before. “Married, MJ?”
“Yes, why the hell not? Tonight. This is Vegas. If we skip dessert, we can probably be married in half an hour.”
“Half an hour? Married?”
“I want to, Alicia. I really, really want to!”
Now she was laughing and crying. The tears sparkled on her lashes, and he didn’t regret what he’d said for a moment. “Yes, MJ. If you really mean it, yes!” she said.
It took a little longer than half an hour but not by much. At ten in the evening, there they were in the glitzy chapel, wearing their dinner clothes, still pleasantly mellow and happy from the wine, and saying their sketchy vows.
Alicia wore her strapless dress, a kiss of sunburn on her shoulders, and the glittering diamond barrette in her gorgeous piled-up hair, while MJ’s whole body buzzed with a giddy sense of triumph and rightness that almost took his breath away.
Chapter Five
But that was then.
He arrived home from the hospital at nine o’clock. It was now twenty-six hours, 520 miles of driving, four hours of surgery and five hours of medical admin and patient care since he’d first found Alicia’s note.
The kitchen was just the way he’d left it, with the microwave dish still sitting on the countertop, containing some crumbs and half a shriveled chicken nugget. It was, what, Thursday? Their housekeeper, Rosanna, came on Mondays and Fridays. She usually replenished their grocery supplies on a Friday, he understood, so there was probably not much food left in the place.
He’d never needed to think about this kind of thing in his life. Mom was a great cook. In college and medical school, he had the full meal plan. Later, living on his own, he’d eaten out or ordered in for almost every meal that he hadn’t grabbed at the hospital café. On his marriage, he’d given Alicia a free hand and she’d set everything up. Most of the time, he never even knew where it came from—if Rosanna had cooked it, or Alicia herself, or if it came from a deli or a caterer. This was New York City. Food just … was.
Except when it wasn’t.
His gut felt terrible, a mix of physical hunger and emotional wrenching that he didn’t know how to damp down. He didn’t want to go out. He didn’t want to hunt up take-out menus and get on the phone. He didn’t really want to eat at all but knew he should.
Life went on.
He needed to have some semblance of a brain in place, in order to talk to Alicia about what happened next.
In the end, he found a couple of eggs and a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer, and made an inept version of scrambled eggs on toast. He didn’t think to put butter in the skillet, so the eggs stuck, and when he tried adding water to unstick them, he ended up with unappetizing eggy slush ladled onto toast that went soggy in seconds.
He ate it anyhow, disguised with some chunks of cheese and a too-liberal shake of pepper and salt.
Then he called his wife.
She would know it was him before she even had the phone to her ear. MJ would have come up on her phone screen. And she must have expected a call from him, anyhow. She knew he wasn’t going to let this go. She sounded guarded and polite, and he fought for the right tone.
“How’re the kids?” he heard himself ask. Heard the scratch in his voice, too.
Hell, it hurt not to be with them. Alicia would have said he barely saw them, but, shoot, that didn’t mean he didn’t care. His awareness of their peacefully sleeping presence when he came home to the apartment at night or left in the early morning nourished him at a level he’d never tried to put into words. The times he did see them were incredibly precious, if demanding, and for all the times when he wasn’t around, he had enormous confidence in Alicia as a mother.
Damn, did he not tell her that enough, or something?
He tried to remember the last time he had, and couldn’t. To him it was so obvious—why did she need to hear it?
“They’re asleep,” she said. “Tired.”
“What did you do today?”