The slight, strange tension in the room seemed to have gone, chased by the hug. “Honey, forget slow, we’re just so happy you’re okay,” Lisa said. “Talking. Walking. Getting better every day. Home.”
“I know.” Jodie blinked back sudden tears as they let each other go. “Me, too.”
Devlin Browne was standing on the deck when she reached it, his dark hair showing reddish glints in the sun, his body tall and strong; there was no evidence of the accident that had injured the two of them in such different ways, nine months ago. He grinned at the sight of her, from behind his sunglasses. “Look at you!” She wished she could see the expression in his blue eyes. He ran his life with such quiet confidence and certainty. She loved that about him, wished right now that some of his qualities would rub off on her.
“Yeah,” she drawled in reply, “all the grace of a ballerina.”
With a walking frame for a dance partner. The doctors and therapists had promised that if she worked hard, she’d be rid of it soon. She planned to astonish them with her progress.
“Don’t knock it,” Dev said. “Compared to how you were even a week ago.”
“I know. I’m not knocking it, believe me.” She felt so self-conscious in his presence, so aware of the strong length of his body. Nine months and more since those three explosive nights of lovemaking, but to her they felt like yesterday. The way their bodies seemed to fit together so perfectly. The smell of him, warm and fresh and male. The words he’d whispered to her in the dark, naked and blunt and charged with sensual heat. Did he ever think about it?
Lisa helped her to sit down and took away the frame, while Elin handed her an ice-cold glass of tropical juice. The deck was dappled with sun and shade, and there was a breeze. It was a perfect day. Dev pulled up an Adirondack chair to sit beside her. He leaned against the wooden seat-back, casually stretched his arms. But his mood wasn’t as casual as he wanted her to think. His gaze seemed intently focused behind those concealing sunglasses, and she didn’t know if his sitting so close was significant.
Were they dating?
Could she ask?
Um, excuse me, Dev, I was in a coma for nearly eight months, and rehab since. Can you just catch me up on the current status of our relationship?
A thought struck her. That Not Ready comment of Lisa’s a few minutes ago …
Not Ready to hear that Dev had moved on to someone else?
But she didn’t have time to examine the cold pit that opened deep in her stomach at this idea. There shouldn’t be a pit! He’d been up front with her nine months ago. “I have nothing to offer, Jodie,” he’d said. “I’m only here until Dad is ready to go back to work. My career is in New York, it’s pretty full-on, no room for commitment, and I’m not looking for it. I really like being with you, but if you’re interested in something long-term, it’s not with me.”
How did a woman respond to something like that? She knew Dev had said it out of innate honesty and goodness of heart. He wasn’t the kind of man who promised what he couldn’t deliver, or tricked a woman into bed with sweet-talking lies. He called it how he saw it, and when he laid his cards on the table, he laid them straight.
Nine months ago he’d been all about the short term, about saying goodbye when it was over, with a big grin, warm wishes and no regrets for either of them, yet now he was sitting beside her, searching her face, examining the set of her shoulders as if he cared that she might not be coping.
Which she wasn’t, fully.
Everything was happening too fast. Dev stood up to greet Lisa’s husband. Mom and Dad came out from the kitchen, Dad in full male barbecue armor, with plastic apron and an impressive weaponry of implements. The front doorbell rang and Elin went to answer it.
And sister number three—Maddy—and her husband, John, were here, having at last managed to negotiate the trip from their car. They’d come around the side of the house and climbed the steps to the deck carrying two bulging diaper bags, some kind of squishy portable baby gym and a baby in a carrier.
Their baby. Their little girl. Tiny. Just a few weeks old. Jodie hadn’t even known Maddy was pregnant. She’d only been told about baby Lucy after she was born—another questionable instance of Not Ready—and hadn’t seen her yet, because Maddy and John lived in Cincinnati, two hours from Leighville, the Palmer family’s Southern Ohio hometown.
“Oh, she’s asleep!” Mom crooned. “Oh, what an angel! She already looks so much bigger than she did two weeks ago.”
“Can we put her somewhere quiet?” Maddy asked.
But it was too late. The baby began to waken, stretching her little body in the cramped space of the car carrier and letting out a keening cry.
“Oh, she needs a feed,” Maddy said. “Where shall I go?”
“Not here,” Dad said. He was a traditional man, with a passion for woodworking and gadgetry. In his world, feeding and diaper changes didn’t belong in the same space as a barbecue.
“You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was just to get here, all the gear we had to bring. John, can you set up some pillows for me in …? Oh, where!”
“My room,” Jodie said quickly. “There’s a heap of pillows, and fresh flowers, and a rocking chair.”
“Oops, I’m going to have to change her first….” But John had already gone to ready the room. Maddy held Lucy with the baby’s legs awkwardly dangling and her little face screwed up as she screamed, and looked around for the diaper bag. “She’s in a mess. Oh, I’m not good at any of this yet! Where’s the monitor? We’ll need it if she naps. I have no idea if she will. And when she cries like this … First baby at thirty-six, people do say it’s harder.”
“Here, don’t worry, it’s fine.” Of all people, it was Dev who stepped forward and took the crying baby. He cradled her against his shoulder and commenced a kind of rocking sway and a rhythmic soothing sound. “Shh-sh, shh-sh, it’s okay, Mommy’s coming in a minute, shh-sh, shh-sh.” Jodie felt a strange, unwanted tingling in her breasts and a familiar yearning in her heart. Why did he do this to her when she tried so hard to stay sensible? How could he possibly look so confident and so good, holding a poop-stained baby? Why was he still in Ohio, and not back in New York?
She had a vivid flashback, suddenly, to the first night they’d made love. Bed on the first date. You weren’t supposed to do that, if you were a female with a warm heart, but of course it hadn’t felt like the first date. She’d known Dev since she was sixteen, and she’d responded to him with half a lifetime of pent-up feeling—to his hands so right on her body, to his voice so familiar in her ear.
“Thank you, Dev!” Maddy unzipped the diaper bag and rummaged around inside. She didn’t seem surprised that Devlin had taken control, but Jodie was.
Not about the control, but about the thing he was in control of. If you were talking legal contracts or high finance or building plans, team sports, political wrangling, then, yes, Devlin Browne could take control in a heartbeat. Would always take control. But when it was a baby?
What did he know about babies?
He doesn’t even want kids.
The thought came out of nowhere, one of the memories from before the accident that her brain threw out apparently at random. “Did I have amnesia?” Jodie had asked at one point.
“Not like in the movies,” they—her doctors and therapists—had said. “But of course there are some gaps. Many of them you’ll eventually fill in. Some you never will.”
“Like the accident itself?”
“Yes,