“The bus?” she said stupidly.
“You always walk, so Charlie can ride his bike.” Cal looked around pointedly. There was no bike because, he was right, they hadn’t had time to bring it. Charlie wanted to ride his bike everywhere. It was the smallest two-wheeler Daisy had ever seen, but Charlie loved it. Daisy was sure he would have slept with it every night if she hadn’t put her foot down. Cal had given it to Charlie for his fourth birthday.
Daisy had protested, had said he was too young, that no four-year-old needed a bike.
“Not every four-year-old,” Cal had agreed. “Just this one.” He’d met her skeptical gaze with confident brown eyes and quiet certainty. “Because he wants it more than anything on earth.”
Daisy couldn’t argue with that. If Charlie’s first word hadn’t been bike it had been in the first ten. He’d pointed and crowed, “Bike!” well before his first birthday. And he’d been desperate for a bicycle last winter. She hadn’t thought it would last. But Cal had insisted, and he’d been right.
Charlie’s eyes had shone when he’d spotted the bike that morning. And over the past six months, his love for it had only grown. Since Cal had helped him learn to balance and he could now ride it unaided, Charlie wanted to ride it everywhere.
Usually she let him ride to the park while she walked alongside him. But they had been late today because … because of her visitor.
She was suddenly aware that Cal was watching her, not the game. “He doesn’t have to ride his bike every time,” she said testily. “And it’s nearly dark.”
“True.” Cal stretched his legs out in front of him and leaned back, resting his weight on his elbows and forearms as his gaze slowly moved away from her to focus on the game, yelling at the batter to focus. Then, still keeping his gaze on the batter, he persisted quietly, “So why don’t you just tell me.”
He wasn’t going to leave it alone. She’d never won an argument with Cal. She’d never been able to convince him of anything. If he was wrong, he couldn’t be told. He always had to figure it out himself—like his “I can love anyone I will myself to” edict. He’d been as wrong about that as she had been about her “love at first sight” belief.
Clearly, when it came to love, the two of them didn’t know what they were talking about.
Now he stared at her and she plucked at the grass beside the blanket, stared at it. Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed. She tried to make it into a mantra so she could convince herself. But she was no better at lying to herself than she was at lying to her ex-husband. Finally she raised her gaze to meet his as he turned away from the game to look at her. “I saw Alex.”
There was the crack of bat hitting ball. Whoops and yells abounded.
Cal never turned his head to see what happened. His eyes never left Daisy’s. He blinked once. That was all. The rest of his body went still, though. And his words, when they came, were quiet. “Saw him where?”
Daisy ran her tongue over dry lips. “He came to my office.”
Cal waited, not pressing, allowing her to tell the story in her own way, in her own time.
And she couldn’t quite suppress the ghost of a smile that touched her lips. “Looking for a matchmaker.”
“What!” Cal’s jaw dropped.
Hysterical laughter bubbled up just as it had threatened to do when Alex told her. This time Daisy gave in to it. “He’s looking for a wife.”
“You?” Cal demanded.
“No. He was as surprised as I was when he knocked on my door. He didn’t know he was coming to see me.”
“Then how—?”
“Lukas sent him.”
Cal’s eyes widened. His teeth came together. “Lukas needs to mind his own business.”
“Of course. But Lukas never does. Besides, he didn’t have any idea what he was doing. He never knew about Alex and me. No one did.” No one ever had except Cal—and only because when she’d discovered she was pregnant, she’d had to talk to someone. “Don’t blame Lukas. He thinks he’s doing me a favor sending clients my way. And he is, I suppose. Most of the time. Not this time,” she said quietly.
“No.” Cal stared down at his fingers plucking at the grass for a moment. Then his gaze lifted and went toward Charlie who was still playing with his friend in the dirt. The question was there, but unspoken.
“I didn’t say a word.”
“But he—”
Daisy shook her head. “No. That hasn’t changed. He wouldn’t want to know.”
“Still?” Cal persisted.
“No. He doesn’t want relationships any more than he ever did,” Daisy said firmly. “He doesn’t want a real wife—he wants a woman to take to social events and go to bed with. It will save him the effort of having to go out and find one, charm one.”
“He charmed you,” Cal pointed out.
Cal, of course, knew that. He knew the whole sordid story.
She had met Cal Connolly when she’d taken the job with Finn after college. Cal had been the photographer she’d replaced, Finn’s assistant before her.
Even after Cal hung out his own shingle, he had regularly come by Finn’s to talk shop. Daisy had been included in the conversation. She learned a great deal from both of them.
Finn was brilliant, mercurial—and impatient. Cal was steadier, calmer, more methodical. He didn’t yell quite as much. Finn had a wife and growing family. Cal was single, on his own. So it was Cal she began to spend time with. And while Finn had always remained her mentor, Cal had quickly become her best pal.
When she wasn’t working for Finn, she had spent hours working with Cal, talking with him, arguing with him. They argued about everything from camera lenses to baseball teams to sushi rolls, from free will to evolution to love at first sight.
That had always been their biggest argument: did you love because—bang!—it hit you between the eyes? Or did you love because you decided who the right person was and made up your mind?
Because of her parents, Daisy had been a staunch believer in the “love at first sight” notion.
“I just haven’t met the right person,” she had maintained over and over. “When I do, I’ll know. In an instant. And it will be perfect.”
But Cal had scoffed at that. Ever the logical realist, he’d said, “Nonsense. I don’t believe it for a minute. That makes you nothing but a victim of your hormones.”
“It’s not hormones. It’s instinct.”
But Cal had disagreed. “You can will whom you love,” he’d told her firmly. “It’s a rational decision.”
So when he’d proposed to her, he’d been determined to demonstrate just that. “Obviously your way doesn’t work,” he’d pointed out. “So we’ll try it my way now.”
And Daisy, because she did love Cal—just not the way she thought she loved Alex—had faced the truth of her own folly. And she’d said yes.
It turned out they were both wrong. But they’d given it their best shot. And Daisy still did believe in love—now she had a codicil: it was apparently for other people.
Now Daisy let out a sigh and wrapped a blade of grass around her finger where Cal’s wedding ring once had been.
“So, are you going to do it? Matchmake for him?” Cal asked.