Lilian Darcy – A Marriage Worth Fighting For (страница 7)

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?”

“Went to a park. We had a picnic. Which ended up taking place in the car because it began to rain. But we had fun anyway.” The forced cheeriness in the word fun reminded him that he wasn’t the only one who’d had to carry on as usual today, despite the upheaval of their separation.

“I’m glad,” he answered her mechanically, then cut to the chase. “What have you said to them, Alicia? What do they know?”

“I haven’t said anything yet. For them, we’re on vacation, that’s all. At some point, of course—”

He jumped in. “You can’t just spring it on them. And you can’t do it when I’m not around. We have to tell them together. I will not have my children exposed to that kind of conflict or have them doubt my role as their father in any way.” In his urgency, he spoke with more anger than he’d intended.

Hell, he was so unused to anything like this!

He wasn’t thinking of the prospect of divorce, there—of course he wasn’t used to that!

But he wasn’t accustomed in any area to having his will thwarted. This seemed almost shameful on his part, certainly nothing to be proud of, but that’s how it was. He was a top surgeon. People did what he wanted. Always.

Alicia, too. Maura and their previous nanny, Kate, another two nannies before that. And Rosanna, the rare times he saw her.

Abby and Tyler were almost the only human beings who ever defied him.

“Time to get out of the bath now, sweetheart. Both of you.”

“No! Not yet!”

“No, no, no!”

He realized he wasn’t comfortable when that happened. He tended to opt out and have Alicia or the nanny take over. “Here, they’re unmanageable tonight, and I’m tired.”

But Alicia was speaking now. He focused quickly on her voice down the line. “Of course I won’t just spring it on them, MJ. Is that really who you think I am? Someone who would risk destroying my own children’s sense of emotional security that way, like Anna and James are doing? Someone who would use them as a weapon against you?”

“No … No, I’m not suggesting that.”

“You seemed to be.”

“Look, it wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t. Our marriage is nothing like what Anna and James had. If you’re saying it is—”

“No, no, I’m not. You’re right. There’s no comparison.” Something they agreed on! He felt a brief moment of relief.

“All I’m saying is that I want us to do this right. If we have to do it at all. I don’t want it, Alicia. If there’s anything I can do, anything I can say, any way I can change, or we can both change, talk so that—” He stopped.

Hell, was he begging?

She stayed silent at the end of the phone, after he’d broken off. He waited, head pounding, jaw tight. Should he seize the window opened up by her silence? Take the initiative? He didn’t know how.

She spoke again before he had any answers. “You’ll have to come up here again.” The words were slow and careful. “I do know that. Maybe it’s best not to put it off. Can you get some time?”

“This weekend,” he said quickly, while the back of his mind buzzed, rearranging his schedule, working out a few favors he could call in. In his position, it wasn’t easy to get a chunk of time off at short notice.

Alicia knew that, and he hoped she would see his willingness as a step toward—

Toward having this whole thing just go away!

But he’d begun to accept that this wasn’t going to be an easy fix.

“If you could, that would be great,” Alicia said, still with that slow, careful way of talking, as if she was having to bite her tongue not to yell at him or blurt out a hundred deeply felt grievances. “It doesn’t need to be the whole weekend….”

“It’s going to be the whole weekend. I’ll drive up Saturday morning, back down Sunday night.” Another ten hours in the car. He didn’t care.

“All right, if you want. I think you’d better book into a motel.”

“What will the children think of that?”

Thick silence. “Make a reservation, please, MJ. It—it may turn out that you can cancel it …” He felt a rush of relief and hope. Short-lived.

“… if we can stay civilized enough for you to sleep in the study.”

“In the study?”

“I made up a folding bed there for Maura—of course, she never used it—and I haven’t put it away yet. There are really only the two bedrooms. Abby and Tyler are sharing. But they don’t need to know where you’re sleeping. Anyway, they’re not going to see our choice of sleeping arrangements—” a pause “—the way an adult sees it.”

“No.”

So this was how she saw the physical side of their marriage, as a “choice of sleeping arrangements.” It felt like a body blow. Like a kick in the—