“Don’t men need a recovery period?” I ask. “You’re almost thirty and everything.”
His hips slow down as he thinks about it.
“That’s enough,” he says, rolling me over and pulling my legs up to his shoulders as I laugh.
When I wake up the next morning, legs like jellyand definitely feeling where Wallace was last night, I see him already in a suit, looping his tie in the mirror.
“Oh, you are not doing this!” I snap, crawling out of bed. “No! No suits!”
“My father just got out of the hospital.” He straightens the tie into a tidy Windsor knot and pulls on his jacket, wincing slightly. “There’s still a clutter of whiney clients to reassure.”
His British accent is back.
“Alastair can make some phone calls!” Grabbing his jacket, I make him look at me. “Don’t, please. I can’t stand to watch the light go out in your eyes again. This isn’t you.”
Gently taking my hands, he kisses them. “I am a Taylor as well as a MacTavish,” he says. “And I am the only one.”
“What- what about Isobel? We talked a lot when I was visiting your dad. She’s majoring in finance, right?”
“Isobel is only twenty-two. I’m twenty-eight. This…” His head drops. “This is for my father. I owe him for all the years I stayed away. He never complained, but I will be here for as long as he needs me.” He frowns, brushing my hair away from the healing scar on my forehead. “Can you be happy here?”
I kiss his beautiful lips, his cheeks, and his chin. “I will be happy wherever I’m with you. But you won’t be. Not here.”
His phone lights up on the dresser next to his watch. “That’s Dad’s ringtone.” He lets go of me to answer it. “Dad? Are you all right? Yes, I will stop asking you that. I’ll probably be the only one. People can’t help themselves.”
Wallace looks at me, frowning. “Aye- yes, she’s right here. Of course. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He eyes my wrinkled pajama bottoms. “How quickly can you change? Dad wants to see us both.”
“On it,” I fake a smile that drops the minute he leaves the bedroom.
Please don’t ask your son to stay here. Please.
The car ride over is silent. I’m suitably attired in a green cashmere dress and my hair in a French twist, looking, I think bleakly, like a CEO’s wife.
This is my first time at Sorcha and Alastair’s home, and it is awe-inspiring. It stretches grandly down the block and I suspect a couple of other homes were knocked down to enlarge it. It’s a Tudor with stately beams and a turret on each end of the house. A butler who could possibly be James’ twin answers the door.
“Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor. Your parents are in the study.”
Mactavish-Taylor!I want to snap, instead, I give a polite smile, just like Wallace.
He steps aside and Wallace takes my hand, leading me down the hallway with a myriad of portraits of Taylor ancestors, looking down at us disapprovingly.
The study, thank god, has no ancestors on the walls. Instead, there’s stacks of books, vases of flowers and a comfortable set of furniture covered in a dark tweed material by the fireplace.
Which is lit.
“Welcome,” Sorcha gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Come sit down quickly, or Alastair will insist on standing up with his proper British manners.”
“I’m capable of getting up, darling,” Alastair says patiently. “There are no bullets left in me. My heart is fine.”
“So, you’ve had just as much luck getting him to slow down as I have with your son, huh?” Sorcha and I exchange smiles. Nothing like critically wounded husbands to really make you bond with your mother-in-law.
“That’s a given,” she sighs.
Wallace sits next to me, closest to the fireplace, of course. Alastair had been sitting like a king in the huge armchair, but he rises gracefully to sit next to Sorcha. It’s a weird sort of standoff, us on onecouch, and them facing us on the other.
No one’s talking.
