Read the book: «Used-To-Be Lovers»

1

Trying hard to concentrate on her work, Sharon Morelli squinted as she placed a wispy chiffon peignoir exactly one inch from the next garment on the rack. This was a standard antiboredom procedure reserved for days when almost no customers wandered into her lingerie shop, Teddy Bares. She was so absorbed in the task that she jumped when two dark brown eyes looked at her over the bar and a deep voice said, “Business must be slow.”

Sharon put one hand to her pounding heart, drawing in a deep breath and letting it out again. Clearly, Tony hadn’t lost his gift for catching her at a disadvantage, despite the fact that their divorce had been final for months. “Business is just fine,” she snapped, hurrying behind the counter and trying to look busy with a stack of old receipts that had already been checked, rechecked and entered into the ledgers.

Without looking up she was aware that Tony had followed her, that he was standing very close. She also knew he was wearing battered jeans and a blue cambric work shirt open halfway down his chest, though she would never have admitted noticing such details.

“Sharon,” he said, with the same quiet authority that made him so effective as the head of a thriving construction company and as a father to their two children.

She made herself meet his gaze, her hazel eyes linking with his brown ones, and jutted out her chin a little way. “What?” she snapped, feeling defensive. It was her turn to live in the house with Briana and Matt, and she would fight for that right if Tony had any ideas to the contrary.

He rolled his expressive eyes and folded his arms. “Relax,” he said, and suddenly the shop seemed too small to contain his blatant masculinity. “We’ve got a project a couple of miles from here, so I stopped by to tell you that Matt is grounded for the week and Briana’s with Mama—the orthodontist tightened her braces yesterday and her teeth are sore.”

Sharon sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. She’d worked hard at overcoming her resentment toward Tony’s mother, but there were times when it snuck up on her. Like now. Damn, even after all this time it hurt that Briana was Carmen’s child and not her own.

Beautiful, perfect Carmen, much mourned by the senior Mrs. Morelli. Eleven years after her tragic death in an automobile accident, Carmen was still a regular topic of lament in Tony’s extended family.

To Sharon’s surprise, a strong, sun-browned hand reached out to cup her chin. “Hey,” Tony said in a gentle undertone, “what did I say?”

It was a reasonable question, but Sharon couldn’t answer. Not without looking and feeling like a complete fool. She turned from his touch and tried to compose herself to face him again. If there was one thing she didn’t want to deal with, it was Maria Morelli’s polite disapproval. “I’d appreciate it if you’d pick Bri up and bring her by the house after you’re through work for the day,” she said in a small voice.

Tony’s hesitation was eloquent. He didn’t understand Sharon’s reluctance to spend any more time than absolutely necessary with his mother, and he never had. “All right,” he finally conceded with a raspy sigh, and when Sharon looked around he was gone.

She missed him sorely.

It was with relief that Sharon closed the shop four hours later. After putting down the top on her yellow roadster, she drove out of the mall parking lot. There were precious few days of summer left; it was time to take the kids on the annual shopping safari in search of school clothes.

Sharon drew in a deep breath of fresh air and felt better. She passed by shops with quaint facades, a couple of restaurants, a combination drugstore and post office. Port Webster, nestled on Washington’s Puget Sound, was a small, picturesque place, and it was growing steadily.

On the way to the house she and Tony had designed and planned to share forever, she went by a harborful of boats with colorful sails bobbing on the blue water, but she didn’t notice the view.

Her mind was on the craziness of their situation. She really hated moving back and forth between her apartment and that splendid Tudor structure on Tamarack Drive, but the divorce mediators had suggested the plan as a way of giving the children a measure of emotional security. Therefore, she lived in the house three days out of each week for one month, four days the next, alternating with Tony.

Sharon suspected that the arrangement made everyone else feel just as disjointed and confused as she did, though no one had confessed to that. It was hard to remember who was supposed to be where and when, but she knew she was going to have to learn to live with the assorted hassles. The only alternative would be a long, bitter custody battle, and she had no legal rights where Briana was concerned. Tony could simply refuse to allow her to see the child, and that would be like having a part of her soul torn from her.

Of course he hadn’t mentioned any such thing, but when it came to divorces, anything could happen.

When she reached the house, which stood alone at the end of a long road and was flanked on three sides by towering pine trees, Matt was on his skateboard in the driveway. With his dark hair and eyes, he was, at seven, a miniature version of Tony.

At the sight of Sharon, his face lighted up and he flipped the skateboard expertly into one hand.

“I hear you’re grounded,” she said, after she’d gotten out of the car and an energetic hug had been exchanged.

Matt nodded, his expression glum at the reminder. “Yeah,” he admitted. “It isn’t fair, neither.”

Sharon ruffled his hair as they walked up the stone steps to the massive front doors. “I’ll be the judge of that,” she teased. “Exactly what did you do?”

They were in the entryway, and Sharon tossed her purse onto a gleaming wooden table brought to America by some ancestor of Tony’s. She would carry her overnight bag in from the trunk of the roadster later.

“Well?” she prompted, when Matt hesitated.

“I put Briana’s goldfish in the pool,” he confessed dismally. He gave Sharon a look of grudging chagrin. “How was I supposed to know the chlorine would hurt them?”

Sharon sighed. “Your dad was right to ground you.” She went on to do her admittedly bad imitation of an old-time gangster, talking out of one side of her mouth. “You know the rules, kid—we don’t mess with other people’s stuff around here.”

Before Matt could respond to that, Mrs. Harry, the housekeeper, pushed the vacuum across the living room carpet and then switched off the machine to greet Sharon with a big smile. “Welcome home, Mrs. Morelli,” she said.

Sharon’s throat felt thick, but she returned the older woman’s hello before excusing herself to go upstairs.

Walking into the bedroom she had once shared with Tony was no easier than it had been the first night of their separation. There were so many memories.

Resolutely, Sharon shed the pearls, panty hose and silk dress she’d worn to Teddy Bares and put them neatly away. Then she pulled jeans, a Seahawks T-shirt and crew socks from her bureau and shimmied into them.

As she dressed, she took a mental inventory of herself. Her golden-brown hair, slender figure and wide hazel eyes got short shrift. The person Sharon visualized in her mind was short—five foot one—and sported a pair of thighs that might have been a shade thinner. With a sigh, Sharon knelt to search the floor of the closet for her favorite pair of sneakers. Her mind was focused wholly on the job.

A masculine chuckle made her draw back and swing her head around. Tony was standing just inside the bedroom doorway, beaming.

Sharon was instantly self-conscious. “Do you get some kind of sick kick out of startling me, Morelli?” she demanded.

Her ex-husband sat down on the end of the bed and assumed an expression of pained innocence. He even laid one hand to his heart. “Here I was,” he began dramatically, “congratulating myself on overcoming my entire heritage as an Italian male by not pinching you, and you wound me with a question like that.”

Sharon went back to looking for her sneakers, and when she found them, she sat down on the floor to wrench them onto her feet. “Where are the kids?” she asked to change the subject.

“Why do you ask?” he countered immediately.

Tony had showered and exchanged his work clothes for shorts and a tank top, and he looked good. So good that memories flooded Sharon’s mind and, blushing, she had to look away.

He laughed, reading her thoughts as easily as he had in the early days of their marriage when things had been less complex.

Sharon shrugged and went to stand in front of the vanity table, busily brushing her hair. Heat coursed through her as she recalled some of times she and Tony had made love in that room at the end of the workday….

And then he was standing behind her, his strong hands light on her shoulders, turning her into his embrace. Her head tilted back as his mouth descended toward hers, and a familiar jolt sparked her senses when he kissed her. At the same time, Tony molded her close. Dear God, it would be all too easy to shut and lock the door and surrender to him. He was so very skillful at arousing her.

After a fierce battle with her own desires, Sharon withdrew, wide-eyed and breathless. This was wrong; she and Tony were divorced, and she was never going to be able to get on with her life if she allowed him to make love to her. “We can’t,” she said, and even though the words had been meant to sound light, they throbbed with despair.

Tony was still standing entirely too close, making Sharon aware of every muscle in his powerful body. His voice was low and practically hypnotic, and his hands rested on the bare skin of her upper arms. “Why not?” he asked.

For the life of her, Sharon couldn’t answer. She was saved by Briana’s appearance in the doorway.

At twelve, Briana was already beautiful. Her thick mahogany hair trailed down her back in a rich, tumbling cascade, and her brown eyes were flecked with tiny sparks of gold. Only the petulant expression on her face and the wires on her teeth kept her from looking like an angel in a Renaissance painting.

Sharon loved the child as if she were her own. “Hi, sweetie,” she said sympathetically, able now to step out of Tony’s embrace. She laid a motherly hand to the girl’s forehead. “How do you feel?”

“Lousy,” the girl responded. “Every tooth in my head hurts, and did Dad tell you what Matt did to my goldfish?” Before Sharon could answer, she complained, “You should have seen it, Mom. It was mass murder.”

“We’ll get you more fish,” Sharon said, putting one arm around Bri’s shoulders.

“Matt will get her more fish,” Tony corrected, and there was an impatient set to his jaw as he passed Briana and Sharon to leave the room. “See you at the next changing of the guard,” he added in a clipped tone, and then he was gone.

A familiar bereft feeling came over Sharon, but she battled it by throwing herself into motherhood.

“Is anybody hungry?” she asked minutes later in the enormous kitchen. As a general rule, Tony was more at home in this room than she was, but for the next three days—or was it four?—the kids’ meals would be her responsibility.

“Let’s go out for pizza!” Matt suggested exuberantly. He was standing on the raised hearth of the double fireplace that served both the kitchen and dining room, and Sharon suspected that he’d been going back and forth through the opening—a forbidden pursuit.

“What a rotten idea,” Bri whined, turning imploring eyes to Sharon. “Mom, I’m a person in pain!”

Matt opened his mouth to comment, and Sharon held up both hands in a demand for silence. “Enough, both of you,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere—not tonight, anyway. We’re eating right here.”

With that, Sharon went to the cupboard and ferreted out the supply of canned pasta she’d stashed at the back. There was spaghetti, ravioli and lasagna to choose from.

“Gramma would have a heart attack if she knew you were feeding us that stuff,” Bri remarked, gravitating toward another cupboard for plates.

Sharon sniffed as she took silverware from the proper drawer and set three places at the table. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” she said.

There were assorted vegetables in the refrigerator, and she assuaged her conscience a little by chopping enough of them to constitute a salad.

After supper, when the plates and silverware had been rinsed and put into the dishwasher and all evidence of canned pasta destroyed in the trash compactor, the subject of school came up. Summer was nearly over; D day was fast approaching.

Matt would be in the third grade, Briana in the seventh.

“What do you say we go shopping for school clothes tomorrow?” Sharon said. Helen, the one and only employee Teddy Bares boasted, would be looking after the shop.

“We already did that with Gramma,” Matt said, even as Bri glared at him.

Obviously, a secret had been divulged.

Sharon was wounded. She’d been looking forward to the expedition for weeks; she and the kids always made an event of it, driving to one of the big malls in Seattle, having lunch in a special restaurant and seeing a movie in the evening. She sat down at the trestle table in the middle of the kitchen and demanded, “When was this?”

Matt looked bewildered. He didn’t understand a lot of what had been going on since the divorce.

“It was last weekend,” Briana confessed. Her expression was apologetic and entirely too adult. “Gramma said you’d been under a lot of strain lately—”

“A lot of strain?” Sharon echoed, rising from the bench like a rocket in a slow-motion scene from a movie.

“With the shop and everything,” Briana hastened to say.

“Quarterly taxes,” Matt supplied.

“And credit card billings,” added Briana.

Sharon sagged back to the bench. “I don’t need you two to list everything I’ve done in the past two months,” she said. Her disappointment was out of proportion to the situation; she realized that. Still, she felt like crying.

When Matt and Bri went off to watch television, she debated calling Tony for a few moments and then marched over to the wall phone and punched out his home number. He answered on the third ring.

Relief dulled Sharon’s anger. Tony wasn’t out on a date; that knowledge offered some comfort. Of course, it was early….

“This is Sharon,” she said firmly. “And before you panic, let me say that this is not an emergency call.”

“That’s good. What kind of call is it?” Tony sounded distracted; Sharon could visualize his actions so vividly—he was cooking—that she might as well have been standing in the small, efficient kitchen of his condo, watching him. Assuming, that is, that the kitchen was small and efficient. She’d never been there.

Sharon bit down on her lower lip and tears welled in her eyes. It was a moment before she could speak. “You’re going to think it’s silly,” she said, after drawing a few deep and shaky breaths, “but I don’t care. Tony, I was planning to take the kids shopping for their school clothes myself, like I always do. It was important to me.”

There was a pause, and then Tony replied “Mama thought she was doing you a favor.”

Dear Mama, with a forest of photographs growing on top of her television set. Photographs of Tony and Carmen. Sharon dragged a stool over from the breakfast bar with a practiced motion of one foot and slumped onto it. “I am not incompetent,” she said, shoving the fingers of one hand through her hair.

“Nobody said you were,” Tony immediately replied, and even though there was nothing in either his words or his tone to feed Sharon’s anger, it flared like a fire doused with lighter fluid.

She was so angry, in fact, that she didn’t trust herself to speak.

“Talk to me, Sharon,” Tony said gently.

If she didn’t do as he asked, Tony would get worried and come to the house, and Sharon wasn’t sure she could face him just now. “Maybe I don’t do everything perfectly,” she managed to say, “but I can look after Briana and Matt. Nobody has to step in and take over for me as though I were some kind of idiot.”

Tony gave a ragged sigh. “Sharon—”

“Damn you, Tony, don’t patronize me!” Sharon interrupted in a fierce whisper, that might have been a shout if two children hadn’t been in the next room watching television.

He was the soul of patience. Sharon knew he was being understanding just to make her look bad. “Sweetheart, will you listen to me?”

Sharon wiped away tears with the heel of her palm. Until then she hadn’t even realized that she was crying. “Don’t call me that,” she protested lamely. “We’re divorced.”

“God, if you aren’t the stubbornest woman I’ve ever known—”

Sharon hung up with a polite click and wasn’t at all surprised when the telephone immediately rang.

“Don’t you ever do that again!” Tony raged.

He wasn’t so perfect, after all. Sharon smiled. “I’m sorry,” she lied in dulcet tones.

It was after she’d extracted herself from the conversation and hung up that Sharon decided to take the kids to the island house in the morning. Maybe a few days spent combing the beaches on Vashon would restore her perspective.

She called Helen, her employee, to explain the change in plans, and then made the announcement.

The kids loved visiting the A-frame, and they were so pleased at the prospect that they went to bed on time without any arguments.

Sharon read until she was sleepy, then went upstairs and took a shower in the master bathroom. When she came out, wrapped in a towel, the kiss she and Tony had indulged in earlier replayed itself in her mind. She felt all the attendant sensations and longings and knew that it was going to be one of those nights.

Glumly, she put on blue silk pajamas, gathered a lightweight comforter and a pillow into her arms and went downstairs. It certainly wasn’t the first night she’d been driven out of the bedroom by memories, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

In the den Sharon made up the sofa bed, tossed the comforter over the yellow top sheet and plumped her pillow. Then she crawled under the covers, reaching out for the remote control for the TV.

A channel specializing in old movies filled the screen. There were Joseph Cotten and Ginger Rogers, gazing into each other’s eyes as they danced. “Does Fred Astaire know about this?” Sharon muttered.

If there was one thing she wasn’t in the mood for, it was romance. She flipped to a shopping network and watched without interest as a glamorous woman in a safari suit offered a complete set of cutlery at a bargain price.

Sharon turned off the television set, then the lamp on the end table beside her, and shimmied down under the covers. She yawned repeatedly, tossed and turned and punched her pillow, but sleep eluded her.

A deep breath told her why. The sheets were tinged with the faintest trace of Tony’s aftershave. There was no escaping thoughts of that man.

In the morning Sharon was grumpy and distracted. She made sure the kids had packed adequate clothes for the visit to the island and was dishing up dry cereal when Tony rapped at the back door and then entered.

“Well,” Sharon said dryly, “come on in.”

He had the good grace to look sheepish. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said, as Briana and Matt flung themselves at him with shouts of joy. A person would have thought they hadn’t seen him in months.

“We’re going to the island!” Matt crowed.

“For three whole days!” added Briana.

Tony gave Sharon a questioning look over their heads. “Great,” he said with a rigid smile. When the kids rushed off to put their duffel bags in the station wagon, the car reserved for excursions involving kids or groceries, Sharon poured coffee into his favorite mug and shoved it at him.

“I was going to tell you,” she said.

He took a leisurely sip of the coffee before replying, “When? After you’d gotten back?”

Sharon hadn’t had a good night, and now she wasn’t having a good morning. Her eyes were puffy and her hair was pinned up into a haphazard knot at the back of her head. She hadn’t taken the time to put on makeup, and she was wearing the oldest pair of jeans she owned, along with a T-shirt she thought she remembered using to wash the roadster. She picked up her own cup and gulped with the enthusiastic desperation of a drunk taking the hair of the dog. “You’re making an awfully big deal out of this, aren’t you?” she hedged.

Tony shrugged. “If you’re taking the kids out of town,” he said, “I’d like to know about it.”

“Okay,” Sharon replied, enunciating clearly. “Tony, I am taking the kids out of town.”

His eyes were snapping. “Thanks,” he said, and then he headed right for the den. The man had an absolute genius for finding out things Sharon didn’t want him to know.

He came out with a payroll journal under one arm, looking puzzled. “You slept downstairs?”

Sharon took a moment to regret not making up the hide-a-bed, and then answered, “I was watching a movie. Joseph Cotten and Ginger Rogers.”

Tony leaned back against the counter. “The TV in our room doesn’t work?”

Sharon put her hands on her hips. “What is this, an audit? I felt like sleeping downstairs, all right?”

His grin was gentle and a little sad, and for a moment he looked as though he was about to confide something. In the end he finished his coffee, set the mug in the sink and went out to talk to the kids without saying another word to Sharon.

She hurried upstairs and hastily packed a bag of her own. A glance in the vanity mirror made her regret not putting on her makeup.

When she came downstairs again, the kids had finished their cereal and Tony was gone. Sharon felt both relief and disappointment. She’d gotten off to a bad start, but she was determined to salvage the rest of the day.

The Fates didn’t seem to be on Sharon’s side. The cash machine at the bank nearly ate her card, the grocery store was crowded and, on the way to the ferry dock, she had a flat tire.

It was midafternoon and clouds were gathering in the sky by the time she drove the station wagon aboard the ferry connecting Port Webster with Vashon Island and points beyond. Briana and Matt bought cinnamon rolls at the snack bar and went outside onto the upper deck to feed the gulls. Sharon watched them through the window, thinking what beautiful children they were, and smiled.

Briana had been a baby when her bewildered, young father had married Sharon. Sharon had changed Bri’s diapers, walked the floor with her when she had colic, kissed skinned knees and elbows to make them better. She had made angel costumes for Christmas pageants, trudged from house to house while Briana sold cookies for her Brownie troop and ridden shotgun on trick-or-treat expeditions.

She had earned her stripes as a mother.

The ferry whistle droned, and Sharon started in surprise. The short ride was over, and the future was waiting to happen.

She herded the kids below decks to the car, and they drove down the noisy metal ramp just as the heavy gray skies gave way to a thunderous rain.