As they ate, she listened to more details of his work, his plans for doing a coastal coral study with one of his classes that would take an intense five days off campus, and then in winter there would be a couple of dive trips out of the country to warmer climes. And—
“Francine?” he said, drawing her attention. “Ms. Duncan?”
“Huh?” she said, looking up. “I’m sorry, was I somewhere else for a moment?”
“I was just saying, I think I’d really like you with long hair,” he said dreamily, gazing at her.
“Well, ordering for me is one thing, T.J., but I’m going to be in charge of my own hair. This cut is so easy!”
“You won’t even consider growing it out? Even if I said I think I’d love it?”
She was gazing off again. “Huh?” she said, when she realized he’d been talking to her again. “I’m sorry.”
He put down his fork. “You’ve been a little weird all evening. Different.”
“Really? Sorry.” She sighed. “Well, I was this close to calling you to cancel. I have a nagging headache. I know I’m probably not the best company.”
“You’re not only distracted, you’ve brought up a couple of things you’ve never even mentioned before. Like the girls—the students. This isn’t a symptom of a headache.”
She looked into his beautiful brown eyes for a second. He had a slight smile and it made her laugh. T.J. was too intuitive for her mood to slip by him. “I do have a headache. His name is Sean Riordan.”
“Oh?” T.J. asked. “Dare I hope he sells insurance?”
She shook her head. “He’s an air force pilot. I knew him when I was an air force nurse. I ran into him the other night while I was out with some girlfriends.”
“Ah,” T.J. said, sitting back. “And can’t get him off your mind?”
“You can say that again,” she said, putting down her fork. Not only did she feel like getting this whole thing off her chest, she felt she owed T.J. an explanation. After all, they were a couple…“I haven’t told anyone this, T.J. Not my mom, not girlfriends, certainly not Rosie…”
“Should I be honored?” he asked, lifting his wineglass to his lips, taking a sip. “Or should I panic?”
“He is Rosie’s father,” she said, staring him straight in the eye. But then she glanced away.
He put down his wineglass. “You don’t say.”
She looked back. “I always knew the day would come when I’d have to face this, but I thought I’d get to choose when and where. Just by chance he saw me a couple of weeks ago, chased me down and asked to buy me a cup of coffee. He said our breakup was a big mistake that happened to a couple of stubborn people, and that we should talk about things.”
“Well, direct, isn’t he? Obviously you didn’t agree.”
“I told him to get lost, but that was just my anger talking. I have no right to keep him away from Rosie. I’m going to have to tell him about her, T.J. And I don’t look forward to it.”
“Uh-oh. This doesn’t sound good. When you said Rosie’s father didn’t know her, I always assumed it had been his choice to take off, ignore his responsibilities.”
“Not exactly,” she said, shaking her head. “It wasn’t like that. But it wasn’t a mistake, like he says. The mistake was us getting together in the first place. He always said he’d never get married or have a family. I always said that’s what I ultimately wanted for my life.”
“Well, hell—why were you with him, then?”
“I don’t know. Because I couldn’t resist him? Sounds like the pining of a teenager, doesn’t it? I wasn’t a teenager. And I had a wonderful time with him—it was just the whole marriage and children thing he couldn’t do.” She shook her head. “I knew either one of us would have to change our minds or we’d part ways. My date of separation from the air force was coming up, Sean had accepted a change of assignment and we’d been together almost two years. And guess what? I got pregnant. And being a nurse, I knew immediately. So I made him talk about what was next for us. Where were we going, as a couple. He said things like, ‘You’re getting out of the air force. You can go anywhere you want. You can move to where I’ll be, or not.’ It went downhill from there. I said I wanted to be married, have children, and he said, ‘Me? Not in this lifetime.’”
T.J. swallowed. He looked down for a moment. He picked up his fork and poked at his food but didn’t eat, a clear indication he was unhappy. When he finally did look up, he said, “And you didn’t tell him.” It wasn’t a question.
She shook her head. “The parting standoff was I needed to take the relationship to a committed level and he wasn’t interested. I said that if it was possible he’d never be ready, I should move on, and he said if I needed guarantees right then, I’d better start planning my move.”
“Well, the man clearly knows what he doesn’t want,” T.J. said with an unmistakable sneer.
“We were both angry,” she said with a shrug. “I told him if he wasn’t serious about a commitment with me, I was going to take the walk. He told me not to let the door hit me in the ass. We both said unforgivable things. I could have told him about the baby, T.J. I could have shouted it at his back as he was leaving. He probably would have done the responsible thing.” Her eyes glistened and she swallowed hard. “And I would never have known if…” Her voice trailed off. She inhaled deeply, straightened proudly. “I didn’t want it that way.”
“Good God, Francine,” he said. “You lied to him.”
“I always intended to tell him,” she said. “Really, I thought I’d tell him when I found out she was a girl, then I couldn’t. I thought I’d tell him before she was born, but I was still so angry, so lonely. I planned to tell him right afterward, but he left me a couple of messages—a couple of those arrogant, cheerful, we-should-keep-in-touch-babe messages, and I couldn’t do it then, either. Next thing I knew, four years had passed.”
He shook his head and frowned at her. “You should have told me this before—you owed me that much if we were going to be involved. And you should have told him.”
“You know what, T.J.? I owe a lot of people a lot of stuff, but at the top of the list is Rosie. I owe her my absolute protection. Not just physical but emotional and psychological protection. I know Sean’s going to be angry—his mother’s going to be very angry and, trust me, she’s a force of nature. But, in the end, you know how much I meant to Sean? He let me go at the mere idea of a child!”
“Listen, there are men who don’t want children. But we still need to know the truth,” T.J. said.
“When Rosie was a new baby, just a couple of months old, I realized that I cried every single day. On and off for hours. I cried through the second half of my pregnancy and every day after she was born. And I made a decision—I couldn’t do that to her. If the only way Rosie could be raised by a happy, positive mother was to forget Sean Riordan, then that’s what I would have to do. Yeah, Sean might’ve been willing to do the right thing, but it wasn’t what he wanted. Rosie and I—we deserve to be loved and wanted. We deserve to never doubt it.”
They sat quietly for a moment before T.J. replied. “This explains a lot. You’ve always kept a part of yourself back. Tell me, Franci, just where did you think we were headed? You and me? Because your ex and I have a few things in common…”
“You and I aren’t headed for any kind of standoff, T.J. We seem to agree on everything. Everything except salmon,” she added with a smile. “I thought it was only fair to tell you why I’m a little distracted.”
“How’s that headache?” he asked.
“Actually, not a lot better.”
“I think I caught it,” he said. “I was very optimistic about where Rosie’s sleepover at Grandma’s was going to leave us.”
“I should have canceled,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t invite you in tonight, T.J. I’m just not in the right frame of mind.”
He laughed a bit loudly. He leaned toward her. “Believe me, Franci—tempting as you are, I’m not getting in the middle of this situation. You work this out with the man, draw your single-parent lines in the sand, refine the details and, when you’re all set there, we’ll pick up where we left off. There is one more thing you might tell this guy, if you’re going to be completely honest.”
“Hm?” she asked, frowning.
“Tell him you’re not over him.”
She let a burst of laughter fly. “After all he’s put me through?”
T.J. wasn’t smiling. “Tell him you’ve had exactly one man in your life since you took that walk. One guy, in that intimate way.”
Shock was etched into her features for a moment. Then she attempted a recovery. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I know it. You were damned hard to warm up. I couldn’t figure out what was holding us up. I had myself almost convinced it was Rosie, so young and all. But there was always a part of me that wondered what the hell was missing because I knew there was more passion in you. If you’ve made up your mind that he’s not going to screw up your life anymore, tell him and get this behind you,” he said. “Then when we’re together, maybe we can turn up the heat a little bit. Because I like what we have together, you and me, but I don’t want to be some platonic bed buddy.”
“Excuse me?” she said, pure shock keeping her from laughing out loud. “Platonic bed buddy?”
“I want more than a Friday-night girl who, when she’s with me, isn’t really with me. I knew something was missing when we crawled into bed.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, we’ve had a very nice—”
When she got to very nice, he did smile. She didn’t go any further. Really, what man was looking for very nice sex? For that matter, what woman? And now the truth was out—he blamed her. And she realized with a guilty flush that he might be right. T.J. barely stirred a spark in her, much less a flame. She felt as if she’d cheated him.
Franci looked down at her half-eaten dinner. She couldn’t meet his eyes with what she was thinking—Sean had barely to caress her skin with his breath and she was on fire. He knew where to touch, how to tease, what to do, and nothing brought him greater satisfaction than to torture her with orgasm after orgasm. It had been like that with them since the first touch, the first night. They had never grown tired of each other—never bored, never disinterested. And absolutely never just very nice. Their sexual relationship had never been anything less than magnificent.
She was conscious of T.J. lifting his hand toward the waiter, asking for the check, instructing him to box up their leftovers. She almost smiled—there wouldn’t be any coffee and dessert tonight.
With his hand on her elbow, T.J. escorted her toward his car rather quickly. As they walked down the sidewalk, Franci looked up to see a familiar figure walking toward them. His hands were plunged into his pockets and his head was down. Just as they were about to pass, he lifted his eyes briefly. Franci said nothing, gave no reaction, but managed to keep walking. She listened for his footfalls behind them, but there was no sound. She knew then that Sean had stopped dead in his tracks and was probably staring after them.
Afraid to turn around Franci sighed deeply. Ah, well. Now they knew about each other. And yet they didn’t know anything at all.
The drive back to her house was twenty minutes of uncomfortable silence. T.J. sulked and Franci realized she might have risked losing the best shot at a stable relationship she’d had in years. But maybe not—according to what he’d implied, she’d risked it the first time she’d crawled into bed with him and had proven to be a barely adequate lover. What she hadn’t quite admitted until tonight was that it wasn’t all it could be for her, either.