Carla Cassidy - Strangers When We Married

She frowned and hugged Kirk closer to her chest. She didn’t care. She refused to care. She couldn’t afford to care about Seth ever again.

He’d turned her upside down, twisted her inside out when he’d left her, and she would never, ever give him that power over her again. And she would never allow him to hurt Kirk as he had hurt her.

Shifting Kirk from one hip to the other, she walked down the long hallway to the closet at the end. She grabbed a set of sheets and a thick blanket, then returned to the living room.

Careful not to awaken him, she set the bedding on the arm of the sofa where he would see them when he woke up. If she had a heart, she would have offered him the bed in the spare room instead of the sofa. But having him set up residency in the spare room felt far too permanent.

Besides, she didn’t have a heart. Seth had stolen her heart when he’d met her, and he’d broken her heart when he’d left, leaving her nothing but loneliness and broken dreams.

Seth awakened just before dawn, surprised to realize he’d slept deeply and without nightmares. The house was dark and silent and cold…especially cold.

In fact, he was freezing. He sat up, stretched, then turned on the lamp next to the sofa. It felt like a meat locker in here.

He grabbed the multicolored afghan from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around him, then reached up and touched the tip of his nose.

Meghan had always liked to turn the furnace way down at night and apparently this peccadillo of hers hadn’t changed. His nose felt like an iceberg in the center of his face. He rubbed it several times as he contemplated turning up the thermostat, then dismissed the idea. He was here on shaky ground as it was, no sense pushing his luck.

With the afghan still around his shoulders, he padded into the kitchen and flipped on the small light above the sink.

Coffee was in order, not only to ward off the chill of the house, but to get his brain cells working properly.

He frowned as he pulled the coffee from the cabinet. She’d switched brands. He eyed the container of a gourmet brand he’d never heard of before.

She’d changed the furniture, changed her brand of coffee—what other changes had occurred in his lovely ex-wife?

As he watched the dark brew drip into the glass carafe, he wondered if she still spent long minutes each night creaming her slender, shapely legs before getting into bed? It had been one of those nightly female rituals that had driven him crazy with desire.

He’d lay next to her in bed and watch. He’d smell the heady fragrance of the cream and imagine those long, sweet-scented, silky legs wrapped around him. And when she’d finished, on most nights, his imagination would transform into mind-blowing, sensual reality.

The gurgle of the coffeemaker pulled his thoughts from what had been, and what would never be again. He poured himself a cup of the fresh brew and sank down at the table.

He and Meghan might have remained married forever had they been able to spend every minute of their time in bed. Between the sheets, they had been equal partners, companionable in their wants and needs. Out of bed they had been disastrous.

He’d probably made a mistake in coming here. He wrapped his hands around the mug, grateful for the warmth. It probably would have been better for both of them had he stayed away, had he not seen his son.

Frowning, he took a sip of his coffee.

Kirk.

Seth had never thought much about having children. He’d had Meghan and he’d had his job. He’d believed that had been more than enough to fill his life, fulfill him as a man.

Even when Meghan had called him and told him she was pregnant, the idea of a child had remained vague, a mere abstract in his mind. She’d been so vehement about him staying out of her life, and at the time he’d been so bitter, it had been easy to agree to her terms that he keep away from her and their child.

There had been times in the past fourteen months that Seth had wondered about the boy, but always in his head he’d thought of Kirk as Meghan’s child, a tiny entity that had little to do with him.

He recognized now that keeping Kirk a mere abstract in his mind had been a survival instinct. But now the abstract had been transformed into a smiling little face with a mop of dark hair and bright green eyes. Now the abstract had become sweet baby scent and chubby arms and legs.

Suddenly hungry to look at his son, he shoved back from the table and stood. Leaving his halfempty cup of coffee on the table, he walked through the living room and down the long hallway.

The faint illumination of night-lights spilled from each of the doorways in the hall. It had always amused Seth that a woman as bright, as totally together as Meghan, had refused to sleep without a night-light in practically every room of the house.

He had to pass the master bedroom in order to get to the smaller room he assumed to be Kirk’s. The third room at the very end of the hall he knew was Meghan’s home office, equipped with a state-of-the-art computer system.

Moving with the grace of a cat, he started across the doorway of her room, but paused to peek in before gliding past.

She slept on her stomach, her hair an explosion of scarlet color and wild curls against the pristine white of the pillowcase. The floral bed comforter was bunched at her waist, exposing a soft green nightgown and her freckled shoulders.

He’d once told her that they’d remain married for as long as it took him to kiss every freckle she possessed. And considering the fact that she had a million freckles, the implication was their marriage would last an eternity.

But she’d blown the scenario of eternity. A blast of bitterness laced with pain shot through him. She’d excised him out of her life with a surgeon’s precision, with unrealistic expectations and the attempt to force him to deny the very essence of himself.

So much for kissing freckles, he thought as he moved on past her bedroom doorway. Eventually some other man would have that pleasure and he didn’t want to examine why that particular thought bothered him.

He drew a deep breath as he stepped into the small bedroom across the hall, drinking in the scents of sweet innocence and babyhood.

The night-light cast shadows around the room and made the teddy bears on the wallpaper appear almost animated.

The crib was against the far wall, and through the oak bars he could see his son sleeping. Holding his breath, not wanting to awaken the slumbering child, Seth stepped closer…closer still.

Kirk slept on his back and he was snoring faintly. Clad in a dark blue fuzzy sleeper, his cheeks flushed a rosy red, the sight of him expanded Seth’s heart.

His child.

His son.

Never again would Kirk be a nebulous abstract in his mind. Seth would never again have the luxury of ignorance, the bliss of not knowing what he was missing.

The desire to pick up Kirk, to hold him tight against his chest was overwhelming. The need to feel the little boy’s arms wrap around his neck, feel the snuggle warmth of his body inundated him. Forever now, Kirk would not just be a name in his mind, but rather a face, a spirit, a little person who was a part of Seth.

“What are you doing in here?”

He whirled around to meet Meghan’s angry gaze. He reeled at the sight of her. Clad in an emerald green velour robe, with her hair tousled from sleep, she looked as lovely as he’d ever seen her.

She motioned him away from the crib and out of the room. Once they were in the hallway, her expression was anything but lovely. “I don’t appreciate you skulking around the house in the middle of the night.”

“It’s practically morning, and I wasn’t skulking around,” he protested, keeping his voice low so as not to awaken Kirk. “I…I thought I heard something and just wanted to check to make sure he was okay.”

The fabrication tasted vaguely sour in his mouth. She eyed him knowingly and he felt his cheeks warm. He sighed. “I just wanted to look at him for a minute,” he finally confessed.

He could tell his answer didn’t particularly please her. “It’s awfully early in the morning to start off angry,” he said. He grinned. “But as I remember, you never were much of a morning person.”

“And as I remember, you were always nauseatingly cheerful in the mornings,” she replied with a touch of crankiness.

“But I always made the coffee for you,” he said, wondering how she could look so damned beautiful with such a scowl on her face. “And this morning isn’t any different.”

Her scowl eased somewhat and she pulled the robe more tightly around her. “Coffee sounds good,” she said grudgingly.

Together they went to the kitchen. She sat at the table while he poured her a cup of coffee and refreshed his own. “What time is it?” she asked.

Seth checked the clock on the oven. “Just a few minutes past six. Did you sleep well?” he asked as he eased down next to her at the table.

“No.” She paused long enough to take a sip from her mug. “I didn’t sleep well because there was a stranger in the house.”

“I’m hardly a stranger. We were married for seven months.”

She sipped her coffee, eyeing him over the rim of the mug. Her eyes looked large, luminous, but he knew he was probably nothing more to her than an indistinct shape without her glasses. “Okay,” she relented. “We were intimate strangers.”

He couldn’t argue with that. In truth, it described their brief relationship perfectly. They had been physically intimate, but when they’d finally tried to share their hopes, their dreams, their expectations for their future together, they’d realized their error in judgment about each other.

“What time do you normally go into the office?” he asked.

“Usually, I’m there around eight-thirty or quarter to nine. But, I intend to go in early today and log some time on the computer before anyone else arrives.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I can’t let anyone know what I’m doing for you.”

“Can’t you do a lot of the work here? You still have your monster computer, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Yes, but I prefer to work at the office. It’s less conspicuous for me to use the official computer at work.”

Although it sounded logical, he had a feeling she had another reason to prefer working at the office rather than here at home. She didn’t want to spend any more time with him that she had to, and she particularly didn’t want to give him an opportunity to spend time with Kirk.

Before he left here, he’d make sure he changed her mind about him seeing Kirk. There was no way he could not be a part of his child’s life now. But he also knew now wasn’t the time to discuss this particular issue with her.

At that moment the object of his thoughts cried out. It was not a cry of distress or fear, rather it was a demand for attention.

Meghan finished the last of her coffee and stood. “Feel free to use the guest bathroom to shower or whatever,” she said, then she disappeared out of the kitchen.

Seth got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. He had all day to shower. In fact, he had a feeling the most difficult part of this entire ordeal was going to be sitting in this house doing nothing…waiting for Meghan to come up with the information he needed.

Seth wasn’t accustomed to doing nothing. He was a man who thrived on action, craved challenge. Hiding out in a house where nobody was home wasn’t very appealing, but at the moment it was his only option.

He walked over to the kitchen window and stared out, watching as the sun crested the horizon, shooting out tentative fingers of light.