Love Starts with Elle(18)
“Yours either.” His low laugh brought the situation into true light. “Give me Marsha Downey’s address. I can go knock on her door, see if she has a spare room for the next month.”
Elle motioned to her room. “I’ll get my stuff together.”
Heath looked dubious. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
In her bathroom, Elle packed up her toiletries. Heath’s surprise arrival had jerked her out of her mental swirl.
When she came out from the bedroom, he was waiting on the couch, barely awake. “I left you a couple of good towels and put clean sheets on the bed. Tomorrow, I’ll clear out more clothes.”
He rose. “I feel like a heel, putting you out.”
“Heath, you’ve actually done me a huge favor. Given me perspective. Sleep well. Hope your girl feels better in the morning.”
Elle jogged across the backyard, autodialing Jeremiah. Better let him know what’s up in case he called the house phone. But his voicemail answered and last week’s reality washed over Elle again as she clicked her phone closed and entered the stale, hot studio.
SIX
With the TV on but muted, Heath tapped his fingers over the keys of his laptop, his legs stretched to the coffee table. An overexposed brunette belted out a song on American Idol. The contest was down to the wire. Final twelve.
He rarely watched TV, but Ava had TiVoed Idol and he’d adopted her habit. Somehow watching people go for their dreams as he curled up on the couch with his wife hooked him.
Muted TV was fun TV. Effervescent Paula encouraged the singer by rocking back and forth, circling her hands as she spoke. The camera moved to Simon. Uh-oh. His expression told Heath the truth about the contestant.
Ava had wanted to be a singer or actress growing up, but when she went to college and joined the newspaper staff, a new ambition coursed through her veins. “I wanted to star with Brad Pitt and kiss him like crazy. Then I discovered Tom Brokaw.”
Her still-familiar laugh echoed up from the overgrown valleys of his heart. He didn’t bother to swish away the water in his eyes.
The opposite of Ava, Heath had never aspired to Hollywood-like fame. He wanted to live in the city, became a prosperous lawyer, bank his large annual bonus, take vacations and maybe drive a Maserati. And, of course, he also wanted to marry the gorgeous girl in his three-hundred-level poly-sci class.
Shoving the hot laptop off his leg, Heath slouched against the couch. How did all his aspiration now seem meaningless, if not cliché? Money purchased items like loneliness and heartache and packaged them in fancy cars and oversized bonuses.
What would he do differently?
Say no to Ava’s broadcast career? Network News had really been starting to promote her, give her the spotlight.
Tell her no, she couldn’t travel to dangerous, war-torn places? As if he could stop her.
Say no to the romantic, sexy evening when Ava had suggested they break their no-children policy “just to see” if they could make a baby? Nine months later, the blue-eyed cherub named Tracey-Love came whimpering into Heath’s world and rained on the barren places of his heart.
What would he do differently so he wouldn’t be sitting here now, alone and widowed, in a dimly lit lowcountry cottage owned by a baseball-bat-wielding strawberry blonde?
Nothing.
An image of Elle Garvey sashayed across his mind’s eye, her hair falling over her shoulder, framing the sides of her slender face. Fiery green eyes watched him. Wonder who’d snagged her? Lucky man. Or so he thought. Hard to judge rightly based on their brief encounter. But he’d been right about Ava the first time he laid eyes on her as she walked across Yale’s campus.
“D-daddy?”
Heath cocked his ear toward the small voice coming down the hall. “In here.”
A rosy-faced Tracey-Love with large, sleepy eyes padded across the hardwood to him, crawling onto the couch, her thumb resting in her mouth.
“Does your tummy hurt?” Heath slipped his feet to the floor and hunched forward to see her face. Since moving into the cottage, he’d avoided fast food as much as possible.
“No,” she muffled through her thumb, already drifting off.
Heath smoothed her hair, tight with tangles. He needed to work on keeping it combed, pinned back, or ponytailed, something. But it was so coarse and thick, downright exasperating.
TL’s thumb slipped from her mouth as her breathing grew easy and even. Heath gently nudged his forefinger through her cupped little hand, thinking how soft and small it was. Not just her hand, but Tracey-Love.
The committee of “everyone” had told him to be firm with her, force her to sleep in her own bed, keep a strict routine. But she cried and begged to stay up with him, all at once afraid of the city’s night sounds and every shifting shadow.
So sue him, he loved his daughter and didn’t think chaining her to her bed, half terrified, at the age of four, constituted tough love. Time would heal her wounds and abate her fears.
Shoot, he didn’t like sleeping in his bed either, and the city’s night sounds terrified him too.
Six nights out of seven, Heath woke up in the wee hours of the morning stretched out on the couch with Tracey-Love sleeping on his chest.
Raising a daughter alone was never a part of the plan. Lord, if You knew, why didn’t You give me a son?