Dance Away with Me(52)

She couldn’t believe she’d heard him right. He never willingly volunteered to hold Wren, and yet here he was. She should be grateful, but she didn’t entirely trust him. Unlike Heather, Ian had no idea how to distinguish one of Wren’s cries from another or how to bicycle her legs if she had gas.

Tess stopped herself. She needed to let go of the idea that she was Wren’s only competent caretaker. “You’re on.” She made herself hand over the baby and climbed back into bed.

He didn’t leave the room right away, and she was too tired to ask why. Eventually, however, she heard the bedroom door close behind them both.

It’s going to be okay. She’ll be fine.

*

Tess had the nightmare again that night. It was always the same. The blood. Bianca’s cries. Tess’s inability to get to her. A little before six, she gave up trying to fall back to sleep.

As she got out of bed, the remnants of the nightmare curdled her stomach. She needed to make certain Wren was safe. She padded into the quiet hallway and looked in the studio. No one was there. The living room was empty and the house quiet. He must have taken Wren outside. But his jacket hung on the hook. That left only one other place they could be.

Bianca’s bedroom.

Tess hadn’t been inside since the afternoon three weeks ago when she and Wren had come to live here. The door was always closed, so it had been easy to avoid the room. She hesitated, then turned the knob.

Dashes of pearly light brightened the sooty swirls of color tangling the walls. When she’d last seen the room, it had been unfurnished. Now it held a simple double bed—a different bed from the one where Bianca had died. This one had no headboard or footboard, only a mattress and box springs on a metal frame. Ian lay on his back, his shoulders propped high on a pile of pillows, a set of black sheets twisted around him. He’d taken off his T-shirt, and Wren was curled sound asleep on his bare chest, her knees under her, butt in the air, cheek against his skin, and his hand curled protectively around her.

The baby was sleeping on her stomach, verboten in modern pediatrics, but at no risk with her head higher than the rest of her. Some would quibble at her perch on his chest, but Wren looked perfectly safe.

A jumble of tenderness, sorrow, and longing snagged in her throat. How she’d wanted to see Trav like this—with their baby—but Trav had been too much a boy at heart to be a father.

Trav . . . A wistful sadness settled over her. Sadness, but not grief. It was time. Time to let Trav go.

She closed the door softly and slipped into her sneakers and Ian’s jacket. Still in her pajama bottoms with the long jacket sleeves hanging past her fingertips, she stepped out into a new day saturated with the scents of dew, earth, and leaf mold. So much that hadn’t been clear during her marriage was clear now. She’d been the grown-up in their relationship, the responsible one, a burden she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.

She wrapped her arms around herself. Trav was the love of her girlhood—the love of the young woman she’d once been—but grief, time, this new life—this baby—had changed her.

She crossed the yard. Off to her left, Ian’s tree house now had a platform. The feelings she held for Ian North were nothing like her love for Trav, but she would no longer deny how strongly she was drawn to him. When she was with him, she felt steady. Her own person. She didn’t have to take care of him. She didn’t have to raise him, corral him, or chide him. Ian North was a man who knew exactly who he was, a man with a clear picture of his place in the world.

The hems of her pajama bottoms dragged in the dewy grass as she made her way down the trail. He was complex, troubled, and mysterious. A man who’d come to terms with how he needed to live his life. Closed off. Maybe that emotional disengagement explained his powerful sexual allure. Because she wanted him. No more lying to herself. She wanted frantic, dirty, over-the-top sex with him. Earthy, bawdy—maybe even kinky—sex. The kind of sex she’d fantasized about long before Trav had died. The kind of sex she imagined Ian—with his commitment to emotional detachment—would offer.

She could have it, too. All she had to do was ask.

The one thing she wouldn’t do.

If Ian wanted her, he’d have to take the first steps. The aggressive female sexual vixen might be a powerful fantasy, but it wasn’t her fantasy. She needed to be the object of lust—the pursued, not the pursuer.

Trav’s sex drive had never been as strong as her own. He always got into it—she couldn’t fault him for that—but she had to make the first move.

“Turn me on, sexy lady. I love the way you turn me on.”

“How ’bout you turn me on for a change?” She’d sometimes say to him, only to have him respond, “Show me how.”

Trav liked things easy. His easy laughter, easy compliments, easy, laid-back nature were as much a part of him as his floppy auburn hair and eternal optimism. Trav didn’t judge or criticize. He enjoyed people for who they were. It was why so many sought his company. It was why she’d loved him. Why she’d overlooked his flaws: his unsteady employment and his casual attitude toward the necessary business of life. Someday, she’d told herself, he’d be the one to do the taxes or fix a loose chair leg instead of leaving it all up to her. Someday, she’d told herself, he would be so overcome with lust that he’d drag her into bed, strip her naked, and make love to her as if she were the most irresistible woman in the world.