Love, Come to Me(47)

“Heath?” He heard her timid voice from the kitchen. Strolling leisurely to the kitchen doorway, he leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb and regarded her silently.

Lucy found that the sight of her disheveled husband had a strange effect on her sensibilities. She had never seen any grown man in such a state. Her father always dressed and shaved before appearing for breakfast each morning. But there was a shadow of a beard on Heath’s face, and his hair was uncombed, and she was overwhelmingly conscious of the lazy grace of his tanned body, clad in gray trousers and an unbuttoned shirt. He smiled slightly, seeming to be cool and utterly in control, but there was a fire smoldering right under the surface that she could sense without any difficulty.

“You . . . made the coffee this morning,” she said in a low voice, not quite meeting his eyes. “I’ll do it from now on. A wife is supposed to do things like that.”

It took all of Heath’s self-possession to keep from pointing out that there were more significant things a wife was supposed to do for her husband. “Fine. As long as it gets made, I don’t care who does it,” he replied in a monotone.

“You’re using a mug,” she said nervously, going over to the cabinets and searching until she found the blue-and-white china all neatly stacked. “Do you prefer that over a cup and saucer?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

She pulled out a china cup and saucer for herself, poured some coffee, and sat down at the table with a faint sigh of weariness.

“Sleep well?” Heath asked.

Her eyes shot to him sharply as she tried to figure out if his question was jeering or not. His face, however, was expressionless. “Yes. I was very tired after yesterday.”

“So was I.”

Lucy drank her coffee while he watched her thoughtfully. She knew he was looking at her, and she could hardly sit still under such quiet watchfulness. “I’m going through the house today,” she said in order to break the silence. “I’m going to find out where everything is, especially the pots and pans and cooking—”

“There’s no need. The Flannerys take care of the cooking and cleaning. You can put together a meal now and then whenever you feel like it, but I didn’t marry you in order to make a housekeeper and cook out of you.”

Lucy stared at him in confusion. For the first time she wondered why he had married her. If he didn’t need someone to take care of him, then had it merely been out of pity? The thought didn’t leave a pleasant taste in her mouth. “But . . . how am I going to spend my time?”

“Any way you want to. You can go into town or stay here. You can do nothing or everything, whatever you wish. I won’t expect your schedule to revolve around mine, since mine will be erratic during the next few months.”

“That’s fine, as long as you’re home by dinner so we can—”

“To be blunt, we won’t be eating many meals together. I won’t be coming home at regular hours. I’ve got . . . business . . . to attend to in different areas, mostly Lowell and Boston.”

Business? Lucy had been long accustomed to that word, and she hated it passionately. What a convenient term for men to be able to use, a perfectly acceptable way to explain or disguise anything they wanted to hide. “That’s just the way a business is run,” her father had told her when she had resented the long hours he spent running the store instead of spending time with her. “Business reasons,” “business demands,” “business problems”—her father and Daniel and every other man she had ever known used the mysterious world of business as an excuse for their faults, their unfulfilled promises, their absentmindedness. And it seemed that her husband knew how to use that word as well.

“What kind of business?” she asked suspiciously.

“Something to do with publishing. Any objections?” Heath asked, now sounding sardonic, and though a multitude of protests trembled on her tongue—yes, I object . . . I’ll never see you . . . we’ll never be a real husband and wife . . . you don’t even care about how I feel about it—she couldn’t tell him any of that.

“Of course not,” she said coolly.

Chapter 6

There was more freedom in being married than Lucy had ever dreamed of. She had never had so much money to spend on herself, so much leisure time and so few responsibilities. Her reputation had been mended somewhat by her marriage to Heath, though it remained slightly fractured. There were still some people who sniffed and raised their noses as Lucy walked by, but there were very, very few these days whose opinion she cared about. Her money and her new status had made her popular with the kind of people she had never known before. Spending most of her time in and around town, she made new friends and kicked up her heels in a way that caused her father and her old friends to shake their heads silently at her.

She was hardly ever with her husband. In fact, Lucy saw Heath so seldom that during the day it was almost difficult for her to remember that she was married. At night things were slightly different—they did share the same bed—but they had never made love, and the distance between them was so wide that they might as well have been on different continents. Many nights he arrived home very late, and she would already be asleep, alone on her side of the mattress. She would stir drowsily as she felt him get into bed beside her, and then they would lie there, side by side, not touching, until sleep claimed them both. They were both careful not to venture on each other’s territory: the left side was hers; the right side was his, and not even in sleep did an arm or a leg cross the invisible line that separated them. But in spite of their lack of closeness, their lack of communication, sharing a bed with Heath became a habit that Lucy would have hated to give up. Even though she could doze off without him there, it seemed that her sleep was never deep or complete until she knew that he was beside her. There was something strangely comforting about knowing that he was next to her, hearing the deep, even rhythm of his breathing, waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the dark outline of him nearby.