Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(66)

Adele spent the day in the huge kitchen of the main house—Carmen still couldn’t call it her brother’s house—baking cookies. Not allowed by anyone to lift or carry, Carmen helped Adele out for a while. But cooking and baking were not favorite pastimes, and Adele was bossy in the kitchen. When Theo and Eli came in with the groceries, Carmen gratefully used the opportunity to find a quiet place and get off her feet.

Carmen had been feeling odd since the morning. Not ill, nothing to do with the baby, she didn’t think, not bad at all. Just…odd. Like her blood fizzed in her veins.

She fished her tablet out of her bag and got comfortable in the blue velvet armchair that had been her mother’s. She’d finished Infinite Jest weeks earlier and had been cleansing her reader’s palate with some lighter fare. Now, she’d started The Portable Dorothy Parker.

“Are you hiding from your own family?” Carmen had been reading for awhile when she heard Theo’s voice. She looked up and saw him standing behind the sofa, smiling at her in a way that made her nethers tingle. He’d seemed tired and not entirely well since he’d arrived. Carmen was putting it up to jetlag, but she’d also noticed that he hadn’t been drinking.

She smiled at him. He’d returned to her life not much more than twenty-four hours ago, but it seemed as though the months they’d been apart had faded nearly immediately into insignificance. They had yet to talk about what they had, or what it meant, or what they’d do, but Carmen didn’t care. He was back with her, and he’d seemed to have forgiven her.

“It’s survival instinct. Sometimes you have to step out of the fray.”

“I hear that.” He came around the sofa and sat in front of her on the steamer trunk that had always served the purpose of a coffee table. “What are you reading?”

Her smile grew as she remembered a game they’d played during the summer. Looking down at the page on her screen, she picked a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph and read it aloud. “‘It did not occur to him to feel even a flicker of astonishment that Rose should have responded so eagerly to him, an immovably married man of forty-nine.’” The trick was to choose a sentence with enough meat that he couldn’t call her a cheat, but without any obvious giveaways.

He closed his eyes, and she waited. Then he grinned and, with his eyes still closed, said, “Dorothy Parker. ‘Mr. Durant.’” He opened his eyes and lifted his brows.

“It’s nuts how good you are at that.”

“I teach that story. And ‘immovably married’ is pure Parker. Almost a giveaway.” He put his hand on her knee and squeezed gently.

She closed her tablet and put her hand on his, wrapping her fingers around the leather cuff on his wrist. “I think I would have liked to have taken one of your classes when I was in college.”

Some emotion passed over his eyes, only briefly and gone before she could identify it. Then he said, “I came looking for you, and I’m glad to find you in a reading mood.”

“What?” She cocked her head.

“Hold on.” He got up, left the room, and came back in a few seconds, a thick sheaf of paper bound with a blue, heavy cardstock folder in his hands. He brought it to her and set it in her lap. “I’d like you to read this.”

She smoothed her hand over the plain blue cover. “Is this what I think it is? Did you finish?”

He sat back down on the trunk. “Yes. It’s not what I thought it would be. But it’s finished. I haven’t yet asked anyone to read it. Would you?”

“Of course. You printed hard copies?”

“I printed that copy. For you.”

Carmen opened the cover and read the title: Lavender in Summer. The words evoked a poignant, bittersweet memory of their last weekend together in France. She’d felt content and free, until reality—or maybe it had only been her skewed view of it—had taken over, and she’d blown everything up.

She turned the title page and found a dedication:

For C.

I’ll never forget

I’ll never regret

I’ll always cherish

My beautiful girl.

That odd fizzing in her blood became a foamy froth, and her head seemed to fill with air. She looked up into his waiting, beautiful blue eyes. He seemed blurry, and she blinked. A tear fell down her cheek in a cooling trail. “Theo?”

He put his hand over hers, pressing it onto the open page. “Maggie was the wrong love to write about. My story with her is over. When I knew that and let her go, I was able to write again. You’re my story now.”

“But I ended our story.”

“You tried to, yes. This book doesn’t have a fairy-tale ending. But you know what? I’m sitting here in front of you. You’re carrying our child. Our story’s not over. What comes next, though, is just for us.” He squeezed her hand, and she closed her eyes at the wave of warm reassurance—of love—she felt. “Will you read it, knowing it’s about us—and that it’s not a fairy tale?”

She was afraid, afraid to see inside his heart and truly know what she’d done. But that fear was buffered by a love richer and deeper than she’d ever known. “Yes. I’d be honored.”

He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to her knuckles. And then he got up and left the room. She set her tablet aside and turned the next page of Theo’s manuscript.