Taking Her Time by Cait London

Author:Cait London [London, Cait]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2004-12-12T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

“I cannot believe you actually called Norma.”

Tucker showed his teeth in a cold smile. They gleamed in his late-day approaching stubble. Carly had always distrusted that smile, because it was his “gotcha” smirky look. Sometimes in their dating, it had been matched by the warmth in his eyes. But this time, his eyes were as silver as a cold steel blade. “You’ve got a few minutes. Norma’s car is at Jimmy’s getting a new battery. She doesn’t think it looks right to make official calls in his wrecker and she’s hurrying him. It’s Saturday, and Jimmy doesn’t like coming in to work on his day off. You’d better start packing your things. Get that junk out of my bathroom.”

Carly hurled her bath scrub-net at his face and it bounced to the floor. She’d lost almost an hour sobbing over the shoebox of valentines she’d discovered in her search for the diary. Tucker had kept every valentine from her and no one else. Her handwriting on the back had been crossed out by a big black marker. His adult masculine script had graded every one, from “Not bad for a first attempt at spelling my name” to “Pure Mush Stuff” to “She didn’t mean a word of it.”

Carly had closed the shoebox carefully. She didn’t want Tucker to know that she had seen inside his deep pain. The insight that she had hurt him deeply, that the smell and stain on the valentines was definitely beer and that she’d driven him to drink had upset her for another hour.

She’d lost years because no one seemed to fit her like Tucker—when he was a teen and sweet, her first love. She just knew she could do better on a second or third love, but they never came. He was the reason—the man standing in front of her, all six-foot-two of big, stubborn, in-her-face ex-husband.

“I’m not taking your bad mood, Ms. Hot-Shot Redford,” Tucker warned too quietly. “If Gary didn’t call, that’s between you and him. But then, maybe he’s seen the light of day—and he’s lucky to escape.”

“How dare you!”

This was the same old infuriating Tucker, who had changed from the sweetheart-friend into a demanding and sulking husband, one who ran every time they needed an intimate, resolving talk.

Tucker moved to the front door and opened it. “You’re getting all worked up, Carly. Maybe Gary didn’t call because he knows you’ve got a wildfire temper. Maybe all he knows is those sounds you make like you’re having a long, slow—”

She couldn’t bear to let her ex-husband know how she’d never had sex with another man, that somehow, just at the wrong moment, Tucker had managed to ruin everything—and he wouldn’t even be close! Tucker was always there, even when he wasn’t!

Carly shivered a little and her hand shot out to fist Tucker’s shirt. “I was dead-tired and my eyeballs felt like they’d fall out, so I relaxed a bit. My scalp is not an erogenous zone,” she lied, because she’d just discovered that it was.

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