Momentary Marriage(39)

He brushed a kiss against her temple. “You need to go. Tomorrow’s a work day.”

“How will you get back to the office if the limo takes me home?”

“I’ll walk. It’s just around the corner.”

“Around several corners,” she corrected.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” Jared loosed her, stepping back. “I’ll call you.”

“Okay,” Kelsey said, obediently climbing into the waiting car. “Goodnight.”

As the limousine pulled away from the curb, she looked through the darkened windows to see him wave briefly before he turned and walked up the street.

Kelsey sank back against the car’s rich upholstery, puzzled as much by her reaction to Jared as by his sudden tenderness. She’d had her fair share of boyfriends, but Jared was something else.

They were entering into this marriage with nothing more between them than lust and necessity.

She really needed to remember that regardless of a few tender moments, a man like Jared Barrett could do permanent damage to her careful heart. If she let him.

***

“You saw Dad!” Amy’s voice rose to a squeak as she stood in the middle of Kelsey’s small, cluttered living area. “Well, what did he say? Was he nice? What does he look like?”

“He’s…tall,” Kelsey said, answering the easiest of the questions pouring out of her sister’s mouth. “Dark hair and a…nice face.”

The words seemed so inadequate. She didn’t have clue how to convey the jumbled emotions that rose in her when she sat looking at her father for the first time three days ago.

“And?” Amy prompted impatiently. “Did he hug you? Did he say why he’s never tried to see us?”

Kelsey turned away from where her sister stood, going to slump in a corner of the loveseat.

“I just went to the seminar,” she said haltingly, not sure she wanted to have this discussion at all. But she’d thought about John Layton many times since that night when their gazes had caught and held. Thought about the fact that he was Amy’s father, too. Still, she wasn’t sure she should have opened the subject with her impressionable younger sister.

“Okay,” Amy said, making an obvious attempt to calm down in the face of her sister’s inarticulate responses. She sat on the loveseat next to Kelsey. “You saw the seminar in the paper and you went, but what happened when you introduced yourself to him?”

“I-I got there late,” Kelsey said, her fingers fidgeting with the tassel dripping from the corner of the cushion on her lap. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure if her reticence that night was more about cowardice than indifference.

“What did he say when you told him who you are?” Amy said, clearly wild with curiosity and imagining a much warmer family reunion     than Kelsey could report.

“I sat down in the back,” Kelsey said. “It had already started—the seminar—and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Okay,” her sister said reasonably, “then you went up afterwards?”

Kelsey slowly shook her head, trying not to feel that she’d somehow failed her sister. “I just sat there looking at him and thinking about all the times we wondered how he looked—“

She broke off, helplessly, looking at her sister.

“—wondered why he never called or sent birthday presents. Wondered if he’d like us.”

Amy’s expressive face shimmered suddenly with the remembered pain that Kelsey felt herself.

“And I just couldn’t speak to him,” she finished. “I sat there thinking of all the things I could say. ‘Hello, I’m your grown daughter.’ ‘So you’re the man who donated the sperm.’”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“Yes,” Amy said slowly. “I guess it would be hard to know what to say.”

“Then, he looked at me,” Kelsey said, still fidgeting with the cushion. “You know, like he really saw me in the midst of all those other people. And I didn’t know what I’d do if he came up to me. So, to keep from calling him a bastard and bursting into tears, I just left.”

Amy sat next to her in silence, her face troubled.

“I wish you’d told me you were going,” she said, at last. “It might not have been so hard if we’d gone together.”

“Maybe not,” Kelsey agreed, returning her sister’s sudden hug. “But I didn’t really decide to go till the last minute. And besides, you’ve been so up about things with Doug. I didn’t want to bring you down.”

A smile dawned suddenly on her sister’s face. “Things are going well with Doug. We watched videos and ordered in Chinese last night. I mean, we’ve done that a hundred times before. But there was this moment—he had his arm around me and he looked down at me—you know, eye to eye? I thought he was going to kiss me again. He didn’t then, but I know he will soon.”