She turned and held the rings out to him. "Tell your mother I'm sorry it didn't work out."
Mack flipped the rings over in his palm. "Why my mother, specifically?"
Wendy turned her back on him and fought her tears. Dammit, she would not cry – not till he was gone. "The whole thing was Elinor's idea, wasn't it? Setting up a perfect little family for Rory?"
He looked intrigued.
"Come on, Mack. She obviously knew what you were planning to do."
"Of course she knew. I told her the night I brought you to Chicago."
"And she was pushing you at every turn, wasn't she? I heard you tell her once that you were working on it, and you sounded angry." Then Wendy registered what he'd said, and the rock in the pit of her stomach felt as if it had turned over. "What did you tell her, Mack?"
"That I was going to marry you."
She considered that flat, chilly statement, trying to find something comforting to hang onto. But even if the plan had been Mack's after all, not Elinor's, it was still coldly and purely logical. What difference did it make exactly when he'd reached his decision? The tiny flame of hope died down and flickered out. "Because it all made such perfect sense."
"I thought so." He dropped the rings into his pocket. "But you have a way of turning things upside down. You know, before I ever met you, Wendy, I had figured out this neat little explanation for what you were doing."
"Blackmail," Wendy said succinctly.
"No. I never thought that – at least I didn't after I realized how easy it was to find you. I thought you'd started out to do what Marissa had asked, but when you saw what an overwhelming job you'd taken on, you yelled for help. It was logical, and I could make myself believe it, till I actually met you and realized you're not the sort to throw in the towel over a mere baby. Or much of anything else, either."
"Is that supposed to be an insult?"
He smiled a little, almost sadly. "Hardly. You struck me from the minute I saw you as the sort who would grit her teeth and deal with anything rather than give in and ask for help."
Wendy bit her lip. For just an instant, she felt uncomfortable – as if Mack could see straight through her.
"Even if you had to lie to yourself and everyone around you in order to keep slogging forward," he went on quietly. "I admired that persistence of yours. I didn't expect that I would come to resent it. But that's exactly what you've been doing for the past few weeks, isn't it?"
Wendy shrugged. "You said yourself we'd just make the best of it."
"It's not enough anymore."
"Too bad for both of us you didn't figure that out a little earlier."
"I swear I didn't intend what happened last night, Wendy. When I heard you crying, I just wanted to tell you I understood, and that it was all right if you needed to be free – that I knew I'd asked far too much, and I realized you couldn't ever love me."
Wendy tried to breathe, but every muscle in her body seemed to have frozen solid.
"Your tears were like jewels dancing in your eyes." His voice was husky, uneven. "Then you reached out to me, and even though I knew that you were trying desperately to convince yourself, I couldn't turn away. I let myself believe that it could be enough – there are jobs in Chicago, and you love that baby so much... But after we made love, when you started crying again, I knew that you could never really be satisfied."
"I didn't cry," she said.
"Yes, you did. You were practically sobbing in your sleep. Then when I saw the letter this morning, the job offer...I understood why you cried."
"You fool," she said. But her voice was no more than a thread, and perhaps he didn't hear.
"That's when I had to admit to myself that making do wasn't enough for me, either. I can't bear to make you lie to me anymore, Wendy -- or to yourself."
"Stop it, Mack!"
He looked tired, and much older. "Perhaps it's best if you hear the whole truth. I knew I could be satisfied with coming second in your life, after Rory. Last night, I even told myself I could bear being third – after your work. But I can't bear being nothing at all. I'd tear myself apart, and you, too." He raised a hand to her cheek, a brief and tantalizing caress. "I'm sorry, sweetheart, for everything. I'll go, now."
She had to stop him. He was moving toward the door, and if he reached it, and left her...
"Maybe you should have told me from the beginning how you felt." Wendy hardly recognized her own voice.
Mack frowned. "I could hardly have swept you off your feet and told you I'd fallen in love."
She took a couple of tentative steps toward him. "It would have saved a lot of trouble."
"Only because you'd have screamed and run."
"Maybe." She reached out blindly, and her fingers clamped around his wrist. "Because I wasn't smart enough to know till later that I love you."
He seemed to have turned into a statue. Only his eyes were still alive, searching her face. "But you cried," he said uncertainly.
"Because you didn't need me! You didn't even want me at your dinner last night, and-"
"Of course I wanted you. I was just determined not to push you till you were ready. Those things are almighty boring."
"And when I opened my mouth about your new product, you went dead silent."
"I was stunned. It was a perfect answer, and you tossed it off without even thinking."
"Then when I practically begged you to make love to me, you had to stop and think about whether it was the right thing to do!"
"Well," Mack said reasonably, "just last week I got a quart of cold water over me, and all I'd done was kiss you."
Wendy gasped. "You thought I dumped the coffeepot on purpose?"
"Didn't you?"
"Of course not. You were the chilly one – wandering in and out of my bedroom and never turning a hair."
"I thought if I could gradually get you used to my presence, my touch, my kiss... I was playing for high stakes, Wendy. And I was willing to wait as long as it took, only the waiting was more difficult than I thought it could be. You didn't seem to be aware of me as a man, and finally I couldn't stand it anymore. So I stopped torturing myself – till last night."
Very gently, his arms closed around her. His kiss was tender, and yet so explosive that she was trembling by the time he raised his head, and the last lingering doubt which echoed through her mind had vanished forever.
"You did cry in your sleep," he said.
"If you say so. I suppose I didn't want to accept the idea that you wouldn't ever love me the way I love you."
He smiled down into her eyes. "If that's what caused it, then you've got nothing to cry about any more, because I love you very much indeed. I think I knew it the night I came back to Phoenix to get you, and you weren't here."
"You mean, Rory wasn't here."
"That, too. But it wasn't Rory's absence which panicked me."
"Let me get this straight. When you proposed – "
"I had Rory's well-being in mind, of course. But I was also playing one gigantic hand of poker."
Wendy shook her head in disbelief. "Well, you bluff a little too well. Next time you try to seduce me, Mack, could you be just a bit more upfront about it?"
For a few seconds, he simply looked at her. Then he grinned. "All right. If that's what you want." He let her go abruptly, stripped off his jacket and tossed it on the floor, unfastened his cuff links and rolled up his sleeves, then scooped Wendy up in his arms and sat down in the rocking chair – the one remaining piece of furniture in her living room – with her on his lap. "How's this for starters?"
He didn't wait for an answer; he kissed her long and hard instead, and by the time he was finished Wendy was too breathless to speak. So she snuggled close to him, secure in the warm safety of his arms, and pressed tiny kisses on the firm line of his jaw now and then as he told her all the things she'd dreamed of hearing – things that he said he'd wanted to share the night before, and through the last few weeks. All the things he had wanted to put in the note he'd written her that morning.
She sat up at that news. "I didn't find any note."
"Before I finished composing it, I saw that letter offering you a job. I thought it was why you were so upset last night, and after that, I couldn't exactly leave you a perky little message. Not that it was anything so wonderful, anyway. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find the right words when you want to say I love you but you can't?"