Chapter 6
“I wish you’d let me know that you’d be coming to get them early,” James said, rubbing water off his face with a towel. He’d been in the pool when Marta Vincent arrived, so his hair was soaking wet and water kept streaming down his face.
Marta was the mother of his late wife, who had died almost three years ago. She was his daughters’ grandmother, and he was always careful about making sure she and her husband remained a fixture in the girls’ lives. But more and more, he found himself chafing at the pressure she placed on him.
At that moment, it was by arriving more than an hour earlier than they’d planned to pick up the girls, who were going to a movie and then dinner with their grandparents.
“I just got done with my shopping early,” Marta explained, with a smile he knew was supposed to be ingratiating. “So I thought I’d stopped by since I was in the area. I’m so sorry if it’s a problem.”
“It’s not a problem. It will just be a little while before the girls are out of the pool and dried and dressed.”
“There’s no hurry. I’m happy to wait for them.” Without waiting for an invitation, the attractive, expensively dressed woman made her way past him and down the hall to the back of the house.
James shook his head, taking a deep breath and telling himself to be patient.
Marta and William had been crushed by their only daughter’s death—as crushed as James himself had been—and Jill and Julie were the only grandchildren they would ever have. He could hardly blame them for wanting to spend as much time with the girls as possible.
He just wished they’d respect his time and privacy a little more. The weekends were the main times he had to spend with his daughters too, so even losing an hour of the afternoon with them mattered to him.
If they kept it up, he’d have to speak to them—as kindly as possible—but he was hoping to put that off as long as he could. He didn’t want to hurt them, and saying no to them felt like a betrayal of Melissa. He really didn’t want to do that.
He followed Marta through the house and out the French doors that led to the patio and then the pool deck in the backyard.
The girls were in the pool playing Marco Polo with Rose.
James had been playing too before Marta had arrived.
He’d been having a good time, although he’d had a couple of close calls when he ended up groping blindly at someone who ended up being Rose.
He was pretty sure his hand had landed once where it really shouldn’t have.
“Marco,” Julie screamed from the pool, her eyes tightly shut.
Both Jill and Rose called out, “Polo,” and Julie ran in the shallow end toward Rose, who was closest to her. Rose started to move away—not very quickly since she was obviously letting the little girl catch her—and Julie suddenly made a great leap and launched herself at Rose.
They went down in the water in a tumble, both of them laughing and Julie crying victory.
Rose straightened up, hugging the girl, a look of obvious affection clear on her face.
James stared at her, his chest tightening as he watched Rose hug his daughter.
She loved Julie. She loved both of the girls. He could see it so clearly, standing on the deck in the distance and watching them in the pool.
She loved them, and James wanted them to be loved like that—he wanted them to be loved by Rose. Genevieve would never have loved them like that. He must have been crazy to ever think that she would.
“James,” Marta said, breaking him out of the reverie.
He blinked. “Yes?”
She was looking at him with narrowed eyes, and James suddenly wondered what she’d seen on his face. “I’d asked if you could get them out of the pool.”
James would have rather let them play for a little while longer since they weren’t supposed to go with their grandmother for another hour, but if he said something, it would turn into an argument or a tense conversation, and it would be a bad idea to let that happen.
So he walked over to the edge of the pool.
“Daddy!” Jill called. “Come back in with us!”
“Look who’s here early,” he said, pitching his voice to sound excited in an attempt to get the girls excited too.
“Grandma!” Julie exclaimed, scrabbling out of the pool. She ran over to give her grandmother a wet hug.
Jill got out too, a little more slowly. She was looking between Rose and her father as if checking to see if their fun for the afternoon was really over.
“We can play again tomorrow afternoon,” James told her. It was mid-September already, but it was plenty warm in Savannah to use the pool well into October.
“But that’s Rosie’s day off.”
Rose was climbing out of the pool too, and James tried not to focus on how her body looked in the one-piece swimsuit, streaming with water. “I can come over in the afternoon if you want me to play in the pool with you. I don’t mind,” she said with a smile.
She looked like she meant it, and James felt another clench in his chest.
Julie had released her grandmother and had heard the end of their conversation. “Rosie can play Marco Polo with us tomorrow afternoon too?” she asked, staring up at them with big hazel eyes.
“Sure,” Rose said. “As long as the weather is good.”
This seemed to cheer both of the girls up, and they happily dried themselves off, chatting with Marta about the fun they’d had today and how they were looking forward to the movie.
“You don’t have to come back over on your day off,” James murmured to Rose, who was pulling a towel around her shoulders, which thankfully hid most of her luscious body.
“I said I don’t mind,” she said, looking surprised. “I don’t have any plans for tomorrow afternoon, and I enjoy hanging out with you.” She gave a little twitch and amended, “The girls, I mean.”
She was self-conscious, James realized. More self-conscious than she used to be with him. It was almost certainly his fault. He hadn’t been acting normally or appropriately with her. He really needed to get it together.
It was harder than it should be though. Every day Rose looked more delectable. Every day he wanted to kiss her even more. Every day, he wanted to pour out his problems to her and be comforted by her. Every day, he wanted to find out more deeply what was going on in her mind.
All of that was well beyond the slot she was supposed to fill in his life, so he had to work harder to contain it.
When Rose took the girls into the house to change out of their suits, James stayed outside with Marta.
Her hair was smooth and her blouse was neatly tucked into her jeans, and he felt wet and sloppy in his swimsuit and the now-damp T-shirt he’d pulled on so he wouldn’t have to greet her with a bare chest.
Melissa had always been put together in the same way—the same way Genevieve was too. She’d liked her clothes and the house and the suits he wore to always be exactly right.
Sometimes it had irritated him. Sometimes he’d just wanted to be sloppy and relaxed, and she’d never been able to accept that.
He suddenly realized what he was thinking and experienced a wave of guilt. He shouldn’t be thinking like that. He’d loved Melissa, and she was dead. It was wrong to dwell on quibbles that might have irritated him in the past.
He’d never done so before, not since she’d died, so he had no idea why he was thinking about it now.
“Is something wrong?” Marta asked in a slightly brittle tone.
James shook his head. “Of course not.”
“I’ve been thinking about the wedding plans,” Marta began, evidently deciding that whatever he’d been brooding about wasn’t really that important.
“William and I, of course, will watch the girls during your honeymoon. And we were thinking that if you want some private time afterward, we can keep them an additional week.”
Several thoughts flashed through James’s mind at the same time.
The first was that Marta was trying to be generous.
It must be hard for her to see him remarry—even someone they’d basically picked out for him—so she was making a real gesture here.
The second thing was that there was no way in hell he would go that long without seeing his girls.
The third thing was that Marta clearly had no idea that he and Genevieve had split up.
Obviously that last thing was the most important. He’d suspected that Marta and William would hear about the broken engagement through the grapevine, even before he’d had a chance to tell them himself. He’d meant to do it today, but he’d been thrown out of whack by her early appearance.
Now he felt guilty since he obviously should have told them earlier.
“Oh,” he said, his voice gruff. “Oh, about that.”
“About what?”
“The wedding. Genevieve and I have decided to call it off.”
Marta arched her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re calling it off. The relationship wasn’t working, so we’re no longer engaged.”
“But you were perfect for each other.”
“We really weren’t. We’re really different, and it just wasn’t working out. I’m sorry if it disappoints you—”
“Disappoints me!” Marta repeated, her tone slightly shrill. “Disappoints me! The girls need a mother. You can’t possibly think—”
“I can take care of what the girls need,” he interrupted, feeling another wave of frustration. “And what they definitely don’t need is for me to be stuck in a marriage that I don’t want. That would be the worst possible thing for them.”
“But we’d discussed it. You’d agreed that—”
“This is my decision,” he interrupted, afraid that if he let her start to go on about that, he could never get her to stop, and then the girls would come back and hear it.
He did his best to keep his voice level and patient.
“It’s not yours. I know you were hoping for it to work, but it’s not.
So you’re just going to have to accept it. ”
“But I know Genevieve didn’t want it to end. Just last night she was going on about how excited she was about it. She was worried that maybe you felt guilty about—” Marta stopped with a gasp, her face clearing. “Oh, I see.”