Authors: Susan Fox

Body Heat (40 page)

BOOK: Body Heat

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I’d told myself that Matt, marriage to Matt, was my passion. But now . . . Why was I almost hyperventilating? What did this all mean? Ack! I was supposed to be getting
married
!

I managed to take a shallow breath and said, with certainty, “I have to see Matt.” I didn’t have a clue what I was going to say, but I could tell him anything, couldn’t I? We’d figure this out together, like we sorted out every other problem in our lives. Surely he’d know why I had this strange ache in my chest.

Jenna, who was leading Mark inside, showed no sign of having heard. Mom and Dad had their heads together discussing Mark, and so did Kat and Nav. Theresa glanced at her watch, probably wondering if she could catch Damien again. Nope, I might as well not have been there.

I went to grab my keys, not bothering to change out of my old shorts and tee.

Not a soul was in sight when I started up the hand-me-down Toyota Dad had passed on to me when I was sixteen. The car almost steered itself toward Matt’s house, a route I’d used to bike when I was younger. “The beaten path,” his mom called it. And that reminded me, Adele would be there. A nurse, she worked some pretty weird shifts, but she and Matt had agreed to spend one mom-son night at home in the busy week before the wedding. She was great, a loving, hard-working single mom, but right now I couldn’t face her.

I pulled over to dial Matt on my cell. The phone rang, then rang again. “Damn it, Matt, where are you? I need you.” It rang again, then once more, and finally he answered.

“You’re there.” I exhaled in relief. “Are you with your mom?”

“Hey, M. No, she just got home from work. She’s having a shower then we’ll get dinner going.”

“I’m on my way over. Need to talk to you. Meet me at your place?” When Matt and I were eighteen, we’d helped his mom convert their two-car garage into a tiny apartment for him.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Uh . . . Jenna’s guy, the one she met hitchhiking from California, showed up.”

“Hey, that’s cool. And so . . .”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Are you okay? You’ve been acting kind of strange the past few days.”

He’d noticed. I shouldn’t be surprised; it went with that soul mate thing. “Just meet me, okay?”

Ten minutes later, when I drove down the back alley, I saw a car in the Townsend driveway—a sporty black convertible that definitely didn’t belong to Matt or Adele. The top was up, drops of water glistened on the black paint, and a guy in shorts, flip-flops, and nothing else was leaning over it, rubbing the car’s body with a cloth.

A hot guy. Momentarily distracted from my worries, I appreciated the view: great butt, muscles flexing under the lightly tanned skin of a buff back, water drops glistening on strong arms and legs. Wow. If this was a car commercial, women would sure be buying.

Curious to find out who he was, I pulled up behind the Miata.

The guy turned, smiled, grabbed a gray T-shirt, and pulled it over his head, and I realized it was Matt.

My Matt. The center of my life for the last fourteen years.

I blinked. That image of the hot car-commercial guy had been weird, almost like a hallucination. This was the old familiar Matt coming toward me as I stepped out of my car—casual in baggy cargo shorts and a loose, faded University of British Columbia tee, his dirty-blond hair showing a few summer-gold streaks. My girlfriends said he was hot, that he looked like a younger, lighter-haired Bradley Cooper. Sure, he was good looking, but to me he wasn’t movie star handsome; he was just good old Matt, the boy I’d grown up with.

“Merilee?” He tilted his head quizzically. His blue eyes, the shade of well-washed denim—yeah, they kind of were the color of Bradley Cooper’s—were warm with concern as he tugged me into a hug. “Are you all right?”

His arms had always given me shelter. When my family ignored me or I was pissed off at my sisters, or when I was suffering the pain that had finally been diagnosed as endometriosis, he’d been the one to comfort and support me.

Yet, now, maybe for the first time ever, I didn’t feel at home in his arms. Or perhaps I was tired of feeling at home and wanted something more. I pushed away from him, not knowing how to say what I needed to. Sensing that once I started, things between us would change forever.

Stalling, I said, “What are you doing with the car?”

“It was supposed to be a surprise. It’s Leon’s brother’s and he loaned it to me. I’m washing and polishing it, then some of our friends are going to do the whole ‘Just Married’ thing with it, so we can drive it from the wedding.”

Just Married.
Not long ago, it had sounded like the best thing in the whole world, but now . . . “M, what are we doing?” The words burst out of my mouth. “Is this the right thing?”

“Doing?” He frowned, processing, then said, “You don’t mean . . . getting married?”

I nodded.

His eyes widened. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, I know you’ve been having some, uh, pre-wedding nerves, but that’s normal, isn’t it?”

“I guess.” Everyone said so, but what I felt seemed stronger. Maybe I was wrong, though. This was why we needed to talk. “I don’t know. Are you feeling any, you know, nerves? Doubts?”

He shrugged. “Not really. I mean, we’re young like everyone keeps telling us, but I want to marry you. We’ve always wanted that. Moving up the date from next year—”

“Should we have?” I broke in. Maybe the timing was wrong. “We always said we’d get married after we got our B.A.’s.” And right before starting the year-long program to get our Education degrees. Then I was going to teach middle grade kids, and he’d teach high school.

That was something else we’d been planning for years. We really were
settled.

“But then you were diagnosed,” he said.

Matt had nagged me into asking a doctor about what my sisters and mom had for years blown off as being normal menstrual cramps. I’d had surgery for endometriosis a couple of months ago. The diagnosis had made Matt and I rethink things. We’d always wanted kids and never once imagined I might face infertility at the age of twenty-one.

“Yeah.” I nodded, mentally retracing the steps that had led us to move up the wedding. “Then you saw that last-minute deal on the cruise.” A Mexican Riviera cruise—a perfect honeymoon and pure R&R. After the surgery, recuperation, and being crazy busy catching up on missed coursework and exams, I was desperate to lie back and do nothing.

“It all came together,” he said, “as if it was meant to be.”

That was how it had felt. Yes, I remembered. But now . . . I squeezed my lips together, then parted them and heard myself say, “But maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”

He frowned. “What are you saying?”

Words poured out, giving voice to all the doubts and fears I’d been trying to ignore all week. “Maybe we shouldn’t do it. Get married. Not now.” Oh God, was I totally crazy? I’d loved Matt since grade two.

“Jeez, Merilee, you’re talking crazy. We’ve loved each other since we were seven.”

It was spooky how he so often read my mind, or our minds were on the same track. I didn’t even have the privacy of my own thoughts. “I know that!” I snapped. “Do you think I don’t know that? I still love you, M, but . . .”

His hands gripped my shoulders, hard. “Calm down, you’re not making any sense.”

“I can’t calm down. I don’t want to calm down. This is important.” He had to see that. Maybe once I explained, he’d make everything right. He’d say something, sweep me off my feet, show me he really, really, totally and utterly loved me, and that we could be just as exciting and passionate as my sisters and their guys. He’d do that
thing
—that grand romantic thing like Jenna’s man had just done—that would show me I was crazy to have second thoughts.

Fingers biting into me, pinning me down, he stared into my eyes. “How can you have cold feet about getting married Saturday, when we’ve been talking about getting married all our lives?”

“I don’t know!” I wriggled my shoulders until he dropped his hands, then I took a step back, away from him. “Maybe
because
we’ve been talking about it all our lives.” He was
still
talking, not
doing
anything. “Maybe because I’ve known you all my life.” And because of that, I should know better than to hope for a dramatic, romantic gesture.

He shook his head, looking frustrated and pissed off. “I don’t get it. You always said we’re soul mates. We’re M&M. A couple.”

“I’m not sure this is the right time.” The more he tried to persuade me, the more
sense
he made, the less right the whole thing felt. Instincts counted just as much as logic, and what my instincts craved was
not
a bunch of rational discussion.

“Everything’s booked.” He snapped out the words. “Theresa made that project plan and you and your sisters have put everything together in under two weeks. Location, minister, reception, food, music. We’ve had the damned stag and stagette.”

He was right, and at first I’d been thrilled to bits about the wedding, but now I felt trapped. “Stop being so logical.” Even that silly stagette had given me doubts, as I’d been showered with sexy, kinky gifts I couldn’t imagine us ever using.

He strode a couple of paces away from me. I heard him take a deep breath, then he turned around and faced me, his expression one of strained patience. “What do you want, Merilee?”

I blinked. What did I want? What had I been hoping for when I came here? Did I want him to fight for me? To sweep me up in his arms and . . . do what? To find that perfect romantic thing, the way Damien had when he asked Theresa to stay over in Honolulu with him. The way Nav had, playing stranger on the train with Kat. The way Mark had, flying down to California to bring Jenna’s car to her.

I didn’t want
settled
. I didn’t want
comfortable.
I wanted what my sisters had: a grand, romantic, larger than life love. Was there any hope Matt could give it to me?

Stunned, Matt Townsend stared at the girl he knew better than anyone else in the world, and felt as if he didn’t know her at all. Had she lost her freaking mind?

He struggled to hold onto his patience. After all the initial excitement about announcing the wedding, she’d grown increasingly moody. He’d figured it was the sister effect as her older sisters—the three-pack, as the family called them—had returned to Vancouver one by one. The Fallon girls pushed each other’s buttons, and it was especially bad for Merilee, the unplanned baby who’d come along eight years after Jenna. Rebecca and James Fallon and the three-pack hadn’t rearranged their lives to make room for the newcomer.

That had always annoyed Matt. Merilee was such a sweet person, but her family was so self-absorbed they barely noticed her. He did, though. He noticed, he valued, he loved her. He looked after her.

And now he was pissed off with her. She was talking crazy, and couldn’t even say what she wanted. “Merilee?” he prompted, struggling to keep his voice even, “you don’t want to call off the wedding, right?” When he put it that bluntly, she’d come to her senses. She wasn’t going to dump him flat on his ass two days before their wedding.

“I think”—she sniffled and swiped a hand across eyes the blue of a spring morning—“that maybe I do.” Tears began to roll.

Her tears usually made him want to cradle her in his arms and make everything better. This time he just gaped at her. She hadn’t really said that, had she? “Are you nuts?”

“Oh, Matt,” she wailed, “try to understand.”

“Understand?” Anger and hurt rose in him, and his voice along with them. “Shit, Merilee, what the hell’s going on?” Trying to regain control—he was
not,
would never be, a guy like his dad who lost his temper—he paced jerkily across the alley, then turned to stare at her. He’d done everything for this girl, focused his life on her for fourteen years. She was
not
betraying and abandoning him. “Two weeks ago, you said getting married was your dream come true.”

“It was.” She stared back at him, eyes huge and drenched with tears. Her shoulders were rounded inside one of his old T-shirts and she looked small and forlorn. Her dark honey-blond hair lay in gleaming curls on her shoulders, incongruously bouncy, as if it hadn’t gotten the message that she was miserable.

He had, and he was feeling pretty damned crappy. Except he still couldn’t really believe it. “It was,” he said harshly, “and now it isn’t. What’s changed?”

“My sisters came home,” she said, so softly he could barely hear.

“Your family’s trying to talk you out of getting married?” Shit. He’d always thought the Fallons liked him. He’d been at family dinners for the past week, and everyone had been friendly. They’d even been getting along better with each other, too. And now they’d stabbed him in the back.

“No.” She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. Oh, M, I don’t know how to say this.”

Insulted, he said, “You can tell me anything. You know that.”

She took a deep breath, then words flew out on the exhale. “I feel middle-aged.”

BOOK: Body Heat

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