Page 5 of This Time Around (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #3)

“ E verything was delicious, Allie.” Jack reached over from his spot on the sofa to grab his coffee mug off the side table, wincing as Paige rolled over in her sleep and kicked him in the nuts.

Allie gave him her serene smile and sat down on the adjacent loveseat, a good three feet of distance between them.

Maybe more. Paige had dozed off a few minutes after dessert, with Allie’s fiancé making an exit a few minutes later.

Something about an urgent oral presentation at work, though Jack had seen Allie roll her eyes when she thought he wasn’t looking.

So it was just the two of them now, plus one unconscious child.

As Jack shifted his daughter’s feet on his lap, Allie balanced a pale blue teacup on a saucer, stirring it with one of those dainty little teaspoons she always used to leave around their apartment.

Jack breathed in the faint scent of Earl Grey, not sure what to say to the woman he’d once been ready to marry.

“Is your coffee okay?” she asked.

“It’s great, thanks.” He hadn’t taken a sip yet. “Actually, I should probably get going.” He set the mug on a coaster and tried to figure out how to move Paige without waking her.

“You said you wanted coffee.”

Allie’s tone was normal enough, but something accusatory rang in it.

Or maybe that was Jack’s imagination. Too many years of veiled and not-so-veiled accusations about how he could never decide what he wanted.

Never commit to a college major or a career or even what he wanted for dinner.

Anything but Allie. Right up to the day she left, he’d always been sure about her.

It hadn’t been enough. Not for her, anyway.

Jack hesitated, then settled back against the sofa. What the hell, it had been sixteen years. A few more minutes of making small talk wouldn’t hurt. He cleared his throat. “Nice place you have here.”

“Thank you.”

“Been here long?”

“Oh, I guess about four years. Something like that.”

She wasn’t offering much, but then again, he was asking pretty dumb questions. Conversation used to flow better than this between them. Had they changed that much, or were they just out of practice?

He took a sip of coffee, then tried again. “Does Wade have to work late a lot?”

Something flashed in those dark green eyes, and he tried to decide if he’d sounded judgmental on purpose. No, of course not. He was just making small talk.

“Wade’s a prominent entertainment attorney,” she said. “He’s very busy.”

“I thought you said he handled your parents’ case.” He shouldn’t contradict her, but at least her eyes didn’t flare with defensiveness like they used to.

“His firm handled the case. It’s a very large law group.” Allie pressed her lips together. “Wade heads up a division devoted to the entertainment industry. He’s in a position to make partner, so it’s important to show everyone he’s committed.”

“Of course,” Jack said. “Gotta climb the ladder.”

Was he baiting her? He wasn’t sure, but certainly his words smacked of insults he’d hurled years ago. It’s all about the money, isn’t it, Al? That’s all that matters to you.

He’d both hated and loved the way her eyes glittered with anger. Well, someone has to figure out how to keep a roof over our heads, and you’re too busy playing video games to contribute anything.

He’d showed her. Not then, admittedly. Not when it mattered, not until years after they’d split, but still. He started to apologize—for his snark just now or for not pulling his weight sixteen years ago, he wasn’t sure. But before he could say anything, Allie spoke.

“You remember that time we went camping?”

The question startled him at first—an olive branch? He found himself smiling. “Yeah. It was your first time. Camping, I mean. I couldn’t believe you’d never slept outside.”

“Please,” she said, lifting her mug for a sip of tea. “You met my family. Our idea of outdoorsy was using the crosswalk instead of the Skybridge to get around Pioneer Place mall.”

Jack smiled. “You were a pretty good sport about it.”

“Yeah, right up until the moment we were attacked by that giant swarm of mosquitoes and you realized you’d packed air freshener instead of bug spray.”

“It did smell nice.” He picked up his coffee and took a small sip. “And all the bugs made for good fishing.”

“I suppose so.”

“Which would have been better if I’d remembered to bring anything to cook with,” he mused. “Or matches.”

“I wasn’t going to bring it up.” She smiled over the rim of her teacup, and Jack had a flash of memory. Allie looking calm and unsurprised in the midst of his latest screw-up—forgetting to register for classes? Not budgeting enough to pay the water bill?

After years of her nagging, it was her eventual calmness that had bothered him most. The moment she’d stopped looking disappointed by his failures and started looking like she expected them.

“Well, it’s water under the bridge,” he murmured, not sure whether he was talking about the camping trip or the bigger picture.

“Right. And hey, we got to figure out how to make fire without matches.”

“I still can’t believe we pulled that off.”

She laughed. “It took half the night, and a little bloodshed.”

“Man make fire,” he said in a caveman voice that always used to get her laughing. “A good life skill for our résumés.”

Still smiling, she took a dainty sip of tea. Silence stretched out between them and Jack wondered what she was thinking. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. “I was cleaning out my parents’ old storage unit the other day and found one of your boxes.”

He didn’t have to ask what she meant by that. Back then, his idea of housekeeping involved shoving everything off counters and tables and piling it into a box. Junk mail, bills, half-empty packs of gum—all of it got stuffed in a box and lugged to the garage to be dealt with “later.”

How the hell was he supposed to know there’d be no later for the two of them?

“What was in the box?” he asked, almost afraid to hear.

“Lots of things,” she said. “A pile of clues you made for me. Remember how you used to do those treasure hunts?”

He nodded as something squeezed tight in his chest. “I remember.”

“You’d leave them all over the house. Things like, ‘If you want some good lovin’, go look in the oven.’ And when I’d check there, I’d find another clue that said something like?—”

“‘Our love isn’t creepy, so go look by the TP.’” He grinned. “That was my personal favorite.”

“I remember they all led to where you’d hidden that bucket list thingy you made.”

“The bucket board,” he said. “Patent pending.”

She gave a small smile and Jack remembered how much bigger her smile had been when she’d found it. He’d fashioned the bucket board from a buddy’s cast-off corkboard and some leftover Christmas gift tags.

“Every year on our anniversary, we’ll write down our bucket list goals as a couple,” he’d explained, “things like ‘have sex under a waterfall’ or ‘think up names for our kids.’”

“Or, ‘start a savings account,’ she’d offered. “Maybe ‘pass the bar exam.’”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

As Jack snapped his attention back to the present, he noticed Allie wasn’t smiling anymore.

“There were other things in the box,” she said, glancing down at her lap. “Tons of paperwork. I’m not sure how it ended up with my parents’ stuff, but there it was—unpaid power bills, an old credit card bill, a third late-payment notice for your student loans?—”

“Right,” Jack grunted. “Keeping track of that stuff was never my forte.”

She frowned. “There were a ton of collections notices. I never realized how many late fees you racked up and how many credit cards there were.”

“Allie, come on.” He set his mug down hard on the end table, deliberately missing the coaster.

“Maybe I could have done a better job paying my bills if you hadn’t insisted on that insanely expensive apartment with the heat blasting all the time and those ridiculously expensive HOA dues to cover the on-site fitness center and the trendy zip code and?—”

Paige kicked him in the nuts again, and Jack shut up. His voice had risen along with his frustration, but his daughter slept on. He took a deep breath, then reached down and stroked her hair. His little girl smiled in her sleep, and Jack felt himself go calm again.

When he looked up, Allie sat staring at him. “My apologies.” Her voice sounded tight. “Sorry if I happened to like having nice things.”

Jack felt his blood pressure rising, but kept his voice low this time. “And I’m sorry if I didn’t mind the romance of learning how to be broke together. Ramen noodles, cheap beer, a crappy sofa scrounged out of the landfill instead of some fancy Pottery Barn number.”

Allie glared. “I’m so sorry to have deprived you of that experience. Bedbugs and Bud Light sound like tremendous fun.”

Jack gritted his teeth, annoyed with himself for falling back into this pattern with her. Annoyed with her for being who she was and with himself for being who he was, even though he felt pretty sure he wasn’t the same guy she remembered.

But mostly he felt annoyed that he still gave a damn what she thought of him.

He watched Allie tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and remembered the feel of those silky threads between his fingers. Her dark green eyes flickered with annoyance, and he watched her gaze drop to his hand. She stared for a long time, eyes fixed on his knuckles.

Or was she looking at Paige? At the small polka-dotted stockings cupped in his palm?

Jack cleared his throat. “I should get going.”

He shifted his daughter’s legs off his lap, and stood up.

Paige grumbled in sleepy protest, but didn’t wake up.

He leaned down and scooped her into his arms, deliberately avoiding Allie’s eyes.

His little girl flopped like a rag doll, but didn’t wake up.

How much longer would he be able to hold her like this?

The thought that she wouldn’t always be this small made his chest ache.