Marry Me Again (The Second Chance Love Series, Book 1) (28 page)

"You?" Rebecca said, playing for time.

"Yeah, me. I've been waiting for you to come to your senses and come back to me."

"Oh, Brian." Rebecca felt absolutely sick.

And then she felt an arm slide around her waist from behind, felt it ease her back against a familiar male body.

"I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you," Tucker said, his light tone in complete contrast to the tension she felt in his rock-hard body.

Brian ignored him and kept his eyes on Rebecca—though he was clearly furious at the way Tucker was touching her, at what the familiarity of Tucker's touch must be saying to him.

"Rebecca, tell me you're not going to marry this lying cheat—"

"You want to talk about lies?" Tucker cut in. "I bet there are a lot of things you haven't been honest about with Rebecca over the past few years."

Tucker was furious. He stepped away from Rebecca and got right up to Brian's face. "And you sure as hell owe me a lot of answers," he said.

Rebecca didn't know what he was talking about, but Brian did. He went stock-still and silent, seething in his tracks.

"What in the world is going on between the two of you?" she said.

Her question silenced them both. They stared at each other, each daring the other to explain.

Rebecca felt a nasty chill work its way up her spine.

They were keeping something from her.

"Excuse me?" said a young man as he hesitantly stepped into the fray. "Mr. Malloy, the chairman's ready to begin now, and we need you."

Tucker glared at Brian and clenched his fist.

Rebecca laid her hand on his arm, the muscle tight with tension.

"We'll be right there, Andy," Tucker said, putting his hand on top of Rebecca's as he turned to face her. "I told you three days ago that we had some other things to talk about it. Well, it's going to have to wait a little while longer. I've got to get into this meeting."

"Okay," she said, still feeling the chill.

Tucker turned and left.

Rebecca watched him go, then turned back to Brian. She was torn—didn't know which way to turn. She wanted to know what they were talking about, yet she didn't. She wanted to talk to Brian, to try to make some peace with him, yet she didn't see how they could.

"I... I need to get in there. It's the bottling plant... "

"I'll go with you," he said.

Rebecca steeled herself for more trouble, but walked into the meeting room beside him. They managed to find two seats together near the back of the room just as the chairman rapped twice with the gavel to start the meeting.

Brian rested his arm on the back of Rebecca's seat, and his touch made her almost as uncomfortable as the look in Tucker's eyes as he stared at Brian from across the room.

"Tell me you're not going back to him, Rebecca," Brian whispered, too close to her left ear.

She looked up, caught Tucker's eye. How could a woman want something so badly and be so frightened of it at the same time?

"I don't know what I'm going to do," she told Brian.

"Are you insane, Rebecca? You can't trust the man—"

"Wait a minute," she said. "What's going on up front?"

A few of the commission members looked quite annoyed. Tucker stood before the chairman, answering his questions.

"We all came here to take a final vote on this project today," Jim Gardner told Tucker.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman. We're just not prepared to proceed right now. We've just been given some new information that has a direct bearing on the case, and we need time before we can give the commission our legal opinion on this project."

Rebecca had Brian on one side and David Wilkins from the Sierra Club on the other. "What the hell is he doing?" they both asked her.

"I don't know," she said.

The commissioners called upon Tucker to explain himself more, but they didn't get a lot out of him.

And the more Rebecca heard, the worse she felt. What in the world was he doing? She'd talked to him last night about the hearing, and he'd told her he felt good about their chances of winning.

Of course, the bottling company would likely appeal in court, but that would take months, probably years, and anything could happen to stop the project in that time.

So what was he doing now?

"I told you that you can't trust him," Brian said.

She didn't say anything to that. She couldn't, because she worried about that very thing herself.

"He's going to roll over on this permit, isn't he?" Brian continued.

"No, he's not," she insisted, wishing she had no doubts herself.

The chairman's gavel fell, adjourning the meeting for thirty minutes or so while they waited for the parties in the next appeal to arrive.

Half a dozen more people came up to Rebecca to ask her what Tucker was doing, but she couldn't help them.

Tucker brushed his way past a couple of reporters—as close-mouthed with them as he had been in front of the commission—then made his way over to Rebecca.

"Let's talk in my office," he said, taking her by the elbow and propelling her through the crowd. "You coming?" he said over his shoulder to Brian.

"No," Brian quickly replied.

Tucker marched down the hall with Rebecca to his office, closed the door behind them and pointed her toward the love seat. He pulled a chair up to sit directly in front of her.

She had trouble meeting his eyes. She looked everywhere except at him, until she had nowhere else to look.

He looked troubled, guilty even, and she dreaded what was coming.

"God, just tell me," she said finally.

He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his head bent down looking at his hands. He took her hands in his and held them there between them.

"We have to talk about Cheryl Atkinson."

"No, we don't," Rebecca said, desperate to avoid that subject.

"Rebecca." He held on to her hands and wouldn't let go. "She's going to walk into that meeting room any minute now. She just signed on to represent a company with an item that's next up on our agenda."

Tucker winced at the look in her eyes. He remembered that look. She'd looked just like this the day she walked into his office and found him in Cheryl's arms.

And in that instant, as he'd watched her eyes, he'd had an awful, sinking feeling that he'd made a terrible mistake, one he couldn't take back and couldn't make up for, no matter what he did.

It had all seemed so simple at the time, and it seemed so stupid now, so cowardly.

How could he make her understand?

"Rebecca—"

She jerked her hands out of his. "I don't want to see her."

"I wish you didn't ever have to," he said sincerely.

"So I could forget? Is that what you mean? Do you have any idea how many times I saw the two of you together in my own mind?"

"I'm pretty sure I do. I spent a helluva lot of time torturing myself by imagining you in bed with Brian." And wasn't that a special kind of hell on earth? Even though it was one of his own making.

"I was never in his bed until after you left me. And this isn't about me. It's about you. Have you been seeing her, too?"

"No." He exploded with it, then regretted it instantly.

"But you came here knowing she was still here, that you'd be working with her."

"I didn't even know she was still in town. It didn't occur to me to ask, because she was the furthest thing from my mind when I came back here. All I was thinking about was you. You and Sammy."

"But you didn't always feel that way, did you?"

Rebecca had slid over to the corner of the love seat, as far away from him as she could get, and she was shaking.

Tucker wanted to go to her, wanted to take her in his arms, but he didn't think she'd let him touch her. He stood up and walked to the window, shoved his hands into his pockets and looked out at the dreary, rain-soaked day.

It was November. Christmas would be here soon, and he'd hoped they would all spend this Christmas together, their first ever.

But right now, he felt it all slipping through his fingers.

"That's what we need to talk about, Rebecca. It was a setup. I knew you were coming to the office that day, and I set you up to find us together."

He turned away from the window so that he could see her face. She didn't believe him. Hell, at times he'd had trouble believing it himself .

"How can you expect me to believe that?" she said. "Why would you want me to find you with another woman?"

"Because of how badly our marriage was going. I didn't think it was going to last—"

"So you found another woman? Rather than just tell me you were done? You expect me to believe that—"

"And because of Brian. He said he still loved you. He wanted to marry you. He was willing to be a father to Sammy, and I thought he'd be a better one than I could ever be." Tucker struggled with the admission, even now, after all this time. "I believed he was going to be everything I couldn't be. I believed he would give you and Sammy all the things I couldn't give you."

"What?" she said.

"I heard the two of you in the garden at your parents' house, that day he came back to town. You couldn't tell him that you didn't love him anymore, and you sure as hell weren't happy with me."

She shook her head. "What are you getting at, Tucker?"

"I heard Brian was thinking of leaving town, and I didn't see any way that you and I were going to make our marriage work."

"Go on," she said hesitantly.

"We had a child to think about, and I kept seeing myself, my parents and the bitterness and anger and uncertainty." He paused, trying to make some sense out of his jumbled thoughts, knowing that he wasn't explaining himself well, if there was a way to explain it well.

"Rebecca, I'm not proud of what I did, and I'm not trying to say it was the right thing to do or that I did it all for you and Sammy. If I could take it back—if any of us could ever change anything we've done, but I can't."

"Can't take back what?"

"I made a deal with Brian."

There, he'd finally said it. And he wasn't sure if it would help or if it would hurt, but it was the truth. He'd promised himself that he would be honest with her, no matter how much it hurt.

"You did what?" Rebecca turned white.

Tucker swallowed hard and made himself continue. "I knew there was no way our marriage would survive. I knew Brian loved you. So I made a deal with him."

"I told him that I would get out of your life, yours and Sammy's, totally, if he still wanted to marry you and if he promised to love Sammy like he would his own son."

Rebecca laughed, an out-of-control sound that held no merriment. "I... I can't believe this."

"Ask Brian. He'll tell you. Or your mother. If she hasn't known all along, she's at least suspected."

"No," she said. "I didn't mean that I think you're lying about it now. I mean—I just can't believe this. Are you telling me that you weren't having an affair with Cheryl Atkinson?"

"I never touched her until that day at the office. I swear it. She was just there, Rebecca. She was available and more than willing."

Rebecca stared down at her hands, clenched in her lap. "And Brian went along with this?"

"He didn't know what I was going to do. Hell, I didn't know myself until Cheryl showed up at my office that day, and I knew you'd be coming by to see your father and that you'd probably stop by my office to say hello. I knew if you saw us together, if I let you think... I knew that would be the end of it for you and Brian would be there to pick up the pieces."

"And Brian went along with it?"

"I think he would have done anything to get you back."

Just as Tucker would do anything right now to get her to come back to him.

And now he wondered if he'd waited too late to tell her this. But it was only lately that he thought he had a chance to get her back. He'd been trying to figure out how to tell her, and he'd been hoping he could put it off just a little while longer to give her some time to learn to trust him again.

But now it had all blown up in his face.

"Rebecca, I'm not trying to make this out to be some noble thing I did. I swear, I honestly wanted you and Sammy to be happy, and I thought you would be with Brian. But at the same time, I was a coward, and this looked like the easy way out, a way to ease my conscience just a little for making such a damned mess of our lives."

"Do you think that you—"

Someone knocked on the closed door, and Tucker wanted to scream in frustration. He needed more time. He had a lot of other things he wanted to say to her, and if he quit now, he was afraid he might never get that chance.

"Mr. Malloy?" The knock sounded again.

Reluctantly, Tucker went to the door and opened it. "Yes, Andy?"

"The chairman's calling the meeting back to order."