email. Thank God I was sitting down at the time.”
She knew the feeling. Her world had tilted, and she now fumbled for a seat. “I’m so sorry. Oh, my God, she is so dead.”
Jack sat on the other end of the sofa—her sofa that had once filled the tiny Cambridge apartment that she’d shared with a much shorter Maggie. He sank back into the soft cushions, yet still managed to look too big to fit there comfortably. “Give her a break, Leen. She doesn’t want you coming home in a box.”
“How did she …?”
It didn’t make sense. Maggie had never known about the night—singular—that Arlene had spent with Jack. It had happened while the girl was visiting her grandparents. And God knows Arlene had never spoken of it to anyone, never so much as whispered Jack’s name in Maggie’s presence.
But her brother and Jack were close—although no longer as close as they’d been as roommates at Boston University. They both currently worked as reporters for the Boston Globe, so it made sense that Maggie would’ve met Jack at some point, but still …
“I met Maggie at the wedding,” Jack explained. “Robin and Jules. Last December? I told her I knew you, and …” He shrugged. “I kinda let slip the fact that you and I had, um, a thing.”
“A thing,” Arlene repeated.
“Yeah,” Jack admitted, making an oops face. “And I also may have said something about, you know, about my, well, kinda still having a thing. You know. For you.”
CHAPTER TWO
Jack was totally screwing this up. Considering he was an award-winning journalist, he’d just delivered the lamest, vaguest declaration of love in the entire history of the world.
And he could see from the disbelief in Arlene’s eyes that she was seconds from losing it and kicking his well-dressed ass out the door.
“You told my daughter—”
“That I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you,” he finished for her, afraid to be more precise in defining exactly what he was feeling and had felt for going on over a decade now, because it was clear that Arlene wasn’t going to fall into his open arms in the immediate future. He’d had that chance, two years ago, and had completely blown it back then. “Yes. We were talking and … I wanted to know how you were.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” she shot back, “although still missing my favorite pair of underpants.”
And there it was—the moment of truth. “Okay,” Jack said, trying to sound matter-of-fact and calm. “Good. Let’s put everything out on the table. Let’s talk about that night. I want to tell you about what happened to me the day after.”
She shook her head vehemently. “Let’s not. Let’s stay on topic and …” He could practically see the wheels turning in her head. “Will told me he saved your life,” she said. “Last November. That you were in Afghanistan and—”
“He’s got nothing to do with this.” Jack knew where she was going. She assumed Will was the mastermind of this crazy plot. Truth was, he hadn’t even mentioned it to Will. Probably because Will would have shut it down, fast, and Jack had had this completely insane spark of hope that Arlene would welcome the chance to stay home—after getting over the initial shock that her daughter had approached Jack for stud services. “This was all Maggie’s idea.”
Arlene wasn’t convinced. “Why are you dressed up?” she asked suspiciously.
He looked down at his wool-covered legs, at the bright silk of his tie. “I wanted to, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Look nice?”
“So that I’d have sex with you,” she concluded. Good old point-blank Arlene. Why couldn’t he be attracted to the shy, reserved type? “You wore it because you were wearing a suit that night.”
He had been. That night.
He’d just won an award for a newspaper story he’d written on the health-care crisis. He’d been giddy, not just from the award, but because he was being recognized for writing about something that mattered.
After the award dinner, purely by chance, he’d run into Arlene downtown, near Copley Square, getting out of work from what she said was a temporary second job, filling in for a waitress friend at a local restaurant. She’d been wearing jeans and a clingy tank top, sandals on her feet, her red curls loose around her shoulders, her smile filled with sunlight and …
But Jack couldn’t for the life of him remember the underwear she’d had on that incredible night. Black or purple. He’d have thought the color would have