Used-To-Be Lovers

Sharon sighed. “Your dad was right to ground you.” She went on to do her admittedly bad imitation of an old-time gangster, talking out of one side of her mouth. “You know the rules, kid—we don’t mess with other people’s stuff around here.”

Before Matt could respond to that, Mrs. Harry, the housekeeper, pushed the vacuum across the living room carpet and then switched off the machine to greet Sharon with a big smile. “Welcome home, Mrs. Morelli,” she said.

Sharon’s throat felt thick, but she returned the older woman’s hello before excusing herself to go upstairs.

Walking into the bedroom she had once shared with Tony was no easier than it had been the first night of their separation. There were so many memories.

Resolutely, Sharon shed the pearls, panty hose and silk dress she’d worn to Teddy Bares and put them neatly away. Then she pulled jeans, a Seahawks T-shirt and crew socks from her bureau and shimmied into them.

As she dressed, she took a mental inventory of herself. Her golden-brown hair, slender figure and wide hazel eyes got short shrift. The person Sharon visualized in her mind was short—five foot one—and sported a pair of thighs that might have been a shade thinner. With a sigh, Sharon knelt to search the floor of the closet for her favorite pair of sneakers. Her mind was focused wholly on the job.

A masculine chuckle made her draw back and swing her head around. Tony was standing just inside the bedroom doorway, beaming.

Sharon was instantly self-conscious. “Do you get some kind of sick kick out of startling me, Morelli?” she demanded.

Her ex-husband sat down on the end of the bed and assumed an expression of pained innocence. He even laid one hand to his heart. “Here I was,” he began dramatically, “congratulating myself on overcoming my entire heritage as an Italian male by not pinching you, and you wound me with a question like that.”

Sharon went back to looking for her sneakers, and when she found them, she sat down on the floor to wrench them onto her feet. “Where are the kids?” she asked to change the subject.

“Why do you ask?” he countered immediately.

Tony had showered and exchanged his work clothes for shorts and a tank top, and he looked good. So good that memories flooded Sharon’s mind and, blushing, she had to look away.

He laughed, reading her thoughts as easily as he had in the early days of their marriage when things had been less complex.

Sharon shrugged and went to stand in front of the vanity table, busily brushing her hair. Heat coursed through her as she recalled some of times she and Tony had made love in that room at the end of the workday….

And then he was standing behind her, his strong hands light on her shoulders, turning her into his embrace. Her head tilted back as his mouth descended toward hers, and a familiar jolt sparked her senses when he kissed her. At the same time, Tony molded her close. Dear God, it would be all too easy to shut and lock the door and surrender to him. He was so very skillful at arousing her.

After a fierce battle with her own desires, Sharon withdrew, wide-eyed and breathless. This was wrong; she and Tony were divorced, and she was never going to be able to get on with her life if she allowed him to make love to her. “We can’t,” she said, and even though the words had been meant to sound light, they throbbed with despair.

Tony was still standing entirely too close, making Sharon aware of every muscle in his powerful body. His voice was low and practically hypnotic, and his hands rested on the bare skin of her upper arms. “Why not?” he asked.

For the life of her, Sharon couldn’t answer. She was saved by Briana’s appearance in the doorway.

At twelve, Briana was already beautiful. Her thick mahogany hair trailed down her back in a rich, tumbling cascade, and her brown eyes were flecked with tiny sparks of gold. Only the petulant expression on her face and the wires on her teeth kept her from looking like an angel in a Renaissance painting.

Sharon loved the child as if she were her own. “Hi, sweetie,” she said sympathetically, able now to step out of Tony’s embrace. She laid a motherly hand to the girl’s forehead. “How do you feel?”

“Lousy,” the girl responded. “Every tooth in my head hurts, and did Dad tell you what Matt did to my goldfish?” Before Sharon could answer, she complained, “You should have seen it, Mom. It was mass murder.”

“We’ll get you more fish,” Sharon said, putting one arm around Bri’s shoulders.

“Matt will get her more fish,” Tony corrected, and there was an impatient set to his jaw as he passed Briana and Sharon to leave the room. “See you at the next changing of the guard,” he added in a clipped tone, and then he was gone.

A familiar bereft feeling came over Sharon, but she battled it by throwing herself into motherhood.

“Is anybody hungry?” she asked minutes later in the enormous kitchen. As a general rule, Tony was more at home in this room than she was, but for the next three days—or was it four?—the kids’ meals would be her responsibility.

“Let’s go out for pizza!” Matt suggested exuberantly. He was standing on the raised hearth of the double fireplace that served both the kitchen and dining room, and Sharon suspected that he’d been going back and forth through the opening—a forbidden pursuit.

“What a rotten idea,” Bri whined, turning imploring eyes to Sharon. “Mom, I’m a person in pain!”

Matt opened his mouth to comment, and Sharon held up both hands in a demand for silence. “Enough, both of you,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere—not tonight, anyway. We’re eating right here.”

With that, Sharon went to the cupboard and ferreted out the supply of canned pasta she’d stashed at the back. There was spaghetti, ravioli and lasagna to choose from.

“Gramma would have a heart attack if she knew you were feeding us that stuff,” Bri remarked, gravitating toward another cupboard for plates.

Sharon sniffed as she took silverware from the proper drawer and set three places at the table. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” she said.

There were assorted vegetables in the refrigerator, and she assuaged her conscience a little by chopping enough of them to constitute a salad.

After supper, when the plates and silverware had been rinsed and put into the dishwasher and all evidence of canned pasta destroyed in the trash compactor, the subject of school came up. Summer was nearly over; D day was fast approaching.

Matt would be in the third grade, Briana in the seventh.

“What do you say we go shopping for school clothes tomorrow?” Sharon said. Helen, the one and only employee Teddy Bares boasted, would be looking after the shop.

“We already did that with Gramma,” Matt said, even as Bri glared at him.

Obviously, a secret had been divulged.

Sharon was wounded. She’d been looking forward to the expedition for weeks; she and the kids always made an event of it, driving to one of the big malls in Seattle, having lunch in a special restaurant and seeing a movie in the evening. She sat down at the trestle table in the middle of the kitchen and demanded, “When was this?”

Matt looked bewildered. He didn’t understand a lot of what had been going on since the divorce.

“It was last weekend,” Briana confessed. Her expression was apologetic and entirely too adult. “Gramma said you’d been under a lot of strain lately—”

“A lot of strain?” Sharon echoed, rising from the bench like a rocket in a slow-motion scene from a movie.

“With the shop and everything,” Briana hastened to say.

“Quarterly taxes,” Matt supplied.

“And credit card billings,” added Briana.

Sharon sagged back to the bench. “I don’t need you two to list everything I’ve done in the past two months,” she said. Her disappointment was out of proportion to the situation; she realized that. Still, she felt like crying.

When Matt and Bri went off to watch television, she debated calling Tony for a few moments and then marched over to the wall phone and punched out his home number. He answered on the third ring.

Relief dulled Sharon’s anger. Tony wasn’t out on a date; that knowledge offered some comfort. Of course, it was early….

“This is Sharon,” she said firmly. “And before you panic, let me say that this is not an emergency call.”

“That’s good. What kind of call is it?” Tony sounded distracted; Sharon could visualize his actions so vividly—he was cooking—that she might as well have been standing in the small, efficient kitchen of his condo, watching him. Assuming, that is, that the kitchen was small and efficient. She’d never been there.

Sharon bit down on her lower lip and tears welled in her eyes. It was a moment before she could speak. “You’re going to think it’s silly,” she said, after drawing a few deep and shaky breaths, “but I don’t care. Tony, I was planning to take the kids shopping for their school clothes myself, like I always do. It was important to me.”