Page 34 of Loving You Always

“She would never have left you for me. Never have cheated on you. One kiss, and you’re throwing that away?”

“A lifetime with a woman who loves someone else?” Cam twisted his eyebrows into a frown. “Would you take that?”

“I’d take Kerris any way I could get her.” Walsh cleared his face of repentance or apology. He grabbed his bags from where he’d dropped them. “As a matter of fact, I’ll take her as your…how did you put it? Broken-in leftovers? Yeah, I’d take her if she’d hadsevenhusbands, not just one idiot ahead of me.”

“So you’re really going after her?” Cam asked.

Walsh walked to the door and knew this would be it. This would be final.

“Unc, would you run me to the airport?” Walsh looked past Cam and Jo to where his uncle stood. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Chapter Eleven

Mama Jess, I need you to do me a favor.”

Kerris glanced from the bulk of her two casts, lumps beneath the comforter, up to Mama Jess’s worried face. She had cried for only a few minutes after Cam left, and then she’d retreated to her office on the screened-in porch. From her wheelchair by the window, she’d looked out and down to the riverbank. Mama Jess had finally convinced her to eat some soup and a sandwich. A quiet meal, with Mama Jess not asking many questions, and Kerris not offering many remarks. After eating just a few spoonfuls of soup and pulling the crusts from her sandwich, Kerris had declared herself exhausted and in need of a nap. And now she was in need of a favor as well.

“What is it, Lil’ Bit?” Mama Jess reached down to push the bangs from Kerris’s eyes.

“When Walsh comes.” She caught Mama Jess’s hand by her face, gripping her fingers. “I don’t want to see him.”

“Do you know that he’ll come?”

“He’ll come.” Kerris licked dry lips. “I just don’t…I can’t see him.”

“I saw him crying his heart out in the chapel.” Mama Jess adjusted the comforter around Kerris’s shoulder, looking down at her with eyes blessedly free of judgment. “That man loves you.”

“I know, and I care…” Kerris let the insipid word describing what she felt for Walsh sit on her tongue like tasteless porridge. “I care about him, which is why I can’t see him right now.”

“Mind explaining that?”

“There’s something broken in me. Something that’s never been right. I used Cam to try to fix it. I used the baby to try to fix it. And if Walsh comes now, as much as I…care about him, I’ll use him to try to fix it, too.”

“Hmmmm.” Mama Jess crammed everything and nothing into that monosyllable.

“And I can’t do that,” Kerris said, her eyes filling up. “Not anymore. Not tohim. I need to be on my own and figure this out. And if he comes…I won’t be able to say no. I won’t be able to send him away. And I just…I just need some time to get it straight. To sort it out. I’ve messed up so badly, and I can’t keep—”

“Stop, baby.” Mama Jess’s voice, quiet and sharp, sliced into the hysterical note Kerris heard building in her own voice. “I’ll handle it.”

***

Walsh pressed the doorbell again for the fourth time in a matter of seconds. Cam said Mama Jess was here with Kerris. Walsh walked over to the window, trying to see through the sheers into the living room. He knocked on the window, a few soft taps. Maybe he should go around to the back door. Maybe he’d knocked too softly, and the steady rainfall had muffled the sound. He put a little more insistence into the fist he banged against the windowpane. It shouldn’t take this long to open a door. Surely Mama Jess hadn’t left Kerris here alone.

The front door opened before he could send his anxious mind too far down that road.

Mama Jess stepped onto the front porch, closing the door behind her and leaning against it.

“Were you going to call the fire department next?”

Mama Jess started her scrupulous inspection at his shoes, then inched up his dark-wash jeans and past his NYU T-shirt until she met his eyes. Walsh didn’t like what he saw there. It was steel. It was determination. The fact that she didn’t let him in hadn’t escaped him. Walsh walked the few feet from the window to the front door, standing his ground in front of the woman he suspected meant to keep him out.

“I’m here to see Kerris.”

“Oh, and here I was about to get flattered.” She rolled the words around in sarcasm and accompanied them with a twist of her lips.

“I…well, I heard that—”

“News sure travels fast.” She squinted up at him in the weak porch light and gestured to his face. “What’s the other guy look like?”

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