The Bedroom Business

Jake smiled.

He knew, in his heart, that was what Emily really wanted. It was just that women were such emotional creatures. Not that he’d say so. Hell, that comment he’d made, about hor­mones and the time of the month...

“You were just asking for trouble, pal,” he muttered.

Still, it was true. Female feelings gyrated like the stock market on a really bad day. Victims of emotion, all of them, even Emily. Really, what would women do without men to ensure that the world remained a logical place?

Okay. He had it all sorted out. Go to San Diego tomorrow, come back on Tuesday, don’t phone her or do anything until he saw her at the office on Wednesday. Give her lots of time to think about the mistake she’d made. Keep her worrying, even turn panicky when she realized how much she missed him...

Yes, indeed.

When he turned out the light, Jake McBride fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The snow that had blanketed Connecticut had left the city of Rochester untouched, which was a rare event because, grow­ing up, Emily had thought of her hometown as the Snow Capital of the Universe.

She thought of that now, as she began preparing dinner for her sisters in the house the two of them shared, and wasn’t it great that it wasn’t snowing?

Coming back to the place you thought you’d escaped, hav­ing to ask your sisters if you might stay with them for a while, was difficult enough. Doing it while the city was trapped under an inverted white bowl would have made it seem twice as dreary.

Not that she didn’t like Rochester. Her roots were here, and her family. Of course, her parents didn’t know she was back. Not yet. She’d wait, give herself time to find a job, an apartment and, most of all, a logical excuse for coming home.

She didn’t want her mother looking at her father with her eyebrows raised, the way Serena had looked at Angela when she’d arrived on their doorstep with a bird, a birdcage, and three big suitcases Monday evening.

“Hi,” she’d said brightly. “Can I move in with you guys for a while?”

“Of course,” her sisters had said, and then they’d looked at each other, and she’d read all the questions in their faces but they were her sisters, and it was okay to look right back and tell them there wasn’t a way in the world she was going to answer any questions.

Emily sighed.

She’d never imagined coming back for anything but a visit.

She’d had such big plans when she left for New York all those years ago. An exciting career, in an exciting city...

Emily blew a curl off her forehead, opened the oven door and checked on the meat loaf baking inside.

And she’d had that, until she’d ruined it all.

The sad thing was that she’d never thought about having a man in her life, except in the most casual way, until she’d gone to work for Jake. And then, as the months passed, she’d begun to wonder if she wasn’t missing some­thing ... something like her tall, dark and handsome boss, who often visited her in her dreams.

Strange, how she’d never admitted that to herself until Sunday night, when she’d done nothing but dream of Jake. Of course, those dreams had been different. She’d buried him alive in a snowbank, in one dream. And she’d chained him to his bed and fed him cephalopod mollusks until he begged for mercy in another.

Emily slammed the oven door, went to the pantry and took out an onion and some potatoes.

So much for dreams, and so much for Jake. She was home and happy to be here. Rochester was a big place. She’d find a good job, a great apartment, and she’d never waste another second of her life, thinking about Jacob McBride.

She’d already wasted a lot of tears on him, and for what? The thing they’d done, the bedroom business, had been noth­ing but an aberration. It had taken her all of Monday to re­alize it, but that was all it was.

Her heart, thank goodness, was intact.

Serena and Angela didn’t think so.

“It’s a man,” they’d kept saying. “It has to be, Emily. You fell in love and he broke your heart. That’s why you ran away.”

And finally Emily had admitted that yes, there’d been a man, but she hadn’t fallen in love and she hadn’t run away.

“I just got tired of New York, that’s all. Nobody broke my heart.”

Certainly not, she thought as she peeled the onion and diced it. Just because she’d packed her things, sold her fur­niture to the superintendent, arranged to have her books, her CDs and some other stuff packed and shipped, and put her­self and Horace on a train all in one day, didn’t mean she’d run away.

A tear ran down her cheek. “Damned onions,” she mut­tered, and wiped the dampness away with her apron.