Wife by Design

She backed up. “Wow. Um, I guess…”

“Yeah,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I guess.”

His eyes finished the sentence. And her entire body tingled.

Whatever doubts she’d harbored about their plan to have sex diminished. Wednesday was coming. And when it did, they’d be naked. He was going to be inside her.

How in the hell was she going to wait that long?

And how was it ever going to be enough?

She watched him gather supplies. And she needed so much more than sex. Though the distraction was incredibly welcome.

“I, uh, guess you told Darin he couldn’t marry Maddie.”

“Nope.”

She straightened, folding her arms, and remembered Darin’s request for a date. Grant hadn’t been able to tell his big brother no then, either. “You didn’t tell him yes, did you?”

Turning, one foot on the zero-gravity mower, he looked at her. “I tried to point out that he was not in any shape to marry. He had an answer for everything.”

“What answer could he possibly have for the fact that they can’t even live alone?”

“Me.”

“You?”

“He expects me to do for the both of them exactly what I do for him. I’m already doing it. So it stands to reason that I could just expand my duties a bit and—”

“You can’t do that.” He was practically killing himself as it was. Hell, he was a thirty-eight-year-old man who had to schedule an hour of sex more than a week in advance.

Grant’s silence didn’t tell it to her straight.

“Are you considering it?”

“I told him I would.”

“Are you?”

“At this point, I’ve done everything I can to avoid thinking about it.”

She didn’t blame him. How did you give your whole life to raising your older brother, invest every part of yourself into maintaining and preserving his well-being, encouraging him to push himself and try everything he wanted to try to get the most out of life, and then tell him he couldn’t have what he wanted most because he was handicapped.

She moved closer. He took her hand, resting it on his upraised thigh. All she wanted to do was pull him into her arms and promise him that they’d get through this together. That he wasn’t alone and it would be okay.

“I was hoping I’d distract him,” Grant said, his voice low, dejected. “The diving lessons… I thought I was doing a good thing.”

“Clearly, he didn’t.”

“All he cared about was that they were going to interfere with his only chance to spend time with Maddie. I thought he’d lost the ability to be single focused. Maybe it’s just that after he lost Shelley, he didn’t care enough anymore. And now, with Maddie…”

“Maybe we should rethink his therapy. I can make some phone calls. Try to get him moved. At least temporarily.And I could take away his cell phone, I guess.”

They stared at each other. Lynn was such a mixture of conflicting thoughts and emotions that she didn’t even recognize herself.

“Are we being fair to them?” she asked.

“I feel like a selfish ass,” he blurted at almost the same time.

“I think we have to discourage any thoughts of marriage but allow the friendship for now.”

“He’s living life again.” Grant’s voice sounded different to her. Not controlled.

He sounded lost. “For the first time since the accident, I’m seeing parts of him I thought were gone forever.”

“Maddie’s good for him.”

“It seems that way.”

Squeezing his hand, Lynn said, “We’ll keep a close watch on them, Grant. I’ll be right here beside you all the way. Doing my part.”

He nodded.

“We should do what we can not to make it too easy,” she continued. “Like, come up with excuses instead of allowing them to have dinner together so often.”

He didn’t agree immediately.

But the idea was sound. Good. Even though she wasn’t excited about it.

“Maybe…once a week?” he suggested.

“Okay.” Once a week she’d have Grant at her dinner table. One hour out of one hundred and sixty-eight. She could handle that.