to put his feelings for her in the past and move on with his life. And in that length of time, he’d done neither. He still loved her. His love for her had been what prevented him from marrying anyone else. He couldn’t, in good conscience, join himself to another woman and devote his life to her, when what he felt for her would only be shade of the love he still harbored for Claire.
And, simply put, he would never love another woman. Not completely. Not the way he had loved Claire. Not as long as Claire still walked the earth, anyway.
He wasn’t so bitter that he blamed her for the unhappiness he felt these days. Sure, he’d wanted to be married with kids by now, and his life would never feel complete without a family of his own. But it was his choice to remain single and childless. His choice not to get involved with other women beyond a superficial, physical relationship. His choice to look down the road at the future and see nothing but a solitary existence. He certainly didn’t blame Claire for those things. But he didn’t exactly forgive her, either.
She sighed fitfully, bringing his thoughts back to the present. “Let’s not start this again,” she said quietly. “It’s pointless. It’ll just make this situation that much more difficult to weather. We’re not going to learn anything more than we already know about each other.”
“Pointless,” he echoed hollowly. “Yeah, that’s a good word for it,” he concurred further. “We have a whole history that was pretty much pointless, don’t we?”
“Nick…” she said, her voice tinted with an unmistakable warning.
He lifted both hands and held them palm out, in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay,” he relented. “I promise to be a good boy. Really, I do.”
Claire rolled her eyes, but refrained from comment. Instead, she turned her attention to her new infant centerpiece. “She sure seems to be sleeping a lot. Is that safe? I mean, I thought babies slept really badly.”
Nick shrugged, gazing in that direction himself. “Depends on the baby,” he said. “A lot of them are lousy sleepers. But some of them sleep like rocks. Besides, this one’s gotta be at least six or seven months old. By now she should be sleeping fairly well at night. And, hey,” he added softly, “tonight hasn’t exactly been conducive to good sleep for her, has it?”
Claire turned and eyed him suspiciously through lowered lids. Very coolly, she remarked, “You seem to know an awful lot about babies. Do you…have one or two of your own?”
He couldn’t help noting that she glanced quickly down at his—ringless—left hand as she made the comment. Ooo, he thought. Touchy. Is that jealousy tinting Claire’s voice now? Well, well, well.
He shook his head. “No, I’m not married with kids. But I’ve got a lot of nieces and nephews. Angie had twins a month ago, bringing her own personal contribution to four, and—”
“You’re kidding!” Claire exclaimed happily. “Angie? Little Angie has four kids?”
Her smile was dazzling, her delight infectious, and Nick couldn’t help but smile, too. “Hey, ‘little Angie’ is twenty-eight years old,” he pointed out. “She’s been married for six years now.”
Claire shook her head in disbelief. “That’s so amazing,” she said. “I remember her tagging along after us when she was just a kid.”
“She always liked you a lot,” he told her. “She wouldn’t speak to me for months after we broke up. She was sure I did or said something to you that made you run off to Connecticut.”
“Nick…” Claire said again, again with clear warning.
“I’m not trying to rehash old business,” he told her honestly. “I’m just stating a fact is all. You can’t expect us to spend any amount of time together and not bring up some part of the past.” He covered the distance necessary to bring him within arm’s length of her. And with no small effort, he refrained from reaching out to touch her. “We were a big part of each other’s lives once upon a time, whether you like to admit that or not.”
Her lips parted fractionally in surprise at his charge. For a long moment, she only gazed up at his face, her cobalt eyes deep and compelling and filled with some emotion he was probably better off not trying to figure out. Claire’s eyes had always been his undoing, he recalled now, too late. So blue. So arresting. So damned expressive. She could never hide her feelings, because invariably her eyes had betrayed her. They’d always been her own undoing, too.
And right now her eyes were telling Nick that she was remembering those times even better than he remembered them himself. Every muscle and microbe, every sense and sensibility he possessed screamed at him to reach out to her. To take her in his arms and pull her close. To relive those moments of the past and create a few more for the future. Even after more than a decade of separation, even after the emotional wringing he’d suffered as a result of her abandonment, he still wanted Claire. With all his heart, with all his soul. Till death do them part.
Great, Nick. This is just great.
“It’s not that I don’t want to admit how important we used to be to each other,” she said, scattering his thoughts, but doing nothing to alleviate the jumble of his emotions. “On the contrary,” she added quietly, “maybe I remember that part of it better than you do.”
Nodding slowly, but unwilling to reveal just how much her statement shook him, he asked, “Then what is it? What’s wrong?”
She sighed again, opened her mouth to say something, then shut it without uttering a word. She only shook her head silently and spun around, but not before Nick caught the shimmer of tears in her eyes. Something twisted tight in his gut at the sight.
Yeah, those eyes, he thought again. They’d always been trouble. Looked like some things, at least, hadn’t changed a bit.
Claire couldn’t imagine what had come over her to make her act this way. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that she’d be responsible—at least in part—for an abandoned baby for another day, perhaps two. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that the person with whom she was sharing that responsibility was a man she’d once banished from her life, a man she’d never expected to see again, in anything other than passing. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that the two of them were traveling down a memory lane that was pockmarked with land mines that might go off at any second.
No, as if all that wasn’t already bad enough, she was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, way down deep inside, in a distant, lonely place she’d thought locked away forever, she was still in love with Nick Campisano. Even after all these years. Even after the emotional upheaval she’d somehow managed to survive upon their parting. Even after all that, she sensed that there was still a part of herself—a rather large part, evidently—that wanted Nick in her life. Substantially. Eternally.
Wonderful, Claire. You’ve just ascended to the next level of stupidity.
She spread one hand open over her eyes, pretending to swipe away fatigue, praying that Nick hadn’t noticed the presence of tears. Why on earth was she crying? she wondered. She was just exhausted, she tried to reassure herself. It was almost three o’clock in the morning, and she’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours straight. Even before that she’d been tired. She’d never been a good sleeper. The holiday season always made that worse. And the emotional stress of the last few hours had helped not at all.
Tired, she echoed to herself. Weary. Fatigued. That was why she was experiencing this strange wave of melancholy memory. It was nothing more than that. She couldn’t possibly still be in love with Nick after all this time. It made no sense.
Oh, really? a little voice inside her piped up. Then why have you never been able to make a commitment to another man? Why have you never found anyone who made you feel the way Nick made you feel? Why is he the yardstick by which you measure every potential mate?
Instead of answering the little voice, Claire commanded it in no uncertain terms to just shut up and leave her alone because it had no idea what it