Love Letters From Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [68]
“We’ll come back and buy it for her when the shop opens.”
When they started walking again, he draped his arm around her shoulders. It made walking a little awkward; she wasn’t accustomed to matching her pace with his. But she didn’t protest.
He looked around contentedly. “This is nice. A great place to retire.”
She chuckled, sipping her coffee. “I can’t picture you retired.”
He said, “I couldn’t picture you retired either. But you seem pretty happy on that horse farm of yours.”
“No horses,” she reminded him. “Chickens, remember? Sheep.”
“I mean it, Cici. This game is for the young. You’re nothing in L.A. if you’re not twenty-eight years old. And what do I have to prove, anyway? I’ve been there, done that. And done it a hell of a lot better than any of those punks ever will.”
She smiled and saluted him with her cup. “You bet you have.”
Suddenly he turned to her, grasped her waist, and swept her across the walkway to a concrete bench. Before she could so much as yelp a protest, he sat her down on the bench and sat close beside her. His eyes were urgent and sincere and the hand that gripped hers was strong.
“Cici, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “The two of us—here we are, with a grown-up daughter, all these years later, and we never really got to have the life we promised each other. But maybe it’s not too late. Think about it. All those things we were going to do, the places we were going to see. We could get on a boat, we could sail the Greek Islands.”
Cici said, “I’ve been to Greece, with Bridget and Lindsay. It was my fiftieth birthday present to myself.”
He looked only momentarily disconcerted. “We could go to Antarctica, Dubai, Istanbul. Or spend a month in Fiji.”
Cici laughed, albeit a bit uneasily. “Me, in Fiji.”
“Or,” he said, laying a hand aside her face, “we could just be quiet together. Dig in the dirt, watch the sunset, take walks on the beach. It doesn’t have to be too late.”
She caught his hand against her face, twining her fingers in his, and her expression softened with tenderness as she looked at him. “Richard,” she said softly. “Last night was great, but ...”
“No buts.” His fingers tightened on hers, and their joined hands drifted to her knee. “I know you think this is coming out of nowhere, but it’s not. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, about what you’ve done here, the life you have, and I’ve got to tell you, it sounds good to me. Better than good.”
It became more of an effort to keep up the smile. “You’d go out of your mind within a month.”
“And then when Lori ... when I thought I might lose Lori ...” He dropped his eyes briefly, and then looked at her again. There was nothing there except sincerity, and, she thought, more courage than she had ever known from him. “And then, seeing you again ... Suddenly I knew what was important, Cici. The only thing that’s ever been important.”
She dropped her eyes to their hands so that he could not see the discomfort in her gaze. For a moment, she actually expected to see his hand as she remembered it from their youth, strong and tanned and supple, the hand that tossed a football and caressed her body to the point of madness, sporting the college ring with the sapphire stone. And she expected to see her own hand, smooth and white and delicately freckled with the sleek French manicure she always used to wear. Instead she saw raised veins and blotchy skin below his perfectly buffed nails, chapped knuckles and freckles that had turned to liver spots on hers. That made her smile a little, sadly.
“Richard,” she began.
Richard said quietly, “I never stopped loving you.”
Cici stared at him for a long and silent moment. And at last all she could say was, “Oh.”
They were ready.
Four glasses of chilled peanut soup were lined up on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Maryland crab cakes and honey-glazed fried chicken were ready to be dropped into separate pans for frying, with the dill-caper butter softening near the stove. The mini quiches and caramelized onion tarts were baking, and the brie en croute was ready to be popped into the