All Fall Down Read online

Two blond heads poked out from under the table. Sunny gathered them into her arms, hugged them close and kissed the tops of their heads, then looked up at him with a small, nervous smile as she stood.

  “I’m sorry,” Sunny said. There was no point in denying anything. “Liesel said to cook the chicken, and I wasn’t sure how to use the oven.”

  “Where is Liesel?” Chris flapped the tea towel again, but most of the smoke was now disappearing.

  “She called and said she’d be home late, and could I start dinner.” Sunny frowned with a look at the oven. “I’m sorry, Chris,” she repeated.

  He gave her a long, strange look. “If you didn’t know how to use it, why didn’t you call her? How the he—heck do you not know how to work a freaking oven?”

  Sunny took a deep breath and coughed on the still-thick scent of smoke in the air. She’d made a mess of things, unintentionally, but she had to take responsibility for it. She hugged Happy and Peace to her again, grateful Bliss’s sobs had softened into silent, hitching tears.

  She bent to murmur into Happy’s ear, “Take Peace upstairs into the bedroom. Silent feet. Go, now.”

  When they’d gone, she faced Chris with a sense of inevitability. “I should have called her, you’re right. I was stupid and silly.”

  “You could’ve burned the house down,” Chris said unnecessarily. He tossed the tea towel into the sink and ran his hands through his hair. Everything reeked of smoke, and he went to the glass doors to take a long, deep breath. He turned back. “Look, Sunshine…”

  Chris stopped dead. Sunny had pulled a large wooden spoon from the kitchen tool caddy. She held it out to him, and Chris took it automatically. Sunny turned to the kitchen table and leaned over it. She flipped her skirt up, exposing her plain white panties. Her hands on the table squeaked as she put her palms flat on the stainless-steel surface.

  She looked at him in resignation over her shoulder, hoping he’d at least be fast.

  Chris stepped back, jaw dropping, mouth dry. “Sunny. What the hell?”

  And that was how Liesel found them.

  Chapter 20

  The first time Liesel Gottlieb looks across the room and sees Christopher Albright, she’s not looking for him. Her gaze just sort of snags on his face as she scans the crowd the way everyone does at parties. Seeing who’s who.

  The second time, though, she’s looking specifically for the blond man with the loud laugh who’s entirely focused on the short redhead in a dress a size too small. She’s all hair and heels and cleavage, and if Liesel were to get much closer, she’s sure the woman would be all perfume, too. That’s okay. Liesel’s a lot more than tits and lipstick, and predatory women like that are lots of fun to usurp.

  Liesel waits, though. This party is full of single hotties, and she’s not really that into blonds as a rule. There is something about him, though. The laugh, for one thing. It turns heads, not just hers. The redhead can’t quite keep up with him, though bless her tiny heart, she’s trying.

  Liesel circulates. She thinks of leaving. She changes her mind when she passes by the makeshift bar someone’s set up at the kitchen table and finds the blond man struggling with a couple slices of lime and a bottle of rum.

  “Mojito?” he asks hopefully.

  Liesel eyes the goods and pulls out the ingredients she needs to make up a standard mojito. She mixes the drink and hands it to him. “It would be better with crushed mint and simple syrup, but this will have to do. I hope she likes it.”

  His gaze shifts toward the living room for a second. “How do you know it’s not for me?”

  “You don’t look like a mojito drinker.” Liesel leans back against the counter. “I figure you for a whiskey sour sort of guy.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He gives her his hand to shake. “Chris.”

  “Liesel.” He has a nice handshake, firm and warm. Not clammy. “Am I right?”

  “Whiskey and soda, actually. But you were close.”

  She laughs. “I tended bar to pay for my last couple years of school.”

  The conversation moves on from there, one topic flowing into another without any break and sometimes, any sense, though neither of them seems to have trouble understanding the other. They laugh. A lot. He leans in to put a hand on the cabinets next to her head, the drink and the redhead both long forgotten. Liesel tips her head, offers her mouth without a word.

  That first kiss goes on and on.

  Liesel leaves the party with Christopher, and they kiss again under a streetlight. Again at the corner by the stop sign. Once more on her doorstep, where he leaves her without asking if he can come inside.

  She’s not surprised when he calls her the next day, or when he asks her out. She’s not even surprised how much she likes him, because meeting Christopher is like hooking up with an old friend she’s known forever. They just…mesh. They merge.

  They were married not quite two years later. Nothing fairy tale about it, no chick-flick drama, just two people who met, fell in love and kept on loving. Facing her husband from across the den, watching him drink his whiskey and soda, Liesel realized how lucky they’d been to have had so few bumps in their road. The problem was, she thought as her husband paced and drank and shut her out, they had no practice at dealing with trouble. It was easy enough to stand together when things were going well. What were they going to do now that things were a little rocky?

  Her hands were cold, and she rubbed them together. She leaned on the arm of the couch, not wanting to sit and yet unsure of how long she could keep standing. “You have to talk about this, Christopher.”

  He sipped at his drink. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “It’s not about what I want you to say. It’s about what you think or feel or need to say.”

  He gave her a look. “Really? You want me to talk about how I feel? Or do you want me talk about how you want me to feel?”

  She wanted to say he was being unfair, but something in his tone stopped her. How did she want him to feel? For that matter, how did she feel, herself?

  “This is a mistake. We were stupid to think this was the right thing to do. We don’t know anything about where she came from, except that those people were a mess. They all killed themselves, for God’s sake,” Christopher muttered, at least making the attempt to keep his voice down. “And she doesn’t seem to see a damn thing wrong with it, Liesel! Who knows how they messed with her head.”

  “So we’ll get her help!”

  Christopher tossed back the last of his drink and set the glass on the bookcase with a thud. He paced, hands on his hips, not looking at her. “She almost burned the house down. Did you think about that? How she doesn’t even know how to work an oven? We’re not talking about getting her a little help, Liesel, we’re talking about training her from the ground up.”

  “She’s not a dog!”

  “No, and you can’t adopt her just like one.”

  Liesel sighed. “So what do you want to do?”

  “We could get them set up somewhere. There are places they can go—”

  “Like what? Foster care? Women’s shelter?”

  “She’s a grown woman. We could help her with money. She could apply for help from the state.”

  Liesel frowned. “You want to send your daughter and grandchildren away to live on welfare?”

  “She wanted me to…spank her.” Christopher’s voice was thick with disgust.

  She crossed the room to him, meaning to make this all go away. Make it better somehow. This was her husband in front of her, not some stranger, after all. Yet when she got there to take his hand, it felt different. She kissed the knuckles anyway. “I know.”

  “It was sick.”

  “I’m not arguing with you about that. But…she didn’t thin