A Marriage Worth Fighting For. Lilian Darcy

and auditions around restaurant shifts. Six years of scraping together the money to eat and sleep, as well as updating her modeling portfolio and fixing her damned teeth.

      She’d been told to do this by several modeling agencies, and it had seemed like an investment in her future, the one key piece of the puzzle that was missing. Once she had straight white teeth, the work would start to flow and the money would pour in.

      But it still wasn’t happening, and there was this horrible slippery slope where you paid off the loan for the teeth with a credit card and then got another credit card to cover the maxed-out balance on the first one, and it was so hard to get ahead.

      When did something stop being an investment and start being money poured down the drain? She hadn’t taken any of those expensive acting and voice and movement classes for a while, and her photo portfolio was more than three years old.

      “You’re a beautiful girl,” she’d been told a thousand times. “But …”

      Fill in the blank.

      You’re two inches too short. You’re too big in the bust. You don’t have the voice. You’re too small in the bust. You don’t have the dance training. You’re a model and we’re looking for an actress. You’re an actress and we’re looking for someone who can sing … who can speak French … who can ride a unicycle … who can dance with bears while wrapping a flaming cobra around her neck and juggling ten chain saws.

      Yeah, and don’t even go near the X-rated ways to complete the “someone who can” equation. This was one of her few sources of pride. She’d never stooped to porn videos or the casting couch.

      But she was scared sometimes. Scared every day. She had nothing to fall back on. No close family, since Grammie’s death. Some distant cousins she didn’t even know. Friends in only a little less bad shape than she was. She could never call on them to bail her out. Most of them, she didn’t even know if they really were friends. More like fellow prisoners in the same trap. Maybe every single one of them would scramble over her dead body if it gave them a route to success. How much scrambling would she be prepared to do herself?

      The desperate plans went around and around in her head. Work more double shifts so she could pay off the debt and get some money saved. Abandon her dreams of success, leave the city and find somewhere cheaper to live, take some night courses to earn a more realistic qualification.

      She had nothing in that area, because she’d been so sure that the “You’re so beautiful” she’d heard since the age of nine would be enough.

      There it was, right now, on Dr. Michael McKinley Junior’s face. You’re so beautiful. He didn’t say it out loud, but she’d learned to read it even when it wasn’t spoken. It was like the twenty-seven supposed Eskimo words for snow, so many variants of the same thing.

      You’re so beautiful, but you’re out of my league.

      You’re so beautiful, but you’re not my type.

      You’re so beautiful, and I’m such a sleaze I’m not going to even hide than I’m looking down your uniform blouse.

      In Dr. McKinley’s case, it seemed to be more like “You’re so beautiful, wow, you’re actually distracting me from my coffee,” and he looked so exhausted and bowled over and unaware of his own reaction that it was quite cute, because he was a good-looking man himself. Aged around thirty, she thought, with an imposing height and build, darkly even features and a warm, well-shaped mouth. So it was no hardship to meet his eye and lift the wattage of the smile a notch or two higher.

      She gave him his breakfast perfectly.

      And then he went, and that was that.

      Or not.

      Because he appeared again for supper just before she clocked off for the night, and he remembered her and told her, “You work longer hours than I do.”

      “But your work is more important,” she answered, which was from-the-heart to a stupid extent, considering Dr. McKinley’s casual comment.

      She had a complex, sentimental feeling about doctors, dating from Grammie’s illness, when a couple of them had been so good and thoughtful and kind, and yet they hadn’t been able to make Grammie better. That was thirteen years ago now, when she was ten, but it still colored her reactions sometimes. Colored her life always.

      “Thank you,” Dr. McKinley said. “It’s nice to hear that.”

      And she could tell he had a healthy ego, but there was a sincerity to the words all the same, and the you’re-so-beautiful in his eyes had an extra something to it, a little spark.

      And suddenly, right there while she poured his coffee, some instinct told her she needed to nurture and fan that spark more carefully and strategically and hardheadedly than she’d ever nurtured anything in her life.

      Because maybe, just maybe, there might be something in it for her.

       Chapter Three

      She meant it, MJ could tell.

      Go back to New York.

      Even though Alicia had only whispered the words, they had more force for him than if she’d yelled them and physically pushed him toward the door.

      She never fought him. On anything. It drove him crazy sometimes. He wanted to tell her, “I’m not asking for that from you. I don’t need such perfect agreement and acquiescence with everything I say and everything I want. That’s not why I married you. You are allowed to be a person, Alicia. An independent person, not just my wife. Your total obedience was never part of the bargain.”

      So why didn’t he say it?

      Standing here right now, in the hallway of the rental apartment attached to his younger brother’s house, looking at his beautiful blonde wife, the question reared up at him like a snake and made him paralyzed.

      Why didn’t he ever say it?

      Because he was scared, he realized. He was bloody terrified that if he pulled their marital bargain out into the bright light of day—or rather the bright light of words—the things they said to each other would shatter any possibility of keeping the life they had.

      The life he wanted.

       Really, MJ?

      Hell, yes, he wanted what he had! Stellar career, beautiful, capable wife, happy children, well-organized home life.

      Which brought him back to square one. Out of the blue, Alicia wanted a divorce and was standing in his brother’s hallway in Vermont, telling him to leave.

      I’m exhausted.

      Another inconvenient and powerful realization. She wanted him to go, and he was tempted to do just that—fling himself angrily out of here and tear back down the highway he’d just driven. But he didn’t think he would be safe on the road for another five-hour stint. He probably hadn’t been particularly safe driving up.

      “I’ll check in to a motel,” he told her for the second time tonight.

      “Will you find one, at this hour?”

      “That’s not your concern, is it?” The words were sour and harsh with anger, and he saw her flinch.

      “MJ—”

      “There’ll be something. I won’t have to go beyond Albany. I can drive that far, without going off the road.”

      She said nothing to this, and he thought it was because they had no precedents to go on. They’d never argued. There was never anything to argue about. She did what he wanted, said what he wanted, kept quiet.

      Didn’t see him all that much.

      Didn’t see enough of him for the two of them to rub against each other the way a married couple usually did.

      That