Winning Over the Brooding Billionaire, page 16
And she had not been drinking at all. It was her father’s party, but she had juggled expertly between being a family member and the complete professional that she was. While she’d socialized—she’d known most of her father’s friends and associates since she was a child—she’s also been making sure everything was perfect, doing all the hard work in the background that made the magic unfold with seeming effortlessness.
He was pretty sure she hadn’t even noticed that he’d been avoiding her.
Sam picked up his phone from the bedside table and frowned. It was just after five in the morning. Had she curled up out there somewhere, exhausted? She wouldn’t have gone down to the creek by herself, would she?
She was getting to know her way around the ranch, but it could still be a dangerous place, perched on the edge of the wilderness the way it was.
But then he saw he had a message and that it was from Shelby. His relief was instantaneous, until he tapped the text icon.
And then he didn’t feel relieved at all.
Sorry. Something’s come up. Had to leave unexpectedly. Caught a ride with Dad. Talk soon.
Strange. No babe or other term of endearment. No little red hearts. No smoochie emoji.
It was five in the morning. He couldn’t call her. On the other hand, she was heading to New York. It was eight there.
He tapped her contact, listened to the phone ring and ring and ring. And then he listened to her voice mail.
He’d always liked hearing her voice on voice mail when he’d called her in the past. But he didn’t feel that way right now.
He’d had a big plan for today. Her father had given him his blessing. He had the ring. He’d had it for way too long. He’d been thinking of things to say for way too long. He needed to give it to her. He needed to ask her the question.
Questions, really.
Will you marry me?
Will you spend the rest of your life with me?
Will you be a mother to Hannah?
Will you have my children?
It wasn’t happening.
Not today.
He scraped a hand though his hair and headed for the shower. He hoped the hot water would dissolve the feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Of what?
He’d felt this way only once before in his entire life. Sitting in that doctor’s office with Beth.
Impending doom.
Shelby’s idea of talk soon was to ignore his calls for three days, and then to finally phone, something weirdly breathless in her voice, as if she was hurrying to catch a train or something.
“Sam,” she said, “I’m so sorry I haven’t returned your calls. Emergency at work.”
What kind of emergency did planning parties leave you open to? He managed, barely, not to say that.
He respected what she did. He respected how she did it. But an emergency so compelling she couldn’t answer her phone for three days? He was skeptical.
“Look,” she said, “I have to tell you something.”
What was with her voice? It made him want to ask, Who are you and what have you done with Shelby?
“It’s been a fantastic summer, really it has. But my work is suffering. It’s all pretty intense.”
“Intense?” he said, stunned.
“It’s suffocating me.”
“What the—” He said a word that men say on a ranch a lot. Buckie’s word for the letter F. He had never said it to a woman before.
“Of course, I’ll call Hannah. If it’s okay with you.”
For a minute she almost sounded like herself.
“I’ll just kind of wean her off of me. I don’t want to hurt her. I’d rather die than hurt her.”
She didn’t sound like a woman who was suffocating. She sounded like a woman who was suffering.
“We need to talk,” he said, trying to be reasonable.
“I can’t. I mean to Hannah. But—”
“But not to me,” he said tersely.
“That’s correct.”
Like a schoolteacher telling him he’d gotten two plus two right.
Shelby Kane had just told him he was suffocating her, and he was practically begging her to talk about it?
No.
He would not beg her to love him back. He would not. But if he stayed on the phone, he might. So he didn’t say one more word. He disconnected.
Buckie waited two weeks before he addressed it.
“What is wrong with you?” He managed to get his word for the letter F in that short sentence three times.
“Wrong with me? Nothing.”
“Don’t give me that.” He put his word for the letter S at the end of the sentence. “You’re acting like a bear with a sore bottom. You got three hands and a cook fixin’ to quit if you keep it up.”
He didn’t say anything.
“What happened between you and Shelby?” Buckie asked.
“I don’t know, okay?”
He said that with quite a bit more heat than he expected.
“Did you have a fight?”
“No! She just left, the night of her dad’s party. She left and she didn’t say goodbye and then she called a few days later and said it was all too intense.” He might as well say all of it. “She said I was suffocating her.”
“You’re dumb as a stick,” Buckie said, all sympathy of course.
“Well, maybe that factored into it.”
“She’s lying to you.”
“Maybe she lied to me before and this is the truth.”
“Dumb as a stick,” Buckie said, with a sad shake of his head. “It wasn’t too intense, and she’s not suffocating.”
“How do you know?”
“You know, I might look as dumb as you’re acting, but I ain’t. I know human nature, and I know who that girl is.”
“Yeah,” he said sarcastically. “I remember. You saw it in her eyes.”
“I know you been hurt, Sam. I know you suffered more loss in a short period than a lot of men get in their lifetimes. But you can’t let it control you. You go talk to her.”
“I’m so angry I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“Say that,” Buckie said. “Say what’s real. In your heart. If she still won’t have you after you’ve had your say, at least you know you gave it everything. You didn’t just quit. We don’t abide a quitter around here.”
Sam glared at Buckie.
“I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that girl is hurting something fierce. If you love her, as much as I think you do, you’ll go find out what’s hurting her so bad, and you’ll bring her back from it.
“That’s what love does. It risks it all. It puts the other person first. It can hurt like hell. But it’s still the only thing that can save us.”
Sam said nothing.
“I need your word.”
“You’re asking me to be like a white knight, riding to the rescue of a maiden in distress.”
“I am asking you that.”
And suddenly, Sam was looking at things differently. He’d been so consumed by his pain and his anger that he had not thought about her feelings.
Was Shelby in distress?
Of course she was!
There was no way what had transpired between them over the last few months was not the truest thing that had ever happened to both of them.
Buckie was right.
Sam was just plain dumb. The truth had been right in front of him all along. Somehow knowing it didn’t make him any less angry with her.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SHELBY HEARD SOMEONE pounding on her apartment door. It matched the pounding in her head. She felt exactly as if she had a hangover, but she did not.
Unless emotion caused hangovers.
And then she deserved a doozy. After not remembering her mother for eighteen years, now it felt as if a dam had burst, and the memories would not stop coming, water pushing its way through every weak spot, rushing out.
Plus, she had just hung up from Hannah. She had done as she promised Sam she would. She had called every day for the first week. And then she’d eased off just a little bit. And now, three weeks after her father’s birthday party, she was calling every third or fourth day. Usually she did a video call, but today she was pretty sure Hannah would have picked up on how hideous she looked.
So, she’d done a regular call. She’d sung Old MacDonald, she’d put extra enthusiasm into the oinking.
And she had hung up the phone and done what she did every single time she hung up the phone.
Cried.
She missed them so much. Hannah. Alvin. Rascal. She missed it all so much. Mouse pancakes and sprinklers and storybooks and games. She missed cows lowing in the distance, elk on the lawn in the morning, the cool, pure breezes coming from the mountains.
Sam.
Especially Sam.
She missed the look in his eyes, and his smile, his hair growing back in curly. She missed his hands: those beautiful, competent, strong hands that could fly a helicopter or throw a calf, and yet be so tender when holding her hand, or so on fire as they brailled her body.
She missed sharing worlds and jokes and ice-cream cones.
Shelby had not known until now that you could physically ache for a person, that you could want them so badly your teeth hurt, that you could feel a dark hole of emptiness inside of you that felt as if it could swallow you.
The pounding at the door came again.
It was unusual to get someone at her apartment door unannounced. Visitors to the building had to get by a doorman and a concierge.
She decided to ignore it, but it came again, insistent.
Maybe the building was on fire and they were ordering evacuation. Or a pervert had slipped in and he was going to tell her he needed to come into her apartment for some manufactured emergency.
She got up off the couch, padded to the door and threw it open, and didn’t bother with the peephole. She thought, Let fate take me.
Shelby was stunned at where fate intended to take her. Sam stood there.
Sam. The relief she felt was intense, even as she tried to school herself not to show it. She was saving him. And Hannah. She could not throw herself against him, and wrap her arms around him, as if he was a knight who had arrived on his steed to save her.
Besides, nothing in his face invited that.
He looked furious.
Gloriously handsome, but furious.
Except for the night she had told him she was not really a nanny, she did not think she had seen Sam angry.
And this did not compare to that. It would be like comparing a campfire to a volcano.
He was a volcano, right now, on the edge of eruption.
There was something about a man who was furious, and doing his best to contain it, that was oddly enticing. Like that thunderstorm the night they had first made love.
She could not think of that right now.
“What the hell are you doing?” he bit out, his gaze raking her.
She realized she must look beyond horrible. Her hair tangled, her eyes puffy from crying, her uniform of sweatpants and an old T-shirt unchanged for days.
“What the hell are you doing?” she shot back.
He glared at her and pushed by her into her apartment. He stood there, looking around grimly. She saw it through his eyes. The curtains were closed. There were two empty ice-cream containers on the coffee table, and one half-eaten microwaved lasagna on a television tray.
He swung around and looked at her. “You tell me what’s going on. Right now.”
Sam was not making a request. He was giving an order.
Shelby closed the door, leaned against it, folded her arms over her chest.
“I told you what’s going on,” she said. “We had a great time. Loved every moment. But it was interfering with my career.”
He cast another look around the apartment. “I can clearly see your career is a priority.”
Don’t break, she ordered herself, but she was breaking. It was as if she was full of cracks and his arrival was putting pressure on them, and they were opening. If she didn’t get things under control, he was going to see how broken she was.
But, wait. That’s what he needed to see. That she was way too damaged for him to want, for him to invite into his life, and the life of his daughter.
“The night of my dad’s birthday party—”
“The night you left,” he snapped.
“I asked him about my mom. I asked him why I couldn’t remember her.”
His whole expression changed. “What did he say?”
“You know why I didn’t remember her, Sam? Because she didn’t love me. She hated me. She hated every single thing about me. She hated being a mom.”
For a moment, he stood there, absolutely frozen. And then in one long stride, he came to her, and his arms folded around her.
It felt as if she had been adrift on a raft in the middle of the ocean, hopeless, and the rescue craft had appeared.
It felt as if she had wandered, dying of thirst in the desert, and found an oasis.
It felt as if she had been lost in the deepest, darkest forest, and finally saw the light.
Of home.
That’s what she felt as his arms closed around her. A sensation of being home.
If she would have had the strength she would have pulled away. But she had no strength left. She could not fight the relief of this: someone coming after her. She leaned into what he offered, and she wept. She had thought she had no tears left, but it turned out she did.
He lifted her easily into his chest, carried her to her sofa, sat down with her on his lap, stroking her hair, saying soothing things.
“Tell me,” he said, and though his tone was more gentle than it had been before, it was still an order that brooked no argument.
“I can’t stop remembering things. About my mom.”
“Tell me.”
She had not said a word about these memories to a single soul. It felt as if they were corrosive, eating away at her.
“I remember clinging to her leg as she was trying to get out the door to go to a party, and her prying my fingers from her slacks.”
His complete attention was her antidote to the poison she had swallowed. She could feel the toxin within her dilute.
“I remember begging for a story and being laughed at. Me? Do I look like I read stories? For god’s sake, the next thing you’ll want is a mommy who makes cookies.
“I remember wearing my prettiest dress, wanting just to be noticed, just to be approved of, and her not even looking at me.
“I remember drawing pictures, signed with love hearts, that were glanced at, then tossed away with no comment.
“I remember her promising to be there for things like the Christmas play, my kindergarten graduation and never showing up.
“I remember her telling me if I stopped pestering her, she’d take me shopping, or out for iced hot chocolate, or to the park. But she never did.
“I’ve waited and waited for you to disappoint me. I was nearly delirious with joy each time you kept a promise. But the trepidation would start to build for the next time.”
One by one, Shelby told Sam every single thing she remembered. She thought she would feel deeply ashamed, weak for sharing these memories with him. But instead, as she spoke the dam emptied, as if all the dirty, debris-filled water had to be cleared away.
Until she came to the last one.
“I remember screaming I loved her at her as she headed out the door. I think I have believed, my whole life, even though I didn’t remember saying those words, that saying them had the power to kill.”
“The exact opposite,” he said firmly. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
But still, she did not say them. “So,” she finally said. “You can see why I had to go.”
“I don’t, really. I don’t get it.”
“Oh, Sam, she’s half of me. Those parts of her are in me. My own mother didn’t love me. Who could love me?”
“I could,” he said, softly, and with such conviction. “I think you’re looking at it all wrong, Shelby.”
“In what way?”
“You are part of her. But you’re the best part. You’re her good thing, her one beautiful, good thing that she gave to the world. I don’t know if there’s a heaven, but I bet if there is, the best part of your mom, the undamaged part, her soul, is looking down, saying See? I made it. The best part of me survived. I go on, in my daughter, in that beautiful, strong, resilient woman who took everything I gave her, who took all that coal I heaped on her, and mined it for diamonds.”
She could feel his words seeping into her, like warmed wine, thawing all the places she had turned to ice.
“What if you’re wrong?” she whispered.
“I’m not wrong. I remember what Buckie told me the first day you were there.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said, anybody who can’t tell who that girl is from lookin’ in her eyes is just plain dumb.”
“Buckie said that about me?”
“Day one.”
“You do a pretty good Buckie impression.”
“I know. Don’t tell him.”
A small bubble of laughter escaped her. Five minutes ago, she had thought she was facing a life without one more moment of laughter in it.
This had been the miracle of Sam from the very beginning: life having a different plan for her than she had for herself.
Thank goodness.
“I miss him. And I miss Hannah.” She took a deep breath. “And you, Sam. I miss you so much. It feels as if my world has gone from full color to black and gray.”
“I’m going to suggest something to you,” he said quietly. “I’m going to suggest that what made you run away from us was not just remembering your mom.
“It was more than that. It’s terror that love will let you down. That it will hurt you more than you can bear. That it will give something to you that you feel you can’t live without and then it will snatch it away.”
