This Time for Keeps, page 6
Pushing to her feet, Meg backed away.
Russell matched her step for step.
“With Charlotte.” Her throat was thick, tight. “She was on a blanket,” she remembered. “Her favorite…a sweet little yellow one. She was up on her hands and her knees, rocking like…”
The warmth of Russell’s hand stunned her.
Frozen, she stared at his fingers against her flesh, strong, blunt-tipped—and something inside her stirred.
A touch. It was such a simple thing. People touched every day. Strangers touched. Friends touched. Lovers…touched. The first time Russell had touched her—
She remembered that, the first time. But she did not remember the last.
“Tell me,” he said again, and this time she heard it, the soft echo of Scotland. But it didn’t caress or seduce, as it once had.
It scraped.
She stepped back, broke the touch. The moment. Didn’t want to feel anything. Russell was part of her past.
Charlotte was her future.
Turning, she traded shadows for the bright wash of sunlight in the cheerful yellow kitchen—where a simple little green vase still sat on the round table, next to a big fat paperback. The bookmark was toward the end, waiting for someone to return.
The dead flowers made it clear no one had.
“I can still see her,” Meg said as Russell came up behind her. “She was so excited at the thought of Charlotte crawling.” And now her baby was about to walk. “She would get down on her hands and knees with her and show her exactly how it was done, and Char would giggle.”
A distorted sound broke from Russell, but she did not let herself turn. Did not want to see.
“What happened?”
Meg closed her eyes.
“That night,” Russell clarified. “I know there was some kind of accident.”
Memories pushed closer. “Don’t,” she said, turning. She didn’t want to go back to that awful place.
But the second she saw the naked, unguarded need in Russell’s eyes, she knew she had to. He was Ainsley’s brother. He’d loved her. When he’d walked away, it was from Meg, not his sister. She’d simply gotten stuck in the middle.
“It wasn’t that late,” she said, wishing she’d worn long sleeves. The house had been closed up and the AC wasn’t running. She’d expected it to be warm. “Ainsley was coming home from a friend’s. Charlotte was in the backseat and—”
Russell’s eyes flashed. “Charlotte was with her?”
“Sleeping,” Meg murmured as she rubbed the chill from her arms. “The State Trooper said it’s a miracle she wasn’t hurt.”
Russell swore under his breath. “I didn’t know.”
How could he? She’d only talked to his mother that one time.
“It was a drunk driver?” he asked.
She could see the trooper all over again, Ms. Peggy’s boy, tall and lanky, shifting from foot to foot. His knock had woken her shortly after midnight. “Yes. He was driving on the wrong side of the highway.” At a high rate of speed. “Ainsley swerved and went off the road…hit a tree.”
Russell’s face darkened. “I should have been here.”
Deep inside, a quiet little voice screamed yes. Yes. He should have been here. For Ainsley…
“It wouldn’t have made any difference.” The result would have been the same. His sister would still have died.
Russell moved so fast she didn’t have time to back away. Look away. He crowded in on her, forcing her to tilt her face to see his. But he did not touch her, not this time.
Not with his hands, anyway.
“You really believe that?”
His voice almost sounded hurt.
Meg swallowed, hard. She wanted to move away, back away. But something deep and powerful held her in place.
“You weren’t here,” she said quietly. “So I guess we’ll never know.”
Russell winced. All six foot one of him recoiled, as if she’d taken a willow branch to his bare flesh. He took a step back from her, then stepped back again.
“But I was,” Meg said, and now her voice broke, and along with it, the dam. “I was here, Russell. I was with her.” In the Emergency Room. At the end. “I held her hand,” she said through a surge of hot, salty tears. “I held her hand and told her I loved her, that everything would be okay.”
Russell looked like he wanted to throw up.
Meg wouldn’t let herself back down. “And you know what she said to me?”
His mouth thinned, but he said nothing.
“I can still see her….” Hear her. Massive internal injuries had left Ainsley weak, but not too weak to hold her baby. “In the hospital bed,” Meg said, “with Charlotte…
“And she asked me,” she went on, “she asked me to take care of her baby.”
Russell’s eyes squeezed shut.
“And you!” The words came out on a broken shout. “She lay there dying, and she asked me to take care of you!”
Slowly Russell’s eyes opened, and a tear slipped from the corner.
“You, who walked out on her. You, who left her here, after she’d traveled thousands of miles to be with you.” Her sainted big brother. “You who left her!” she spat, but then remembered the baby and lowered her voice. “You weren’t here, Russell. You weren’t here when she fell for some young soldier about to deploy for Iraq, when she confused his hunger to live for love, when she missed her period….”
But now he was here, to settle her affairs.
It was a little late for that.
“You weren’t here…” Meg said again, this time softer. He hadn’t written. Hadn’t called. “When Charlotte was born.”
When Ainsley died.
But his sister had thought of him anyway. With her final breaths, her final words, she begged Meg to forgive her brother.
“You weren’t here.” And she didn’t want him here now. Didn’t want to see him, hear him. Didn’t want to feel his hand on her body, his warmth whispering through the coldness.
Biting down on her lip, Meg sucked in a sharp breath and turned, did what Russell had done two years before.
She walked away.
SETTLING SOMEONE’S affairs sounded so tidy and clinical. Like a task to be squeezed into spare time. Come into the house, empty out drawers and cabinets and closets, pack a few boxes. Clear everything out—send it away, throw it away.
But the reality was neither tidy nor clinical. These items weren’t just stuff to be sorted and dispensed with; they were the remnants of someone’s life. Ainsley’s life. She’d worn each pair of jeans or shirt or shoes that Meg picked up. She’d loved the pink flip-flops Meg couldn’t bring herself to toss, despite the fact they were almost completely worn-out. They’d picked up the satchel purse together at a flea market, along with the ornate cowboy boots. Or rather, boot. The mate was nowhere to be found.
Well over an hour after leaving Russell in the kitchen, Meg secured the top of a box and looked away, toward the simple honey oak dresser. On it sat a perfume bottle, amber in color, delicately curved in shape. The fragrance was musky, exotic…Ainsley’s favorite. For well over the past year, she’d never worn anything else.
Meg crossed to the bottle and picked it up, noticed the writing was in a language she did not recognize. On impulse she lowered her finger and released the scent, inhaled deeply.
For the briefest of seconds, it was as if Ainsley were there.
Knowing that wasn’t true, Meg finished clearing the dresser, sorting everything into either the keep, donate or discard box. Somewhere else in the house, Russell worked. Every now and then she heard a bump or a thump, but otherwise they worked in silence.
They were used to that.
The pictures stopped her. In the bottom drawer, tucked away underneath a brightly colored knit scarf, two simple wooden frames lay faceup. In one, two familiar faces greeted Meg. In the other, a complete stranger. And yet, there was something about the sandy-haired young man, the shape of his eyes maybe. His mouth…
Meg picked up the frame and removed the picture, turned it over. On the back was a name, a date from a year and a half before…and suddenly Meg realized exactly who she was looking at. The young man with the military-precise haircut and languorous smile—Tyler, the name said—was Charlotte’s father.
But there was no last name, no town, and there were about a million Tylers in Texas.
Frowning, she placed the photo in the keep box. Someday she would show Charlotte. Someday she would want to know.
The second picture went into the same box, but Meg did not let herself linger over that one, the snapshot from her honeymoon, taken in the Scottish Highlands.
Without hesitating, she closed the box and pushed it aside, reached for another one. As she worked, she listened for Charlotte, but heard only the soft roll of thunder in the distance.
After stripping the bed, she briskly folded the sheets and old quilt, but could not bring herself to put them in the donate box. Instead she set them aside and went down on her knees, checked the space below.
The boot made her smile. She retrieved it, dragging a flat box out along with it. She was only half paying attention when she lifted the lid—and saw the envelopes. And postcards. Unlike the haphazard way Ainsley lived her life, these were stacked into neat piles. On top of one pile was a picture of some kind, ruins high on a mountaintop. On the other…a pride of lions.
And there in the shadows of Ainsley’s bedroom, Meg’s heart started to pound so hard she felt it in every pulse point of her body. It echoed in her ears. Because of the envelopes. Airmail. There were no return addresses, but there didn’t need to be. The handwriting was enough, the bold masculine scrawl she’d seen hundreds of times before, on notepads, documents…her marriage certificate.
Slowly, methodically, as if she no longer occupied her own body, she lifted the top envelope and dragged her finger along the postmark, felt the room shift.
She knew that date, remembered the week that followed all too well. She’d been here one afternoon, had come over to watch Charlotte while Ainsley ran to the grocery store. Her sister-in-law had been sitting at the kitchen table when Meg arrived—smiling. In her hands, there’d been an envelope….
But she’d tucked it into a magazine as soon as Meg walked in. A magazine Meg had not seen after Ainsley left.
And now she knew why.
The letter had been from Russell.
Driven by something she didn’t understand, Meg picked up the box and turned it upside down, let every letter, every postcard fall to scatter against the old hardwood floor. There, she ran her hand through them, envelope after envelope…image after image. Of South Africa. Egypt. China. Vietnam. Tasmania. Of islands in the South Pacific. Brazil. Peru…
The images blurred…but she knew. She knew why Ainsley had always seemed to know where Russell was.
Because she had.
Blinking, Meg stared down at the jumble of words: Hi and Hello, Miss you and Love you, Perfume for you…
Blanket for Charlotte.
The tears started then, one after another. Her fingers were numb as she reached for the most recent envelope and pulled out the single sheet of loose-leaf paper. She scanned the page line by line, looking for—
She wasn’t sure what made her look up. A sound maybe. A feeling. Kneeling there beside the small, stripped bed, the letter from Russell to his sister clenched in her fingers, Meg twisted around, and found him. With his shoulder propped against the frame, he dominated the doorway, the dim lighting making the shadow at his jaw look darker. Sterner.
But it was his eyes that drew her, his eyes that made her breath catch. They were narrow and shuttered, trained exclusively and directly on her.
And in response, something deep, deep inside shifted.
CHAPTER FIVE
Two and a half years before
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
He was angry. She could tell by the way he stood, with his practically nude body dominating the small doorway. The lines of his face were hard. The lines of his body were harder. His chest looked as if were made of stone. His legs looked primed for battle.
He’d been sound asleep when she slipped from bed, the covers tangled down around his hips.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said dismissively, refusing to let the accusation in his eyes intimidate her.
“So you’re painting?” Once, the remnants of his Scottish ancestry had made his voice supportive. Seductive. Now there were only hard edges, and ridicule. “At three in the morning?”
She ran the roller back against the wall, replacing the warm buttery yellow with the moss-green she’d found in a design magazine. “No time like the—”
“Damn it, Meg.” He was across the room in a heartbeat, yanking the roller from her hands. “Stop it.”
She stepped back before he could reach for her. “Stop what? Trying to get things done?”
“Pretending,” he said, and though his voice was rough from sleep, it didn’t carry any warmth. “Stop freaking pretending that this is normal.”
And something inside her just…shattered. “You think I’m the one pretending?”
He dropped the roller onto the tarp. “You’re damn straight I do. Can you even see yourself, Meg? Do you even know what you’re doing? Tearing through the house from one project to another—”
All those broken pieces inside her shifted, sliced at her. But before the pain took control, she shoved it away. “She’s gone,” she said quietly. “Our little girl is gone, Russell. Nothing can change that.”
His eyes went flat. “We can try again.”
That’s what he always said. “Try what? To replace her?”
“No. Not replace her. We can try for another child—”
He made it sound so sickeningly clinical. Put the past behind them, move on. Try for another child. Forget about the one they lost.
“Not tonight,” she said, looking away from him toward the glass of wine on the floor, the wall to the left painted by him, the one to the right by her. “Not tonight.”
Present Day
HE KNEW. SHE COULD TELL from the way he looked at her, the knowing etched into the lines of his face. It seemed like a lifetime ago since she’d seen him smile.
He knew what she held in her hand, what she had spread around her. What she’d been doing. And for some crazy reason, Meg felt as if she were sitting there completely naked.
There was no way to deny what she’d been doing. No way to pretend she hadn’t been pawing through private words Russell had intended for his sister…and his sister alone.
No way to deny the fact that she’d been wrong.
Not two hours before she’d stood in the kitchen, lashing out at him for abandoning his sister. But the letters and postcards told a far different story.
It stunned her how badly she wanted to pick up each one, read every word.
Words not meant for her.
“I owe you an apology,” she surprised herself by saying.
“No, you don’t.” Unlike the warm, sometimes irreverent thoughts in the letter, these words were blunt, curt. He pushed from the door and crossed the room, closed in on the bed. “You don’t owe me anything, Meg.”
Meg. It sounded so…cold. “I didn’t know you stayed in contact with her.”
“There was no reason you should.”
For almost two years she’d worked to move forward, stand tall. She’d moved through each day, taught herself not to look back. Sometimes she’d stumbled. Once she’d fallen. But the pieces had come together, until finally she’d reached a point where she no longer felt the stab of vulnerability with every breath she took.
With six little words, Russell brought it all back.
There was no reason you should.
Because the letters were between brother and sister, not man and estranged wife. If he’d wanted her to know what was going on in his life…
If he’d wanted her, he would have written to her.
“I’m glad.” She swallowed against the tightness in her throat, realized that she was. No matter what had gone down between Meg and Russell, Ainsley had been an innocent. She had not deserved to lose her brother.
“I’m glad you were there for her,” she said, and with the new awareness came a new realization. If Russell had written to Ainsley, then his sister could have written to him. And if she’d written to him…what had she said to him? What had she told him?
How much did he know?
She wanted to search his eyes, to see if they would tell her. But something she didn’t understand held her back. Sometimes it was better not to look too hard or too deep, not to ask questions, not unless she really wanted the answer.
She already felt naked enough.
“And I’m glad you were there,” Russell said, reaching to gather the scattered envelopes back into a pile. “You have no idea how much she idolized you.”
Meg’s mouth twisted. “Idolized is a little strong.”
“Her word, not mine,” he said, dragging his thumb along Ainsley’s name, written in his bold script.
Meg looked away from his ring finger, naked now, not even a hint of a tan line, toward a picture of mist-shrouded Mayan ruins. Machu Picchu, she realized. She and Russell had always talked about going.
He, apparently, had.
“Don’t look so stunned,” he said, and God help her, there was a warmth to his smile, so unexpected that the coldness seeping through her just…stopped. “You were good for her. You accepted her for who she was, held her hand when no one else would.”
Memories washed in, of Ainsley’s quirky smile—and the silver rings she wore on every finger.
“But that doesn’t mean you have to do this.”
She blinked, looked up. “Do what?”
Russell’s eyes met hers. “Charlotte.”
And somehow Meg knew. Even before he said another word, she knew.
“Taking care of a baby is a lot of work,” he went on while she tried to tamp down a quick surge of panic. “Especially one that isn’t…”
Just breathing hurt. “Mine?” Once she would have turned away, allowed him to leave the word unspoken. But that was a lifetime ago, when she’d deluded herself into thinking hiding was synonymous with safety. “Is that what you were going to say?”
