This Time for Keeps, page 7
The hard lines of his face gave away nothing. “She won’t always be a sweet little baby who you can cuddle. She’ll be a toddler who throws tantrums and a little girl who doesn’t always want to do what you do. She’ll be a teenager—”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“She’ll test you, make you crazy. But if this is what you think you want, you have to be there, no matter what. Through thick and thin. You can’t just check out because things get rough.”
Meg felt her mouth twist, didn’t try to stop it. “Wow,” she shot back. “To think I thought you knew me.”
His eyes met hers. “I thought I did, too.”
“Apparently we were both wrong.” Anger mixed with the unease. “So let me tell you something, Russell. I couldn’t love Charlotte more if she was my flesh and blood. I was there when she was born. I stood up for her when she was baptized. I promised to be there for her, always. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
For a long moment he said nothing, just looked at her as if she’d become transparent and he could see straight into the deepest, darkest places. Then his gaze softened, and the old Russell was back, the one from all those years before, the one who knew how much love she had in her heart. “Then she’s a very lucky little girl.”
Meg swallowed. “I’m the lucky one,” she whispered.
He held her gaze for a heartbeat longer, then looked away, down toward the postcard still clutched in her fingers.
It was instinct that made her let go, instinct that made her drop the image of Peru before he could reach out—and touch her.
RUSSELL PUT THE LONG, narrow box on the front seat of his rental car, then closed the door and headed for the back porch. He had room for another box or two; everything else would have to wait. The dark clouds to the northwest were pushing closer. It wouldn’t be long before the sky opened up.
His thigh throbbed. Pressing his hand to his jeans, he rubbed, but the dull ache persisted. He’d forgotten what it was like to be in Pecan Creek, how thick the air could become in advance of a storm—how discreetly the quiet, tree-lined streets could seep into a man’s bones. He’d forgotten how numbing the simplicity could be—how easily the illusion could seduce.
Now, being back…everything blurred all over again, as if he’d walked from stark sunshine into some insidiously dense fog where he couldn’t see two feet in front of him.
That’s what she’d always done to him.
It was also why he’d left. To breathe, think. To see things clearly.
He kicked an old acorn near the back porch. Christ, when he’d walked into his sister’s bedroom to find Meg kneeling there in a soft sweep of filtered sunlight with the postcards scattered around her…
Russell still couldn’t figure out what exactly bothered him so much—and that bothered him even more. The look of longing on her face…
It had been years since he’d seen longing of any sort on his wife’s face.
And he didn’t want it now, not when he knew how badly Meg’s make-believe world was about to shatter—and that he was the one who was going to swing the ax. She’d wrapped herself and Charlotte into a cozy little cocoon where all that mattered was the bond they shared. But reality was far more complicated. Meg was not Charlotte’s mother. They didn’t share blood. But there were those who did, and they were growing restless.
“What happened?”
The quiet voice carried on the wind to swirl through him. He pivoted toward the porch, where he found her standing on the top step. The coming storm lifted the ends of her hair, blowing them against the baby in her arms. Charlotte was awake, but her eyes were heavy as she gazed up at Meg.
Just like when he’d found her earlier, upon his arrival, it was another memory he did not want, an image he’d once looked forward to, coming home to find his wife and daughter greeting him. Over the past two years he’d managed to put all that behind him. Indulging in make-believe wasn’t healthy. Their failed marriage had proved that.
But here in Pecan Creek, images of what could have been met him at every turn. His flight next Monday couldn’t get here fast enough.
“To your leg?” Meg clarified, her gaze on his thigh, where he still rubbed.
His hand fell away. “It’s nothing.”
“You’re limping.”
“Just the rain,” he said, glancing toward the clouds. “The barometric pressure.”
“Barometric pressure,” she repeated. “Just like that, you’re suddenly a human barometer?”
The quick spurt of laughter surprised him—who was this woman? Only seconds before, everything inside him had been twisted like barbed wire, but the way she stood there on the back porch with the baby propped on her hip…
He might as well have been a ten-year-old trying to explain how the big picture window got broken.
“Apparently,” he agreed, closing the gap between them. With effort, he kept his strides even. “Can come in pretty handy, too—”
“Russell.”
The familiarity in her voice—the awareness in her eyes—killed the fun and games. Little Charlotte babbled away, once again pawing at Meg’s chest. But Meg wasn’t smiling as she usually did when she held Charlotte. She almost looked stricken.
“Tell me,” she said, and this time her voice was quiet. Firmer. “What happened to your leg? Were you in an accident?”
He reached the bottom step as a raindrop splashed on his arm. “It was a long time ago.”
She stepped back from the splatter of the storm. “Not that long ago,” she said quietly. “You’ve only been gone…” She looked away, toward the gnarled branches of the old post oaks.
Twenty-two months. He’d been gone twenty-two months.
It might as well have been twenty-two years. They’d both been broken back then, in heart, in spirit. He was broken in body now, but she…
She was radiant.
And it slayed him. It slayed him how beautiful she looked standing with her shoulder-length hair blowing against her face, the soft light in eyes that had been dull and flat when he left, the fullness to a face that had been tired and gaunt, the strength in her clearly supple body…the baby in her arms.
Their little girl would have been two years old now.
He thought about that sometimes, dreamed about her when he fell too deeply asleep. He could see her there in the shadows, a smiling little girl with her mother’s eyes.
He ripped his gaze away from Meg and Charlotte, looking instead toward the small empty house where his sister had lived.
“It was in Africa, about a month after I got there.”
That had been his first assignment, the reason he’d walked out the door that night a lifetime before. Just a quick assignment, four weeks, six at the most. Go to Mozambique, document the civil uprising, return to Pecan Creek. He’d never intended to stay away.
“It started as a cut,” he muttered as Meg looked back toward him, and then it was slow motion all over again, the juxtaposition between his wife and the baby, the simplicity of a warm spring day in Texas versus the unmitigated hell he’d walked into. “I was at a field hospital,” he said. “They were understaffed.”
Meg’s expression tensed. “As a patient?”
“Volunteering.” Before Meg, he’d been able to separate work from life. But there in Africa, with his own life so twisted up, there’d been no way to stand there with his freaking camera and just…take pictures. Not when mothers cried and children lay dying. “I—I…” He wanted to look away from her, but something inside fed on the warmth in her eyes. The compassion.
There’d been no compassion before, when he’d needed—
His wife.
“A nurse was running,” he said. “She tripped—I tried to catch her—” But they’d both gone down. “Instead I caught her scalpel in my thigh.”
Meg frowned. “Ouch.”
“It wasn’t too deep,” he said, but his hand went to his leg anyway, and rubbed. “Just a puncture wound mostly.”
Meg spider-crawled her fingers along Charlotte’s chest, earning full baby belly laughs. But she never took her eyes from Russell. “But in Mozambique…”
“Infection set in.” It had been bad. For a while, they’d insisted he would need to lose his leg. “If I’d stayed—” He broke off when her eyes went dark.
“You went home—” she started, then corrected herself. “To Scotland.”
He knew the exact second she put the pieces together. Her body straightened. The soft line of her mouth hardened. But it was her eyes that got him, the dull, vacant glaze that threw him back in time. “To a hospital in Edinburgh.”
She slid her hand around Charlotte, pulling the baby closer. “That’s why Ainsley went back. To see you.”
He hated the betrayal in her gaze. It was one thing for her to resent him. But his sister was no longer here to defend herself.
“She never said a word,” Meg whispered.
And he could tell how badly that reality stung. She didn’t like being left out of decisions. “Meg, I’m sorry.”
“Did you ask her not to?”
Memories rolled over him, hazy, dark like the clouds closing in on Pecan Creek. There’d been a fever. He’d hallucinated. He’d grabbed her hand and held on, asked her to never leave.
But when he opened his eyes, it had been Ainsley sitting by his bed. Ainsley quietly crying.
“We weren’t together,” he said. And they hadn’t been for a long time.
“No,” Meg said, but there was no emotion in her voice. No tears in her eyes. “We weren’t.”
The ache in his thigh radiated in all directions. “I—I…” Christ, he did not need this. But like removing a bandage, he knew the slower he moved, the worse it would get. “I got the papers your lawyer sent,” he said. Her call about Ainsley had not gotten through, but the divorce papers had. “I brought them with me.”
She just stood there. The wind kept blowing, Charlotte kept fiddling with everything she could get her curious little hands on, but Meg, Christ, she just stood there.
She just freaking stood there.
They might as well have been discussing the weather.
And that cold, polite indifference fired through him with an intensity that made him want to destroy the distance between them, take her in his arms and—
And.
It was always the “and” that got him.
CHAPTER SIX
Two years before
“I PICKED UP SOME WINE on the way home, a cab.”
On the other side of the small room she used as an office, Meg kept tapping at the keys of her laptop.
“I poured you some,” Russell said, moving into the room. He hated how tentative he felt, like a stranger in his own home. “Here.” He extended one of the crystal goblets they’d received as wedding presents. She’d been so excited….
“In a minute.” She never looked up.
Glancing over her shoulder, he saw the editorial raising questions about the new research institute going in west of town. “It’s your favorite,” he said. “From that little winery—”
Her fingers stilled against the keys. “Russell.” Her eyes flashed as she looked up. “I said in a minute.”
And something inside him…snapped. She always said “just a minute.” “Not now.” “Maybe later.” “Tomorrow.”
“I heard you.” It was all he could do to set the glass down gently, rather than slam it against the hardwood of the bookshelf. “Just like I heard you last night and last week…” He stepped toward her, saw her wince. “Damn it, Meg!”
Thoughts blurred. Control shattered. He reached for her even as she jerked back, took her arms and pulled her to her feet. “Do you hear yourself?” he asked. “Do you know how long it’s been?”
Everything about her froze. His wife…froze. “You’re not really going back to that again, are you?”
“Back. To. That.” The words tore out of him. “Is that what making love is to you now…that?”
She made it sound like something dirty and dreaded.
Eyes that had once been vibrant and blue went dark as she looked up at him. “Russell, please.”
“Please…what?” She was still in his arms. His hands were still on her body. Her face was inches away. “Go away? Leave you alone?” Nothing. No change in her expression. No denial. “Never come back?”
Now she moved. Now she looked down. “Please don’t do this.”
Something dark and desperate shifted through him. This was his wife. This woman, this stranger…was his wife. Once she’d promised to have and to hold, in good times and bad…
Now she couldn’t even look at him.
“Meggie.” He hated the way his voice thickened on her name. He was on his knees, goddamn it, on his freaking knees. “I don’t want to do this alone.”
Her eyes lifted, and for the briefest of seconds he saw her, his wife. And that was all it took for him to pull her closer and bring his mouth to hers, to crush her against him and drink—
She twisted away with a violence that left him standing there, stripped to the bone.
Hand against her mouth, as if rubbing away something ugly and filthy, she turned and hurried from the room.
He did not follow.
Present Day
CHARLOTTE SLEPT. Meg eased the baby from her arms to her crib and gently pulled up the soft chenille blanket. After raising the rail, she turned and slipped from the room. Sometimes, just the crack of her ankles was all it took to wake Charlotte up.
Door closed, she made her way to her office and fired up her laptop, glanced at Julia’s proposal for an allegedly explosive exposé before pulling up the outline for the festival. With only two days left, it was time to double- and triple-check every last detail.
Russell had the papers. He was ready to sign. Just a technicality, really. Their marriage had been over for years.
But that didn’t stop the slow, steady leak inside her, the coldness oozing into places she’d thought permanently walled off. A simple signature shouldn’t make any difference. She was the one who’d initiated the divorce. She was the one who’d had the papers drawn up.
She just hadn’t expected him to come home to sign them.
Seeing him again…
No, she told herself. No. She wasn’t going to do that, wasn’t going to dwell on the situation or torture herself. Russell’s eyes didn’t matter. Nor did the minefield of memories she’d tiptoed through that afternoon at Ainsley’s house.
But the restlessness lingered, no matter how many times she read the same bullet points detailing the silent auction. Giving up, she headed for a shower, but wound up in the kitchen instead. Robotically, she retrieved the five-year-old cab from the cabinet above the oven. In the drawer by the stove she found the corkscrew. From the china cabinet…a single crystal goblet.
And from somewhere long, long ago, the memory stirred…
It’s your favorite…from that little winery—
She’d never let him finish. She’d looked at him standing there with that glass of wine in his hands and the hunger in his eyes…and she’d known. She’d known what he wanted, and it hadn’t been to give her a glass of wine. At least, not because he wanted her to relax.
He’d wanted what he’d always wanted…her.
He’d wanted to go back in time, to pretend. He’d wanted things to be simple, uncomplicated. Easy. He’d wanted her to be someone she no longer was.
She’d wanted to scream.
When he’d touched her, when he’d pulled her into his arms and slanted his mouth against hers, she thought she had.
But maybe it had only been inside.
She’d done that a lot back then, screamed at the top of her lungs. But no one had heard. The wine had helped. At first.
Then Russell had left. She’d thought the screaming would stop then. And during the bright hours of the day, when she’d been busy and absorbed by the Gazette, it had. But when she’d come home, the screaming had started all over again, sharp and stabbing and silent, over and over. There’d only been one way to make it stop.
One way to make everything stop.
Craving that same numbness, she looked at the smoky bottle sitting beside Charlotte’s pink sippy cup…and her hands started to shake. She lifted the corkscrew anyway and wedged open the bottle, inhaled deeply. Closed her eyes as the once-familiar musky scent drifted through her. Just one glass. Just to help her relax.
Just. One.
Just. Tonight.
Without thinking, she picked up the bottle and tilted it toward the glass, poured, watched the deep burgundy liquid slosh up against the crystal edges before sliding back down to settle in the bottom.
Meg picked up the glass and drew it to her mouth. Closed her eyes. Inhaled deeply. Soon Ainsley’s affairs would be settled and Russell would be gone. It was what she wanted. She’d be able to breathe then.
She’d be able to forget about dreams that had died so very long ago.
NIGHT FELL SOFTLY in Pecan Creek. The brunt of the storm had skirted south of town, providing a lightning show but little else. Now high, thin clouds skittered across an almost-full spring moon. The air was slow, thick—drenched with the perfume of azaleas and dogwood and the lilacs dripping from vines twined along an old fence.
Russell couldn’t sleep. That happened a lot. Doctors had prescribed medication. A New Age friend had offered up hypnosis and ambient music. But rarely did Russell sleep more than three hours at a stretch, five hours combined. Instead, he walked.
There was something calming about being awake when everyone else slept, something grounding about walking a deserted street. Sometimes he brought his camera. A cat, an owl, a flower against the darkness…he never knew what would catch him.
But tonight he walked alone.
He’d always been a wanderer. A nomad. He’d left Scotland at eighteen, craving…something. Something more. Adventure. Restlessness had driven him, a hunger to do and see and experience. Until Meg. Then he’d just wanted Meg.
