Especially now that she’d found her unexpectedly perfect partner.
* * *
Grayson had never been happier about all the things that could go wrong on a farm. Today, it had been the mister going out in his pig pen. He’d spent the day covered in mud and swearing at plastic pipes and tubing. But, frankly, he wasn’t sure how he would have gotten through the day in one piece otherwise. Not when every single thing on his farm reminded him of Lori. The way the pigs had snuffled around him all day, wishing he was their beautiful friend coming with special treats and pats for their little heads. The way the chickens had run to the gate when they saw him coming, only to back away when they realized he wasn’t Lori.
When the plumbing job was finally done and even he couldn’t take his stench anymore, he showered out by the back of the barn, but that reminded him of the first night when he’d had to come out to shower to try to escape her and the feelings he couldn’t contain. He’d wanted her so much, but more than that, he’d already begun to admire and like her. And then, of course, there were the many sexy showers they’d shared after that...
When the water grew cold, he wrapped a towel around himself and went back into the house.
God, it was quiet. Too damned quiet. But there were flashes of color all around now from where Lori had brought out a vase that she’d found up in the attic, along with the bright yellow quilt she’d bought in town at the General Store because she said it made her happy just to look at it.
His phone rang and when he saw her name on the screen, he leapt at it. “Lori.”
“Grayson.”
Even for a man of few words, he’d never realized that so much could be said with so little.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “Tell me about your day. Even if it has to do with something boring about a tractor or fertilizer, I want to hear it.”
He laughed, the sound not nearly as rusty now as it had been for most of his life. All because of her. “I spent the day knee-deep in pigs and mud and broken water pipes. Your basic average dream day on a farm.”
How he loved the sound of her laughter, could picture her holding the phone up to her ear, probably twirling around on her jaw-droppingly perfect legs as she spoke to him.
Always moving.
Always laughing.
And so full of love she never failed to stun him.
“Wow, two sentences was one more than I thought I’d get out of you,” she teased. “You must really love me.”
“I love you so damned much,” he confirmed for her, before saying, “Now it’s your turn to talk my ear off.”
“I did it, Grayson. I got in Victor’s face and told him to get out of mine. I fired him with the full support of everyone in the show. It turns out that after I left, they put two and two together and found out what he did. But honestly,” she said in a far more chipper voice than he would have thought after having to deal with that slime, “squashing that bug only took a few minutes. The rest of the day I was working with the troupe, and that was really great.” She barely paused for breath as she barreled ahead and said, “I’m going to need to stay here for the rest of the week to take them through to the end.”
“Of course you are. They need you.” And she needed them just as much. It was something he’d never doubted for a minute.
It wasn’t until she was finally silent for a long moment that he knew something else was up.
“I want so badly to come back to you and the farm the second the show is over, but…”
Another pause came and he had to grab a kitchen chair and sit down to brace himself for it.
“A friend of mine needs me to go to New York City to be a last-minute replacement for the lead in his show, which means I’ll need to fly from Chicago to New York to perform at the International Dance Exhibition the following weekend before I can catch a red-eye to come back to you.”
Grayson wanted to beg, even wanted for a minute to be bitter that she’d chosen dancing over him. But how could he do either of those things when he
knew
she was making all the right choices?
Of course she had to do both shows. And of course she’d have to do all the other shows that would come next, opportunities she couldn’t possibly turn down. Not only because so many people in her industry depended on her, but also because she was meant to dance, and to keep dancing.
But she was also meant to be with him, damn it.
Grayson wanted to see her dance. And he wanted to be as brave for her as she’d been for him. Not only in the way she’d insisted on loving him after he’d tried so hard to push her away, but by confronting the man who had hurt her so that she could love again with a whole heart.
Lori had been brave enough to face down her past.
It was long past time for him to do the same.
Chapter Twenty-five
Grayson stepped off the plane in New York and found the driver waiting for him by the luggage carousels. For a moment, it felt as though the past three years hadn’t happened. As though this were just another business trip, and he was simply heading home to Westchester to shower and change and have a pre-dinner drink with Leslie, where both of them tried to act interested in things they didn’t actually care about at all.
When he gave the address to the driver, to the man’s credit, he barely betrayed a response. In the backseat of the town car, Grayson took out the picture of Lori as a little girl that Mary Sullivan had given to him at Sunday lunch. He’d kept it with him every second since she’d been gone, and it never failed to bring a smile to his face, even now.
Both of her front teeth were missing, she was wearing ripped boys’ jeans and a T-shirt that were both at least two sizes too big, and she was hands down the prettiest thing he’d ever seen in his life as she leapt through the air, dancing in the middle of her crowded backyard. He could see the way, even at eight, that she’d blossom into such a striking beauty. He could also see that she was too determined, too stubborn, to ever allow anything or anyone to take away her joy, her love for life.
Grayson wanted to be worthy of sharing that life with her, but he wanted something else, too. He wanted, one day, to take pictures of his own little girl as she danced and laughed and loved just like her beautiful mother.
At the entrance was a flower stand and Grayson asked the driver to stop, tucking the picture into the pocket above his heart as he opened the door and stepped out of the car. He didn’t buy the biggest, flashiest bouquet. Instead, he bought a small bouquet of bright tulips, Leslie’s favorite flower.
“I’ll walk from here,” he said to the driver, who nodded and pulled over to the curb to wait.
The cemetery looked the same as it had three years ago during his wife’s funeral, the last time he’d ever been here. The grass was perfectly green and meticulously mowed. The sky was full of dark clouds that looked as if they would burst with rain at any moment, the gray, cold sky so different from the clear blue over his farm.
As he approached Leslie’s gravestone, he could see that it was polished clean and bright, with an enormous bouquet of flowers in a vase beside it that he knew had to be from her parents.
The last time he’d been here, he’d been stunned...and racked with guilt. The shock had eventually lessened as he accepted that she really was gone, but the guilt, the blame he’d placed on himself for not knowing his own wife better, had deepened. Every day, as he’d put on his suit and tie and gone in to work to field questions and sympathy from colleagues and friends and people he only knew from cocktail parties, the guilt and blame and disgust with everyone who said they loved her and missed her but who hadn’t done a damn thing to stop her self-destruction, grew to the point where he knew he couldn’t stay there another second. He’d needed to start over in a world that was as far from New York society as possible, so he’d gone west and, just like Lori in her rental car, had stumbled onto his farm. The real estate transaction had been completed by nightfall, and Grayson had never planned on looking—or coming—back.
“Leslie.” He knelt down and laid the flowers on her grave, putting his hand over the cold stone as if that would help them finally connect again. “I’m sorry I haven’t been back for so long.”
It was so awkward that he felt like they were having one of their surface conversations again, where both of them spoke, but neither of them said anything. Lori, he knew, would never have stood for that. Cemetery or not, she would have said exactly what was on her mind...and in her heart.
Suddenly, he could picture her there, egging him on:
Come on and grow some balls, farmer. Why are you still so afraid of baring your soul?
Unconsciously, his hand went to the picture of her in his shirt pocket.
They’re all good parts,
she’d told him.
And I’d never let anyone hurt you.
Even now, he could feel her protecting him, his fierce and beautiful dancing farm girl who had the biggest heart of anyone he’d ever known.
Grayson sat down on the grass beside Leslie’s gravestone and ran his fingers slowly over the engraving of her name. “I’m sorry I was a bad husband. And I’m sorry that I wasn’t much of a friend by the end, either. I knew you were unhappy. I was unhappy, too. But I didn’t know how to fix any of it, so I ignored it instead. I ignored you, Leslie, and I’m so, so sorry.”
He’d apologized more in the past two weeks than he had in his entire life. And yet, just as he had with Lori, he couldn’t see how his wife could ever forgive him for the mess their lives had become before she died. No amount of apologizing would change that.
But since his big mistake had been that he hadn’t talked to her—really and truly talked to her—when she was still alive, he figured, at the very least, he could change that now.
“After you died, I pretty much lost it. I turned away from every last person, every last piece of our life, and decided to start over. I’m in California now, on a farm. A big one, right by the ocean. Whenever the fog rolls in, I think of how much you loved to walk along the coast on stormy days. I wasn’t searching for happiness, just for an escape, but the amazing thing is that I found it after all. Not just in the land, and my animals, but with the last person on earth I would ever have expected.
“You would have liked Lori, Leslie, and I know she would have liked you, too. She never stops asking questions, and when I try to ignore them she just asks more, so I’ve told her all about you. About when we were in college, how we used to the Tree Lighting and Yule Log ceremonies, and that one year we were so excited about being the big winners of the bad poetry contest. I even told her all about the way I asked you to marry me and ended up dropping the ring into a storm drain because I was so nervous.”
He thought he heard something then, a rustling of the leaves above him that sounded like a question:
Is she pretty?
Before he knew it, Grayson was laughing and crying at the same time. Of course it was what Leslie would want to know.
“Yes,” he said as he finally let his tears fall for the woman who had been such an important part of his life for so long. “She is.”
And during the next hour, as he sat and finally talked to his wife, the thick gray clouds blew away one by one until there was nothing but bright, blue sky above the two of them.
* * *
Lori stood backstage at the Joyce Theatre in New York City in a circle with her dancers, all of them holding hands as they got ready to go out on stage. It had been the craziest forty-eight hours of her life, but she’d loved every second of it.
Carter had brought her in to take over on choreography that had been set in stone for months. But the vision she’d had was so clear and pure that she’d choreographed a brand-new dance barely one step ahead of the dancers learning the movements.
“Thank you so much for going on this journey with me,” she told them now. “You’re all amazing and wonderful and I love you guys for trusting me with this dance and putting your hearts and souls into something that means so much to me.” She grinned at them. “Now let’s go make some magic happen.”
One by one, they took their places on the darkened stage and when the lights slowly came up, the audience saw them not as dancers, but as beautiful wildflowers in red and orange, yellow and purple. All around the flowers the wild green grasses swayed in the breeze. The score the orchestra played sounded like the ocean on a clear day, with children playing with buckets and pails in the sand and seagulls flying above the gently crashing waves.
On a crack of thunder from the percussion section, the bright, sunny lighting gave way to a sudden storm, blue lights and whisper-thin streamers beginning to rain down from above the stage. To the crashing sound of the waves and the hard pellets of rain, the flowers and grasses gave in to the wildness of the storm, even more beautiful now as they were blown hard by the wind, soaked by the rain.
And then, suddenly, the smallest wildflower was ripped from the ground by the wind. She was blowing away from the rest of them, when from the center of the group, the largest, most powerful blade of grass reached for her.
He cradled her against him in a beautiful dance of protection and love as the storm continued to rage, and then, when the storm waned and the sun emerged again, he finally set the brightly colored flower free to fly away.
Oh, how beautiful that wildflower was as she flew, higher and higher in that bright, pure sunlight. The other flowers, the grasses, watched her dance through the sky, as they knew she’d dreamed of doing all her life.
The sun was setting and the flowers were closing their petals, the grasses already collecting dew in the cool night, when the wildflower emerged again in the dark sky. She’d always dreamed of flying, but one perfect dance in a storm had given her new dreams.
She still wanted to fly...but she no longer wanted to do it alone.
And then the wildflower and the blade of grass were coming together again, wrapping themselves around each other in a dance of love that was just as beautiful beneath the calm moon as it had been in the rain and the wind.