Dream Chaser (2 page)

She slowed to a stop several feet away, not wanting to disturb him. He looked to be asleep, his hat hiding his face, his muscular arms crossed over his chest and dusted with golden hairs so much lighter than those on Brad’s thick arms.
Now why did I notice that?
His chest moved slowly, evenly. Those arms looked so powerful. Was he like Brad, someone who lashed out, who enjoyed intimidating others?

Her breath caught in her throat. She backed up a step when he stirred then rose off the log, swinging one long leg over as if dismounting from a horse. He shoved his hat back on his head, revealing blond hair with shots of silver just above his ears and the bluest eyes she had ever seen. The barest hint of aftershave wafted in her direction.
Woodsy
. Like what her father had worn.

When he glanced her way, she remembered…the man who’d driven the limousine. The ghost of a smile shimmered in the light and welcomed her as he stood up. “Hello,” he said, in a deep rumble that made her insides tremble. He gazed at her for a moment. “I hope I didn’t startle you. Aren’t you Suzanna Wallace?”

She nodded.

“My sympathies. I heard about your husband.” His eyes, laser-like, seemed to pierce her heart as he spoke.

“I guess everyone around here must know by now.” Could he tell her sorrow was mixed with anger and guilt she couldn’t seem to escape—even when she ran until she couldn’t run anymore?

“Your face—” A hand reached out as if to touch her left cheek, now bruised and swollen, and dropped to his side when she retreated a step.

“I slipped—in the cottage,” she explained, feeling her face heat at the lie. But she couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell anyone. As she remembered the nightmare of her fight with Brad, she started to wobble on her feet.

His hands came up and grasped her arms to steady her then dropped away again when she gasped and her mouth twisted in a grimace from the still-tender bruises.

She blinked at him and rubbed her right arm with her left hand, her rings sparkling in the sun. “My arms are still sore.”

“From when you slipped? I’m sorry.” His head cocked to one side and his mouth quirked crookedly. “I’m Jonathan Kingsley. Here for my daughter’s wedding. The kids played here almost every summer. That’s why Chrissie insisted on a beach wedding.”

Memories flooded her. “Chrissie.” She remembered a mischievous little girl, always making sand castles with little flags stuck in the turrets. “With your wife?”

“No, their grandmother usually brought them, sometimes with one of my cousins.”

That’s right.
Hadn’t Margaret’s friend, the one who owned the cottage where she’d found Neil, said the Kingsleys were divorced? Margaret knew everyone at home and at the beach. “You have a son, too. Neil.”

“That would be him.” He glanced again at her face. “I had to see my daughter off the other day before returning the limo. Even so, if I’d realized what had happened, I would have stayed to help you.”

“Your son was so kind. He took me to the hospital and…” She had to look away. “Then he brought me back to the cottage.” She tried to smile and felt the tug of stiff muscles on one side of her face. Did they even work anymore? “Congratulations on the wedding of your daughter.”

Jonathan looked toward the sea for a moment before his face turned somber and his eyes darkened. “I suppose every father feels no man is good enough for his precious girl.”

“I think I’d feel the same about my son—but he’s still in college and there’s no special lady in his life at this point. At least he hasn’t told me there is.” Her heart gave a funny little flutter when she thought of her children. Would she feel the same if Penny got married—her career-oriented daughter who scoffed whenever someone asked her about marriage and children? Penny was always saying she needed no man and certainly no children. They would slow her career-building.

The man turned in her direction again. “Are you okay to walk back to your cottage? Mine is closer if you need to rest.”

“Thanks, but I’ve caught my breath again.” She began to retrace her steps slowly, certain that she could never keep up with his long-legged stride. “I’ll be fine. I just needed some air—to think.”

“I’m sure you must have lots on your mind.” His voice had taken on a sympathetic timbre, as if he knew what lay ahead of her, arranging for Brad’s body to be flown home, planning the funeral, having to tell everyone once she arrived home, unless Kevin had already done that.

She stooped and picked up a shell, tracing its smooth edges with one finger. “If I had my choice, I’d leave it all behind and just go away somewhere.” She squinted into the sun in his direction.

“Well, if you ever get out to Montana, stop in. My door’s always open.” The caring smile that had been so fleeting returned, warming her.

“But you hardly know me.”

“We’re beach neighbors. My son remembered your children, from years ago, when you were here on vacation. He said your little boy followed him around and waved whenever Neil was kite boarding.” He pulled a business card from a chest pocket and handed it to her. “That number always answers—even when I’m not there. Feel free to call if you’re ever in the area. I’m sorry, again, about your husband, Mrs. Wallace.” He grabbed his hat when the wind threatened to blow it toward the dunes and took off up the beach on the hard-packed sand at a ground-gobbling jog.

She watched as his stride, so free and relaxed, took him quickly down the sandspit. Why had she said she wanted to take a trip, to run away? Except for her trips to the beach with the children, to Margaret’s cottage, she never travelled. She should have questioned Brad further when he’d suggested this trip. At the time she’d viewed it as his way of making amends after he’d been so nasty to her at home. But then his bullying had escalated from threats to his fists. Again.

She bit her lower lip, hoping the pain would overcome the ache in her heart, the guilt she felt, the anger, and then—taking her by surprise—the stabs of loneliness, worse now than before.

Hours later, when she walked past the cottage, so recently the site of the beach wedding for the Kingsley daughter, the windows were shuttered against the rising wind and no smoke rose from the chimney. Maybe the handsome Mr. Kingsley had already left. By the time she reached Margaret’s cottage, she was weeping again.

Who would walk Penny down the aisle if she ever married? Not Brad. She shook her head to banish the thought. Suzanna had to deal with what was happening now. She had to call the coroner to learn when Brad’s body would be released for transport to the airport. In the space of less than an hour—in the time it took for her to tell him she wanted a divorce and he had so violently rejected the idea—her whole life had changed. She had no idea how she was going to cope. She took a deep breath as she opened the door of the cottage and closed it tightly behind her.

“A shower first,” she muttered to herself.
Then I’ll call Margaret, and then the coroner.
After that, she had no idea what she would do.

Jonathan looked out at the puffy clouds below the plane. Neil sat next to him, riffling through a magazine.

“How was Mrs. Wallace—that day you helped her?”

His son glanced at him and ran a hand against the military brush cut of his sandy hair. “Not good. Terrified, actually. And when the paramedics took over, she started to go into shock. I was afraid she was going to pass out.” He shoved the magazine into the seat pocket facing him. “Too bad you were seeing Chrissie and Dan off at the airport. We could have used someone else to watch her.”

“What about her face?”

“Her cheek was red, maybe swollen, but she didn’t seem to notice.”

“When I saw her on the beach, she said she’d slipped. I’m guessing maybe into a fist.”

“Could be. The noises I heard the day before the wedding—when I was on my morning run—told me her husband has a temper. Had a temper.” Neil shifted his weight in the seat.

“Her little boy probably isn’t all that little anymore. That had to be seven or eight years ago. There were always kids on the beach when we were here. Too bad you never came.”

Jonathan shrugged. “It was your time with your grandmother.”

“Chrissie and I liked flying on our own—meeting her here.” His mouth curved upward. “She pretty much let us do whatever we wanted as long as we didn’t get into trouble.”

Jonathan thought back to his encounter with Suzanna on the beach. Those red-rimmed green eyes so full of pain, framed by wisps of dark hair just long enough to be lifted off her face by the ocean breeze. Those beautiful hands with long slender fingers that plucked the shell off the sand and seemed to barely touch the edge when she held it. He looked back at his son. “Do you suppose she plays the piano?”

Neil pushed his seat back and closed his eyes. “Who?”

“Suzanna. Mrs. Wallace.”

“Why do you ask?”

“She’s got the fingers for it. Know where she lives?”

One ice-blue eye opened and looked at him from under lashes slightly darker than Neil’s hair. “She mentioned something about the Midwest—when she was talking to the doctor.” He sat up to stretch his arms above his head and look out the window. “I hate these crowded seats.”

“Even after all your travel on those Japanese trains?”

“I’m standing up then.” Neil’s eyes twinkled back at Jonathan. “Gives me an advantage for looking at the scenery.”

“Hmm.”

“She’s not like Maris.”

Jonathan’s mouth turned down at the corners. Maris had been angling to get close to him for years. “What’s your point, son?”

Neil chuckled. “You seem interested in Mrs. Wallace, more than other women anyway, or are you holding out on me? Seeing someone again? You don’t have to worry about me or Christine anymore. No reason why you can’t find someone. Unless Maris is in the picture.”

Jonathan chose to ignore his son’s questions.
Hard to believe I’ve been divorced more than twenty years.
The Midwest, eh? Maybe he’d Google her. He had to go to Minneapolis next month, to see Jamie. But what was the likelihood he would see Suzanna Wallace?

He’d given his daughter the wedding she wanted. And she hadn’t seemed upset that her mother never showed after leaving a message at the ranch a week before the event. He couldn’t remember the exact words, only that it was obviously an excuse, transparent in its flimsiness.

“Neil, are you sure your mother got all those emails about Christine’s wedding?”

Neil shrugged, his eyes closed again. “None bounced.”

His ex-wife was a travel consultant. She was probably guiding a gaggle of tourists with bad legs in Bermuda shorts somewhere around the Continent. He would have thought her daughter’s wedding was more important than getting tips from strangers. On the other hand, their kids had never been Chelsea’s first priority.

Jonathan looked out the window again. The clouds had dispersed. Far below he saw neat square fields that told him they were somewhere over the Midwest, maybe Iowa. Neil had the right idea—to get some rest before their plane landed in Denver, and each took a different flight from there, his son to the coast and another flight to his duty station in Japan, and he a shorter hop to Bozeman. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But Suzanna Wallace’s bruised face and those green eyes that seemed to shimmer beneath her dark lashes continued to float in his mind’s eye. When he’d reached out to keep her from falling that day on the beach, he’d felt something he hadn’t experienced in years. More than simple concern for a person who was hurting?

“Margaret, can you come over?” Suzanna stood up from the table and straightened her blouse. After watching her husband’s coffin wheeled into the belly of the plane as they’d prepared to leave North Carolina, numbness had taken over. The flight attendants had left her alone after handing her a blanket and a pillow. She’d huddled throughout the flight under the blanket, trying to imagine how she was going to cope now that he was gone. When the tires of the plane touched down in Minneapolis, she was relieved to see that it wasn’t raining. She simply couldn’t bear it if the skies were dripping, like her eyes had been each interminable day at the beach.

“I’ll be right over. Kevin told me what happened. Put on the tea and don’t do a thing tilll I get there. I’m bringing brownies.”

Margaret was barely in the door before she hugged Suzanna to her ample bosom.
“
Have a brownie, Suzanna, fresh out of the oven and still warm. Now tell me what happened. All of it. What’s that nasty bruise on your face?”

Suzanna caught her breath, aware of her tears beginning again, unable to hold them back. “Brad. I thought he was going to kill me. He said—he said—” She hiccupped, “That he didn’t care how I felt. He was going to keep on seeing her.”

“Who?”

“His new paralegal. I think her name is Tiffany. Or something. The last one—I know he was screwing her, too—
”

Margaret sat back in her chair and reached for another brownie. “You should have divorced him ages ago.” Her voice was accusing.

Suzanna squinted back at her friend, her eyes puffy. “You’re probably right. Anyway, the last one was blond and big-breasted—not like me—and with legs that wouldn’t quit. I think George fired her …”