Everything but the marriage (14 page)

Devlin stared at her. She didn't even realize what she'd lost in her headlong rush.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Never mind." It wasn't something he could possibly sit here and explain to her. Maybe, with luck, he'd get a second chance to show her what he meant. Because there was no sense in pretendmg that he didn't want to make love to her again. And again.

"What happened, Annalise? Why were you so upset? What was it about seeing Kelly and the baby that hurt you so much?"

Her eyes dropped from his to stare at the rumpled covers between them. She owed him an explanation. No matter what he said about having wanted her—and

she tucked that away to pull out and think about later—the fact remained that she'd used him.

"I told you I'd been married," she began quietly. "What I didn't tell you was that I had a baby."

She heard the quick rush of Devlin sucking in his breath but she didn't lift her gaze from the bed.

"When Bill and I got married, I think we woe both looking for a family more than anything else. He came from a very wealthy background. His parents had never had much time for him and I think, in his own way, he was as lonely as I was.

"We were happy. He was kind and funny and we laughed a lot." Her face softened with the memories and Devlin felt an odd little stab of something that could have been jealousy but obviously wasn't.

"We wanted to start a family right away, even though we were both pretty young ourselves. Both of us wanted children. We wanted the sort of stability and balance that a family can give. So we started trying to have a baby. Only nothing happened. After a few months, we went to a doctor and they started running tests."

She plucked at the sheet, her forehead puckering as she remembered the endless poking and probing, the intimate questions from doctors she'd never seen before and would never see again.

"They finally told us that it was my fault. That there was something wrong with my tubes and it would take surgery or a miracle for me to conceive. And cvot with the surgery, the miracle wouldn't hurt."

* * So you had the surgery.''

"No." She shook her head. "Bill and I talked about it and decided that maybe this was some sort of sign. We were so young and so earnest about life. We decided maybe we were meant to adopt children instead. I mean, I knew firsthand what it was like to be bounced from place to place, never really belonging, never having anyone you could count on. So we decided that was what we*d do."

"What happened?" he prompted her when she fell silent.

"A miracle." Her mouth curved in a smile of such beauty Devlin looked away. "I got pregnant before we had a chance to do more than just start looking into adoption. We were ecstatic. We decided to hold off on the adoption, and then, in a couple of years, we could start the process again and adopt the rest of our fam-ily.

"I had a wonderful pregnancy. It was as if all the trouble Fd had conceiving had somehow made the pregnancy go more smoothly. My labor was easy and Bill was there when Mary was bom."

Unconsciously she clasped her hands over her elbows, hugging herself almost as if she were holding a child.

"She was the most perfect baby you've ever seen. She hardly ever cried. She was always laughing and happy."

She glanced at him with a self-conscious laugh. "I know all parents say that, but Mary really was special."

"I believe you," he said gently. "What happened to her, Annalise?'^'

Her smile faded. "She started to have problans when she was not quite a year old. It didn*t seem too serious at first but we took her to the doctor. We thought we were being overanxious parents. But we weren't. The doctor told us she had Tay-Sachs disease. It's a genetic disorder. A perfectly healthy parent can be a carrier and pass it on to their child."

She was silent, staring into the middle distance, her face without expression.

"By the time Mary was two, she was blind. She died just after her third birthday."

The stark recital only added to the impact of her words. Without any breast-beating, she expressed all the terrible anguish she must have suffered.

"Fm sorry." The words were hopelessly inadequate of course, but there didn't seem to be anything else he could say.

"Thank you."

"When...1 mean, how long ago..." He let his voice trail off.

"A year ago. I had her cremated and I scattered her ashes over a lake we used to visit. She hked to watch the gulls before.. .before she lost her vision." She had to stop to clear her throat and then she continued more briskly.

"And then I packed everything in my car and started driving. I got odd jobs here and there, but I couldn't seem to concentrate very well. I was fired a couple of times. Sometimes I just quit because I couldn't bear to be in one place for very long.

"I guess I thought if I just kept moving, the pain wouldn't find me. Only it always did."

That explained her frantic rush earlier. She hadn't been desperate for him to make love to her. She'd been desperate to try to forget. Seeing Clay had brought all the hurt rushing back over her. That's what she meant when she said she'd used him.

"Annalise, what about Bill? Where was he?"

"He left," she said simply.

"He left you and your daughter?" Devlin felt rage chum in his gut. "The son of a bitch just walked out?"

"It wasn't like that," she protested. "You mustn't think badly of him."

"Oh, mustn't I?" he muttered, wishing he had the man in front of him so he could slowly choke the life from his miserable body. He got up and stalked to the dresser, snatching a clean pair of shorts out of a drawer and stepping into them with a motion nothing short of violent. He grabbed a pair of jeans and jerked them on.

"What kind of man walks out with his wife and daughter just when they need him the most?"

"A good man." She held up one hand when he looked as if he might explode. "And a weak one, I suppose."

"You suppose?" Absently he handed her one of his shirts to replace the sheet she was still holding over her breasts. When she hesitated, he half turned away, though it seemed a bit late in the day to be worrying about modesty.

"Bill wasn't a bad person," Annalise insisted as she buttoned the soft cotton over her breasts. "He felt terribly guilty about Mary being ill. When she was di-

agnosed, we had tests run and found out that Bill was the one who carried the gene for Tay-Sachs. He felt as if it was his fault that she was ill."

"I can understand that," Devlin admitted grudgingly. "But I can't understand how he could leave you alone to cope with it."

"Some people just aren't strong enough to deal with something like that," she said, smoothing the tail of the shirt across her thigh. "He tried. He really did. But after a while, he couldn't even bear to look at her."

"So he dumped you?" The incredible thing was that he couldn't hear so much as a hint of bitterness in her voice, not a trace of anger.

"No. He moved out and I filed for divorce. But he continued to support us. I couldn't work, of course. Taking care of Mary was a full-time job. He paid for a house and all the medical expenses. We didn't have to worry about anything."

"Conscience money." Devlin dismissed her ex-husband's motives without hesitation.

"Maybe. But it was all he could give us."

"It wasn't enough," he snapped, angry for her.

"You can't ask more of someone than they're capable of giving," she said softly. "I don't hate him. I know he felt guilty about not being there for me, for Mary. He'd have continued to take care of me for the rest of my life if I'd wanted,"

"Big deal."

AnnaHse didn't try to argue any further. She couldn't really expect Devlin to understand Bill. Devlin faced the worid square on, dealing with whatever life threw at him. Until Mary's illness. Bill had never

had to deal with anything more challenging than choosing the color of a new car.

When he'd been faced with something that would have been hard for anyone to deal with, he hadn't had the strength to stand up to it. He'd run away. It was something he'd have to live with for the rest of his life. If he deserved a punishment, that was surely more than enough.

She released a slow breath, aware that she felt incredibly tired and, simultaneously, lighter than she had in months. It was as if, in talking about what had happened, she'd shed some of the burden of the grief she'd carried for so long. She stifled a yawn.

Devlin had been pacing the room with long, restless strides as if he needed to do something to wear off the tension. Now he stopped next to where she sat on the side of the bed. Annalise looked up at him, her eyes questioning.

Hesitantly he reached out to touch his fingertips to her cheek, the tender gesture slightly awkward. She wondered if she was aware of the conflict she could read so clearly in his eyes.

After a moment, his hand dropped back to his side and he half turned away, looking out the window where the rain was still falling in a steady patter. Darkness had fallen while they talked, hurried along a bit by the storm clouds.

**I guess I ought to shut the doors, make sure I didn't leave any tools out in the rain."

"Yes." It suddenly seemed too much of an effort to hold her head up.

"Are you hungry? I could heat up some soup."

"No, thank you." She yawned again. "I'm just so tired.''

"Go to sleep, then. I'm going to check on... things," he said vaguely.

Annalise watched him leave. She wanted desperately to fight the drowziness. There were things that needed to be said. But she couldn't think what they were.

Sighing, she lay down, curling up on her side, her face buried in Devlin's pillow. She'd only rest her eyes for a few minutes and then she'd be ready to cope again.

Devlin stood in the hving room, staring out the window at the steady fall of rain. Ice clinked against the side of his glass as he raised it and took a swallow of its contents. He felt the Chivas slide down his throat, creating a mellow warmth in the pit of his stomach.

He rarely drank and never more than one drink. He'd had too much to drink the night Harold Sampson had murdered his wife and left all the evidence pointing m Devlin's direction. The fact that he'd admitted as much hadn't helped his defence any. But tonight, the Scotch helped ease his inner chill.

He twisted the glass in his hands, watching the amber liquid shift around the clear ice cubes. There had been moments during the past few days when he'd entertained the thought that maybe, if he slq)t with Annalise, it would solve a whole host of problems, enabling him to stop taking cold showers and start

sleeping at night. If he could make love to her just once...

His soft laughter was self-directed and held little humor. Of all the hopeless male fantasies, that had to be one of the oldest and, apparently, one of the most enduring. Sex rarely solved more problems than it created. You would think he'd have known that.

Not that knowing it would have stopped him from making love to Annalise. Nothing short of a cataclysm of truly spectacular proportions could have stopped him once he'd felt the depth of her response.

Of course, that response hadn't been the result of anything likely to increase the size of his ego. Annalise hadn't been desperate for him to make love to her. She'd been desperate to forget, at least momentarily, the grief that gnawed at her.

Devlin's mouth twisted in a rueful smile. It wasn't the sort of thing a man liked to hear from a beautiful woman to whom he'd just made love. His smile faded and he took another swallow of Scotch.

For someone who didn't intend to get involved, he'd done a rather poor job of keeping his distance. He frowned uneasily. There was no more pretending that he didn't care about Annalise. But there was also no reason to let things get out of hand.

He'd known for a long time that he wasn't suited to deep, personal involvements. He would never marry, never have children. His frown grew brooding as he looked into a future that stretched out ahead of him like a long, lonely road.

But that was the way it had to be. There were risks you just didn't take in life. One of the ones he'd

promised himself never to take was the chance of ever hurting people the way his father had. It was common knowledge that abused children grew up to become abusive parents. Not all of them certainly, but the statistics made it clear that the odds were against him.

He couldn't quite picture himself striking a woman or a child, but it wasn't a chance he was willing to take. He was capable of violence. He'd known that even before he went to prison. The years in prison had sharpened that side of him—he wouldn't have survived without it.

There were those who would argue that the situations were quite different. One was defending your life, the other was attacking a person smaller and weaker than yourself. Because he was capable of one didn't necessarily mean he was capable of the other.

But what if that edge was sharper than he knew? What if the violence was so deeply ingrained in him that it came out when he wasn't expecting it? He'd lived with violence in one form or another most of his life. You couldn't just walk away from that kind of heritage.

He downed the last of the Scotch, feeling it settle in the pit of his stomach, a smooth pool of fire that helped ease the ache.

It had been, God help him, a relief to learn that Annalise couldn't have children. Not that he wouldn't have given his right arm if it would give her back the child she'd lost. But it wouldn't be his child—never his. It was a measure of how crazed he'd been that the

thought of using protection hadn't even crossed his mind. All he'd been able to think of was that he had to have her.

The truth was, he still wanted her. If he'd ever thought that his craving would be permanently eased if he had her just once, he'd been wrong. Scant hours after making love to her, he wanted her as much as if he'd never had her.

Annalise came awake slowly, aware that, while her mind was still tangled with sleep, her body tingled with life. She shifted, moaning softly as she dragged her eyes open.