Love on the Line (31 page)

But she would make Ryan say it to her face.

Chapter Twenty-four

Ryan gave up on the espresso machine after the third try and made coffee in a pan on the stove. He grabbed at a mug and heartily wished that after he’d returned from the Pacific-Union event the night before that he hadn’t dived into the bottle of scotch that now sat empty on his kitchen counter. His head was thick and his thoughts thicker.

The knock at his door sounded like a giant hammering on an anvil. He really shouldn’t drink scotch. He shot a look to the clock in the hall. Seven forty-five. Adam had finished the last of the stalls in the barn the day before, so Ryan wasn’t expecting him. Maybe he’d left some tools.

He threw the door open.

Adrenaline flooded him when he saw Cara. Cara safe. Cara unharmed.

Even his best anger management tools hadn’t prevented him from putting his fist through his bathroom wall at three in the morning when he’d driven to her place for the third time and she still hadn’t returned home. Not that he’d wanted to see her. He just wanted to know she made it home safely.

He only hoped he could rope in his driving wish to throttle her.

“May I come in?”

He hated that voice. It was the proper voice of highfalutin’ city people, of TV news anchors, the measured voice of cold reason.

But as he looked into her eyes, he thought maybe not. Maybe he was mistaken. She didn’t look like a woman driven by reason. If she were, she surely wouldn’t be standing on his front porch. Not in the face of what he had loaded up to say. Not wearing a party dress that looked like she’d slept in it.

Against his better judgment, he nodded and stood aside to let her in.

“Thank you,” she said.

He heard the waver in her voice and saw the tremble in her lips. But his heart shut, hard, like steel walls around a compound. A wavering voice and trembling lips weren’t going to do her any damn good.

“I had hoped to tell you about all this properly, in due time.”

There it was, that formal,
snotty
, tone. It stoked the fire in him, and he barely contained his roar.

“Properly? All this?” He waved his arms. “Like there’s a
proper
way to tell a person that everything about you is a lie? Like there are specific words that make deception okay?”

He
was
roaring now and couldn’t stop.

“The bake sales, Cara? The community raising money to tide you over? Do you even
know
how hard it was for some of those people to give? Some of them are on social security and welfare—how will you explain to them that you took their money when all along you had billions of dollars?”

He crossed his arms. It was the only way to keep from punching another wall. “I earned my money. I know what it takes—what it took—for them to give.”

“No one
earns
ten million dollars a year. Or a billion. It’s a responsibility, Ryan. At least I don’t spend my money on fancy cars and houses and God knows what else.”

The pounding in his head intensified. He tightened his grip on his elbows. Maybe he would smash a wall.

“You’re going to lecture
me
about responsibility? About how I spend my money? That’s
ripe
. Really ripe.”

“And
you
—what about you? What about the walls you’ve built around yourself? Not even Mother Teresa could gain entrance to the inner kingdom of Ryan Rea. How long will you let events of the past color what’s happening now, color how you see people?” She drew herself up. “I’ll have you know that I
never
lied to you.”

Her voice didn’t waver now. And from her comments, evidently she knew about the paternity suit. She’d known and still she’d kept up her deception. She was in full-on defense mode—he could see it from the way she squared her shoulders. Good. If she wanted a battle, she’d have it. He planted his legs wide and fisted his hands on his hips.

“Deception is the silent partner of lying,” he said hotly.

The veins in his neck throbbed, and her eyes went wide as she backed away.

“I can see that you can’t forgive me,” she said in a quieter voice. “But don’t say anything to anyone.” She took another step back. “Please. I want to tell the people here in my own way.”

“And in the meantime you continue to hoodwink them like you have me? Are you a pathological liar? Or do you just get your kicks from fooling those who trust you?” He felt heat rush through him. Instead of cooling down, his anger was ramping up. “And how do you figure out the
right
way to tell people that you’ve been hiding who you really are? That you took their money, that you could’ve funded a clinic on your own? That you could’ve funded
ten
clinics? I suppose you have some fine-tuned plan for that?”

She shrank back against the wall. Great. All his studied practices for turning up the good did absolutely nothing when he needed them.

“I couldn’t have funded the clinic,” she said in a low voice. “In fact I can’t fund it until next month, maybe even longer. I don’t expect you to understand that. But please, Ryan,” she said with a look that made him feel like the bully he was being, “just give me this—let me break the news in my own way.”

She turned to the door. And then she turned back. “I wasn’t lying when I told you I loved you.”

She tossed her hair and walked to her car. And drove off without looking back.

A wrecking ball could have hit him and he wouldn’t have felt it, he was that stunned. She loved him?
Sure
. The woman was damned good at deception. And she was still practicing it.

No, not practicing; she’d already perfected her technique.

He closed his eyes.

He rubbed at his head, then found himself rubbing at his chest, at a spot over his heart. Both his head and his heart ached. But Alex was wrong: pain and inconvenience did not add up to love.

He slammed into the kitchen and downed two Tylenol with a mug of cold, bitter coffee. Then he stared at nothing.

And he let his brain exercise some control over his emotions.

He could’ve probed deeper about the painting and the book—his instincts had told him they were out of place in the home of a woman who had little money.

And he should’ve pressed her about New York. She hadn’t said she wasn’t there; she’d just put him off with that crack about a familiar face. He’d overlooked the way she evaded personal questions with her smooth manners and easy way of turning conversations. He’d fallen for her misdirection because he wanted to believe it; he wanted her answers to fit his illusion.

He could’ve asked her more about her life, but no, he’d just spilled his guts about his own life, rambling on about his dreams and blathering about his fight to get his head around money.

And she’d let him.

She’d listened to him.

She’d listened
...

Even through the throbbing in his head he began to recognize the role he’d played in this charade. He’d been stuck in his
own
damn deception.

He’d been one hell of a fool.

Chapter Twenty-five

The next morning Ryan slipped into a seat in the last row of the crowded town hall meeting room. Evidently everyone in Albion Bay had seen the flyers plastered around town announcing the special meeting.

A few hours before, he’d ordered the same breakfast at the diner that he always did, but he’d pushed it around his plate, unable to eat. The fight raging in him snuffed his hunger and made it hard for him to think. He had a game later; he should’ve stayed home and worked out, stretched, and then driven to the stadium. As it was, he could stay for only half an hour; he had to make batting practice on time.

But no amount of working out or stretching was going to dissolve the heaviness that hung in him. He’d spent the hours he should’ve been sleeping tracking back through every conversation he’d had with Cara and then, when he was sure he wouldn’t sleep, he’d spent hours reading about her on the Internet. And while it was true that she hadn’t directly lied to him, the result was the same: she’d managed to trigger every distrusting cell that still lived in him and trigger them good. And though he didn’t want to admit it, the woman she was—Caroline Barrington, wealthy socialite—kicked up a wall of wariness he’d never felt as strongly before. He’d never been outflanked by a woman, and Cara could outflank just about anyone on the planet if she wanted to.

Excitement buzzed in the room as Belva and Perk stepped up to the podium. Ryan gave a silent prayer of thanks that he’d had the foresight to have Belva take the pledges at the fundraiser. There was no way he could stand up in front of the good people of Albion Bay and say anything at that moment. What should’ve been a celebration to announce the funds they’d raised for the clinic had morphed into a macabre charade. At least for him it had.

He looked around the room and didn’t see Cara. A public meeting probably wasn’t her idea of a good forum for breaking her news. She probably had an army of PR people helping her figure out how to spin her confession. PR people could spin anything—they’d made aborigines believe they needed deodorant, hadn’t they?

But as he sat there, the thoughts he’d wrestled with all night and through the morning kept surfacing—relentless, nagging and undeniable. They gnawed through his cynicism and forced him to face the role he’d played all along in Cara’s drama.

“This thing working?” Belva said as she tapped at the microphone. A sharp squeal of feedback from the PA system shot through the room. “Guess so,” she said with a shrug. She drew herself up and held out an index card, squinted at it and then laid it on the podium. “I don’t need notes.” She tilted her head toward the mayor. “Perk here thinks I do, but I don’t.” She tapped the card with her finger. “The zeros on this card are a bit overwhelming, but I can tell all of you that thanks to Mr. Rea’s efforts and those of every one of you who pitched in, we have two and a half million of our four-million-dollar goal for the clinic build-out.”

Ryan’s heart sank as the crowd cheered. He’d thought his teammates and some of the front office brass would’ve been more generous, would’ve given enough to move the needle closer to the goal. But they didn’t live out here, and a remote country clinic wasn’t at the top of their lists. And two and a half million
was
a good start.

Cara came in through the side door that led to the kitchen. The purplish circles under her eyes told him she hadn’t slept any better than he had. To his surprise, she didn’t take a seat but instead walked up to Belva and whispered to her.

“Cara would like to speak to us,” Belva said as she stepped aside and stood by Perk.

Even from where he sat in the back of the room, he could see Cara’s hands trembling. She placed them on the podium.

“Nothing has ever meant so much to me as the relationships I developed since moving to Albion Bay,” she said.

It was a good thing there was a microphone, because her voice was barely above a whisper.

Ryan saw the puzzled looks on the faces of the people seated near him. Cara speaking about the relationships she’d developed with people in the town wasn’t the segue they’d been expecting.

“This town is a true community,” Cara went on, her voice becoming steadier. “You help each other, care about each other, reach for the future together while at the same time helping each other heal the wounds of the past.” She stopped and looked out at the crowd, but the sweep of her gaze didn’t reach him. “I’m not sure that you realize how rare that is in today’s world.”

People were listening intently now, but Ryan felt tension building in the room. Belva had crossed her arms and though a half smile curved her lips, her body language betrayed her bewilderment at Cara’s speech.

Cara pulled an envelope from her pocket and handed it with shaking hands to Belva.

“I rehearsed scores of ways to say this to you”—she turned and looked back out at the crowd—“to all of you. But the simple truth is what you deserve.”

A murmur waved through the room.

“Unfortunately, sometimes... Well, maybe always, there’s nothing very simple about simple truths.” She turned back to Belva and pointed to the envelope.

“I’m returning the money that you all so generously raised for me and—”

“Oh, honey, for goodness’ sake, you don’t have to do that,” Belva said, stepping closer to Cara.

Cara held out her hand to keep Belva at arm’s length.

“But I do”—she pointed to the envelope again—“I do have to. In that envelope is not only the money I’m returning, but also a pledge for two million dollars for the clinic. From me.”

A few people clapped before a stunned silence fell over the room as what Cara said sank in.

For a simple woman, she had a flair for drama. But Ryan reminded himself that she wasn’t a simple woman. What she was, he was still trying to get a grip on. All night he’d imagined the life she must’ve come from. Embarrassment had wound through his feeling of betrayal as he’d remembered his foolish fear that she’d love him only for his money. He’d tried to dam up the burning feeling of shame, but it oozed through his defenses and squeezed hard, taunting him.

“I... I wanted to come out here and have a fresh start.”

She said it as though she’d been in prison and didn’t want people to know of her criminal past. Ryan crossed his arms and pushed back into his chair.

“I wanted to be accepted for who I am and what I could contribute.”

She wrung her hands in front of her and shut her eyes. Then she opened them and gestured to Belva.

“I will be forever grateful to have been a part of your lives here.”

She said it as if she was already gone, as if her life in Albion Bay was over.

People shifted in their seats, uncomfortable with the tone of her speech.

But he knew what was left for her to admit.

Though he sizzled with the anger he hadn’t tamed, some part of him wanted to leap up and go to her. He could only imagine the anxiety flooding her as she took a breath to go on.