“If I hurt youâ”
“
If
you hurt me?” Out of desperation she grabbed the box of tissues and threw it at him. “If you hurt me, you son of a bitch. What am I, rubber, that you can slap at me and it bounces off? You say you're falling in love with me, then you turn around and calmly tell me that it's over.”
“I said I thought I was falling in love with you.” It was vital, he thought with a little squirm of panic, to make that distinction. “I stopped it.”
“Youâ” Rage really did make you see red, she realized. Her vision was lurid with it as she grabbed the closest thing at hand and heaved it.
“Jesus, woman!” Brian jerked as the small crystal vase whizzed by his head like a glittering bullet. “You break open my face, you're just going to have to stitch it up again.”
“The hell I will.” She grabbed a favorite perfume atomizer from her dresser and let it fly. “You can bleed to death and I won't lift a finger. To fucking death, you bastard.”
He ducked, dodged, and was just fast enough to tackle her before she cracked him over the head with a silver-backed mirror. “I can hold you down as long as it takes,” he panted out as he used his weight to press her into the mattress. “Damned if I'm going to let you take a chunk out of me because I bruised your pride.”
“My pride?” She stopped struggling and her eyes went from hot to overflowing. “You broke my heart.” She turned her head, closed her eyes, and let the tears slide free. “Now I don't have any pride to bruise.”
Staggered, he leaned back. She simply turned on her side and curled up again. She didn't sob now but lay silent with tears wet on her cheeks.
“Leave me alone, Brian.”
“I thought I could. I thought you'd want me to do just that sooner or later. So why not sooner? You won't stay.” He spoke quietly, trailing a finger through her hair. “Not here, not with me. And if I don't step back, it'll kill me when you leave.”
She was too tired even to cry now. She slipped a hand under her cheek for comfort and opened her eyes. “Why won't I stay?”
“Why would you? You can go anywhere you want. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. You're young, you're beautiful, you're smart. A doctor in any of those places is going to make piles of money, go to the country club every week, have a fancy office in some big, shiny building.”
“If I'd wanted those things, I would already have them. If I wanted to be in New York or Chicago or L.A., I'd be there.”
“Why aren't you?”
“Because I love it here. I always have. Because I'm practicing the kind of medicine here that I want to practice and living my life the way I want to live it.”
“You come from a different place,” he insisted. “A different lifestyle. Your daddy's richâ”
“And my ma is good-looking.” She sniffled and didn't see the quick, involuntary quiver of his mouth.
“What I mean isâ”
“I know what you mean.” Her head felt like an overblown balloon ready to burst. Idly, she told herself she'd take something for it. In just a minute. “I don't care much for country clubs. They're usually stuffy and burdened with rules. Why would I want that when I can sit on my deck and see the ocean every day of my life? I can walk in the forest and spot a deer, watch the mists rise off the river.”
She shifted just a little so she could see his face. “Tell me, Brian, why do you stay here? You could go to any of those places you named, run the kitchen in a fine hotel, or own your own restaurant. Why don't you?”
“It's not what I want. I have what I want here.”
“So do I.” She turned her cheek back against the bedspread. “Now go away and leave me alone.”
He got up and stood looking down at her. He felt big and awkward and out of his depth. Hooking his thumbs in his front pockets, he paced away, paced back, turned to stare out the window, to stare back at her. She didn't move, didn't speak. He cursed under his breath, hissed out a breath, and started for the door. Turned back.
“I wasn't truthful with you before. I didn't stop it, Kirby. I wanted to, but I couldn't. And it wasn't just thinking, it was ... being. I'd rather not be, I'll tell you that straight out. I'd rather not be, because it's bound to be a mess somewhere along the line. But there it is.”
She brushed a hand over her cheek and sat up. No, he did not have the look of a happy man, she decided. There was resentment in his eyes, stubbornness in his mouth, and annoyance in his stance. “Is this your charming way of telling me you're in love with me?”
“That's what I said. It so happens I'm not feeling very charming at the moment.”
“You boot me out of your life, you humiliate me by catching me at a weak moment, you insult me by denying my feelings and my character, then you tell me you love me.” She shook her head, pushed her damp hair back from her face. “Well, this is certainly the romantic moment every woman dreams of.”
“I'm just telling you the way it is, the way I feel.”
She let loose a sigh. If in a corner of her heart joy was blooming, she decided to hold it in check, just for a while. “Since for some reason that I can't quite remember I seem to be in love with you too, I'm going to make a suggestion.”
“I'm listening.”
“Why don't we take a walk on the beach, a nice long walk? The air might clear your brain enough for you to find a few drops of charm. Then you can try to tell me again, the way it is, and the way you feel.”
He considered her, discovered his head was already clearing. “I wouldn't mind a walk,” he said and held out a hand for hers.
TWENTY-EIGHT
S
OMETHING bad was in the air. Sam could sense it. It was more than the thick heat, more than the hard look to the sky. He had some worries about Hurricane Carla, which was currently kicking the stuffing out of the Bahamas. The forecasters claimed she was primed to dance her way out to sea, but Sam knew hurricanes were essentially female. And females were essentially unpredictable.
Odds were she'd give Desire a miss and take out her temper on Florida. But he didn't like the feel to the air. It was too damn tight, he thought. Like it was ready to squeeze over your skin.
He was going to go in and check the little weather station Kate had gotten him last Christmas, do a run on the shortwave. There was a storm coming, all right. He wished he knew when it was coming.
As he crested the hill he saw the couple at the edge of the east garden. The sun was slanting over them, turning Jo's hair into glittering flame. Her body was angled forward, balanced against the man's with a kind of yearning it was impossible not to recognize.
The Delaney boy, Sam thought, grown up to a man. And the man had his hands on Sam's daughter's butt. Sam blew out a breath, wondered just how he was supposed to feel about that.
Their eyes were full of each other, and with a fluid shift of bodies their mouths tangled. It was the kind of hotly intimate kiss that made it obvious they'd been spending time doing a lot more to each other.
And how was he supposed to feel about that?
Time was, young people wouldn't neck right out in the open that way. He remembered when he'd been courting Annabelle, the way they'd snuck off like thieves. They'd done their groping in private. Why, if Belle's daddy had ever come across them this way, there'd have been hell to pay.
He walked on, making sure his footsteps were loud enough to wake the dead and the dreaming. Didn't even have the courtesy to jerk apart and look guilty, Sam thought. They just eased apart, linked hands, and turned toward him.
“There's guests inside the house, Jo Ellen, and they ain't paying for a floor show.”
Surprised, she blinked at him. “Yes, Daddy.”
“You want to be free with your affections, do it someplace that won't set tongues wagging from here to Savannah.”
Wisely, she swallowed the chuckle, lowered her eyes before he caught the gleam of laughter in them, and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Sam shifted his feet, planted them, and looked at Nathan. “Seems to me you're old enough to strap down your glands in a public place.”
Following Jo's lead and warned by the quick squeeze of her hand, Nathan kept his tone sober and respectful. “Yes, sir.”
Satisfied, if not completely fooled, by their responses, Sam frowned up at the sky. “Storm coming,” he muttered. “Going to give us a knock no matter what the weatherman says.”
He was making conversation, Jo realized, and shoved her shock aside to fall in. “Carla's category two, and on dead aim for Cuba. They're saying it's likely she'll head out to sea.”
“She doesn't care what they say. She'll do as she pleases.” He turned his gaze on Nathan again, measuring. “Don't get knocked by hurricanes much in New York City, I expect.”
Was that a challenge? Nathan wondered. A subtle swing at his manhood?
“No. I was in Cozumel when Gilbert pummeled it, though.” He nearly mentioned the tornado he'd watched sweep like vengeance across Oklahoma and the avalanche that had thundered down the mountain pass near his chalet when he'd been working in Switzerland.
“Well, then, you know,” Sam said simply. “I hear that you and Giff got a mind to do that sunroom Kate's been pining for.”
“It's Giff's project. I'm just tossing in some ideas.”
“Guess you got ideas enough. Why don't you show me then what y'all have in mind to do to my house?”
“Sure, I can give you the general layout.”
“Fine. Jo Ellen, I suspect your young man figures on finagling dinner. Go tell Brian he's got another mouth to feed.”
Jo opened her mouth, but her father was already walking away. She could do no more than shrug at Nathan and turn to the house.
When she stepped into the kitchen, Brian was busy at the counter de-heading shrimp. And singing, she realized with a jolt. Under his breath and off-key, but singing.
“What's come over this place?” she demanded. “Daddy's holding full conversations and asking to see solarium plans, you're singing in the kitchen.”
“I wasn't singing.”
“You were too singing. It was a really lousy rendition of âI Love Rock and Roll,' but it could be loosely described as singing.”
“So what? It's my kitchen.”
“That's more like it.” She went to the fridge for a beer. “Want one of these?”
“I guess I wouldn't turn it down. I'm losing weight just standing here.” He swiped the back of his hand over his sweaty forehead and took the bottle she'd opened for him. He took a long swallow, then tucked his tongue in his cheek. “So, is Nathan able to walk without a limp today?”
“Yeah, but I bloodied his lip.” She reached into the white ceramic cookie jar and dug out a chocolate-chip. “A brother with any sense of decency would have bloodied it for me.”
“You always said you preferred fighting your own battles. How in God's name can you chase cookies with beer? It's revolting.”
“I'm enjoying it. You want any help in here?”
It was his turn to experience shock. “Define âhelp.' ”
“Assistance,” she snapped. “Chopping something, stirring something.”
He took another pull on his beer as he considered her. “I could use some carrots, peeled and grated.”
“How many?”
“Twenty dollars' worth. That's what you cost me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just a little wager with Lexy. A dozen,” he said and turned back to his shrimp.
She got the carrots out, began to remove the peels in slow, precise strips.
“Brian, if there was something you believed all your life, something you'd learned to live with, but that something wasn't true, would you be better off going on the way you'd always gone on, or finding out it was something different? Something worse.”
“You can let a sleeping dog lie, but it's hard to rest easy. You never know when it's going to wake up and go for your throat.” He slid the shrimp into a boiling mixture of water, beer, and spices. “Then again, you let the dog lie long enough, it gets old and feeble and its teeth fall out.”
“That's not a lot of help.”
“That wasn't much of a question. You're getting peelings all over the floor.”
“So, I'll sweep them up.” She wanted to sweep the words up with them, under the first handy rug. But she would always know they were there. “Do you think a man, a perfectly normal man, with a family, a job, a house in the suburbs, a man who plays catch with his son on a Sunday afternoon and brings his wife roses on a Wednesday evening, could have another side? A cold, dark side that no one sees, a side that's capable of doing something unspeakable, then folding back into itself so he can root at the Little League game on Saturday and take the family out for ice cream sodas afterward?”
Brian got the colander out for the shrimp and set it in the sink. “You're full of odd questions this evening, Jo Ellen. You writing a book or something?”
“Can't you just tell me what you think? Can't you just have an opinion on a subject and say what it is?”
“All right.” Baffled, he tipped the lid to the pot to give the shrimp a quick stir. “If you want to be philosophical, the Jekyll and Hyde theme has always fascinated people. Good and evil existing side by side in the same personality. There's none of us without shadows.”
“I'm not talking about shadows. About a man who gives in to temptation and cheats on his wife one afternoon at the local motel, or who skims the till at work. I'm talking about real evil, the kind that doesn't carry a breath of guilt or conscience with it. Yet it doesn't show, not even to the people closest to it.”