Three Wishes (21 page)

She wanted to believe it, but there were so many possible glitches. “What if something's too good to resist?”

“Nothing will be. I just need to talk through some things. I need to see what's there and what isn't.”

“There'll be women.”

“I won't be looking at women.”

“They'll be looking at you.”

Suit and all, he gave her a bear hug. “I love you. I'm immune.”

She grunted against his designer lapel. “That's what they all say. I'm going to wish for you to return.”

“Bree.” He held her back. “Don't. That'd be a total waste. I'll be back day after tomorrow. My tickets say it. I say it.”

Bree took a deep breath and pictured the being of light. It was real. The mole on the back of Simon Meade's neck proved it. The being of light wouldn't let her lose Tom. Would it?

Worst case, there were still those wishes.

 

Afterward she would blame it on loneliness, frustration, and simply thinking about the wishes once too often. At the time, all she knew was that she had woken in her own ancient house without Tom, and she was cold.

Scrambling out from under the quilt, she pushed icy feet into slippers and trembling arms into her robe. Pulling the belt tight, she glanced at the clock on her way to the door. It was six in the morning. She hadn't slept well. She missed Tom, missed his bed, missed his warmth.

The house was dark, but her feet knew it well. They plodded with due speed and much annoyance down the stairs to the first floor, then through the kitchen and down a narrower flight to the basement, which was framed in stubbly cement and colder than cold. The furnace was at the far end. She pulled the fight chain there, shivered, and scowled.

She jiggled one knob, then another. She made sure the pilot light was on. She checked to see that the dampers were open. She turned a dial and gave the furnace a shove. When nothing happened, she shoved it again. Her breath came out white when she swore.

Tom had warned her. Flash had warned her. She hadn't listened. She didn't want to listen even now, because the
last
thing she wanted to do was to pour money into this house. She didn't want to
be
here. She wanted to be with Tom. But Tom was living it up in New York, having all kinds of fun with his friends, maybe even making plans to return there and wondering how to break the news to her.

She needed a miracle, was what she needed. Right here. Right now.

Feeling desperate and cross enough to be brash, she squeezed her eyes shut, laced her fingers together with her knuckles by her chin, and dared the being of light to put up or shut up. “I . . . wish . . . for . . . heat.” Picturing that being, she said it again, louder this time, to make sure it heard. “I . . . wish . . . for . . .
heat.”

Opening her eyes, she tucked her hands under her arms, glared at the furnace, and waited for it to turn on.

It didn't

She rocked back on her heels, tucked her hands in tighter, and waited longer.

Nothing.

Turning on her cold-enough-to-be-nearly-numb heel, she stomped back upstairs and lit the woodstove in the kitchen. By the time it was radiating warmth, she was wrapped in a quilt in a chair inches away, brooding over a mug of hot tea, telling herself that maybe, just maybe, wishes took time.

She arrived at the diner at ten, two hours before she was due to start work. If three layers of sweaters and two of socks hadn't given her away, her scowl would have.

“Aha,” Flash gloated. “What did I tell you? If you'd listened to me, you'd still be lying in bed, nice and warm. How cold is the house?”

“Cold,” Bree grumbled, though she suspected disappointment was as much behind her mood as the chill in her bones. She had waited at the house for nearly four hours,
four hours,
and her wish hadn't come true. Okay, she had money to fix the furnace. A new car could wait. But the thought of having three wishes had been kind of nice.

Flash wrapped her hands around an apricot bran muffin that was fresh from the oven and warm. “Sit and eat. The Wrights will handle the heating, and they won't charge you an arm and a leg. They'll be in for lunch. We'll give them the news then.”

 

When the Wrights came in at noon, they were the ones with the news. “Can't eat now,” Ned said. “Just got word on the scanner.” As he spoke, the whine of the town's fire alarm began to sound from the top of the hill to alert the volunteer force. “There's a fire over on South Forest.”

Bree had the worst thought. “South Forest?”

“Don't know whose house.”

She saw Eliot turn into the diner's lot with his lights flashing and ran to the door. When he climbed from the cruiser looking straight at her, she knew. Grabbing her jacket, she joined him. Horror was shaking her so badly that she didn't trust herself to drive.

Within minutes, they were at the scene. There wasn't much she could do but stand and watch. There were no flames shooting through the roof, only thick black smoke, but the flames were on their way. The second floor was fully engulfed, the first floor long gone. She imagined that the basement was nothing but a charred concrete shell.

Feeling helpless, discouraged, and quite personally at fault, she watched while the men she knew—plumbers, carpenters, and electricians transformed into firefighters—directed thick streams of water through the upper windows. Glass shattered. Water was re-aimed. The air was filled with the acrid scent of a burning past.

She didn't want to think about the damage, about the loss of a history, about memories that would never be the same, but she thought about all those things. She was the last of the Millers. This house was all she had.

“This wasn't what I meant by heat!” she wailed to no one in particular. “It wasn't what I meant
at all!”
Her voice held both upset and accusation. She wanted to blame someone else,
something
else. But her cry was lost to the awful sound of fire and the thunder of water from yards and yards of canvas hose.

As word spread through Panama, friends arrived to stand with her, but they were small solace for the ravage she witnessed. By the time the flames were out, nearly half the town was there, and she was feeling completely alone.

“You'll rebuild, Bree.”

“The house will be better than ever.”

“You can stay with us. Our attic room is perfect.”

“Take the room over our garage. It's yours.”

Her eyes remained on the ruin of her house. She couldn't seem to drag them away, not even when they filled with tears.

Jane slipped an arm around her. Quietly, she said, “You'll stay with Tom?”

Bree nodded. She was practically living at his house anyway. That's where she would have been last night, if he hadn't been in New York. She wouldn't have slept at her own house, wouldn't have woken up lonely and cranky and cold, wouldn't have dared the being of light to make good on its promise, wouldn't have forfeited a wish out of spite. There was plenty of heat at Tom's house. So had her wish come true in some perverted sense?

 

Many hours later, warm as toast under the down comforter on Tom's bed, she was no closer to an answer. Her stomach turned each time she pictured the blackened remains of her house. It had taken two showers before the stench of the smoke left her hair, and a bath filled with scented oils before her skin let her forget.

By that time, she was worried again. Tom hadn't called. He had said that he would, had
promised
it—his word, not hers. If he hadn't been able to get through at her house, he would have tried here, unless he was so wrapped up in being back in New York that he forgot. She was scared, so scared.

Sitting up, she hugged her knees to still the shaking inside. Fine. If he gave her up and went back to his life in New York, she would take the insurance money from the house on South Forest and buy this house from him. She had always wanted it. She could live here without him and go back to her own life, which had been just fine before him. Just fine. Yes, it had been. Just fine before Tom.

The digital clock turned. It was midnight He should have
long since
called.

Grabbing for the phone at the side of the bed, she called information, got the number of his hotel, and, on the second try, pressed all the right buttons. A hotel operator answered. Bree asked for Tom. After a pause came word that he had checked out that afternoon.

She didn't know what to think or do. In a bid for calm, she tried to recapture the comfort of the being of light. For the first time, she couldn't. She could picture a great ball of light, but the picture was an intellectual one. She couldn't feel it. Emotionally, she was detached. And suddenly she was back in the world she had known before that October night, only it didn't seem as wonderful to her now as it had seemed then. Now it seemed programmed and parochial. It seemed lonely. It seemed boring. Ironic, but it even seemed
barren.

Unable to sit still with those thoughts, wanting to recapture the present, she left the bed and began walking from room to room. That was how she found herself upstairs, looking out over the front yard from the spare bedroom, when a pair of headlights lit the street Her pulse skittered when she saw that the headlights belonged to a taxi, which pulled up in front of the bungalow.

It was Tom, back home a day early. Because New York had been so good that his mind was made up?

Heart pounding, she watched him turn away from the cab and lope up the walk. She ran down the stairs, opened the door just as he reached it, and held back in fear for only as long as it took him to drop his bag. When he reached for her, she was there, holding tight to his neck, clinging in a way she would never have done in her other life but which was the only thing that made sense in this one. It was a long minute before she realized that the shaking wasn't all coming from her. He was holding her that tightly.

“I went by the house,” he said, in a voice so raw she barely recognized it. “What happened?”

“Fire,” was all she had a chance to say, because anything else would have been lost in his kiss. It was a kiss that tasted of fear and a desperate need for reassurance, as much of it his as hers.

When it ended, he took her face in his hands. “When?” His thumbs brushed at her tears.

“Lunchtime today.” She wormed her arms inside his and touched his face right back, needing to know more, feel more, to prove he was there. “I called your hotel. They said you checked out.”

“I had to get back here. Were you at work when it happened?”

She nodded and burst into tears. “Why didn't you
call?”

“I tried, but your phone just rang.” He pulled her close. “When I tried the diner, the line was busy, and then I was sitting in the airplane on the goddamned runway for three hours while the fuckin' air traffic control computers were down. Aw, honey, don't cry. Please don't cry.”

She tried to stop—told herself that there was a message in his wearing jeans and a sweater under his coat and not his despicable suit—but it didn't work. “I was scared!”

“So was I,” he said against her hair. “Scared in New York, scared back here. I love you, Bree.”

She locked her hands at the center of his back and cried harder. She didn't want him to leave, didn't want him to leave
ever again!

He held her for another minute, running his hands over her back, telling her he loved her, begging her not to cry. When he urged her inside and shut the door behind him, he leaned against it and pulled her tight to his side. “I bought you something.”

She ran the back of her hand past her eyes. “I don't want anything. Just you.”

“You heard me say that.”

“Huh?”

“The exact same words. I was saying them the whole time I was in New York. I didn't like the traffic. I didn't like the crowds. I didn't like Nathan saying that he could get me good money for a three-book deal but
great
money for a four-book deal. I didn't like my law partners trying to measure in dollars and cents the kind of clients I could bring in from the entertainment industry. The hotel was pretentious, the restaurants overpriced, and the air polluted. I kept asking myself what in the hell I was doing there, when the only thing I wanted was you.”

Bree raised her head. “It was?”

“Is.” hi the near dark, his eyes were fierce, his voice was compelling. “I was supposed to see Nathan again today, but I canceled. I walked up and down the streets and thought about the people I'd planned to stop in and see, and I didn't stop in and see a one. The only thing I wanted to do was shop.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a box. It was small, square, and blue, and had a neat white bow tied around it.

Bree looked from the box to his face and back.

“Open it,” he coaxed.

She released her hold of him and took the box from his hand, untied the ribbon, and lifted the top. Inside was another box. She looked at Tom again.

“Go on,” he said, and took the outer box from her when she removed the inner one.

Afraid to hope, she held it in her hand. Then she lifted the lid. There, on a dark field, lay a pear-shaped diamond set in platinum, and slowly but surely the light returned to her life, radiating outward from the diamond, speaking of belonging and love, filling her with warmth. “This is . . .?”

“It is.”

She looked up. “Are you asking . . .?”

“I am.”

“Oh my
God,”
she breathed, and she threw her arms around his neck. Seconds later, she was back looking at the ring. She had never owned anything like it, had never
dreamed
of owning anything like it. “You bought this in New York?”

“It's the only important thing I did the whole time I was there.”