The sharp pain in my ankle stole my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. On my hands and knees, I flopped over to sit on my butt as I felt the ankle already beginning to swell inside the boot.
Damn. Damn. Double damn.
Desperately wanting to take the boot off to relieve the increasing pressure, I resisted the misguided urge. I struggled to remember the right things to do for a badly sprained ankle.
The same thing had happened to me when David was in college, sometime after Patrick was born, but before we had Nate. That was so long ago it was hard to bring it all back. We’d been walking to one of David’s intramural basketball games, and I had tripped where grass met sidewalk. He helped me into the gym, propped my foot on a chair, and played his stupid game.
Then
he drove me to the E.R. That much I remembered.
But the only thing I could recollect about treating the injury was that it took several hours to get an expensive x-ray only to be told my ankle wasn’t broken and there really wasn’t much they could do.
Ice and elevate. Hard to do when you’re sitting on the ground in the middle of the woods with no way to get back to civilization.
I didn’t want to cry, but no one was around, so I indulged myself for a couple of minutes. Wiping away the tears, I straightened my spine and tried to think of what to do.
I needed something to use like a crutch. I let my gaze scan the area. Nada.
“Damn it.”
My ankle throbbed in time with my rapidly beating heart, swelling until I was sure the boot would split open.
“Jackie? Where are you?”
I couldn’t believe it. Mark had come looking for me. I shook my head to make sure it wasn’t just some hallucination brought on my pain and frustration. “Over here! I need some help!”
Hearing his footsteps, I shouted again.
He came jogging up. He skidded to a halt in front of me and crouched down. “Jackie! What happened?”
“I sprained my stupid ankle,” I said, feeling clumsy and more than a little embarrassed. I’d run away from the cabin like some stupid kid. “I twisted it on that.” I pointed at the offending tree root. I winced when he touched the boot.
“It’s swollen already,” he said, giving my thigh a pat. “Not good.”
Knowing he sure didn’t deserve the sharp edge of my tongue, I bit back a sarcastic retort to his statement of the obvious. “Yeah. It hurts like hell.”
“I’m going to have to carry you.”
Snorting, I shook my head. “You’ll get a hernia.”
His responding snort didn’t sound at all like amusement.
I looked into his eyes.
Oh, yeah
. Mark’s temper was full flight.
“You sure know how to piss me off, you know that? You’re a piece of work, lady.”
I could have given back as good as I was getting, but I was smart enough to realize I deserved his anger. I just bit my tongue and sat there.
He ran his hand from knee to ankle. “Nothing looks broken, but I haven’t seen that ankle yet. I hate to take the boot off. If I—”
“I know. I know. If you take it off, you’ll never get it back on. Look, you can’t carry me.”
“So help me, God, if you say something about your weight—”
“I could weigh as much as Carly, and it
still
wouldn’t work.” Mark seemed to be reining in his anger, so I tried to explain. “It’s just too far. We need to find something I can use as a crutch.”
Before I could protest, he reached down, gripped my hands, and pulled me to my feet. Well, at least to my
foot
—my good foot.
He turned his back and bent his knees. “Put your arms around my neck. We’ll piggyback.”
“Mark, you can’t—”
“Jackie,” he said before he took a deep breath. I thought I heard a slow count of ten. “Put your arms around my neck.”
“Fine,” I snapped before I did as he asked.
He put his hands behind my knees and pulled me on his back. After he got me settled, he began to hike back toward the cabin.
“Let me know if you need to put me down.”
“If I put you down, it’ll be in the damn lake. Cool that hot Spanish temper.”
“Now we’re resorting to ethnic insults?” I was growing a little angry at the implication that this was all
my
fault.
He
was the one who said those three stupid words that started this whole mess. “It’s your fault I got hurt.”
He skidded to a stop. I heard a ten count again.
This whole situation suddenly seemed horribly amusing. I bit my bottom lip to keep from laughing.
Funny—whenever David and I would fight, it got ugly. Fortunately, it was never physical, although I was known to throw a knick-knack or two at his head, and I had a nasty door slamming habit. Mark and I were, for all intents and purposes, fighting. But all I wanted to do was laugh.
“You’re damn lucky the lake is the other direction,” he said with a note of humor to his voice. He started walking again.
“Damn lucky,” I said with a chuckle.
It didn’t take long at all to get us back to the cabin. I had to admire that type of strength.
Mark set me down in the main room, and I hopped on my good foot until I let myself fall into the chair. He was immediately there, taking a seat on the coffee table and propping my injured foot on his lap.
Slowly untying the laces, he slid my boot off as I dug my fingers into the arms of the chair and sucked in my breath. He gently ran his fingers over the ankle that appeared to be about the size of a softball. “I really need to take the sock off. Or do you want to do it?”
“None of the above?” My whole leg throbbed from knee to toes. “Can’t I at least have a stiff drink first? Bite on a leather strap or something?”
He laughed, the sound rumbling in that broad chest, making me smile despite the pain. “I’ll be gentle.” And he was. He made a pained face when he looked at my foot. “Ouch. Already bruising. That’s going to be pretty ugly in a couple of days. You should probably have it x-rayed.”
“Nah. It’s not broken. Just sprained. Is there any ice in the freezer?”
“I’ll check.” Mark started to get up, but I reached out and grasped his elbow. “What?”
“I’m sorry, Mark. I–I shouldn’t have run out like that. I knew I’d pissed you off, and I just needed to get some fresh air. I wanted to give us some space.”
With a curt nod, he went into the kitchen. I could hear him moving things around, and he came back in with one of those flexible blue packets you freeze and then put inside a cooler. “Better than ice.” He sat back down on the coffee table and folded it over my injury. “We should go home.”
Tears flooded my eyes before I could stop them. “I ruined everything.”
“You didn’t ruin...
everything
. Last night was still fantastic.”
I sniffled and nodded. “I wish I could explain it so you’d understand.”
With a shrug, Mark took off my other boot. He got up, grabbed a throw pillow from the sofa, and settled my injured ankle on it. He sat next to my foot on the coffee table, holding the cold pack and idly stroked my calf through my khakis. “Don’t you love me, Jackie?”
I love you with all my heart.
“Did I ever tell you I was only nineteen when I got married?”
“What does that have to do with my question?”
“David—”
He shook his head. “You’re breaking the first rule.”
“I know, but hear me out. Please.”
Mark gave me a quick nod.
I heaved a deep sigh and dove in headfirst. “David was the first guy—the
only
guy—I ever loved. He was the only man I’d ever slept with. I think marrying your first love isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. You never have to face that...that...
hurt
—that horrible hurt that comes with losing your first and only love. I went through my entire adult life thinking that my life was his, and when he left me, I thought I didn’t matter if I couldn’t be with him.” Mark started to say something, but I cut him off. “My life wasn’t my own because he was my beginning and my end. I thought we’d be together forever. I never learned how to get over a lost love. Something every teenager learns, I never did.”
“Angela Kramer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My first love. Angela Kramer. She broke up with me the week before the junior prom because Scott Fitzpatrick had a Camaro.” Mark sighed. “She broke my heart.”
I took a deep breath, hoping I was getting through to him. “I’d never had my heart broken until the year I turned forty. My husband of twenty-one years came home and told me his secretary was pregnant with his child—his twenty-fucking-year-old secretary. I was suicidal.” I couldn’t believe I had finally admitted that frightening reality to myself, let alone aloud and to Mark. “I’m not sure I would have lived through it if it weren’t for Patrick and Nathaniel.”
Mark’s dark eyes locked with mine, and I was so intimidated that I almost glanced away, fearing he would discern the depth of my feelings. “I’m not going to leave you, Jackie.”
Tears brimmed my eyes again, spilling over onto my cheeks. “No one ever means for something like that to happen, but—”
“I’m not going to leave you, Jackie. I love you.”
I just shook my head and let my chin drop to my chest. “You can’t know that.”
His heavy sigh floated through the air, settling on my heart like a tremendous weight.
I love you, Mark
.
I’d admitted it to myself. Why in the hell couldn’t I say it to him?
“You don’t believe me. You think I’m just like that bastard ex-husband of yours. Not all guys are like that. Some of us mean what we say and do what we promise.” He stood up, came to me and put his finger under my chin to force my head up. “I love you, Jackie Delgado. I won’t look for other women. I won’t fool around. I promise.” He caught one of my tears with his thumb. “I’m breaking my own rule, but I need you to know something. I was married to Elaine for sixteen years, almost seventeen. And I never strayed.
Never
. I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”
“But—”
“Just shut up and listen to me for a minute.”
I nodded and sniffed back some more tears.
“When Elaine got sick, I had well-meaning friends—guy friends—who thought I might be...lonely. They tried to set me up with women, but fuck that. I didn’t care how sick she was, I wasn’t going to some other woman just to have sex. Sex is great, but without love that’s
all
it is. Sex. I didn’t have sex with you, Jackie.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. “Silly me, I thought we did.”
His hand cupped my cheek as I turned my face into that wonderful, loving palm. “I made love to you because that’s exactly what it was—an expression of my love. I’m a one-woman man. I’ll always be a one-woman man. And
you’re
that woman.
I. Love. You.
”
I started to cry again. God, I felt like a stupid yo-yo. Cry. Laugh. Cry. It spilled out of my lips before I could even stop it. “I love you too.”
“Told you so.”
Time to laugh again. Then Mark bumped the coffee table and I hissed at the resulting pain.
“I’m going to get our stuff together and throw it in the car. We’re heading back home, and we’re going to get that ankle x-rayed.” He ran his fingers lightly down my leg. “I suppose sex is out of the question.” He wiggled his eyebrows.
I picked up my sock and threw it at him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mark pulled the Accord into the garage, then came around and helped me out. After getting me settled on my new crutches, he grabbed our duffle bags and cleared a path for me into the house by holding open doors and kicking shoes out of the way.
I was so tired I could barely see straight. The ankle had throbbed all night as it continued to swell and turn some disgusting shades of blue and purple. I tried to tough it out, insisting I didn’t want to ruin our trip, but by supper it was obvious the mini-vacation was over. Hard to feel sexy or enjoy the wilderness when you’re in that much pain, and we couldn’t even cuddle because I had my ankle propped up on pillows. Neither of us had gotten much sleep, and we left hours before dawn to get back home.
“I still wish you’d let me take you to the hospital,” he scolded.
I teetered on my crutches, put my injured foot on the floor to regain my balance, and grimaced. “I don’t need an x-ray, and I sure don’t need to spend four hours in some E.R. for them to tell me it’s just a sprain.” I sounded as grumpy as I felt. Tired and in pain were a bad combination. “The crutches are enough. Thanks for stopping at the pharmacy, and thanks for buying me the ibuprofen. I need a handful right now.”
Mark grunted a reply that I figured was caveman speak for, “You’re welcome.”
“Dad! You’re back early!” Carly called from where she sat on the barstool, eating what looked like Fruit Loops. She fixed her eyes on my crutches. “Ms. Delgado? What happened to you?”
“She sprained her ankle. Where’s Kat?” Mark asked.
I followed his gaze to two enormous Nikes he had kicked aside by the door and realized very quickly exactly who they belonged to.
Oh, shit.
Nate suddenly appeared in the hall, blushing all the way as he tugged on his t-shirt.
Oh, shit
. At least his jeans were still on.
Carly confirmed what I had already figured out. “Nate stayed over last night, but I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”
Oh, shit.
“We were watching movies, and I–I just feel asleep on the couch.” Nate used that sheepish voice he always trotted out when he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “You’re home early.”
Nate really needed to learn when to keep his mouth shut.
How had I missed his car? It wasn’t in the driveway, and I hadn’t taken inventory of the ones parked on the street. Of course, I hadn’t known there was a reason to check them for a familiar, weathered black sedan.
Mark’s ruddy face and clenched fists told me he was trying to contain a potential nuclear meltdown. Nate was in for it. So was Kathy. My problem was I didn’t know where I fit into this whole ridiculous nightmare. My personality split right down the middle and began to tug me in two different directions. Was I going to react as Nate’s mother or Mark’s girlfriend? Even worse was how would Carly’s teacher handle all of this?