Borrowed Bride Page 9

  “That seems a rather caustic assessment of fate coming from someone who leads such a charmed existence,” she remarked.

  He jerked his gaze to her. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Come on, Connor, you have to admit that you’re a lucky son of a gun.”

  “Lucky? You think I’m lucky?”

  “Aren’t you? I’m not being sarcastic and I’m not talking about the explosion now, either, but about your...life-style. You take chances most people would be scared to death to take and you walk away whistling. You do all kinds of reckless, dangerous things, things that I wouldn’t dare to even dream of doing and you survive. Hell, you revel in danger.”

  “That doesn’t make me lucky...or brave or even stupid, for that matter. Don’t you see? Once you know that fate is in the driver’s seat and that, when you get right down to it, it doesn’t matter a rat’s ass how cautious or reckless you are, it’s not hard to throw yourself out of a plane or volunteer to be the one to open a ticking suitcase some jackass left on the courthouse steps. It’s not hard at all once you understand that it just doesn’t matter.”

  Gaby’s brows were lowered, her tone hushed. “Are you saying it doesn’t matter to you if you live or die?”

  He grimaced impatiently. “If you’re asking whether you’re stuck here with a suicidal maniac, the answer is no. I’m saying that what I choose to do, the risks I take or avoid, have nothing to do with whether I live or die.”

  “That’s absurd. We may not have any control over the actual moment of our death, but we can certainly better our odds of living a longer, healthier life by taking care of ourselves and not taking unnecessary chances.”

  “Wrong, Gaby, none of us has a damn thing to say about the odds.”

  “Don’t give me that smug look,” she retorted. “Everyone knows that the more often you play with fire the more likely you are to get burned. The same principle holds true for skydiving and drag racing and...”

  She stopped. He was shaking his head more vehemently now.

  “You’re wrong,” he told her. “I know you’re wrong.”

  He stood abruptly, and for an instant Gaby thought he was going to stalk off. Instead, he took a couple of steps away from her and leaned on the deck rail, looking out at the lake where a couple of mallards swam in lazy circles, the swirl of green feathers along their necks gleaming like emeralds in the sunlight.

  For several minutes neither of them spoke. The tension radiating from his hunched shoulders was almost palpable, making Gaby wish for some tactful way of changing the subject. How had they ever gotten into so murky a philosophical realm in the first place? And how had a conversation begun merely to pass the time turned into such an emotional clash of ideas?

  “I was six when my mother died,” he said suddenly, without preamble and without turning his head to look in her direction. “It was August and we had been out shopping for back-to-school clothes. I was going to be starting the first grade the next week. My three older brothers hadn’t wanted to go. They didn’t want to waste one of their last afternoons of freedom trying on clothes for school, but I was excited by the whole idea of school and everything about it. Probably because my mother made it seem so exciting, like an adventure.”

  Gaby heard him draw a deep breath. There was no mistaking how much of an effort it was for him to talk about this, and she was tempted to tell him to never mind, to say that maybe she was wrong and he was right about fate and risks and that he really didn’t have to try to convince her by dredging up details from his past that were obviously painful to him. It was too late for that, however. She sensed that for her to speak now would be to intrude on what had become a private moment, one too emotionally charged to be short-circuited.

  “It was one of those hot, humid August days when the air is almost too heavy to breathe,” he went on. “As soon as we got home, my brothers all took off to play with their friends in the neighborhood. I was upstairs with my mother, helping her sort all the new socks and underwear into piles when all of a sudden it got dark outside, real dark, almost as if night had come early. We turned on the radio, and the announcer was talking about a thunderstorm heading our way. Right away my mother ran to the front door and started yelling for my brothers to come home and to put their bikes in the garage so they wouldn’t blow away.

  “I remember thinking about The Wizard of Oz,” he continued, “and about the scene when Dorothy’s house is spinning through the air and the witch comes riding by on her bike with the wind blowing all around her. The way the air felt that day, I could imagine exactly how that could have happened. It was so hot and heavy that you could feel it in your chest and you knew something was going to happen, something had to happen, or else the whole world would just explode.”

  He exhaled, still hunched over the railing, one hand gripping it tightly. Gaby felt as if the air around them was heavy and charged in exactly the way he described. She could almost feel the pressure building inside him, and it made her fingers curl so tightly her nails bit into her palms. The moment held a sense of inevitability. She’d ridden a roller coaster only once in her entire life, but she would never forget the feeling that had churned inside her as the car made the long, slow climb to the top of the track, knowing that a violent drop was coming any second and that there was no way to avoid it no matter how much she wanted to. She felt that same way now.

  “After she called them home, my mother ran out back and began dragging in the patio furniture,” he said, his voice a slow, steady monotone. “I helped her with the cushions, throwing them down the cellar stairs. My brother Jake—he was thirteen—he came home then and helped her drag the table close to the house where it would be safe. My brother Chris was rushing around picking up the bats and other stuff laying all over the yard. When the rain started, she yelled for us to go inside. Justin still wasn’t home, so she went out front and called for him again. Then she ran to take the clothes off the clothesline. I watched her from the kitchen window, and up over her head I could see this giant wave of darkness coming closer and closer and 1 was excited and scared all at once.”

  Gaby’s lips were pressed tightly together, her arms folded across her chest as she listened with a grim feeling of helplessness growing inside her.

  “I remember her running into the house and dumping an armload of clothes on the kitchen table. By then she was really upset with Justin for not heading home as soon as he saw a storm coming. Jake wanted to ride his bike down to the ball field to see if he was there, but my mother wouldn’t let him and he went off to his room in a huff. I remember she dragged out the phone book and looked up the number of Justin’s friend Brian and called to see if he was there. He was at Brian’s, and she told him he better stay there until the storm passed. Then she ran back outside to get the rest of the clothes.

  “That black wave was right up over our house by then, and I could hear thunder in the distance getting louder with every crack. My mother was still grabbing the clothes off the line, and I remember wondering why she was bothering because it was raining so hard they were already wet. And I remember wishing she would just come back inside because I was getting really scared and I . . . I just wanted her to be there with me.

  “I had never seen it so dark in the middle of the day,” he continued. “The next thing I knew, she was yelling for Jake to bring in the dog. ‘Get the dog, get the dog,’ she shouted. I knew Jake couldn’t even hear her upstairs with his radio blasting, so I ran to the back door to do it. By the time I got there, she was already tossing the last of the clothes inside.

  “She said to never mind, she’d get the dog herself. She was out of breath, and I knew she was upset with Jake for taking off to his room instead of helping. And then Knight—that was the dog’s name, Knight—he wouldn’t come when she called him. He was a huge German shepherd that would charge anything that set foot on our property, but he was crazy scared of thunder and he was cowering behind the shed. My mother ran back out to the yard to
get him. It was raining hard by then, and I watched her bend down and grab his chain and . . . ”

  He stopped abruptly and Gaby closed her eyes. Comprehension, which had been hovering closer and closer, rose up suddenly to fill her throat. She unconsciously pressed her hand there, her teeth clamped over her bottom lip. When she opened her eyes to look at Connor, he had turned at last and his gaze found hers.

  “You’ve probably never seen anyone struck by lightning.” He said it matter-of-factly, with no trace of the emotion that had been lurking in his voice just a few seconds earlier, and that made his words all the more horrifying.

  “Most people haven’t,” he went on. “It’s fast and there’s a sound like the earth splitting open, only it’s happening up above you and right in front of you at the same exact instant.” He shrugged. “Or maybe I just imagined that. It’s just... it’s not..” He paused and for a moment Gaby had the strong and eerie sensation that she was seeing not the Connor she’d always known—or rather, thought she had—but a six-year-old boy, overwhelmed and struggling to make sense of something that was beyond understanding at any age.

  “It’s something you don’t forget,” he concluded finally, softly. “You don’t ever forget.”

  “Oh, Connor,” she said on a ragged breath. “I had no idea. Joel never mentioned...”

  “He didn’t know,” he interjected. “I never told him.” A smile drifted ghostlike across his lips. “I never fold anyone before today.”

  Please don’t let her ask me why, Connor pleaded, silently calling on a God he wasn’t even sure he still believed existed. Faith didn’t fit very neatly into his view of life, so he preferred not to think about it. He couldn’t explain to Gaby why he had told her about that day when he had never spoken about it to another living soul, because he didn’t know why himself. He had never discussed what he saw with his father or his brothers or the child psychologist he had been taken to see every week for months after “the accident”—as it came to be known in his family—had occurred.

  They could refer to it as an accident all they wanted. Connor had always understood that it hadn’t been an accident. Accident implied something inadvertent, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. He stopped believing in accidents the day his mother died.

  Call it fate or destiny or anything else—it’s just the way it was. Written in the stars. The way it was meant to be. That’s all. Acknowledge and move on. And he had no idea why, after all these years, he had suddenly begun talking about it, and to Gaby of all people. He didn’t want to think about the reason for that any more than he wanted to think about God.

  He watched as she got to her feet and walked the few steps to where he was standing by the railing. Her touch on his arm was so light he saw more than felt it, and still it was enough to cause an immediate and portentous tightening of all the muscles in his stomach and chest. His response to her, swift and primal and beyond his control, was something he understood all too well.

  “I’m so sorry, Connor,” she said quietly. “That was an awful thing for a little boy to have to witness.”

  He tried to force a smile and found it harder than he expected, like a weight too heavy to lift. Giving up, he shrugged instead. “Yeah, well. It was a long time ago.”

  “Of course.” She dropped her arm to her side, her expression rueful. “And time heals all wounds, right? I’ve heard that line more times than I care to count in the past couple of years, and you know what? I don’t buy it. Time doesn’t heal a damn thing. It doesn’t erase the pain or lessen it, it simply gives you more practice at hiding it from everyone else.” Her smile deepened with self-deprecation. “And from yourself, too, sometimes. Then one day, when you’re least expecting it—”

  “Wham,” he broke in. “Right in the gut.”

  She nodded, her small smile edged with sadness in a way that tore loose something buried deep inside him.

  “Wham. That says it exactly,” she said. “Sometimes when Toby does something funny or clever, I look at him and out of nowhere comes this massive wall of pain and I just miss Joel so much it takes my breath away.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He managed a feeble smile at last. “I never buy new socks or underwear without breaking into a cold sweat.”

  She tipped her face up to look at him, her beautiful eyes slightly narrowed, her soft mouth pursed thoughtfully. As if, it seemed to Connor, she had been presented with one of those psychedelic-looking posters that contained a hidden picture and she couldn’t quite figure it out.

  He sighed, his smile sardonic. “You’re wondering why I told you about this when I never even told my best friend.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “I am wondering about that. Among other things.”

  “I can’t explain it,” he told her. “I certainly didn’t plan on talking about it when I asked you to sit with me. Maybe I was just ready to talk to someone and you were handy.”

  She looked skeptical. He didn’t blame her.

  “Then again,” he continued, “maybe it’s because I’ve always known how much you disapprove of me and of my ‘lifestyle,’ as you put it, and when you made that remark about me tempting fate I just wanted to set the record straight once and for all.”

  “You certainly don’t owe me any explanations about how you choose to live your life.”

  “Don’t I? Seems to me I owe you something. I gave you some rough times through the years, when I wanted Joel to come along on some crazy stunt or another that you thought was too dangerous.”

  “That I knew was too dangerous,” she corrected. “And you always dismissed my concerns as if they were nothing.”

  “Now you know why.”

  Her smile slipped away. “Yes. Now I know why.”

  “My mother was a very cautious woman, Gaby. She never left the house without checking to see that the stove was off and grabbing an umbrella just in case it should rain. And Joel, hell, Joel carried a spare key in his pocket and had a spare for the spare tucked inside his wallet.”

  They both laughed, and when their eyes met they both fell abruptly silent, as if caught in some transgression. Gaby looked away first, awkwardly dropping her gaze to the deck below. Connor moved restlessly toward his chair.

  “No doubt about it, Gaby. If being cautious was enough to keep you safe, they’d both be alive today.” He sat down, leaning his head back against the chair cushion with a weary sigh. “Instead of me.”

  His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t aware she had sat down again until she spoke. Her tone was soft and warm and when he opened his eyes to look at her, she was leaning forward in her chair and smiling at him.

  “He’s a lot like Joel,” she said. At his confused glance, she added, “Toby. You said you wondered if he was like Joel. He is. His smile, his laugh, even his sense of humor. Of course, he’s still only five, but Toby is...exceptional.” She raised her hand as if to ward off any protest, her smile both sheepish and proud. “Oh, I know, I know, that’s what every mother says about her child, but Toby really is special. He has this air of serenity that seems to come from someplace deep inside. As if he’s centered somehow.”

  “Like Joel,” Connor said, his voice gruffer than usual.

  Gaby nodded. “Like Joel. I think that being so sick for all those months added to his tendency to be self-reliant.”

  Connor levered forward, feeling as if someone had just swung a hard right at his gut and connected. “What are you talking about? When was he sick?”

  She looked startled briefly, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just assumed you knew but, of course, how could you have?”

  “Knew what, for God’s sake? Is Toby all right or isn’t he?”

  “Yes. Well, at least we think he is. The doctors...”

  He shot to his feet, unable to sit quietly for this. “Hell, Gaby. Why didn’t you call me or send a message if the kid was sick?” He caught her wry expression and grimaced. “All right, all right. I guess I’m not exactly your idea of a knight in shini
ng armor. I still wish I had known.”

  He forced himself to sit. “What was wrong with him?” he demanded.

  “You remember he had that heart problem when he was born? A small hole near—”

  Connor nodded impatiently, cutting her off. “Yes, but that was all taken care of before they sent him home from the hospital.”

  “So we thought,” she said ruefully. “A few months after Joel was killed, Toby passed out on the jungle gym at the playground. When they examined him at the hospital emergency room, they discovered that in addition to the concussion and bruises he suffered from the fall, his heart was malfunctioning. That’s what caused him to black out in the first place.”

  “Hell,” he muttered, roughly dragging the hair back off his forehead. “You must have been half-crazy with worry.”

  “More than half, actually. He had to have emergency surgery. Twice,” she amended, shuddering at the recollection in a way that sent frustration shooting through Connor, along with an all-too-familiar desire to go back and change the past. “It was touch and go for a while afterward. He was kept in the hospital for weeks of recovery—no easy thing for a three-year-old, believe me—and then confined to bed at home for a long time after that.”

  He shook his head at the thought of as active a little kid as he remembered Toby being restrained for all that time. “And now?” he asked, his clipped tone urgent. “How is he now?”

  “Like I said, he seems to be fully recovered. The doctors still want to see him for periodic checkups, but they tell me that he’s as good as new. Correction,” she said, smiling happily. “Make that better than new.”

  Connor relaxed his fists, aware for the first time how tightly they’d been closed and how badly his hand was throbbing as a result. “Good. That’s really good.” With a small shrug he dropped his hands to the arms of the chair and sat back. “I wish I had been here for you. There might have been something I could have done. Some way I could help out.”

  “Thanks. We managed fine. Toby and I make a great team, and I had my mother and my sister to help. And Adam, of course.”