Her Perfect Life

by Hinze, Vicki

  “And?” She pushed because they both needed to know exactly why he’d done those things. Their relationship was different now than it had been before, too, and they both needed to get a grip on the change.

  His eyes filled and he blinked hard. “Because they were my last connection to you.”

  Like her kids to her parents. She’d always known their connection was important to him, but until now she hadn’t realized how important. Until coming back and seeing his reaction and feeling the full weight of how much he cared. Her chest went tight, and her heart filled. “In case I’ve forgotten to mention it lately, C.D., I really do adore you.” She swallowed hard. “I am… so lucky to have you in my life.”

  Tenderness filled his eyes. “Me, too, Angel.” He hesitated, then spoke in earnest, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he should say and what should be left unspoken. “I knew it before, but after I’d lost you…” The weight of that loss to him grew clear to her. “Well, now I really know.” He walked around the bar, started pouring tequila, needing a break from the emotional intensity charging the air between them.

  Katie took the hint. “So how can Barbie return that investment and it still be there? You’re getting fuzzy on money again, hotshot.”

  “Samantha,” he called Barbie by her real name, “invested the fund money and added the insurance money to it. She’s invested well. When they told me you’d been rescued, I had her pay back the insurance company from the fund and left the rest invested.”

  “Oh, I see now,” Katie said. “Actually, I only partly see now. The college funds part is clear, but you digressed from my responsibility for Top Flight.”

  “Sorry.” He grinned, not sorry at all. “I wanted to do something special to keep you with me all the time. Barbie suggested ditching the old bar and putting in a new one in your honor.” He pointed to the center of the oak bar, near the cash register. “There’s a plaque and everything.”

  Katie moved over to read it. “In loving memory of Katie Cole Slater. She walks forever in my soul.”

  Her heart beat hard and fast and tenderness filled then overflowed it. “It’s beautiful.” She looked to him. “That’s… an amazing tribute, C.D.”

  “It’s a Cherokee term,” he confessed, stepping behind the bar and mixing the margaritas. “The Lakotas—and maybe other tribes—use it, too. I heard it once and thought it was beautiful… Special.” He smiled. “Like you.”

  He thought it was the most accurate expression of love he’d ever heard—but being a man, of course, he couldn’t just say that. “It really is beautiful and special,” she agreed, then asked, “So that’s how I am responsible for this work of art. Lovely.”

  “You’re responsible for other things, too.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “I told you, you advised me to listen to Samantha. You know how I am with money, Angel.”

  “A walking disaster.”

  “Exactly,” he agreed, rubbing the rims of glasses with a wedge of lime. “If you hadn’t told me to listen to her, I wouldn’t have done it, and—”

  “Because you did, I’m responsible for all kinds of other things like…”

  “The cottages, for one, and other stuff here and there.” He ground the glass rims in salt.

  Katie smiled. “You’re giving me a lot of credit.”

  “That’s okay. I give you blame, too, so it evens out.” C.D. blended the slushy drinks, then poured them into glasses. “Because of that tribute I also lost Barbie—as the woman in my life, I mean. She still handles my investments, of course.”

  “Why did you lose her over the tribute?” Katie didn’t get it. Barbie, a.k.a. Samantha, had known them both.

  C.D. came around the bar and passed Katie a chilled glass. “She said no woman could compete with that.”

  She walks forever in my soul. “It does sound pretty daunting. Didn’t you explain that between us it’s different?”

  He sipped from his glass. “Her bottom line was that if a woman’s in a man’s soul, she’s in his soul. He has no heart left to lose to anyone else.” He set his glass on the bar. “She had a point.”

  “Did she?” Not sure what to make of that, Katie denied a little flutter of pleasure in her heart, slid onto the bar stool and began to drink. The tangy salt felt great going down her throat.

  He nodded, tapped the stem of his glass with his thumb. “I’ve always compared other women to you, Katie. Barbie knew it. She said that when you were alive, any woman measuring up was difficult. But after you were immortalized in death, no other woman could ever rise high enough to meet the mark.”

  Nearly breathless, Katie set her glass down. “You know, when I walked in here, I intended to do some serious drinking and have myself a whale of a pity party.”

  “I know.”

  “But I have to tell you, at the moment, I’m wondering why. I’m not feeling at all pitiful.” Actually, she was feeling pretty special.

  “Good. Then you must be doing something right.”

  “It’s not me,” she admitted, studying his face, the line of his jaw, the curl of hair against the collar of his shirt. “I think it’s seeing me through your eyes.”

  The tenderness in his eyes turned smoky and warm. “Then a pity party is way out of line.”

  “I know.” She frowned, feeling a little confusion. “But birthday, divorce, kids with Sam—I should be wallowing in one, shouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know,” C.D. said, then sipped from his glass. “Should you?”

  “I think I should.” While she decided, she took another drink. “I think I must be really messed up because I’m not.”

  He shifted on the stool beside her. “Do you want to do your debating on it to music?”

  She wanted to, wanted to be held by him, but he had to know as well as Sam all she’d been through in the tribal prison. How did he feel about that? “I, um, haven’t danced in along time, C.D. Since before the crash.”

  He searched her face. “What are you telling me, Angel?” he asked. “That you don’t want to dance, or that you want to but you’re afraid to because…?

  “Things happened there.” She lowered her gaze to his chest. “I, um… I…” Her breathing didn’t want to work. Suddenly, it was if as her lungs had deflated and couldn’t expand.

  C.D. cupped her face in his hands. “Katie, you’re safe with me. You don’t have anything to fear from me, ever. Not about anything. I don’t care what it is.” He stroked her cheek, her chin. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  About dancing, about the growing physical awareness between them that had them both as tense as teens and thinking about making love, about anything that happened in the tribal prison. “You can do that, C.D.? You can accept me—not as a friend you adore but as a woman—unconditionally?”

  “I always have.” He gave her that slow, sexy smile that kept women up nights and waiting by the phone.

  “No.” Her heart beat hard and fast. “Really?”

  He nodded, his expression tense, as if nervously awaiting her reaction. “Really.”

  She put her hands over his on her face. “You know, as I recall, you were a pretty good dancer.”

  “As I recall, you danced about as well as you walk in heels.”

  She rolled her gaze. “I’ll give you that one, but we always did pretty good together.”

  “A perfect team.” He slid her a suggestive grin. “So do you want to dance?”

  To dance and more. She walked in his soul. Did that mean he loved her? What she felt for him, she felt in the marrow of her bones, in every chamber of her heart. It was complex. The same as before, only different. Bigger, deeper, more. Very complex. Too complex for tonight. “Why not?”

  He picked out some tunes on the jukebox, then returned to his seat and hung his cane on the ledge of the bar beside him.

  Nervous, she reverted topics. “For the record, I definitely think I’m entitled to a pity party.” She took a drink from her glass, letting the
shift in her feelings settle.

  “Whatever you want, sweetheart.” He lifted his glass.

  “I did my duty to country and family, and now I’m forty and I have everything I never wanted, C.D. Sam’s divorcing me because he loves his wife in ways he never loved me.”

  “I wouldn’t use Sam as a measuring stick on anything, Angel,” C.D. said. “Just my personal opinion, of course.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a selfish moron. I’ve never figured out why you loved him. And now, I can’t figure out why you want him to love you.”

  She frowned up at him. “Because he said he would.”

  “He did,” C.D. countered. “Then you died, and he fell in love with someone else.”

  “I did not die.”

  “You had to Sam.”

  “Whatever!” She huffed. “Don’t you get it?” she asked, guessing she wanted a little bit of that pity party, after all. “He loves her more than me. My kids don’t look at me or think of me as their mother. I have no career anymore. I wanted to be a pilot my whole life. Now that’s gone, too. I have no life, C.D.”

  “Not exactly.” C.D. grunted. “Jake called you mom. He and Molly want to come over to play in the garden. You can choose any career you want from this minute on, and you’re already building a new life.”

  “But, think, C.D. My point is I wasn’t through with the old life yet.” She downed a healthy swig of margarita. “Everything’s pretty much shot, and I wasn’t done. Nobody asked me if I was done. I didn’t get to choose. I just get to live with everyone else’s choices.” Her head was a little fuzzy. How could that be on half a drink? Well, half a drink and a glass of wine with dinner? “You know,” she settled a hand on her hip. “I think I’m pretty ticked off about that.”

  “I can see that you are.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you be? I gave everything, C.D.” She turned to him, knee to knee on the barstools. “I have nothing left, and I can’t even hate the woman my husband loves more than me because I actually like her.”

  “And considering she’s living your life, and she’s not yet close to forty, that might just bug you most of all, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said with gusto and conviction. “Now you’re getting it.”

  C.D. chuckled, pulled Katie off the stool and into his arms, between his thighs. “You said you’ve got nothing,” he whispered, his voice a husky rasp. “That’s not true, Angel.” He looked deeply into her eyes. “You’ve got me.”

  “Because you feel guilty,” she countered. “No matter what you say, I know you feel guilty, honey. You can’t hide it from me. I feel it in you.”

  “I am guilty, but that’s just a fact. It’s not the only reason you’ve got me.” He stood up and led her to the dance floor. Willie Nelson was singing You Were Always on My Mind.

  “Doesn’t it hurt your knee to dance?”

  “Not when it’s slow and easy like this.”

  She moved with him as one, their bodies fitting together, their steps in tandem. “I’d forgotten how well we danced together.” She smiled against his shoulder.

  “I hadn’t.” He pulled her closer, twirled.

  “You thought about me a lot, didn’t you, C.D.?” She looked up but only saw the underside of his chin.

  “Every day of my life, Angel.” He looked down at her. “You walk in my soul, remember?”

  Love burned intensely in his eyes. Love for her. It spoke to her mind and heart and soul, and she lifted her mouth to his.

  They kissed, but this kiss was not a kiss between partners or friends, it carried too much fire and passion, too much desire too long denied and even more gratitude and love. So much love.

  C.D. pulled back. “Katie, are you sure you want this for us?”

  “Do you?” She rested her hands on his chest. “You and the kids are all I’ve got, C.D. I want you. I won’t lie and say I don’t, I do. But I know you go through women like water and I can’t lose what we have.” She let him see her vulnerability. Her fear. “I can’t lose you.”

  “You won’t,” he promised. “Not ever. Not for any reason.”

  She looked into his eyes, saw truth, and let out a little mewl. “Promise me. Swear it.”

  “I swear,” he said, then kissed her again. Longer, deeper, hotter, letting her feel the fury of his passion.

  Somewhere during the night, long after they’d left the bar, all the feelings of isolation and abandonment, of betrayal and loss and devastation, faded and fell to a stronger, more potent and powerful certainty that she was cherished and desired, beloved and loved.

  They couldn’t seem to say goodnight, to let each other go. So they settled on the sofa in the cottage and she snuggled deep in his arms, smiled at his content sigh at closing his arms around her, and the truth crept in and settled over her.

  She and C.D. never had made love or violated her marriage vows, but they had always lived love, sharing a special bond that was undeniably intimate. They had shared a life where he had welcomed her to walk in his soul, and she had welcomed him to walk in her heart. Yet only now was Katie grasping the true meaning of what their hearts and souls apparently had known all along.

  They belonged.

  * * *

  Sometime before dawn, Katie awakened on the sofa and looked at C.D., slumped and seemingly sound asleep with his head lolled back. His presence felt reassuring. The light above the stove in the kitchen was on and cast enough of a glow to see the outline of his face, but little more. His eyes were closed, but she couldn’t tell from his breathing if he was really asleep, awake or languishing in that netherworld somewhere in between. “I think I owe you an apology, C.D.” She whispered in case he had drifted off, too.

  “For what?” he whispered back.

  “I imposed on our friendship a little too much.” Inside, she was shaking, afraid of losing that special bond between them in spite of assurances he made under the influence of . . . whatever this was between them. They belonged, but what did that mean? To him, what did it mean? “I didn’t intend to make you feel you had to do… this.” Had he felt pressured to alter their relationship? Had she done that to him? Had he done it to himself because he had been rescued and she hadn’t and she’d come home and Sam had ditched her? Did C.D. feel he had to step up out of guilt?

  His response was immediate and blunt. “I didn’t feel I had to do anything.”

  “I know you feel sorry for me because of the way things have gone in my life since I got back, and then Sam giving me the divorce papers on my birthday… well, that just added to it.” The truth in that hurt, and made her sick. She’d never in her life been with a man because he’d pitied her. That she felt C.D. was with her now because of it made her want to throw up.

  “Is that what you think this is about, Katie?” He sat up straight to look into her face. “You think I’m here with you because I feel sorry for you?”

  He was angry. He shook with it, and that confused her. “I understand it, C.D., and I’m apologizing for putting you in that position. Don’t come unglued on me for it.”

  “I’m not coming unglued.”

  “You’re really close,” she insisted. “Don’t you think I recognize when you’re angry? Honey, I know you better than—”

  “No, you don’t,” he cut her off, touched her shoulder so that she sat flat, back against the back of the sofa. “If you think I’m with you out of pity, you don’t know me at all.”

  The truth was written all over him. She touched his face, smoothed the anger from it with trembling fingertips, and reassessed, doing what she should have done the first time. “Why are you here with me, C.D.?”

  “Why are you here with me?” He challenged her.

  She rolled to face him, then sandwiched her hand between his. “That’s a fair question.”

  “Do you have a fair answer—beyond you had nowhere else to go, because you could have gone anywhere, Katie. I want to know why you chose to be with me.”

  She thou
ght for a long minute. “When I was a young girl, I created a list of what would make mine a perfect life.”

  “I remember all about your list, Angel.”

  She had first told him about it in a hazy stupor one night after she and Sam had argued on the phone about her return home from a mission being delayed for three more days. She didn’t remember what mission, or even where they were at the time. Italy, maybe. Or Guam. It didn’t matter. She and C.D. faced whatever came whenever and wherever it came. They had stood together from their very first meeting, shortly after she’d married Sam. “There wasn’t anything elaborate on it. It was a simple life.”

  “Home, husband, kids, front porch,” he recalled. “Wait. There was something about the husband…” He let out a groan.

  He remembered it; Katie could feel the tension winding up in him. “That’s right,” she said. “A husband who wouldn’t leave me for a younger woman—”

  “No. No, it was when you turned forty, which you did today.” C.D. hugged her to him. “Oh, no. I’m sorry, honey.”

  That’s exactly what Sam had done to her. “Me, too.” Forty had been her grandmother’s age when her grandfather had walked out to live with his twenty-two-year-old assistant. Her grandmother had been devastated and never had recovered. “I got my perfect life,” Katie told C.D. “But at forty, poof! It’s gone.” Just like her grandmother’s.

  “That was your old perfect life, for the woman you used to be, and it wasn’t so perfect, Katie, as you’ve already discovered.”

  “But I didn’t know that then.”

  “You’re digressing,” he said, tossing her words to him back at her. “What I want to know is who are you now. And why are you with me?”

  Nothing less than the truth would be honest, and she couldn’t be anything but honest with C.D. “Because you love me.” She said it simply, but no words ever spoken carried more feeling. “I see it in your eyes, C.D. I felt it in your tribute on the plaque. In the way you look out for me and cherish me and care for me. You always want the best for me, even if it isn’t best for you. You say and live it. You love me.”