“I believe we have a date,” she said with a sigh, giving him her hand.
“We do, darling.”
With impeccable timing, Arnold began the pre-arranged song as he swept her into his arms. “Moonlight Becomes You” floated over the deck. His hand found the smooth skin of her back and his arm tightened around her, drawing her close. Their bodies melded and they moved so perfectly in sync they glided across the floor as a single being.
He concentrated on capturing the scent of her hair, the softness of her cheek against his, the feel of her body pressed against his from shoulders to hips. His senses were heightened with the knowledge this would be the last time he held her in his arms and he burned those sensations into his memory. They would have to last him a lifetime.
The music ended and he steeled himself to release her. To his surprise, her arm slid around his neck and her fingers tangled in his hair as she whispered in his ear, “I’m afraid I’ll need one more dance before I can bear to let you go.”
He leaned back to see such love shining in her eyes that his knees almost buckled as his heart broke. He refused to let the crushing pain of losing her reach his eyes. He would not ruin her night. Instead, he folded her back into his arms as the band began “The Nearness of You” and Arnold sang the words he would remember later with such clarity.
It was four a.m. The last of the guests had departed around two o’clock, some to drive back to Annapolis, a few to stay at Marjorie’s bed and breakfast. Several couples had been offered guest rooms at the Wyndham’s Cottage. Without exception, they all had raved about the party, congratulating Mrs. Wyndham for hosting such a remarkable affair. On several occasions, Amanda overheard her graciously giving credit to Amanda and Zoe for the entire event from concept to completion. That put a satisfied glow in her mid-section.
The caterers had packed up their gear and left. What food remained was offered to the staff. Tomorrow they would come back and take down the tables, the tents, the lighted garlands, and centerpieces and return the “Cottage” to its pre-party state.
Tonight, Amanda would bask in the glory of a job well done and the satisfaction of a final check—including a hefty bonus—from Mrs. Wyndham. More importantly, she would share the success with the man she loved, who had had no small part in contributing to that success. The man, who after those incredible dances at midnight, had left no doubt in her mind about his feelings for her. He loved her.
Amanda’s heart swelled with joy. The sorrow of losing Danny was tucked away in a corner of her heart, never to be completely vanquished, but overlaid by the happiness of her love for Dev. She was sure that if Danny had only known him, he would be happy for her too.
She’d changed out of her long black dress, a smile twitching her lips as she remembered the heat in Dev’s eyes every time he caught sight of her in it at the party. Comfortable in soft sweatpants and an ancient tee shirt, she snuggled next to him on the ride home. He was unusually quiet, no doubt as exhausted as she, but without the thrill of their success to buoy his spirits. She imagined his enthusiasm would return as soon as they slid between the sheets.
As soon as she stepped through the door, Spook twined around her legs meowing loudly.
“Oh, poor baby, you must be starved.”
The black cat agreed, dogging her footsteps to the kitchen, keeping up her complaint as Amanda opened a can of cat food. She put the dish down and Spook fell on it like a ravening beast, much to Amanda’s chagrin.
She turned to find Dev making a fresh pot of coffee. “Honey, it’s almost four-thirty. You want a cup of coffee now?”
“Yeah. I’m too keyed up to go to sleep. I thought we could talk a bit.”
He avoided her eyes and her stomach began a slow roll. Something was wrong. She thought back over the evening, trying to find something, anything, that might be the cause of his troubled expression. Anything except the very first thought that had leapt to mind. She’d said she loved him. He’d had several opportunities, but he hadn’t said he loved her back.
Her stomach bunched itself into a fist and slammed against her heart.
Now he was going to remind her gently that she had made him promise not to fall in love. He was only following the rules. Her rules. She slid heavily into a chair at the table. She tried to concentrate but her thoughts skittered away in a hundred different directions, like insects running from the light, leaving her mind blank. She watched the thin stream of dark liquid begin to fill the coffee pot.
Dev set cream and sugar on the table with two spoons. “Would you like a cup?”
She shook her head, sure the coffee would never stay down. When he brought his cup over and sat down opposite her, she said calmly, without a hint of the despair that filled her heart, “You don’t love me. I understand. It’s okay. After all, I’m the one who made the rules. So don’t feel obligated because of what you overheard me tell Zoe. There’s no reason for you to feel badly.”
She had to close her own eyes against the regret in his.
“There are plenty of reasons for me to feel badly, but that certainly isn’t one of them.” He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. Then he pointed to the picture of Danny on the table by the love seat. “You know, that was the only tree within a mile of the dusty, half-destroyed village we stopped at that day. Danny wanted you to think the areas we patrolled were . . . nicer . . . than the usual collection of five or six hovels with a well and a couple of goats trying to find something to eat. He always wanted the best for you.”
Amanda studied at the picture and frowned. “What are you talking about? That picture was taken by his best friend, Mac.”
“Yeah, that was me.” He kept his eyes locked on hers. “In the Army everybody called me Mac.”
“But . . . but . . .” She shook her head slowly, struggling with this unexpected piece of information. “When he was killed in that roadside bombing, I thought there were only two survivors, and those men were critically wounded and not expected to survive . . . When I never heard from him, I thought Mac had . . . died . . . too.”
Her gaze went to his arm and the hand, now gloveless, that rested on the table next to his coffee cup. She looked up. “You were one of them? But why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because I’m the reason Danny didn’t make it. He got killed because he came back to get me out of the wreckage. I tried to make him stay back but he wouldn’t listen. So you see, if it hadn’t been for me, Danny would be here with you right now.”
It must be because she was so tired that this conversation didn’t make any sense. The man sitting across from her said he was Danny’s best friend, the man he’d mentioned in dozens of letters during his five years in Iraq. Dev was Mac.
“Danny made me promise that if anything should happen to him, I’d find you and, well, make sure you were okay.” He grimaced. “It should never have taken me that long to contact you, but I was a coward. I figured you’d hate me for coming back alive instead of Danny, and I wouldn’t blame you. Most days I hate myself for it.” He dragged a hand through his hair, leaving an unruly tangle in its wake. “After all the things that Danny told me about you, I felt like I already knew you. Knew how devastating his death would be for you. That’s the reason it took me so long to . . . Believe me, Amanda, I’d give anything to change places with him.”
“Wait. Wait just a minute.” She held her hands up. “You’re telling me that you’re the Mac Danny mentioned in his letters to me?”
“That’s right.”
“So that’s how you knew he was allergic to cats,” she said, rubbing Spook’s ears while she purred.
“Yes.”
“And the nightmares? They’re about the bombing? When he . . . When you were wounded.
“Yes.”
“All these weeks we’ve . . . been together, you’ve been fulfilli
ng this, this . . . promise . . . to Danny to take care of me?”
“Yes. No. Sort of. Well, it started out that way but th—”
“So the repairs to my house, the new hot water heater, that was all part of the promise?” She made air quotes around the word.
He nodded, not even trying to interrupt her now.
“And hiring me to do your company’s books?”
She had her arms crossed in front of her, and her eyes had gone from smoke to steel. This was rapidly turning out to be the worst day of her life since the day she got the news about Danny.
“Well you must really have loved it when I tumbled right into bed with you. That was part of making sure I was all right too, no doubt.” Her voice dripped acid.
“No. That . . . that was all me. It was wrong. I should never have—”
“Lied to me? For weeks? Pretended to be my friend while you treated me like a helpless child who couldn’t take care of herself? Slept with me under false pretenses?” Made me fall in love with you?
She stood up, fury coursing through her body like molten lava. She wanted to scream at him, throw things, hurt him as badly as he had hurt her. Instead, she gathered contempt around herself like armor and said icily, “Get out. Consider your ‘promise’ kept. Find a new accountant, because we won’t be speaking to each other again—ever. The money I owe you will be in the mail tomorrow.”
Thank God for that bonus check from Mrs. Wyndham. It had been earmarked to provide a nice cushion while she grew her business, but using it to erase the debt to Dev would allow her to cut him out of her life completely. The pain and anger she tried so hard to control got the better of her, and even though she knew she would hate herself for it later, she couldn’t stop herself from lying, “All those times we made love? It was Danny’s face I saw.”
The flash of pain in Dev’s eyes didn’t give her the satisfaction she’d hoped for. With a last disdainful glance, she picked up Spook and walked to her bedroom, closing the door softly to prove to herself that she hadn’t lost all control. A minute later she heard the front door open and close.
CHAPTER 24
Eighteen hours A.A. That’s how Dev measured time now. After Amanda. Knowing for weeks that this pain was coming still hadn’t prepared him to deal with it. He felt hollow. All the good things in his life were gone, leaving behind a shell filled with regrets and recriminations. He’d called the dependable Ed Santone and asked him to cover his Sunday night shift. He couldn’t face the mike and pretend to be fine. Not yet.
He went to the tiny cove he and Amanda had found weeks ago. Sitting on a sliver of sand too narrow to deserve the term beach, he watched the moon fall into the bay, its silver trail snuffed out like a burned down candle. By the time the dawn was casting a golden glow on the electric blue horizon, his clothes were damp with dew and his eyes gritty with unshed tears. He drove home, showered, and threw himself across his bed in an attempt to lose his pain in sleep.
Visions of Amanda played across the inside of his eyelids. Sitting at the conference table, her bottom lip caught between her teeth as she worked on the company’s books. Her eyes full of mischief as she pushed back the shower curtain to join him in a soapy prelude to lovemaking. Her face relaxed in sleep with her hair spread across the pillow like pale silk.
Eventually he gave up on sleep, dressed, and went into work.
“Hey, Boss. I hear Saturday night’s party was the bomb,” Mike greeted him with double thumbs-up.
Unable to reconcile Mike’s sunny greeting with the gloom that had taken up residence in his head, Dev frowned. “Who told you that?”
“Are you kidding? It’s all over town. Some of the people Amanda and Zoe hired were in the diner this morning sharing all the juicy details. The food, the swanky clothes on all those hoity-toity big wigs, the band—and your music, too. That guy you got to sing? Wow, did he ever create a sensation. The ladies were all swooning about his voice.” He nudged Dev with an elbow. “I hear Amanda was a knock-out too. A few of the waiters were taking bets on who could score a date with her first.” He chuckled. “I didn’t have the heart to tell them she was already taken,” he finished with a sly wink.
Dev rewarded his enthusiasm with a stony stare that had Mike’s smile shrinking like a punctured balloon. “Yeah. It went well. What are you doing this afternoon?”
“I was running a couple of tests on the back-up transmitter.”
“I’d like you to do me a favor, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure, boss. What do you need?”
“Would you drive over to the Wyndham place and pick up the equipment and CDs I left there? It was too late to pack everything up on Saturday night, but I imagine the cleanup crew Amanda hired will have it all ready to go by now.”
If he was confused by Dev’s strange lack of animation, Mike hid it well. “Absolutely, boss. Let me put these data sheets in my office and I’ll get right over there.”
“Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.” Dev went into his office and left Mike staring after him. No way was he going over there himself and take the chance of running into Amanda. The paperwork in his inbox had piled up since he’d been spending so much time at her place. Time to get back to business. He slid a stack of correspondence over and started in on it.
At five-thirty, Rosemary brought him a sandwich and a mug of coffee before she left for the day. She set the food on the edge of his desk. “I’ve retyped those letters you wrote today, boss. I have to say your spelling has taken a nosedive since Friday.”
“Oh. Bad, huh?”
“My third-grade nephew can do better. What’s got you so distracted?”
“Nothing you need to worry about, Rosemary. I’ve not been sleeping very well and I’m just tired.” He nodded toward the plate she had brought him. “Thanks for the sandwich.”
“You haven’t eaten anything all day. Are you sure you’re not coming down with something? I don’t remember you ever skipping lunch before.”
“I’m fine, Rosemary. You don’t need to mother me.”
He tossed his pen on the desk and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Sorry, Rosemary. That didn’t come out the way I meant it. I’ve just . . . got a lot on my mind right now. I appreciate all that you do for me, especially things above and beyond what I pay you for.” He slid the plate and mug in front of him. “Mmm, corned beef on rye. Smells delicious. Thank you again, Rosemary.”
“You’re welcome, boss. I’ll be heading home now, unless you have anything else for me?”
“No. Nothing else tonight, Rosemary. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a good evening.” He picked up the sandwich.
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
As soon as she was through the door, he put the sandwich back untouched, then got up and closed his office door. He was in no mood to swap idle chitchat with any of his employees. He’d already made Rosemary look at him like a kicked puppy, God knew what would have come out of his mouth if Andy gave him a hard time. Better to hole up in here and try to get some more work done before he was due to go on the air.
At ten-forty-five he’d consumed five cups of coffee and had damn little in his out-box to show for the hours he’d worked. Not surprising since the image of a beautiful gray-eyed blond kept coming between him and his computer screen.
Would she be in bed by now? The thought of her in the skimpy tank top and satin boxers she’d taken to wearing to bed when he was there had him instantly hard as steel. Would she listen to his show? Probably not. Why would she listen to someone she hated? So, no more calls on his request line from Amanda Adams.
Nevertheless, when he took over the mike after the eleven o’clock news, he couldn’t stop himself from playing “Someone to Watch Over Me”.
Amanda sat in the back room of Silvercreek Gallery sharing a lunch of coffee and a day-old scone, which she was
slowly reducing to crumbs on her plate. Zoe, meanwhile, wolfed down a chicken salad sandwich, a glass of iced tea, and two cookies.
Amanda squeezed her eyes shut. She was done with crying. She’d cried enough over the past three days to make it worthwhile to buy stock in Kimberly-Clark. She inhaled deeply then exhaled slowly.
Someday she would be able to relive the triumph of their first event without thinking about the personal disaster that had followed. But that day wasn’t here yet. She didn’t want to think about the Wyndham’s party now. Today they had finally finished removing the last few items from the Wyndham’s old cottage. They’d cleaned up, taken out the trash, and recovered the furniture with white sheeting. But when she closed the door behind her, Amanda had an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss.
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