Remarried in Haste

by Sandra Field

  “You love me?”

  She said blankly, “Well, yes. Of course. Why else do you think I’m here?”

  “Despite everything, you still love me?”

  “Don’t you love me?” she asked in a hostile voice.

  “Sure I do,” Brant answered in a dazed voice, and knew he’d spoken the literal truth. A truth he’d had to travel twenty-five hundred miles to discover. “That was one more reason why I wasn’t even tempted to sleep with Gabrielle, how could I make love to her when I love you with all my heart?”

  Love. Present tense.

  If, after this declaration, Brant had expected Rowan to fall into his arms as easily as a ripe coconut falls from a palm tree, he was soon disillusioned. She said, “I want you to quit your job.”

  The breath hissed between his teeth. Twice in less than a minute she’d outflanked him. Taken him completely by surprise. You’re losing your touch, Brant, old man. “Are you serious?” he said. She nodded. “Give it up altogether?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t ask much, do you? Why do you want me to quit my job, Rowan?”

  “I can’t imagine you even have to ask that question.”

  “I am asking it,” he said, holding tight to his temper.

  She tossed her head. “You’ve got a choice. You can live with me and have a different job or you can keep the one you’ve got and stay divorced.”

  “I never thought blackmail was one of your talents,” he said unpleasantly.

  Her head jerked up, her nostrils flared. “Maybe we should quit right here—the shortest reconciliation on record,” she said bitterly. “Because I’m not going to budge on this one, Brant. I don’t know how to get through to you the cost of your job to me. In loneliness. Constant anxiety. Outright terror when I pick up the newspaper and see that the latest coup is in the place you flew into three days ago. I can’t do it anymore! I won’t do it anymore.”

  “But I—”

  “You saw how I looked this afternoon by the time you got out of that field! Try stretching that out over two weeks, or a month, or six weeks...however long your assignment lasts. I can’t take it anymore. Lying awake night after night worrying about you. Knowing there’s nothing I can do to keep you safe. Knowing I’m not as important to you as your job.” She scuffed at the sand with the toe of her sandal, her head downbent. “I’m tired of being second on the list.”

  “I always came back,” he said forcefully. “I never took unnecessary risks, and I always knew what I was doing.”

  “Then why were you abducted?”

  “That was sheer bad luck,” he said impatiently.

  “No, it wasn’t! You’re the one who’d put yourself in the situation to start with.”

  “So once in eleven years at that job I got into trouble,” he said furiously. “I’d call that a pretty good record.”

  The words tumbled from Rowan’s lips. “Perhaps it’s my fault you’ve never understood how badly your job affected me. What you said a couple of days ago about not sharing our vulnerabilities—I was guilty of that, too. Before you left on an assignment I’d try not to show you how much I dreaded you going, I think I was afraid it might jinx you so you’d never come back.” Her voice was shaking again. “And then when you came back, we’d fall into bed and it would all be forgotten. Until next time.”

  She suddenly gripped his bare forearm with one hand. “At the end I tried to tell you, before you left for Colombia. But you weren’t listening, were you? And let me tell you something else. That eight months was the worst time of my whole life. Eight months of wondering if I was already a widow. If I’d ever find out what had happened to you or if you’d just disappear without a trace. No news, no body, nothing. It was so horrible... Oh, Brant, don’t you see? I can’t live like that anymore.”

  Staring down at her fingers, he said, “Where’s your wedding ring?”

  “Home,” she said shortly. “In the drawer.”

  “I’d be nothing without my job,” he said with raw honesty. “It’s what I do.”

  She said steadily, “I don’t believe that. You’re much bigger than your job.”

  “I’ve done a lot of good over the years.”

  “Of course you have! Don’t think I don’t know that.” Her smile was wry. “I just need you to be a different kind of hero, that’s all.”

  He repeated the one thing he was sure of in this whole mess. “You’ve never stopped loving me.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “And you were never unfaithful to me.”

  “Not even an issue.”

  Shaken to the depths of his being, Brant put his arms around her and rested his cheek on her hair. “I love you, too, Rowan,” he said hoarsely. “We’re bound together, you and I...”

  Her voice smothered in his chest, she mumbled, “I don’t think we ever really were divorced.”

  So Gabrielle had been right: some divorces weren’t worth the paper they were written on. But Brant didn’t want to think about Gabrielle. Rather, he wanted to savor the wonder of holding Rowan close again. Her body felt absolutely right in his arms; it was an embrace, he thought humbly, that went far beyond the sexual. He said, “This is what I want. You. But I don’t have a clue how to go about getting it.”

  Her arms were snug around his waist; he could hear the small, steady thud of her heartbeat against his chest. She said so quietly he could barely hear her, “When you were away, the loneliness was the worst. Waking in the night to an empty bed, coming home from one of my trips to an empty apartment, going to the market on Saturday morning on my own, going to the movies and seeing people in couples... oh, God, how I hated the loneliness.” She lifted her head. “I’m no saint, Brant. Now that I look back, I think I lost my temper all over the place and at the drop of a hat instead of trying to make you understand how difficult it was without you. In the long run, losing my cool didn’t really accomplish very much.”

  “Whereas I’d just go away on another assignment. Run away. Because that’s what it was.”

  Her smile was troubled. “Hindsight’s great stuff, isn’t it?”

  But where do we go from here? Brant said helplessly, “I love my job, Rowan.” As if a tape deck had been turned on, into his brain clicked Gabrielle’s words the evening she’d told him about this trip. I’ve watched you the last two years. You’ve been acting like a man demented. Like a man who couldn’t care less if he got himself killed. Was that the attitude of someone who loved his job? Or had he been using his job to kill the pain of Rowan’s absence?

  Rowan said trenchantly, “Maybe you should try and figure out why you’re in love with danger. Maybe she’s been your real mistress all these years.”

  He couldn’t have stopped the tremor that ran through his body. In love with danger... That, he knew, went back to a five-year-old boy whose mother had died and whose father had taken over his upbringing. “You’ll be recommending a therapist next,” he said nastily.

  “I hit home there, didn’t I?”

  Another nasty retort was on the up of his tongue. Brant bit it back. The stakes were too high to indulge in namecalling. Much too high. His mouth dry, he said, “I’ve never talked much about my father...never wanted to.”

  “Perhaps it’s time,” she said.

  His throat closed. “If I quit my job, what else would I do?”

  She was frowning in thought. “All these years I wonder if somehow you’ve been living your father’s liffe—instead of your own.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him!”

  “Sooner or later you’ll have to.”

  With unwilling admiration Brant said, “You don’t quit easy, do you?”

  “Not where you’re concerned,” she said pertly. “But don’t let it go to your head.”

  He kissed the tip of her nose. “Or to any other parts of my anatomy.”

  She nuzzled his breastbone in a gesture that tore at his heart, so familiar was it, and so deeply missed. “We shouldn’t get in
to bed with each other, not yet,” she said.

  The words were dragged from him. “You want children.”

  This time it was she who quivered as though he’d struck her. “Yes,” she whispered. “Your children, Brant.”

  He tried it out on his tongue. “Our children.”

  A single tear hung on her lashes. “I’ve got—” But then she broke off, biting her lip, her face anguished.

  “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

  She shook her head; the muscles in her throat moved as she swallowed. “I just don’t want to wait any longer, I’m thirty-one years old,” she said.

  He knew in his gut that she’d been about to say something different. Later, he thought, one thing at a time; and again tried to be as honest as he knew how. “I’m scared to death of having kids.”

  “I think your father has a heck of a lot to answer for!”

  She looked very militant. He’d like to have seen Rowan and his father face to face, it would have been a confrontation worth witnessing; Douglas Curtis, however, had died two years before Brant met Rowan. “Do you think I’d be any good as a father?”

  “If you gave yourself half a chance, I think you’d be a wonderful father.”

  It was the third time she’d knocked him off balance. He had none of her certitude about himself in the role of father. None at all. Seeking refuge in practicalities, he asked, “What would I do if I quit my job?”

  “I’ve thought about that quite a bit. You could make a list of all your skills, see what’s marketable...you’re a very smart man, there’s lots you could do. You could even start your own company, taking people to out-of-the-way places.” She looked at him through her lashes. “Just don’t include Colombia.”

  He burst out, “If I quit my job and then it didn’t work out between you and me—I’d have nothing left.”

  She winced. “If we both want it to work out, it will.”

  Brant was quite astute enough to pick up the undercurrent of doubt in her voice. “What about your job? You travel, too. You can’t very well go careering around the rain forest if you’re seven months pregnant.”

  “I’d cut back on the number of trips I take. And my company gives maternity leave.”

  Her head was held high. But in the pallid moonlight he could see the lines of strain around her mouth and the shadows under her eyes. “Why don’t you sit down for a minute?” he said. “You look tired out.”

  As she turned, Rowan stumbled over a rock. Losing her balance, she banged her knee against the jagged edge of a big boulder. She gave a yelp of pain, put out a hand to support herself, scraped her sore palm and gave another pained yelp. Brant reached her in one quick stride and eased her down on the boulder. “Let me see your knees.”

  She lifted her skirt. The blood trickling down her shin was black as ink. He said, “God, sweetheart, your knee’s a mess.”

  “When Natalie screamed this afternoon, I took off like a bullet out of a gun. That kind of wrecked it.”

  “We’d better go back...I’ll put some more ointment own.”

  Rowan took him by the wrist. “Are we going to be okay?” she blurted.

  He lifted her to her feet, wondering how he’d existed for over three years without being able to touch her and hold her in his arms. “We’ve got to be,” he said huskily. “Because I can’t live without you. You were never second, Rowan. I just behaved as though you were, and for that I deserve to be horsewhipped through three counties.”

  “You really are sorry...”

  “Sorry—that’s one hell of a wishy-washy word for the way I’m feeling. But yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “You’ve got a lot of feelings, Brant Curtis,” Rowan said in a small voice. “You’ve just got to learn to let them out more often.”

  “Plus find a new job and raise a passel of kids,” Brant said wryly. “Anything else you can add to the list?”

  She gave a sudden delightful laugh. “Maybe somewhere in there you should marry me again. For the sake of the children, you understand.”

  “For our sake,” he said fiercely, and kissed her with all the love that had been locked inside him for so long. Too long. She kissed him back with all her old tempestuousness; they were both trembling when he finally released her. She whispered, “I think I’d better look after my knee myself. If you come into my room, we both know what’ll happen.”

  “And it’s too soon,” he said in an agony of frustration.

  “I hate it when you look like that!”

  With his fingertips he smoothed the distress from her features. “Hey, I’m a big boy, I’ve managed for three years, remember?”

  “I don’t even want to wait for three days,” she announced with a violence that entranced him.

  “Three hours?”

  “Not three minutes!”

  He laughed. “Back to your room, Rowan. Morning comes early.”

  She took three or four steps, limping awkwardly. Giving him a sly grin she said, “This is all your fault. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with keeping you off that plane to Toronto, I wouldn’t have tripped over the curb.” Then, as if her own words were replaying in her head, she paled and all the laughter vanished from her face.

  Brant took her by the arm. “Rowan, there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  She made a tiny gesture to ward him off. “I can’t,” she said in an almost inaudible whisper. “Not yet. I just can’t.”

  “You can trust me! I’m not getting on a plane to Toronto until the end of this tour, and when I do I hope to God you’re sitting beside me.”

  “Please...let’s go back to my room.”

  “One reason we divorced is that we’re both as stubborn as any of the donkeys we’ve seen on these islands,” he said. “We’ve got to trust each other, Rowan. Not doing so is what’s kept us apart.”

  “Are you going to tell me what your father was like?” she flashed.

  He wasn’t, no. “Stalemate,” he said tautly.

  “For now.” Rowan ran her fingertips over the gray in his hair, her lip caught between her teeth. “We can’t expect to fix seven years in half an hour. I guess.”

  “Trouble is, I was never known for patience.” Brant swung her up into his arms, his one desire to remove that haunted look from her face. “You don’t weigh as much as you used to. Or else I’m in better shape.”

  A tiny smile pulled at her mouth. She ran her finger down his chest and said, “Oh, you’re in fine shape.”

  “All talk and no action,” he grumbled, grinning at her.

  “Most of the time I talk too much.”

  “While I don’t talk enough.”

  “Tonight was a marked improvement on that score.”

  “How about we call time-out? I, for one, need to do some heavy-duty thinking...we’d be strapped for money if I quit my job.”

  She ticked off her fingers. “We could sell the condo—I sublet it when I moved to the country. We’ve got my salary. And there’s your father’s inheritance. We’d be fine.”

  “I suppose you’re right...” For the first time Brant could see possibilities in the money his father had left him, money he’d vowed never to touch. He rather liked the idea of using it to set himself up in some kind of new career that had nothing to do with Douglas Curtis. The perfect revenge, he thought grimly, and heaved himself off the soft sand onto the path. Within minutes he was depositing Rowan at her door and she was turning the key in the lock. He said lamely, “You’ll be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll put some ointment on my knee and go to bed.” Almost shyly, as if he were a man she’d only just met, she cupped his jaw in her hands and kissed him softly on the lips. Before he could say anything, she slipped through the door and shut it behind her.

  Brant scowled at the closed door, then walked to his own room, which was, of course, empty of anyone but himself. He sat down on the bed. He had a choice. Keep his job and stay divorced, or quit and be with Rowan.

 
But was it a choice? He had to have Rowan. He needed her. The last two years he had indeed been like a man possessed, doing his best—or his worst—to get himself killed. More than once he’d taken risks that had been plain foolishness, for which he’d have fired another man without a second thought. Even though he hadn’t deserved to, he’d gotten away with them. But if he kept that up, sooner or later—and it’d probably be sooner—he’d step on a land mine or walk into an ambush and it’d be game over.

  No choice at all. He wanted Rowan. In his arms. In his life. And to achieve that he’d give up a lot more than his job.

  She’d never stopped loving him. Nor he her.

  If he’d deceived himself so badly on that score, what else was he hiding from himself?

  A five-year-old boy crying for his mother...

  But Brant didn’t want to go that way. He wasn’t ready.

  One thing at a time, he decided, and shifted gears. He’d miss certain aspects of his job, he knew that. The unpredictability. The excitement of marketplaces and dusty streets half a world away from home. The alertness to signals most other people wouldn’t even see, the sense of living on the edge: he’d thrived on all that. Until the last two years.

  Funny, he thought. Going to get Rowan this evening, facing her on the beach like a man fighting for something incredibly precious, he’d had the same sense of living on the edge, of being in a country he’d never seen before. Rather startled by this similarity, he allowed his thoughts to carry him forward. He’d stifle in an office, and he was much too used to being his own boss to suffer anyone else ordering him around. An administrative job? Forget it.

  He’d come up with something. Or—and again Brant smiled to himself—Rowan would.

  He bent to unlace his sneakers, gratitude and a deep happiness welling through his whole body. Although he would have much preferred not to be alone right now, he was nevertheless content to wait. Because Rowan still loved him and he loved her.

  His soul was in her keeping. He knew that beyond a doubt.

  He was the most fortunate of men.