by Laura Parker
“I’d like that,” Halle answered. “If I’m still here.” She turned quickly to Joe, a plea for escape in her expression. Regardless of how the McCreas felt about it, she was acutely uncomfortable to have met them under these circumstances.
Catching the drift of her feelings, Joe nodded. “I’ll be in touch, Mr. McCrea. Mrs. McCrea? Lacey?”
A little shamefaced, Lacey came over and offered his hand to Joe. “Thanks. What you said about things, it helped.”
Joe’s steady law enforcement gaze zeroed in again on the teenager. “What you did this morning was damned foolish. No more theatrics or next time I’ll see to it personally that the authorities are called in. You’ll find yourself in a controlled environment talking to professionals in hospital coats.”
“Jeez! I hadn’t thought—” Lacey turned bright red, the first indication that what he had done was done on impulse and for effect rather than as a committed statement of extreme mental anguish.
Feeling a certain responsibility to see that Lacey felt he had a lifeline, Joe asked, “You fish?”
Embarrassed by his embarrassment, Lacey shoved a hand through his hair. “Used to. Been a while.”
“Come fishing with me tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up at first light.”
The teenager shifted on his feet. “That sounds kinda early.”
“It is kind of early. Be ready on the front step at five-thirty. And another thing. Your dad’s got some good points. You must finish school. After that, what you decide to do is your own business. While we fish, I’ll tell you some stories about me and my old man. In the meantime, I’ve got to get my lady home.”
Lacey glanced at Halle, a warmly appreciatively male glance. “I can see why you’re in a hurry.”
As they stepped out onto the McCreas’ drive, Halle caught Joe by the hand and thrust her fingers through his to give them a small squeeze. “I’m so proud of you. You were wonderful with that boy.”
He turned to her, smiling in a way that made a dimpled canyon in his left cheek. “Lacey just needs a little more of his father’s silent support and a lot less of his opinions.”
“Do you think he’ll get either?”
Joe shrugged. “McCrea can now see the need for change but old habits die hard. They really could use a referee.”
. Halle turned suddenly into him, halting their trek toward his truck with the cushioned barrier of her body. As his eyes widened in surprise she recalled how she had watched him early this morning, his black lashes lying along his cheeks when he slept. She basked in those dark eyes that seemed to drink her in, losing no refraction of light that contained her image. She trembled at the sight of his hard mouth, badge of his uncompromisable standards, that she knew could suddenly soften with laughter or hot wet kisses.
Reaching up on tiptoe she kissed him and tasted the sweetness of this morning’s victory, won at a cost that made it’s satisfaction all the more prized.
As he responded by wrapping her hard and high against his length, the accumulated emotions of five long years rolled up through her in alternating waves of bitter and sweet. They rose from her womb, belly and chest, surrounded her heart and then rose higher to inform her brain. This was the man she had loved from the beginning, the one soul in the universe who matched and complemented hers. She had once felt soul-welded to him. Looking up in his beautiful face at this moment, she knew she had never stopped loving him.
Now, finally, in the last days she had come full circle. At the brink once again. But sail off into the ether again? She did not dare. Not for her own sake, but for his.
She settled back on her heels reluctantly, and he was equally reluctant to release her. His arms held her against him a little longer, until their lips came slowly unsealed.
“What was that for?” he asked a little breathlessly, half aroused already.
She gave her head a tiny shake against the pleasure promised by his smile. “We need to talk, Jag.”
His head jerked in response to what she knew he saw in her eyes. Her memory was back.
He released his hold on her, as if the temper of his embrace were going to make the difference in how she responded to him. “Okay. Talk.”
“At home,” she answered softly as she again reached for his hand. But he lifted it, eluding her touch. She looked away, fighting down the ripples of panic his action caused.
Chapter 12
Having led the way, Joe turned to her five feet inside his door. The animation of personality had drained from his face. All that remained was the smooth-as-glass impenetrability of a former member of the NYPD’s finest. “Why don’t we get this over now? I’ve got things to do today.”
Halle had expected him to be defensive but the breadth of his hostility surprised her. He looked as if he’d had a whiff of the sulfurous River Styx and she was the source. It hit her that despite the speech she had silently composed during the drive here, she wasn’t at all prepared to deal with his present mood. She needed a little time.
She glanced past him into the living room. “Can we sit down and discuss this?”
“No.”
Halle saw in the glare of his gaze that he was ready to do battle and that she should be prepared to defend herself. She nearly smiled but thought better of it. He was preparing for the worst, preparing to say goodbye.
He might have been on target if she hadn’t spent the last few days in his company. But she had all her old memories of Joe back, as well as the new ones. As difficult and stubborn as he sometimes was, she knew with the certainty of memories that were her own that he had once loved her. The past two days proved he still cared. Those feelings were her hope and the source of his fear.
She crossed her arms and set her jaw in a reflection of his own stance. “All right. If you insist, we’ll talk here.”
He dipped his head, eyes slipping out of her range. “How long have you had your memory back?”
“Why?”
“How long?” The tether on his temper slipped a notch.
She weathered his hostility, amazed that he did not know that his very volatility was giving away the depth of his feelings. “A little while.”
He looked up, backing her against a wall with his gaze. “A little while as in a few minutes, a few hours... or a few days?”
“A day.” She pushed right back with the force of dappled green. “Yesterday.”
His lids flickered. “Yesterday. Did it come back while we on the drive back to Gap?” The color of his eyes changed, growing dark with begrudgingly remembered passion. “Or when we were making love?”
The reminder lifted her heart up on tiptoe. “Why should the exact moment matter?”
“Because it does.” His expression remained hostile. “When, Halle? Tell me when, exactly.”
Flushed by the cross signals he didn’t even realize he was delivering, Halle turned away from the thwarted passion shimmering off the surface of his impelling gaze. “Early yesterday, before daylight. When I awakened from the nightmare.”
“Don’t you think you might have shared this recovery with me sooner?”
She waved a band in defense. “While you were explaining the history of my dreams these images began to flash through my mind, disjointed at first but with other thoughts attached. They were playing off one another like a ball in a pinball game.”
She was surprised then as he grabbed her arm and swung her back to face him because she hadn’t been aware that she was walking away from him or that he was following.
He looked mad enough to throttle her. Why, she wondered in confusion, was he so angry? “Don’t spare me, Halle. What’s the verdict?”
She gazed up at his scowl and understood. He wasn’t applying any of the patient logic he’d used to ease the situation between Lacey and his father to their own case because he stood to lose on a more personal level. Only he didn’t know, the fix was in. “I don’t know what you mean.”
But they both knew she lied.
Joe looked down at his h
and where his fingers were making bloodless impressions on her skin. “You let me talk to you about our marriage last night without any defenses in place. Why did you do that to me? Did you need that victory to make your revenge complete?”
Genuine surprise colored her voice. “What revenge?”
“Oh, come on, Halle.” He released her, backing off as if he hadn’t just minutes before tried to stop her from distancing herself from him. His face was realigned into angles of weariness. It was only 9:00 a.m. but the round with the McCreas had taken its toll. She had been wrong to assume otherwise.
He slumped down in his leather chair and slid a hand down his features trying, it seemed, to wipe away his exhaustion. “We both know how pointed your ironies can be. You did everything in your power to destroy me when we separated. I thought making certain I was served divorce papers on the third anniversary of our marriage was the worst thing you could do to me. . .until you married Shipmann.”
Halle flinched. “I want to explain that to you. I want to explain, oh, so many things.”
He shook his head once. “No. I don’t want explanations. If you’re going to walk out of here you might as well do it now instead of an hour from now.”
“Why?” she challenged, unwilling to be brushed off or dictated to. “Can’t you stand to let me bare my soul to you the way you did to me these last days?”
He stood suddenly still. “Dammit, Halle. I turned myself inside out these last days trying to take care of you. You got your revenge, I’m gutted just like a fish. Go home.”
“No.” She reached out and pressed him back into his chair when he would have risen. As the flame of his temper rose she brought her face down, level with his, just as she had once seen him do to a belligerent drunk who was disrupting a party they were attending. “You’re going to stay and hear what I have to say because you owe it to me.”
He looked a little dangerous as he reached up and grabbed the wrist of the hand she had planted in his chest. “I owe you?”
“Yes.” She nodded in the affirmative once. “I listened to you. You can damn well listen to me.”
When she would have released him he held on to her wrist and pulled her forward so that their noses almost collided. “Don’t push me, Halle,” he whispered.
The heat coming off of him made her shiver with the thrill of flirting with danger. She didn’t know whether to quail or kiss him. “Why? Can’t you take it on the chin anymore?”
His face darkened with a flush, accenting the purple-and-blue rings about his wounded eye, and she wondered how far she could push him before he relented or walked out of her life for good.
He released her and lifted both his hands in mock defeat. “All right, sweetheart. Give it your best shot. But, understand, I will fight back and I know how to fight dirty.”
“Very well.” Halle straightened and rubbed her hands on her shorts, amazed that they were clammy despite the spring warmth. She stopped when she noticed Joe staring. His experienced eye didn’t miss much.
“Remember the other day when you told me that you couldn’t hand me back my past as if it were a gift to give? You said that even if you filled me in on every detail of what you remembered about me, it wouldn’t be my memories but your memories.”
“I said that?”
“You also said that unless the memories and feelings came from me, they didn’t count. Well, I needed time to think when the memories came back because, frankly, the feelings that came with them were not what I expected.”
“You remembered how much you hated me.”
He was staring at his boot tips with the intensity of a bird dog sighting a quail. Did he really think she had set the stage only to berate him with past transgressions? Didn’t he know that she wouldn’t have wasted the breath if that was all she had to say to him? No. It struck her as fresh insight. He did not know that.
She moved to perch on the sofa arm opposite his chair. His gaze shifted for an instant to the length of her bare legs. The expression he could not quite hide was one of longing and bitterness and sorrow.
She swung one leg to keep his gaze focused. “I remembered how much you’d hurt me, betrayed me and then given me up without a fight.”
His gaze lifted, snagged hers and held. “Without what fight, Halle? There have to be two people in the ring for there to be a fight. I was boxing my own shadow from the night you locked me out.”
“You went to another woman!” she said, preempting the lead-in to her confession.
“Right. And my explanation that nothing happened isn’t one you believe.”
“No, I’m not saying that.” She sought help in his grim expression but did not find it. “I’d never heard your explanation before last night.”
He reared back in his seat and crossed one ankle onto the opposite knee. “You want to tell me why you wouldn’t hear my explanation before now? Because I sure as hell knew I wanted to give it to you.”
The accusation was fairly leveled and she tried to meet it with equal honesty. “I was scared, Joe. I had never had anyone to call my own before you. Then you walked up to me that afternoon on Fifth Avenue and I fell so far and so fast and so hard I don’t think I ever caught my breath. I gambled everything in marrying you. Even when no one else thought I was right. That scared me. When it started to go bad it seemed that they were right. I had gambled too much.”
“So, you stuck your neck out?” he countered. “So did I. I married you, Halle, knowing that no one who knew you before me thought I was good enough. Your parents didn’t bother to recognize my existence except as a possible future alimony collector. We both gambled equally.”
Her spirit meter dropped as she realized that he wasn’t going to help her. The sudden pain in her chest was the familiar pang of loneliness that she had known all her life but never quite gotten accustomed to. She quelled the eager answer that rose up in her that she had gambled more because she had so much more to lose. When she lost him, she lost the only person who had ever loved her, unconditionally. Instead, she chose his argument.
“Your friends didn’t like me, either. They thought I was stuck-up and class-conscious. I couldn’t help the fact that I was wealthy yet it seemed as if you were ashamed of it.”
Joe wagged his head. “I wasn’t ashamed. I just didn’t want people to get the idea that I had married you for your money. Your friends all thought so.”
“What difference did it make what they thought? I loved you.” She had to catch her breath behind that sentence. When she did she said, “That should have been enough.”
She saw his mouth tighten and the narrowing of his eyes as he considered the possible answers he might give. In the end it was simple enough. “It was enough, Halle. It was.”
“Then why did you pull away after our first year?”
He sighed. “I didn’t pull away. You just got so caught up in your job it seemed that way.”
“You were never home.” She could hear her voice climbing the scale but the memories accosting her were a little more raw than she had expected.
“Crime doesn’t punch a time clock, Halle. I sometimes worked undercover, pulled night shifts, or had to track down leads. You worked eighty hours a week if you include all the after-hours functions you attended.”
“I had to attend them as part of my job. It was how I made contacts and brought in business.”
His expression soured as his hands tightened on the chair arms. “Yeah, you worked real hard at cocktail parties at Trump Tower and dinners at Tavern-on-the Green with Shipmann.”
Her chest hurt badly now. Each breath seemed to sear her lungs. “I stopped asking you to come with me because you said you hated the crush and the people. You thought they were snobs.”
“Most of them were,” he groused.
“Then so were your friends!” she retaliated.
For a moment they stared at one another, hearing the echo of a dozen other long-ago arguments on the same subject.
He recovered first, sh
aking his head sadly. “You see? Nothing’s changed.”
“I’ve changed.” She wanted to tell him that he had been the first and only love of her life. Turning to and marrying Daniel Shipmann had been a mistake, a detour, a blind alley. That was why, even without a single memory to bolster or blast her impressions of him, she had known deep in her bones that they were connected. The love had never left. But that seemed a great hurdle to jump without at least a little explanation.
She stood up and began pacing. “You’re right about some things. The mistakes between us were mostly mine. Once I decided we should divorce, I was so certain I held the high ground. The moral indignity of being betrayed by you made it easier not to see you.”
Joe didn’t say anything about his innocence this time. He was struggling to view things from her point of view. “I’ve turned things six ways from Sunday, Halle, and all I can come up with is that you owed me at least one hearing. One.”
She paused and turned to him. “I agree. It wasn’t until afterward that I knew that I had let my attorney railroad me. He said that if I let you back into my life even for a night, you would gain grounds to demand more of me than if I completely shut you out.”
“Demand what, Halle?” The answer reached his eyes before he said, “I only wanted you.”
“I know that now,” she said in a small voice.
“The attorney thought I wanted your money.” Joe didn’t make it a question. He had known all along that this was the crux of the problem. “I told him I wanted nothing. He didn’t believe me. But you, you should have known better.”
“I did know better.” She came toward him again, braving the effrontery of his unwelcome expression. In the depths of his eyes was another, very different emotion struggling to escape. “I was afraid of something else. I was afraid that you would talk me out of the divorce altogether.”
