“I didn’t hear you calling any refs jerks this time.”
She laughed, and his grip on her tightened. “You couldn’t possibly have heard me even if I had.”
“I’d hear you.”
She found herself believing his certainty. She loved him, and almost told him then. But that was for a private moment, which this most certainly was not. “I’m so proud of you, C.J. Draper.”
Warmth leaped up to a blue flame in his eyes, but he kept the words casual. “Hey, I wasn’t the one out there making the plays. The guys won the game.”
“You taught them how to win. And then you let them do it.”
He saw the understanding in her eyes, and he knew she appreciated the extent of his accomplishment. Who needed awards or trophies when someone looked at you that way? “Hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he murmured.
“I know.” She put both arms around his waist and hugged him hard.
“All right, all right, you two,” Rake boomed over her head. “I’m always having to break you two up.”
She released one arm’s hold on C.J., just enough to clasp hands with Rake and accept his hearty kiss on the cheek.
“Hell of an accomplishment, C.J. I’m braggin’ all over how I know C.J. Draper.”
“Still a couple to go before we wrap up the big one.” C.J. sounded like a boy afraid that hoping too hard might jinx his wish. But to Carolyn the words seemed faintly ominous.
Two more games to reach the Final Four. The last weekend of the basketball season, when, of the nearly three hundred teams that had started off the season, only four remained with a chance at the national title. The semifinals on Saturday, then the final game on Monday night were watched by millions on national television. Getting to the Final Four meant exposure for the players, added revenue for their schools and the sort of attention that could put a young coach on the fast track to glory. A track that led straight away from Ashton.
But not as far away as England, a nagging voice reminded her.
“In my book the biggest win of all is the one you’ve got wrapped up in your arm right this second,” Rake said. “Don’t let go of that one, C .J.”
She felt his arm tighten around her, and her heart made a silent plea. Don’t let me go, C.J. Don’t ever let me go.
* * * *
“Can I open my eyes yet?” Carolyn squirmed impatiently against the backrest of pillows on her bed.
“Not yet. This is a surprise. Don’t you know the rules about surprises?”
She made a face at C.J.’s chiding tone, but didn’t know if he’d seen it since her eyes were obediently closed. “I know what you’re doing, you know,” she said with a trace of smugness.
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“I can hear the VCR.” If he hadn’t sounded so abstracted, she wouldn’t have tried to rub it in. “It’s a special tape, isn’t it? Is it last night’s game, C.J.?” One eye popped open rebelliously, but she saw only C.J.’s broad back blocking the TV screen. She closed her eye again.
“You think I’d do that to you? Make you watch another basketball game?” He’d teased her about that ever since he’d caught her watching one of his scouting tapes a couple of weeks ago. “And the name’s Christian Jeremiah.”
She knew immediately what he’d given her.
His name.
Christian Jeremiah. She mouthed the syllables. How like him to slip in the giving of a gift so quietly. She hadn’t forgotten what he’d said that November night at Angelo’s: he trusted his name only to the people he trusted with his life.
“Christian Jeremiah? That’s what C.J. stands for? I think it’s a wonderful name.”
“Give the lady a prize—she didn’t even give the hint of a giggle. Now keep still and keep those eyes closed.”
She wanted to hug him, to touch him, to kiss him, but she held perfectly still.
She sat up a little straighter in triumph. “It’s last night’s game, isn’t it?” She could hear him coming closer and joining her on the bed.
“Nope.”
Being wrong wasn’t so bad, she thought mistily, not when his voice was a breath in her ear, not when his arm was circling her shoulders.
“Okay,” he whispered, taking time to trace the delicate patterns of her ear with his tongue. “You can open your eyes now.”
She opened her eyes as she opened her arms to his embrace. For twenty-eight years she’d lived without him; now, after just a few weeks, the solid warmth of his body was a familiar comfort that she clung to.
Reluctantly he drew away enough so they both faced the television. He seemed nervous. “Here.” He handed her the remote control. “Turn it on.”
She looked up at him, puzzled by the faint anxiety filtering into his voice and eyes. “Not basketball?”
He just gestured for her to turn the power on. Her thumb pressed the button, and the machine hummed to life.
The screen glowed for an instant, then the slightly grainy background of old home movies resolved into the figures of a young man and woman. The woman had the crisp bone structure that would tempt an artist, and the man’s hair held a shine that promised gold even in the black-and-white film.
They smiled into the camera for a moment, then turned to each other and, clearly, immediately forgot the camera.
Carolyn’s heart constricted, pushing out the words and the tears together, “My parents.”
“Oh, God, Carolyn, I’m sorry. I thought you’d want—if I’d known—”
He reached for the remote control, but she jerked it away from him. “I want to see.”
“Carolyn, honey—”
“I want to see.”
The tears didn’t stop, but they didn’t prevent her from seeing the eighteen minutes of film. A graduation showed her parents looking very dignified in their professorial gowns—until her mother mugged at the camera. At a faculty picnic, her parents and younger versions of Stewart, Elizabeth and Dolph Reems participated in a spirited softball game; and a child she realized must be her toddled along the sidelines. Then came a sequence of first her father and then her mother pushing her in a swing while they took turns filming. They must have found a cooperative stranger to run the camera, because the film faded out with the three of them laughing as the swing went higher and higher with two pairs of hands pushing.
It wasn’t until the screen went blank that she became aware of C.J.’s hand stroking her hair.
“I’m sorry, honey. I should never have sprung it on you that way. If I’d thought—”
She pulled in a deep breath and wiped at the tears with her fingertips. “It’s all right, C.J. I’m okay now. It was just the shock . . .”
The shock of seeing her parents as living, breathing, laughing, running people. She’d thought of them the way they were caught in the still photographs she knew. Serious-faced for the faculty section of an Ashton yearbook, or smiling warmly as they did in the photo with her in her living room, but always two-dimensional figures. Her professor parents.
“How did you find these...?”
“Stewart had them. We were talking about your parents one day, and he said he’d taken some movies. I wanted to see them. I wanted to know what they were like.”
Her heart turned with an odd kind of joy that only made the tears come faster. He’d wanted to know what her parents were like. He cared so much about her that he wanted to know them, too.
“There are three. This is the first. I thought it would be nice to have them on tape so you could watch them whenever you wanted …”
C.J. trailed off, sounding miserable and guilty over her tears.
She turned in his arms and entwined her own around his neck, speaking between light kisses along his jaw. “Oh, C.J., I love you. Thank you.”
He seemed slightly bewildered by the change in her, and she saw that he’d heard the last words first. A weight eased from his eyes.
Then her other words took hold. Oh, C.J., I love you.
He cradled her face between hi
s big hands to force her eyes up to his, to try to read those words, those dizzying, dazzling words there, too.
She knew she wasn’t ready for that examination. She hadn’t meant to say the words so soon. She wasn’t sure if he’d be testing her, or she’d be testing him. But she couldn’t bear the idea that either of them might fail, so like a coward she avoided it by pressing her lips to his. That took no courage at all.
Her tongue slipped between his parted lips. She dipped deeper, enticing, driving the breath out of his body in short, shallow gasps.
She felt bold and shaken, all at the same time. Brazen with desire, she gently drew his tongue back into her mouth. He took the invitation with a rhythm her whole body took up. Their rhythm. The beat of their love.
Clothes formed no barrier; they flung them away without finesse. Nothing was a barrier. They joined, moving together toward the goal she knew only they could reach. Only together. They were there. Together.
Together. The word still echoed softly with the passion that continued to throb through her. She wouldn’t wonder how long together. She couldn’t. She rested her cheek on his chest and heard the strong, solid pulse of her love beating in his heart.
C.J. held her tightly but consciously kept his touch light as he stroked her back. Every time between them was fantastic. This time was different. Deeper. Richer. There was an added resonance.
He didn’t use the word love, even to himself, but the sound of it vibrated between them. He knew it.
Love was a miracle—that was what people said. But miracles could disappear if you didn’t believe. God, he wished he’d spent time in his life practicing believing in more than his ability to make a basketball do tricks.
* * * *
C.J. shifted to pull the covers over them, and she stirred and raised her head. “When will the other tapes be ready?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“I want to watch it again, okay? I promise, no tears this time.”
“That’s a deal.”
He held her against him as she watched the tape in silence twice more. As she rewound it after the second time, she sighed deeply.
She caught him studying her face, anxiety drawing his brows down in a frown. She smiled reassurance at him and the crooked response pulled at her heart.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully as she clicked the tape back onto her parents’ smiling faces. “I think they would have liked you.”
Unexpected and swift, tears pricked her eyes. “Nobody’s ever said that before,” she said with a tremor in her voice. “They all say—”
“How proud they’d be of you,” he finished for her.
She looked up in surprise at the disapproval in his tone.
“They’ve probably been saying it since you were old enough to understand. And all those well-intentioned ‘compliments’ had you trying harder and harder to make your parents proud.”
The words clicked in Carolyn’s head like tumblers in a lock. Of course. That was just how it had been her whole life. She’d never seen it until he’d said the words. But she’d felt the frustration of searching for something unattainable. Oh, yes, she’d felt it.
“I knew I wasn’t like my grandparents. By the time I was seven years old I knew I was different.” The words came haltingly. “I never knew what kind of person I should try to be. Then, when Stewart and Elizabeth brought me here, it felt familiar, comfortable.”
She looked at him to see if she was making sense. Even if she wasn’t, he understood. It showed in the blue depths of his eyes. She felt a grateful swell of love for him.
“I was intelligent. That was one kind of person to be. One kind of person I knew my parents must approve of because they were intelligent. I decided to become a professor.”
Then everything had seemed so clear. If she followed the rules, if she did all the things a professor should do, and if she did them perfectly, surely her parents would have loved her.
As if in answer to her thoughts, he said, “There’s no magic formula for pleasing somebody. And there shouldn’t be. Even if your parents are around to tell you what they want from you, it doesn’t mean you’ll make them happy. You’ve got to make those decisions yourself.”
She read a sadness in his eyes and knew he was talking about himself. The old unspoken question opened her lips, but she hesitated.
“Go ahead, ask,” he urged softly.
Carolyn swallowed. “What happened with your father, C.J.?”
He let out a long breath and stared at the lifeless screen for a moment before drawing in more air. “He left when I was nine. Just walked out on my mom and Jan and me.”
She settled the palm of her right hand over his heart, but didn’t say anything.
“I thought he was God when I was a kid. Later on I saw what a jerk he really was. I remember him talking about all the great things he could do if he didn’t have us hanging around his neck. What a big man he was, and what a sap Mom was for always helping other people. So he took off, and he left Mom to try to make it alone with two kids.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No.” He pulled the covers more tightly around them, taking time to tuck the corner around her shoulders. “When I first made it to the pros, I kept expecting him to show up, asking for money. But in my second year I found out he’d died four years before, about ten years after he left. He died broke.” He seemed to try to shake off the memory with a move of his shoulders. “But I wasn’t ever worried about getting his approval. More like worried how to get away from him.”
His derision was supposed to show how little it bothered him, Carolyn knew. She knew, too, how he still ached with a boy’s loss.
“But the rest of the family’s great,” he told her. “You’ll like them.”
“I’d like to meet them,” she said, the wish a little tentative.
“You will,” he answered with a firmness that wiped away her momentary uncertainty. “If we make it to the Final Four, I’ll have them all come to the semifinals.”
She kissed him softly and let him lead them both to a place where love wrapped around them. No scar, no matter how old or how deep, could hurt either of them there.
* * * *
The first ring of the telephone pulled Carolyn just far enough out of sleep to hope the sound was a dream. The second ring was undeniably real.
The cocoon of warmth created by the covers and C.J.’s body was disrupted when he reached across her for the receiver, and ruptured completely when he sat up abruptly. He asked two terse questions: “How bad?” and “Where?” Then he got to his feet, jerking his clothes on even before he’d hung up.
“C.J., what is it?”
“Rake. He’s hurt. He was in an accident last night in Chicago.”
“Oh, God.” Big, gentle Rake.
“Is it bad?”
“Yes.”
She swung her legs out of the bed. “I’ll go with you.”
He snapped his jeans shut and looked at her for the first time. “No.”
She ignored him. “What happened?” she asked as she started getting dressed.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his socks, he started swearing. Low and vehement. “Some jackass he was trying to help in that damn fool program of his was going ninety-five miles an hour on Lake Shore Drive when they crashed into the guardrail and flipped over onto the rocks. Why the hell did he try to help?”
He tied his shoes and stood up.
She had her shirt and socks on, held her dark slacks ready to step into them.
“You’re not going, Carolyn.” His voice was harsh with anger at a world that would let people like Rake be hurt. The tone, more than the words, stopped her.
“I don’t know when I’ll get back. The guys need one of us around with all this tournament buildup. They need you.”
He kissed her fiercely at the door. She watched him clatter down the stairs in the near dark of the winter dawn and wondered, How about you? Don’t you need me?
Chapter Twelve
When he called that evening to say Rake was holding his own, she felt as if he’d been gone for weeks and was a thousand miles away. He sounded so tired. And so unreachable.
The next twelve hours were critical. He’d call if there was any change. He’d be back as soon as he felt he could leave.
She heard his car at about 6:30 Wednesday evening. She had the door open long before he came up the stairs. Tight grooves cut into his cheeks and hard lines around his eyes chilled the blue. But the lines were from exhaustion, not grief—there was that to be grateful for.
Rake would make it. He faced months of rehabilitation, and maybe more surgery on broken and crushed bones, but he’d weathered the initial trauma that threatened his life. The driver escaped with bumps and bruises.
“Too damn high to get hurt,” C.J. said as he paced in her small kitchen. She reached out a hand to him, but he might not have seen it as he passed her. He hadn’t touched her since he’d come in.
“C’mon, let’s go out,” he said abruptly. “Let’s go have rigatoni at Angelo’s, and you can tell me about the guys.”
At Angelo’s he downed barely enough rigatoni to keep the chef from being insulted and listened avidly to her small pieces of news.
It had been a remarkably quiet two days for a team about to play in a regional semifinal. There were only sixteen teams left in the country, but fifteen of them were given better odds than Ashton of getting any farther.
“Carolyn. C.J.” A thread of cigarette smoke preceded Edgar Humbert’s economical greeting. “What have we here? An anticipatory celebration dinner? Awfully confident, aren’t you, C.J.?”
C.J. smiled dutifully at the well-intentioned kidding.
Edgar tried unsuccessfully to snap his fingers around the inevitable cigarette. “Oh, no, of course not. How stupid of me. You must be celebrating Carolyn’s coup. What an offer, my dear!”
Carolyn saw C.J. tighten, and she tried to stem Edgar’s flow. Not now, she silently pleaded to the fates. This wasn’t the time. Perhaps after the season, after she’d thought it out herself. Perhaps then would be the right time to tell C.J. about it.
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