The Long Way Back

by JoAnn Ross

  Ancient animosities, never fully dealt with, surfaced. “If you want an acquiescent female hovering at your bedside, kissing your owies to make them better, I’d suggest you get in that Ferrari and go home to your wife.”

  Nora examined the wound on the back of his head, then began cleansing the cut.

  “I’m not married.”

  She tugged on a pair of surgical gloves. “That’s not what I hear.”

  “All right, I guess we’re technically married, but Tiffany—who, by the way, never let marriage interfere with her constant need for male companionship—is currently sleeping with one of my old teammates. She’s also filed for divorce.”

  He frowned, thinking of his last conversation with his New York lawyer. Tiffany was insisting that six months of marriage entitled her to half of his last contract earnings. While Caine had been willing to pay it, writing his second marriage off as an expensive mistake, his attorney had counseled restraint.

  “Apparently, an up-and-coming outfielder is socially more desirable than a relief pitcher who’s been put out to pasture on waivers.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nora said, meaning it.

  “I can’t really blame her,” Caine said. “I knew all along that Tiffany was only along for the ride. So, I can’t expect her to tag along if that ride takes a downhill turn on the way.”

  He didn’t add that since his injury, he’d been a less-than-ideal husband. He’d been, by turns, sullen, uncommunicative, hot-tempered and angry. And those unappealing mood swings hadn’t been helped by his increased drinking.

  But dammit, Caine had told himself innumerable times in an attempt to justify his behavior over these past months, given the choice of sitting home and listening to his young, spoiled, self-centered bride whine about how she’d never agreed to be the wife of a washed-up old has-been, or going out to some convivial watering hole, where people still treated him like a hero, he’d choose the drinks and his newfound friends any day.

  “Nice view of matrimony you’ve got there, O’Halloran,” Nora murmured.

  Caine shrugged. “Hell, Nora, you know as well as I do that marriage is nothing more than a convenient deal between two people who both have something the other wants. So long as things stay the same, the relationship putters along okay.

  “But let the balance of power shift, and it’s over. Finished. Kaput.”

  Nora thought back on the unromantic agreement she’d forged with Caine on that long-ago rainy afternoon. Their marriage had admittedly started out as a convenient deal to legitimize an unborn child’s birth. But surprisingly, for a too-brief, shining time, it had blossomed into something more. And then it was gone, disappearing back into the mists of memory like the fabled Brigadoon.

  “What about love?” The minute she heard the quiet words escape her lips, she wished she could take them back.

  “Hell, if there’s one thing life has taught me, sweetheart, it’s that love is nothing more than good sex tied with pretty words.”

  Caine’s cynical view of love and marriage, along with his wife’s seeming desertion, had Nora almost feeling sorry for him.

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about being alone for long, O’Halloran,” she said as she drew up some lidocaine into a syringe. “If that half-nude layout in this year’s Vanity Fair sports issue was an advertisement for wife number three, you should get a lot of applicants.”

  Caine felt the bite of the needle and drew in a short, painful breath. “You’ve seen it?”

  Caine couldn’t imagine, in his wildest dreams, this woman even glancing at a spread of scantily clad men. Then he remembered how, before their marriage and their lives had fallen apart, Nora had displayed a fire he’d never suspected was under all that Scandinavian ice.

  “Hasn’t everyone?” She put in a stitch, tied it, then moved on to the next one.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” She made another careful stitch.

  “What did you think?” He pressed his hand against his stomach in a futile attempt to quiet the giant condors that were flapping their wings harder with each stitch Nora made. “Have I still got it?”

  “I suppose you’ll do. In a pinch.”

  “You always were so good for the ego,” Caine muttered.

  Nora scraped at the sides of the wound with a fine scalpel, straightening the jagged edge.

  Caine glanced into the mirror, saw what she was doing, felt his stomach lurch and looked away. “I suppose, to be perfectly honest, I was advertising, in a way. But not for a new wife.

  “Although I didn’t admit it to the press until I got put on waivers,” Caine said, “I knew all along that I wasn’t going to be starting this season. That being the case, my agent felt we needed to keep my name in front of the public.”

  “I suppose I can understand keeping your name alive,” Nora said, “but where does taking off your clothes and posing in your underwear with a cocker spaniel come in?”

  “Hey, I sure as hell wouldn’t be the first athlete to use a sexy photo shoot to show he’s still in shape,” Caine argued. “It’s the same thing all those actresses do to prove to producers and casting directors that they’re not over the hill.

  “As for the spaniel, that was the photographer’s idea. She said something about a cute dog making me look both tough and soft at the same time.

  “Besides, at least the magazine and all the press it generated was a helluva lot better than all those stories the sports reporters are writing about me being a washed-up, out-of-shape old wreck.”

  “It’s fortunate you didn’t get yourself beaten up before that photo shoot,” Nora said. “Because right now you are anything but photogenic.”

  She finished the last three stitches, then pulled off the gloves and tossed them into the white enamel trash can.

  “That’s it?” Caine asked, not quite able to conceal his relief. Although she’d done a pretty good job of killing the pain, the sound of the silk thread pulling through his numb flesh had made him queasy.

  “That’s it.” When she turned around, Nora caught him surreptitiously rubbing his hand. “Let me see that.” She took hold of the hand that had always been so much larger and darker than her own. “Dammit, Caine, your knuckles look worse than Tom’s.”

  “I was just grateful your brothers were there to help me.”

  “They always were.” His knuckles were badly bruised, and skinned, but nothing was broken, Nora determined.

  “The Three Musketeers,” Caine remembered fondly.

  She turned his hand over. “You’re still shaving your fingers.”

  “Hey, as a doctor, you use your best tools. Well, my fingers are my tools and shaving a layer of skin off my fingertips gives me an ultrasensitive touch.”

  She’d been three months pregnant, and a reluctant new bride, when she’d first found him using a surgical scalpel on his fingertips. She’d accused him of barbaric behavior, but months later, when they’d finally consummated the marriage neither of them had wanted, she’d been unwillingly stimulated by the idea of his heightened tactile sensitivity.

  Memories, painful and evocative, hovered between them. Caine’s eyes moved to the front of her white lab coat, remembering how her breasts felt like ripe plums in his hands.

  Nora remembered the way his compelling midnight blue eyes seemed to darken from the pupils out when he was aroused.

  Caine wondered if there was a man in Nora’s life now. And if so, if they did all those things together that he’d taught her to do with him.

  “I read that you’ve lost the feelings in your fingers,” Nora ventured finally, seeking something—anything—to say.

  “The feeling’s come back,” Caine insisted, not quite truthfully. “I just have a little control problem.”

  “Well, I wish you luck. Sensor-motor injuries are unpredictable. Who knows, you may actually prove all the naysayers wrong and be back on the mound by the All-Star break.”

  Which would, of course, result in yet another injury. Alth
ough Nora had never been a baseball fan, one of the few things she’d learned about the sport was the tradition of wearing out relief pitchers rather than starters.

  The better a relief pitcher was—and Caine was undeniably one of the best—the more often a manager used him. Add to that the mental stress that came with pitching when the game was on the line, and it was no wonder relief pitchers tended to be men capable of living for the moment.

  Needless to say, Nora had never been able to understand the appeal of such a life.

  “I want to tape that rib. Then we’ll be done.” She wrapped a wide flesh-colored tape around his torso, tugging it so tightly he was forced to suck in a painful breath. “You can get dressed now,” she said in the brisk, professional tone he was beginning to hate.

  Without giving him a chance to answer, she left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Caine braced his elbow on his bare thigh and lowered his head to his palm. The beer buzz was beginning to wear off and now, along with the pounding in his head, the ache surrounding his swollen eye, the crushing feeling in his chest and a grinding nausea, he was experiencing another all-too-familiar, almost-visceral pain.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come home, after all.”

  But he had, and now it was too late to get back in the Ferrari and drive away. One reason he couldn’t leave Tribulation was that having already cracked open Pandora’s box, Caine knew that all the old hurts, ancient resentments and lingering guilt would eventually have to be dealt with.

  The other and more pressing reason was that as much as he hated to admit it, Caine O’Halloran, hotshot baseball star and national sports hero, had absolutely nowhere else to go.

  He dressed with uncharacteristic slowness, every movement giving birth to a new pain.

  Nora was standing behind the oak counter she’d had built in the foyer, waiting for him.

  “You’ll need another appointment.” She clicked through the appointments in her computer. “If you’re still in town two weeks from today, you can come in around four-thirty. Otherwise, you’ll need to find another doctor to take out those stitches.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Doc, but I’m going to stick around for a while.”

  “And exactly how long is ‘a while’?’

  “You asking for professional reasons? Or personal ones?”

  “Professional.” She practically flung the word in his face.

  Caine started to shrug, experienced another sharp stab of pain and decided against it. “Just wondering. And to answer your solely professional question, I’m sticking around for as long as it takes.”

  Nora didn’t quite trust the look in his eyes. “For the feeling to come back in your fingertips?”

  “Yeah.” Caine nodded, his gaze on hers. “That, too.”

  When the mood threatened to become dangerously intimate once again, Nora became briskly professional, which was no less than Caine expected, and named her rock-bottom fee.

  “Not exactly city rates.”

  “Tribulation is not exactly the city.”

  “Point taken.”

  It took a mighty effort, but he managed to pull his wallet out of his back pocket without flinching and withdrew the bills.

  “You’re in a hurry.” He remembered this as she asked for his insurance. “I don’t need a receipt.”

  “My accountant yells bloody murder if I don’t keep accurate records,” she said, taking the form from the printer and signing it with a silver ballpoint pen. Her penmanship, Caine noted, was as precise as everything else about the woman. And even as he reminded himself that such painstaking attention to detail was simply Nora’s nature, there was something about the meticulous cursive script that provoked the hell out of him.

  She handed him the receipt. “Where are you staying?”

  “At the cabin.”

  “All alone?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “You might have a concussion. It’d be better if someone kept an eye on you.”

  “I don’t have a concussion, Nora.”

  Her brow arched in the frostiest look she’d given him thus far. “Now you’re a doctor?”

  “No. But I’ve had concussions before, and I think I’d recognize one.”

  “You’ve drunk a lot today,” she reminded. “All the alcohol is probably numbing the pain. You really should spend the night at your folks’ house.”

  “I’m staying at the cabin. Alone.”

  “Still as hardheaded as ever, I see.”

  “Not hard enough,” he countered.

  “You’ll have pain.”

  “I’m used to that.”

  “I’m sure you are. However, I’m still going to prescribe something to help get you through the night and the next few days.”

  “I can think of something a lot better than pills to help me get through the night.”

  The seductive suggestion tingled in the air between them.

  Nora reached for the prescription pad. “Take one tablet, with food or a glass of water, every six hours as needed.”

  Her voice, Caine noted, had turned cold enough to freeze the leafy green Boston fern hanging in the front window. “Needless to say, you shouldn’t drink and I wouldn’t advise driving or operating heavy machinery.”

  “Damn. Does that mean I can’t down the pills with a six-pack, then go to the mill and play Russian roulette with the ripsaw?”

  She absolutely refused to smile. “Not if you want to keep that hand.” She glanced at her watch as she tore off the prescription and handed it to him. “Nelson’s Pharmacy should be open for another five minutes. I’ll call ahead just in case his clock and mine aren’t in sync.”

  Caine plucked the piece of white paper from her fingers and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans without looking at it. “Thanks. I appreciate everything you’ve done.”

  “I’m a doctor, Caine. It’s my job.”

  “True enough. But I’ve become painfully familiar with doctors, Nora, and believe me, none of them have as nice a touch as yours.” He flashed her the bold, rakish grin that had added just the right touch to his Vanity Fair photo.

  “If you don’t behave, I’m going to call your mother to take you home.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you still refuse to put athletes in the same category as adults?”

  “If the jockstrap fits…”

  Her smile was patently false as she picked up the telephone receiver and began to dial. “You’d better get going, Caine. Ed Nelson isn’t going to keep his pharmacy open all night. Even for the great local hero, Caine O’Halloran.

  “Oh, hi, Ed, this is Nora. Just fine, thanks. And how are you? And Mavis? Another grandchild? Twins? You and Mavis must be thrilled. What does that make now, six? Eight? Really? Well, that’s wonderful… .

  “The reason I called, Ed,” Nora said, breaking into the pharmacist’s in-depth description of the newest additions to the Nelson family, “is that I know it’s near your closing time, but I’m sending a patient over.”

  She turned her back, studiously ignoring Caine.

  Frustrated and aching practically everywhere in his body, Caine stalked to the door, then slammed it behind him with such vehemence that one of her diplomas fell off the wall in the adjoining room.

  CHAPTER 4

  Caine picked up the prescription at Nelson’s Pharmacy and endured a lengthy conversation with the elderly druggist, who wanted to know all the particulars of Caine’s career-threatening injury.

  After finally escaping the medical interrogation, he stopped at the market, picked up cold cuts for dinner and, ignoring Nora’s medical advice, purchased a couple of six-packs of beer. Just to take the edge off.

  Then he drove out to the cabin—a cabin that, despite his avowal never to return to Tribulation, he’d never quite gotten around to selling.

  Although he’d hired a woman from town to clean the place occasionally, the air was musty and a layer of dust covered everything.
Caine neither noticed nor cared.

  He turned on the television and tuned in to a game between Kansas City and Toronto on ESPN, threw himself down on the sofa, creating a dusty cloud, and pulled the tab on one of the blue metallic cans of beer. Foam spewed across the back of his hand; Caine licked it off his skin and settled back, stretching his legs out in front of him.

  After swallowing two pink pills, he downed the entire can of beer in long thirsty chugs, tossed the can onto the pine coffee table, and opened another.

  Three hours later, he’d made inroads on the beer and the Royals had shut out the Blue Jays at home, winning with a home run. And although the combination of pain medication and beer had created a pleasant, rather hazy buzz, he hadn’t enjoyed the game.

  The televised broadcast had driven home, all too painfully, the unpalatable fact that for the first time since his fourteenth summer, a new baseball season had begun without Caine O’Halloran on the mound.

  That unpleasant thought kept him awake long into the night until, finally, the combination of drugs and alcohol allowed him to slip into a restless sleep.

  * * *

  Caine wasn’t the only one who had difficulty sleeping. The following morning, Nora awoke more tired than she’d been when she went to bed and irritated with herself for letting Caine get under her skin. She’d tried to put him out of her mind, but ten-year-old memories, as vivid as if they’d occurred yesterday, had proved to be thieves of sleep.

  She showered, blow-dried her hair and kept her makeup to a minimum of pink lipstick and mascara. Her clothing—pearl-gray skirt, matching blouse and low-heeled, comfortable shoes—was as subdued as her cosmetics. Although it was spring, mornings were chilly enough to require her wool coat.

  As she gathered up her driving gloves, Nora cast a glance at the clock. If she left now, she could still make a stop before driving to Port Angeles.

  The clouds were faint pink streaks in a pearly gray sky when Nora parked in front of the Tribulation Pioneer Cemetery. The small iron gate creaked as Nora pushed it open. The front rows of headstones, dating back to the founding of the town, were chipped and weather-pitted. An archangel guarding one resting place had been missing a wing for as long as she could remember.