“I’d be glad to,” she said, although she didn’t look particularly glad.
“But we should probably wait and take Alex,” she continued. “It would be fun for her—and give her a sense of involvement.”
“Thank you,” Ben said, gazing at the softness in Christine’s big blue eyes. Her sensitivity touched him.
“You’re right,” he told her. “It’ll make a big difference to her if she feels this Christmas is really hers, that she belongs here, that she’s not just a visitor.”
“We could go on Saturday….”
Buddy plopped down on Ben’s foot, apparently planning to take a nap then and there.
“We could make a day of it,” Ben said, warming to the idea, although he warned himself not to make too much of Christine’s participation. “There’ll be a lot of crowds this close to Christmas, but we’ll need sheets and little-girl stuff for the spare room in the apartment. Some games and books, too.”
“Might make good Christmas presents.”
“Sure,” Ben agreed as the ideas kept tumbling forward. “I’ll rent some videos for her. She loves Lassie. And Buddy!” The dog perked up one ear when he heard his name, but didn’t lift his head from Ben’s foot. “She’ll love Buddy. I can’t wait to see the two of them together. She always wanted a dog, but there was no way I could take care of one back then, and Lord knows, Mary wasn’t going to do it.”
“You really love her,” Christine whispered, her amazement apparent.
“Of course I do. Don’t sound so surprised.” Didn’t she know him well enough by now to at least take that for granted?
“It’s just so new to me. A man caring for his child. First Will and now you.”
The admission was heart-wrenching, and Ben had to fight every instinct to pull her into his arms, cradle her there, give her the kindness she’d never known.
He put his hands in his pockets.
And stood, frozen, as Christine slowly moved her face toward him. Her lips were hesitant, hardly passionate, as they touched his. Yet he felt overwhelmed, thrilled, ecstatic. She’d kissed him of her own free will. Because she’d wanted to.
If Ben hadn’t been so caught up in the sweetness of her touch, the desire it was sending through him, he’d have laughed out loud.
Instead, under cover of the flowering hedge, he kissed her back. Again and again, his blood pressure rising with the intensity of her kisses. Until Buddy decided he’d rested long enough and wanted in on the fun. Yapping, he began to leap up.
For once, Ben was thankful for the nuisance. The dog had just saved him from trying to make love to Christine Evans in a public park and scaring her away for good.
“I THINK I MIGHT marry him,” Tory told Phyllis later that night. The women were in the kitchen, enjoying cups of cappuccino before going to bed.
“Oh, Tory! Do you think…”
“Hold it.” Tory stood, cup in hand. She helped herself to more whipped cream, took her time coming back to the table. “Just like everything else in my life, it won’t be for real,” she said before Phyllis could paint a picture that would be too excruciating for Tory to look at.
“And it won’t be permanent.” She sat back down, dipped her finger in the cream, watching it bob, white and foamy, on top of her coffee. Phyllis hadn’t said a word.
“Just long enough for him to get custody of Alex.”
As she finished, she finally dared glance at her friend. There was no sign of cheer on Phyllis’s habitually cheerful face.
“Does he know that?”
“Not yet.” Tory returned her attention to the whipped cream. “I haven’t even told him I’ll marry him.”
“I’m assuming he’s asked?”
Tory nodded.
Leaning her forearms on the table, Phyllis gave her a searching look. “Do you love him?”
An instinctive no on her lips, Tory stopped. “Define love.”
“It’s a combination of giving the other person your whole heart and trusting him completely.”
Trust. A word so long absent from Tory’s vocabulary she wasn’t sure she even knew what it was.
“Are you afraid to be alone with him?” Phyllis asked, both hands framing her cup.
“No.”
“If telling him about Christine wouldn’t risk all our lives, would you tell him about her?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think he’d ever deliberately hurt you?”
Tory was beginning to see where Phyllis was going with this, and she was a willing traveler on the journey, if for no other reason than to see what her destination might be. She suspected it was a place she’d never been before. “No.”
“Do you believe the person he is when he’s with you is the same person he is when he isn’t with you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think he tells the truth?”
With curious fascination, Tory said, “I do.”
Brows raised, Phyllis looked at her.
“I trust him,” Tory said.
Phyllis continued to watch her, waiting.
“I do care about him—much more than I should.”
Phyllis nodded. “You love him.”
Tory couldn’t make herself say that, couldn’t travel any further with her friend. It was enough to know that she trusted Ben. Trusting a man was a new experience, an incredible thing in and of itself. Something she’d be thankful for the rest of her life.
“Are you going to tell him it’s only temporary?” Phyllis asked, taking a sip from her nearly full cup.
“I don’t think so,” Tory said. “I’m afraid he wouldn’t go through with it. And it would be pretty selfish of me to risk his chances of getting custody of that child just so I could clear my conscience.”
“I suppose that makes some sense, but there’s more, isn’t there?”
Tory gave her friend a twisted grin. “You’re too damn good,” she said. “You’re wasted in the classroom. You should be in private practice somewhere raking in the bucks.”
“I love teaching,” Phyllis said, her face still unusually serious. “And I’m not listening to you with my clinical brain. I’m listening as a friend, with my heart.”
Unfamiliar feelings overwhelmed Tory—warmth, security, the knowledge she wasn’t alone. All emotions that would become unbearable when she had to leave them behind.
“So why aren’t you going to tell him it’s temporary?”
Tory smeared melted cream on the rim of her cup. “Because he’ll want to know why and I’m afraid I’ll tell him.”
“And we aren’t wrong in thinking that’s out of the question?”
Years of being on the run, of training herself to survive in hiding, had Tory shaking her head emphatically. “It’s dangerous even for you to know,” she said.
Phyllis smiled gently. “Didn’t have much choice there, did you?”
Shaking her head, Tory went on, “You can never control what someone else is going to do with a piece of information. What if Ben thinks he can beat Bruce at his own game? It would be just like a man to feel he has to fix things. And…and how can I ask him to make a lifelong commitment to a dead woman?”
“Or, I suppose he could do what I almost did that day when I saw you guys sitting by the statue, and slip up. I was so sure that was Bruce, so upset he’d found you, I almost called you Tory.”
Tory shrugged. “Every person who has that knowledge is one more chance that Bruce will find me. And the life of everyone who knows could be in danger.”
Taking a sip of her coffee, Phyllis eyed Tory. “There’s always the chance that Bruce will move on now that he thinks you’re dead. Find someone else to obsess over, marry her.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought of that,” Tory said. “Hoped for it, dreamed about it. But I can’t count on it.”
“No.” Phyllis shook her head, her red hair vibrant in the kitchen’s bright light. “But if it happened, there’d be no reason for you to ever leave Ben.”
Tory couldn’t think about that possibility. Couldn’t allow herself to hope. Or to worry. She could get through this, help Ben and his daughter, as long as she held steadfast to the idea that it wasn’t permanent. If she started to think differently, to dream again, it would kill her.
She’d survived too many broken dreams in her life. She couldn’t do it again.
“I wish you could at least go through the ceremony as yourself,” Phyllis said, frowning again.
“If I did, Bruce would know within an hour.”
“I don’t know, Tory. I don’t like it,” Phyllis said. She pushed her cup aside, rested her elbows on the table.
“I don’t, either.” Not any part of it. “But I can feel that little girl’s pain, Phyllis. I feel her physically, like it’s all happening to me. I have to do this, to help her.”
“And what about Ben? I’m assuming that since he asked you to marry him, he loves you.”
Tory looked away. “He hasn’t said.”
“But you think he does, don’t you?”
“He doesn’t know me.”
“Tory, you’re just as aware as I am—”
“You said love included trust,” Tory interrupted.
“If I don’t tell Ben the truth, he can’t trust me.”
“You’ve told him the truth about everything except the one thing you aren’t free to talk about.”
“It’s a mighty big thing.” Tory laughed, but there was no humor in the sound.
Phyllis reached her hand across the table, pulling back just before it touched Tory’s. “There’s no way you’re going to make it through this without being hurt.”
“I know.”
But if she saved a little girl from the hell that was her life, if she could make Ben happy by giving him back the daughter he adored, if she could pretend, even for a week, that she was exactly who Ben thought she was, then all the pain would be worth it.
TORY WAS UP at dawn the next morning. She’d slept very little. If she was going to do this, she’d have to tell Ben immediately.
And she was going to do it. For once in her life, she would risk every ounce of strength she had to help someone else. Even if only this once, she would be the type of person she’d always wanted to be. The type of person she admired.
She was carrying Christine’s name and she was damn well going to live up to it. She was going to put others before herself. She was going to have a reason to feel good about herself.
All that was left was to tell Ben. And she wanted to do that before he got his call from the social services people this morning. She wanted them to know that Alex would not only be coming home to her father, but that her father had provided her with a new mother, as well.
A respectable college professor who would bring only good, solid influences into the child’s life.
BEN HAD JUST COME IN from a run with Buddy when the phone rang. Throwing the leash on the counter, he grabbed the mobile. He hadn’t expected to hear from them so early.
“Sanders,” he said, out of breath. And not from running. They’d better have good—
“Ben?”
It was Christine. He hadn’t really expected to hear from her at all. He’d already mapped out his plan to stay in close contact with her.
“Hi there. This is a nice surprise,” he told her.
“I just…the thing is, I’ve been up most of the night and…”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes!” Her response was more nervous than affirmative, and Ben’s muscles started to tense.
“I, uh, probably shouldn’t do this over the phone, but I wanted to get it over with.” He could hear her take a deep breath. “I wanted to speak with you as soon as possible in case—”
Hand to his forehead, Ben braced himself. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. That is, I’m calling to tell you yes, I’ll marry you.”
The phone slipped down his sweaty palm and almost out of reach. He caught it before it fell. He sank onto the tile floor.
“Say something!” She laughed nervously. Not happily. Just nervously.
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve made up my mind.”
Which wasn’t really the same thing at all. But he didn’t think he could be noble enough to make an issue of it. All he needed was to get her married to him. Time, patience and love would take care of the rest.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” He couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off his face, not even when Buddy climbed onto his legs and tried to lick it off.
“Wait.” Christine’s voice held more warning than joy, but even that made little difference to the relief—the happiness—coursing through him. She was going to marry him. He’d have a lifetime to teach her about joy.
“I have some conditions.”
Sure. Fine. Bring them on. As long as one of them wasn’t that she planned to leave him. Anything else he could handle.
“You have to understand that I’m still not sure about a lot of things—”
“It’s okay, Christine,” he was quick to reassure her. “I meant what I said. I won’t pressure you into more than you’re ready for.”
“Believe it or not, I’m completely comfortable on that score,” she said with a small laugh.
His blood started to heat. “Completely?”
“Yes, well, completely enough to trust that you meant what you said about giving me time.”
That was actually better than he’d hoped. If he’d finally managed to earn Christine’s trust, he was much further ahead than he’d realized.
“Thank you.”
“You pack a pretty mean kiss,” she said. Her words sounded thin, as though she couldn’t believe she’d even said such a thing—and that earned her another piece of his heart.
“So do you, lady.”
He waited, but she didn’t continue the sexual banter.
“So, what are these conditions?” he asked.
“You have to understand that I’m only considering marriage at this point because of Alex.”
“Just as the timing of my proposal was because of her.”
“Right.”
Ben pushed Buddy away, raised his knees and rested his elbows on top of them.
Whatever else she had to say, he was ready to handle. Christine had agreed to marry him.
“I can’t promise you forever,” she said softly.
Ben’s leg fell to the ground.
“It’s not that I don’t want to…I think…but my life is so out of control sometimes that I can’t always trust myself, don’t know how I’m going to react.”
Like running away from him in the library, he translated. It hadn’t meant she didn’t like him. Hadn’t even meant she didn’t like his kisses. She’d simply been unable to stop herself.
Okay. He’d known he was signing on for the long haul—long and maybe difficult—when he’d asked her to marry him. Knew, too, that every trial would be worth the effort if it meant he had Christine as his wife.
“Would you like to believe it’s forever?” He chose his words carefully. He didn’t want to push her into a corner, but he had to know where he stood.
“Um, I…the thing is…”
“Just answer the question, Christine.”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s enough for me.”
“There’s more.”
He’d had a feeling there was.
“No talk of love, okay? Not right now.”
If that was what she needed. “Okay.” He could express his love without words. And hear hers, too.
“So, when do you want…I mean…”
“Would you be happy with a quiet, private ceremony?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, her pleasure obvious. Ben wasn’t sure it was too flattering to have his bride-to-be so delighted by the lack of formalities.
Unless the bride-to-be was Christine.
“Relatively soon?” He didn’t want her to change her mind.
“How soon is that?�
��
“Next week.”
“Christmas is on Monday.”
“How does Tuesday sound?”
“Fine…I guess…yes, fine.”
“Do you think Phyllis would like to be a witness?”
“Yes.”
“Want to get together to make the arrangements?”
“Yes.”
Standing, Ben grinned.
“I’m waiting for the call about Alex, and then I may have to drive to California to pick her up. Can I call you back as soon as I know what’s happening?”
“Yes.”
She sounded as shell-shocked as he felt. And yet, he didn’t get the feeling she was trying too hard to run away from him.
“Okay. And, Christine?”
“Uh-huh?”
“I’m glad we’re getting married.”
“I’m glad, too.”
They were the finest words Ben had ever heard.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“DO WE HAVE to have a new mommy, Daddy?”
Alex, dressed in faded jeans and a button-up blouse, was sitting quietly on the floor, stroking an adoring Buddy. Mary had had Alex’s blond hair cut short—for ease of care, he supposed—and it gave her an adorable elfin look.
Every time he looked at her, Ben felt a thrill of happiness, a surge of relief—and a sense of despair. His happy, vivacious little girl had done nothing more energetic than follow him around all morning.
He’d expected her to run him ragged with all the things she wanted to do. So far, they hadn’t left the apartment. As eager as he was to show her Shelter Valley, introduce her to his new home—and, he hoped, hers—he’d been more determined to see her smile again.
She’d sobbed for half an hour when he’d finally been allowed to see her the day before. She’d apologized over and over as they’d shown him her back, told him how to care for the already healing flesh. She’d refused to believe she hadn’t done something horribly wrong. And she’d refused, too, to let go of him, even after they left the office of Child Welfare. She’d held his hand as he drove, until her weariness had taken over and she’d fallen asleep. Once they got home, she’d awoken only long enough to beg him to let her sleep in his bed. Just for that one night, he’d allowed her to do so. He’d been certain that once daylight arrived and she realized she was still with him, she’d be back to her precocious self. Ready to take on the world—or at least her new bedroom.
My Sister, Myself Page 19
