Wounded Heroes Boxed Set

by Judith Arnold

  "Thanks again," Bonnie said before bidding Janet good-bye and hanging up. She eyed the soggy wad of paper towel on the counter, and then her equally soggy skirt and blouse. Shoving away from the counter, she went upstairs to change her clothes.

  At one time in her life, she had hated spending time at home alone. The silence had been too keen a reminder of Gary’s absence; the shadows and echoes had seemed to mock her, magnifying her loneliness. But she’d grown stronger over the years, and she’d come to appreciate those rare occasions when she had the place all to herself. Now that she knew Shane was safe, she relished the prospect of a tranquil evening of solitude.

  Upstairs in her bedroom, she removed her clothes, hung her skirt and blouse up to dry on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom, and slipped into a pair of jeans and a cotton sweater. The constant clatter of the rain on the roof above her head took on a soothing quality, and she relished the coziness of being indoors on such a ghastly afternoon.

  She gazed out her window at the watery vista. The front lawn was already flooded, the parched yellowish strands of grass floating in dark, swampy puddles. Scores of leaves and several small branches torn from nearby trees were strewn across the road, and an empty trash can had come to rest on its side at the edge of the driveway across the street from hers. The tulips in her flower beds sagged under the weight of the rainwater collecting within their bowl-shaped petals; their season was pretty well spent, and Bonnie didn’t hold out much hope of their surviving this storm.

  Turning from the window, she sighed and crossed to her dresser to get her hairbrush. She ran it through her damp hair a few times, then scowled. Something besides the scattered tree branches and the drooping tulips was amiss outside. Tossing down her brush, she hastened back to the window and peered out, squinting to see the yard through the sheets of rain.

  The birch tree. Its white bark starkly visible in the gloom, it leaned precariously toward the ground, its slender trunk straining, its pale green leaves fluttering raggedly in the wind.

  She sped down the stairs and threw on her raincoat. Yanking open the front door, she charged out onto the porch and gaped at the glistening layer of water spreading across her lawn from the evergreen hedge to the driveway. With so much moisture accumulating in the grass, the soil must have become dangerously muddy, leaving the birch’s roots nothing firm to cling to.

  Her beautiful new birch tree. Seeing it quake pathetically in a rainy gust, Bonnie did something she hadn’t let herself do when she’d discovered Shane missing: she panicked.

  She hurried inside to fetch an umbrella, then forged back out into the storm. Her sneakers quickly became saturated as she sloshed across the yard to the tree. She gave the trunk a cautious shake and felt the give in it, the ominous play in the waterlogged soil at its base.

  The umbrella slipped, and she let it drop. She could survive a soaking, but the birch tree might not. She touched it again and a small cry escaped her as she acknowledged how wobbly it was. Not until a gale caught her umbrella and flung it across the yard did she let go of the tree.

  She raced after the umbrella and caught it, then tramped through the spongy lawn, ignoring the branches in her way, the collapsing tulips and daffodils, the mat of azalea petals carpeting the earth underneath the shrubs. Once she was back under the protective overhang above the porch, she shook out the umbrella and turned back to stare at her tree. "Stand!" she shouted, her voice barely carrying through the storm’s cacophony. "Stay standing!" As if the tree were Shane, as if a good maternal scolding would be enough to set it straight.

  She tried to ignore the fear gnawing at her as another strong gust of wind tugged at the poor birch and caused it to quiver. She couldn’t just wring her hands and wait for it to fall over. But she had no idea how to go about protecting it from the weather’s ravages. She had to do something. She would never forgive herself if it died.

  Pushing her drenched hair back from her face, she stalked inside and into the kitchen, where she kept the telephone book. Paul was an expert when it came to landscaping; he would tell her how to save her tree. Much as she hated having to turn to him for assistance—especially after their last encounter—she wasn’t going to risk losing her precious tree on a matter of pride.

  He answered after the third ring: "Tremaine Nursery, Paul Tremaine speaking."

  "This is Bonnie Hudson," she identified herself, maintaining a level voice. "I’m calling about the birch tree."

  He didn’t speak for a minute. "What about it?" he finally asked.

  "Well, this storm has flooded the front yard, and the tree is rocking back and forth." The words came faster as her anxiety rose to the surface. "I’m afraid it’s going to fall over, and if it does, it’s going to die. I don’t want it to die, Paul. It’s such a beautiful tree, and I don’t know what to do—"

  "Calm down," he said quietly. "I promise you, the tree won’t die."

  Bonnie clamped her mouth shut to silence her babbling. She hadn’t intended to let Paul know how distraught she was.

  "It hasn’t fallen over yet, has it?" he asked.

  "No, but—"

  "I tell you what," he went on. "I can leave here in about a half hour. I’ll drive over and stake the tree for you. All right?"

  She took a deep breath. "What should I do in the meantime?"

  He chuckled. "You can either stand outside holding the damned thing upright, or you can stay warm and dry inside and pray for the wind to die down. I’d take the prayer route, myself. This storm’s no joke."

  She was grateful to him for making light of her alarm, and for not embarrassing her by alluding to anything personal between them. "I’ll pray," she decided, matching his casual tone.

  "I’ll be there as soon as I can," he said before hanging up.

  Bonnie lowered the receiver and returned to the living room. The sky had grown even more foreboding with the approach of evening. The tree shuddered in every breeze, teetering at dire angles.

  She had never suffered such despair over the ill-fated dogwood tree. During the three years she and Shane had lived in this house the dogwood had deteriorated until it was finally, irrevocably dead, and she hadn’t experienced the merest bit of sorrow over its demise. As for her flowers—she’d planted the bulbs herself, and weeded the beds when Shane neglected to, which was most of the time. She liked pretty plantings. She’d missed not having a yard during all the years she’d lived in Cambridge, and she was glad to have one now.

  Yet she wouldn’t despair if the flowers drowned, if the lawn was washed away, if the runaway garbage pail blew across the street and landed on her porch. All that mattered was the birch tree. It meant more to her; it had been a present from Shane. He’d bought it with his own money...

  Actually, he hadn’t quite bought it. The tree technically still belonged to Paul. Paul had delivered it, dug a hole for it, molded the soil around its base with his hands. When she gazed through the rain at the birch she thought not only of Shane’s extraordinary effort to make amends for having hitch-hiked but of Paul’s exertion in planting the tree, his strength and grace when he’d planted it, his kindness toward her son.

  His kiss.

  She stood by the window, holding a kind of vigil, watching as the wind tormented the tree, as the rain deluged the yard and transformed it into a sea of mud. She prayed for the tree, prayed for the rain to let up, prayed for Paul to arrive. She hated being dependent on him—but she was depending on him for the tree’s sake, not her own.

  After what seemed like an eternity, she saw two white beams cutting through the rain, the headlights of a truck turning onto her street from Pond Road. If she’d bothered to think about it, she would have been astonished by the overwhelming elation she felt at Paul’s arrival. Grabbing her dripping raincoat from the newel post, she slung her arms through the sleeves and hastened out onto the porch. She didn’t bother with the umbrella, but simply sprinted across the yard to greet Paul as he rolled to a stop on her driveway. She darted around the front b
umper and swung open his door.

  "Thank you," she shouted above the din of the rain hammering onto the gravel. "Thank you for coming."

  He pulled on a lightweight nylon jacket and climbed out of the cab. "We guarantee our work," he said. "I should’ve staked the tree when I planted it. I never expected we’d have a storm like this."

  "Obviously," Bonnie muttered, frowning at his inadequate jacket. "Would you like me to get the umbrella?"

  Sauntering to the back of the truck, seemingly oblivious to the rain as it soaked his hair and shoulders, he shook his head. "If you want to help, I’d rather you use your hands for something more important than holding an umbrella." He pulled three pointed stakes from the truck bed, and then some wire and rubber slings. He carried them over to the tree, laid them down, gripped the tree with both hands and yanked it upright with a single powerful jerk. "Think you can hold it steady?" he asked.

  She clasped the trunk, which was slippery from the rain, and held it tight. Paul set to work driving one of the stakes into the mushy earth near the base of the tree.

  It was too noisy for them to speak, so they didn’t. They simply worked together, communicating with hand gestures and nods. Holding the tree erect didn’t require too much concentration, and Bonnie was able to observe Paul while he worked. The rain pulled down on his hair, straightening the waves, and it glued the denim of his jeans to his thighs. Except for an occasional wipe of his hand over his eyes he ignored the downpour, his focus solely on the tasks of securing the stakes and then looping the slings around the tree. Once all three stakes were in place, he gestured to Bonnie to let go of the trunk and then gave the tree a shake to test it. Nodding in satisfaction, he turned to her.

  "Thank you," she said, tasting the raindrops on her lips.

  He shrugged. "I should have done it right the first time."

  Their eyes met. Water skittered down his cheeks and neck and dripped onto his shoulders from the ends of his hair. Bonnie supposed that she must look like a drowned cat. Even so, she was happy to be here with Paul, helping him. No matter what his nursery’s guarantees were, no matter that he’d rejected her after she’d entertained second thoughts about having rejected him, no matter that their relationship was doomed for too many reasons, his having come here during a storm to save her tree had been thoughtful. "Would you like to come inside and dry off?" she asked, hoping that he wouldn’t interpret the invitation as anything more than a friendly gesture.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the house, its windows filled with beckoning amber light. Then he turned back to her. His expression was enigmatic. "It’s kind of late. I should be getting home."

  If she didn’t want him to misinterpret her invitation, she couldn’t misinterpret his refusal. It was late, and he had every right to want to be home by now. "Well, thanks again," she said. "I would have been miserable if anything had happened to the tree."

  "It’ll be fine," he assured her, giving the trunk a final testing push to make sure it was solid. Then he plodded across the water-logged lawn to his truck.

  "Drive carefully," she called to him.

  He responded with a wistful smile, then climbed in and started the engine. The headlights struck Bonnie with silver-white light as she stood in the driveway, watching him back down to the street and drive away.

  ***

  IF ONLY SHE hadn’t looked so lovely, he would have gone inside with her. If only her hair hadn’t looked so sleek and slippery in the rain, and her long lashes hadn’t beaded with pearl-like droplets of water, and her lips hadn’t looked so invitingly moist, he would have done it. He felt clammy and uncomfortable, and the air had cooled enough to impart a chill to his muscles. He wanted desperately to dry off and thaw out.

  But not in Bonnie’s house. Not when he still desired her so much.

  He switched to his high beams as his truck approached the first shadowy obstruction on the road. He shouldn’t have taken Pond Road, but he’d steered onto it reflexively, his mind on Bonnie rather than on the route he was taking home. He couldn’t stop thinking about how genuinely upset she was over the fate of a tree. A tree! Paul worked with trees—he knew exactly how much they were worth and how far one should go to rescue them from the elements. He liked domestic plantings but he had no emotional attachment to them. He viewed them as any professional would.

  Bonnie had viewed the birch tree as an owner, though—more than an owner. When she’d telephoned Paul at the nursery an hour ago, she’d tried gamely, but without much success, to hide the distress in her voice. And when she’d raced out of the house to greet him before he’d even had a chance to turn off the engine, he’d understood how profoundly attached she was to the tree.

  If he were a fool, he’d believe that she was attached to it because of his connection to it. He’d believe that when she’d curled her slender fingers around the trunk the tree had stood in for him, that when she’d held it so firmly she was vicariously holding him. He’d believe that the tree meant more to her than it ought to, just as it meant more to him than it ought to, because it was something that bound them together.

  But he wasn’t a fool, so instead of going inside with her, he’d taken off.

  The truck bounced over a fallen branch, then dunked into a murky puddle, the wheels spraying brown water to either side. He struggled to dismiss Bonnie from his mind and devote his full attention to navigating this hostile stretch of road. But as the headlights of a car traveling the opposite direction cut through his windshield, he found himself thinking of Bonnie’s clear eyes, so bright and dazzling in the dim light. He found himself remembering the way her lids had grown heavy when he’d kissed her two days ago at the nursery, the way her arms had closed around him...

  And then he heard a thonk!. The truck veered wildly to the right, then slid to the left, as if it were totally divorced from the steering wheel. He fought it, swearing as it veered toward the right shoulder once more. The other car careered past him, and he detected the rhythmic bumping and shaking that indicated a blow-out.

  Muttering an oath, he shifted into neutral, tugged on the parking brake and emerged from the truck. His front right tire was flat.

  He would have to change it right here in the rain, in the darkness. He would put on the spare and go home, treat himself to a long, hot shower and then a stiff drink. He would forget about Bonnie’s eyes, her invitation, the warm, dry haven of her house. He would forget about the way her hands had looked as she’d curved them around the smooth bark of the tree.

  At the rear of the truck he unhooked the tailgate, lowered it, and straightened up just as another car came along the road, jostling around the rocks and ruts and hitting a deep puddle not far from Paul. A tidal wave of murky water surged up at him, hitting him dead-on.

  The hell with it all. He didn’t want to forget about Bonnie. He wanted to get in out of the storm—and he wanted to be with her.

  Chapter Seven

  * * *

  "CAN I COME IN?" he asked.

  It had taken her several minutes to answer his knock, during which time he’d considered hiking back to the tree-sheltered stretch of gravel at the side of Pond Road where he’d abandoned the truck. He had intended to drive all the way back to her house, but the shimmying of the steering wheel and his concern about destroying the tire’s rim had given him second thoughts, so he’d parked the truck safely out of the line of traffic, locked it up and left it, confident that nobody was going to steal an undrivable vehicle with Tremaine Nursery painted across the doors in bold letters.

  He assumed she would let him inside for a few minutes. She had invited him in earlier, after all, and he hadn’t been gone long enough for her to change her mind. Even so, the way she inspected him in the glow of the porch light, the way she ran her gaze down his drenched body and then back up again to his face, gave him pause. It dawned on him that he looked ghastly.

  "Of course you can come in," she finally said, holding the door open for him. "Do me a favor and take off your shoe
s by the door. I’ll go get you a towel."

  Stepping across the threshold, he relaxed. Her words were just right—friendly, considerate, but devoid of intense emotion. At that moment, as soggy and disheveled as he was, he was relieved that she was offering him nothing more complicated than the opportunity to dry off.

  She vanished from the living room, leaving him to unlace his work boots and remove them. He remained by the front door, watching as the hems of his dungarees dripped water onto the hardwood floor at his feet. He took some small pleasure in the fact that his short walk through the rain had helped to wash most of the mud from his trousers.

  He was removing his jacket when she returned with two thick bath towels. She started to hand them to him, then thought better of it. "Follow me," she said, beckoning him through the kitchen and into the lavatory. "Why don’t you take off your things? I can throw them into the dryer."

  "Bonnie—"

  "Your pants are soaked."

  That was the truth. His shirt wasn’t too wet, thanks to the jacket, and his boots had kept his socks reasonably dry. But his jeans were saturated.

  Still, he wasn’t too keen on getting undressed in Bonnie’s house.

  "Come on," she chided him. "Ten minutes in the dryer and they’ll be dry. You can wait in the bathroom." She balanced the towels on the edge of the sink and eyed him impatiently.

  The shiver that rippled through his flesh convinced him. "All right," he said, closing the door, peeling off his jeans and emptying the pockets. He edged the door open a crack and passed the jeans out to her, then shut the door again.

  He wrapped one towel around his shoulders and used the other on his cold legs. Then he tackled his hair, rubbing the towel through the limp waves. The towels had a fresh scent that reminded him of the laundry detergent his mother used to use when he was growing up. That seemed appropriate, because at the moment Bonnie’s attitude resembled nothing so much as that of a fussing mother.