Snowstorm Confessions

by Rachel Lee

  Diane said she’d be right over. Help was on the way.

  * * *

  Jack crawled out of the attic, content. The man was an ex who had cheated on her. No threat there. And tomorrow or the next day, Bri would call him to get rid of the raccoon. How long it took him to catch the animal would depend on whether he could afford to stay away for a few days or a week. Once he “caught” the animal, he couldn’t risk making noise up here for a while. Time would tell.

  In the meantime, he was sure he could let her talk to her best friend without listening in. Diane would be on his side, after all, wanting only what was best for Bri.

  Jack closed up the attic, checked to make sure it was safe, then shinnied down the tree. Amazing what you could learn just by listening. He hoped that soon he’d have a chance to comfort Bri.

  But first, maybe, it would be best to ensure that her ex didn’t hang around for long. Better safe than sorry.

  * * *

  Luke climbed into his truck and nearly skidded on the snow and ice as he pulled away. Had he been out of his ever-loving mind? What had made him think she would listen to him? She certainly hadn’t listened to him when he’d denied her accusations the first time.

  Damn, she still had those witchy green eyes, that heart-shaped face, although it had lost some of its softness to the years. Chiseled cheekbones showed now. But her brown hair still looked as silky as ever. In short, except for the chaos between them, he’d still think she was the most beautiful woman on the planet.

  But he’d seen inside that woman, and what he’d found there hadn’t been all that beautiful. Not toward the end. Not when she’d refused to trust him or his honesty.

  And what was that crap about him being gone all the time? She’d known that before they married. She’d refused his every attempt to get her to travel with him because she wanted to keep nursing. Her job had mattered more to her than being with him. That was a two-way street.

  So how dare she throw that up at him? Especially at this late date?

  He’d almost convinced himself yet again that the marriage had been a huge mistake by the time he got back to the crusty motel on the edge of town. He’d spent time in worse accommodations over the years, and with fewer amenities, as construction manager for DEL Inc. He barely noticed his surroundings as he entered the room, paused to wash his face, then set out again for the truck stop across the highway.

  He needed to eat. He hadn’t eaten during his entire trip to this godforsaken town in the middle of nowhere. Nerves about seeing Bri again? Maybe.

  The part of him that never stopped working had already scanned the town. Turning this place into a tourist resort was going to take some big bucks. The basics of the charm were there, but they needed a whole lot of touching up to make this the kind of place people with money would want to spend a few weeks skiing and hiking. Yeah, they would put a lot of good stuff out at the resort, but people often wanted to wander into town.

  Conard City spoke of older times. That would help. Some sprucing up would seal its charm, make people feel they’d come to a place out of time. But boy, it was going to take some sprucing.

  But first he had to get the lay of the land up in the mountains, figure out if they’d run into a few surprises about how much it would cost to build the place and put in the kinds of slopes that would appeal to everyone from the beginner to the pro. The designers had given him a rudimentary plan, but now he had to look over the actual site and see how much could actually become reality. And if it would be worth it.

  He half hoped it wouldn’t be. Then he could leave and be sure he’d never see Bri again.

  Just what the hell had he expected, anyway? The woman had always been stubborn, she clearly hadn’t trusted him and she’d divorced him. A sane man wouldn’t have returned for a second round.

  But he knew what he had wanted. Their marriage was dust, but it still chapped him that she had believed those lies about him. It wasn’t enough to know in his own mind that he’d never cheated, he wanted—no, needed—Bri to know it, too. Somehow that mattered and had never stopped mattering.

  Somehow it all still mattered, he thought grimly as he settled into a booth in the overbright truck stop diner. Three years since the divorce. Even longer if he counted back to when he’d first realized the relationship was crumbling. Shouldn’t he be over it all by now?

  But maybe when you’d invested that many hopes and dreams into a person and a relationship, cutting loose wasn’t easy. God knew, he’d never wanted the divorce. He just hadn’t had the heart to fight her anymore.

  Setting her free hadn’t been easy. It had been necessary.

  Chapter 2

  A week later, Bri was in the locker room, ditching her scrubs for street clothes. She was feeling good, all things considered. Apart from an uneasy awareness that Luke was probably still around somewhere, she hadn’t seen him. A mercy. She felt she had stuffed all the painful genies back into the bottle, and that life had pretty much returned to normal.

  That normalcy had been hard-won, and she welcomed its return. Even though her marriage had been running into trouble before the never-to-be-forgotten phone call from Barbara, that hadn’t made it any easier to break the ties. Anyone who thought divorce was easy had clearly never been through one.

  She sighed, pushing the memories away once again. She was here now, reasonably content with her life and enjoying her job. No need to hash over the dead things in her life. Looking forward had always been her salvation.

  After she had dumped all over Diane, however, her best friend had left her with a question that she was trying to ignore: Why do you still care so much?

  Ah, heck, she thought, closing her locker. Why indeed? There seemed to be no answer to that.

  Forcing her thoughts back to the mundane, she realized she hadn’t heard any more sounds from the attic. Maybe it hadn’t been raccoons after all, but simply the wood expanding or shrinking. Certainly the temperatures had been unpredictable this spring. It ought to be greening out there right now, but the trees were showing more intelligence than the calendar. They hadn’t even tried to bud yet, as if they knew darn well there was still snow on the ground and more in the forecast. Weird.

  She was just emerging from the locker room when one of the nurses passing by stopped her. “Do you know Luke Masters?”

  A week of good resolutions seemed to evaporate. “Unfortunately.”

  “Well, he’s in the E.R. asking for you. Dr. Trent sent me to find you.”

  “I’m on my way.” Why would he be asking for her? And what was he doing in the E.R? Her heart sped up, and she figured no amount of resolve was going to cure that until she found out what was going on.

  Part of her just wanted to head for the door and pretend she hadn’t gotten the message. The cowardly part. The part of herself she sometimes believed might have been the cause of a lot of problems in her life.

  Sighing, she headed for the E.R, but she couldn’t imagine any reason Luke would be asking for her. She thought they’d pretty well ended any hope of talking that night last week. On the other hand, as a nurse she’d seen plenty of the worst that could happen to people, and knew how often they wanted to see a familiar face. Any familiar face.

  Then it hit her like a ton of bricks. Luke was in the emergency room? Visions of catastrophe, drawing on graphic memory, suddenly crashed home. She increased her pace to the fast walk hospital staff used because they weren’t supposed to run. It was damn near as fast.

  She reached the nurse’s station in front of the emergency pod. Ira Mason stood there, sorting some files. “Hi, Ira. I hear you have a patient asking for me.”

  He nodded. “Luke Masters? You know him?”

  She caught herself just in time, holding back the statement that he was her husband. Not anymore. Man, was she going to slip into old habits that easily? A little flame of annoyance lit. “From way back.”

  “Bay three.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “Well, he’s no
t in danger of dying. Pretty messed up, though.”

  That was about all she was going to get from Ira. It wasn’t her case, she wasn’t a relative and the hospital was pretty strict about patient privacy. As it should be, she thought as she walked down the hall to the cubicles.

  Sheila Gardner was hurrying toward the front with a clipboard. “Ah, you must be here to see that guy who’s asking for you. Bay three.”

  Bri didn’t fail to notice the curiosity on Sheila’s face, but this was no time for a heart-to-heart about past heartbreaks. The silly phrase floated through her head, but provided no distraction. Luke was hurt, and the intervening years were slipping away as fast as a speed skater headed for the finish line. Nor did all her training as a nurse prevent her heart from climbing into her throat as she approached the bay. How bad was it? She had plenty of experience to raise horrifying images in her mind’s eye.

  She pulled the curtain aside and stepped in. The sight of Luke’s naked leg raised and surrounded by metal framework didn’t shake her. They’d probably had to stretch his leg a bit to reset bones. There was no evidence that the fracture had broken the skin—a good sign.

  What got to her was the face above the blanket that covered him from chin to hips. He had a huge bruise around his eye, red and angry-looking, and his left cheekbone appeared swollen. Then she noticed that the arm lying along his side already sported a cast.

  Damn, he’d done a number on himself.

  She heard a rubber-soled step behind her and turned to see Dr. Trent. “He’s going to be okay,” he said. “They’re checking the X-rays of his leg right now to see if the reset looks good or if they’ll need to pin it.”

  She nodded quickly, wondering why her mouth was so dry. “His head?”

  “So far the concussion actually appears mild. We did a CT on him and saw only some insignificant bleeding. He also cracked his cheekbone. No displacement, no movement of the bone, so we’re going to leave it. His arm was a simple fracture, but his hand is a mess of lacerations and contusions. He’s not going to be happy when he wakes up from the morphine.”

  Then Dr. Trent touched her arm. “He was pretty angry when he came in here. Aggressive. We need to keep an eye on that concussion, at least overnight. It might be worse than we think. Just watch it. There’s no telling how he might react when he wakes.”

  She knew all of this already, but she didn’t mind having Dr. Trent repeat it. Somehow it was more calming hearing it in his measured, steady voice than from inside her own head.

  Then came the question she had half expected and had been dreading.

  “Bri? Does he have anyone around here? Because he’s going to need help, but mostly he’s going to need some pretty close observation. Of course, we can keep him hospitalized....”

  The idea of Luke putting up with being stuck in a hospital would have been funny under other circumstances. Heck, he was going to be upset enough about the limitations his injuries were going to cause. He was not good patient material.

  “There’s just me,” she said quietly. “We’re divorced.”

  Trent grimaced. “Not good. Although I guess that’s why he kept demanding we get you. I don’t think he knows what decade it is right now. Well, I can sure understand if you don’t want the responsibility. Just let me know so I can make arrangements after we find out how that leg is.”

  Maybe, she thought bitterly, as she stood staring at Luke, she should call Barbara to come watch him.

  Bitterness aside, though, something stronger tugged at her. At last she gave in with a sigh and sat on the one chair beside the bed. She tried to focus on the steady drip of the IV into his uninjured arm, but her eyes kept straying back to his face. God, he was a mess! That cheek alone was going to cause him some huge pain.

  Sheila came in, nodded to her and checked his vitals. Then she pulled out an ice pack, flexed it to activate it, and rested it gently on his cheek. “Twenty minutes,” she said.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You haven’t eaten, have you?”

  “I just got off shift.”

  “Then let me bring you a tray from the cafeteria. They have a passable turkey breast tonight. Potatoes or rice?”

  “Potatoes, please. And coffee. Looks like I’m going to need it.”

  “You should have heard him when they brought him in. Cussing a blue streak. He said somebody pushed him, but the other guy who was up there with him said no one else was around. Then he kept demanding to see you. He said he had to warn you. I mean, man, he was out of it.”

  Bri listened, her heart growing heavy. She knew even mild concussions could cause all sorts of disorientation. It wasn’t unusual for a concussed patient who was conscious to ask every thirty seconds where they were and what had happened. But claims of being pushed? A need to warn her of what? That seemed to go beyond the ordinary confusion.

  Rubbing her forehead, trying to ease the beginnings of a tension headache, she felt the first real fear. Earlier she had been concerned, but not afraid. Looking at him, however, she thought of all the deficits that could arise from even a so-called mild concussion. Sheila’s description of his state when he arrived hadn’t reassured her at all.

  She wished his eyes would open, that he’d look at her, recognize her and be all right. Bad as things had gotten between them, she wished him no ill. None at all. But she had never expected to ever again fear for him.

  Unsettled, she wanted to get up and walk outside, at least for a few minutes, to gather her increasingly scattered thoughts and emotions. Much as she tried to tell herself that she cared about him the way she would have cared about anyone she had known, the response inside her told her she was lying.

  There were threads left tying her to him and the past. She had thought them cut, but they remained. She felt as if she were on a pinnacle, suddenly surrounded by the abyss of all that she had thrown out of her life. The pain remained, but something else did, too.

  This was not good.

  Sheila popped in with a dinner tray and Bri thanked her. She glanced at the clock above the bed and saw that the ice pack needed to remain another five minutes. She wondered what was taking X-ray so long. She wondered if she would be able to eat.

  She grabbed the coffee first. Sheila had brought her two covered cups full. She downed them both, then took a stab at the turkey, potatoes and broccoli. The broccoli was a little soggy from being in the steam tray, but otherwise Sheila was right about it being a passable meal.

  She paused to remove the ice pack from Luke’s cheek and stood for a minute, just looking down at him. The bruise was still spreading, distorting his face even more. It looked as if he was going to be eating through a straw, she thought.

  That little flicker of anger that had started earlier returned, but it was not anger at him. All of it arose from seeing him laid low like this. In the years she had known Luke, he’d always been a powerhouse, always on top of things, always independent. Maybe that had been part of what had bothered her, that he had never seemed to need her in any way. It wasn’t as if she wanted him to be dependent on her, but it would still have been nice to feel needed in some way. Essential.

  Wow, that was a heavy thought. She pulled back from the bed and picked up the tray again. She’d wanted to feel essential? Wasn’t that a crock. She liked her own independence and had respected his. Right?

  Staring down at the tray, she wondered what was going on inside her. Last week she had yelled at him for always being gone during their marriage. Now tonight she was thinking he hadn’t made her feel important enough?

  Whoa. Being around him again wasn’t going to be good for her unless she could find a way to avoid thoughts like these. At this late date, it struck her as just more rationalization, anyway. Since the relationship was over, it was pointless to invent new reasons for its failure.

  Her appetite gone, she took the tray out and put it on the meal cart rack in an empty slot. Catching sight of Sheila, she asked, “Who brought Luke in? There was someo
ne working with him?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t recognize the guy.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He said he had to go back and pick up tools he left because he was in such a rush to get Luke down here.”

  Made sense, Bri thought. Just as she reentered the cubicle, Dr. Trent appeared. “Good news. We can wrap the leg—the break won’t need any pins. You want to wait outside? With any luck, we’ll have the cast on him before he starts to wake up.”

  And then what? Bri wondered as she went to the small waiting area. He’d stay overnight here, but then what?

  Gloom filled her. Her mind scrambled around, trying to find other ways to manage this, but in her heart of hearts she knew she was going to wind up taking care of him, at least until he was ready to travel.

  Luke Masters was going to move back into her life.

  * * *

  Luke was starting to wake when they wheeled him out of the bay. Bri followed, watching him stir and groan.

  “You’re sure the concussion isn’t bad?” she asked Trent again as she passed him.

  “Do a neuro on him if you want. Pupils are normal and reactive. All other reflexes are fine. He’s just a little addled at the moment, but like I said, we’ll keep him under observation tonight. The more you can get him to talk or at least acknowledge you, the better.”

  As if he were going to talk much with that cheekbone all swollen. He must feel as though he’d been hit by a baseball bat in the head. Never mind the pain he’d start feeling in his arm and leg.

  Luke was placed in a room by himself, maybe because he’d been aggressive when he arrived and they feared he might disturb another patient. The ward nurse, Karen Bloom, told her she didn’t have to stay all night.

  “You know we’ll watch him.”

  “I know, Karen, but he was asking for me. It might be better if I’m here.” Exhaustion was beginning to break through her worry, though. She’d just worked a twelve-hour shift, which had now stretched to more than fifteen if she counted the time in the E.R.

  “Your ex, huh?” Karen said. “Not fun.”