“The police killed him, but not before he killed a family of five. Mother and father, two teenage boys and a four-year-old girl.” He closed his eyes for a moment, the torment of that knowledge almost too much for him to handle. “If I hadn’t gotten that scum off, the family would still be alive. I killed them, Alma,” he cried. “Ronald Harper might have been the one who pulled the actual trigger, but I’m the one who killed them, who’s responsible for their deaths.”
His guilt was palatable and her heart ached for him. “Things don’t always play out the way we want them to.”
He knew she meant well, but he couldn’t get his bitterness—directed at himself—under control. “Yeah, well, you tell that to that family. Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean for this to happen, but you’re dead. My bad.”
She watched him pointedly, deliberately abandoning any sympathy she’d been feeling for him. He didn’t need coddling, he needed a way to get back to the surface before he buried himself alive.
“So now what? You’re going to beat yourself up for the rest of your life?”
He blew out a breath, then shrugged. “Sounds like a plan.”
She pulled no punches. “Sounds like a lousy plan,” Alma told him.
“You don’t get a say in it,” he told her, trying very hard to make her back away from him. She would only be letting herself in for disappointment if she stayed in his life.
That stung but this wasn’t about her; it was about him and he was hurting badly. She had to get him to see past the pain, see the uselessness of what he was doing to himself.
“Maybe not, but let me ask you a question. Say you go on beating yourself up.” She gave him the full treatment. “You even put on a hair shirt, sleep on coals, walk on glass—is any of this going to bring back even one member of that family?” When he didn’t say anything, she demanded, “Well, is it?”
There was anger in his eyes when he looked at her. “No.”
“Okay, we’ve established that,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion as she continued. “Now let’s establish something else. Two nights ago you saved a little boy’s life, a little boy who, if not for your insane superhero act, would now be laid out in a casket, waiting to be the central figure in a funeral. You saved a life,” she stressed. “Maybe that’s how you’re supposed to learn to live with yourself, learn to forgive yourself.”
He wasn’t following the point she was trying to make. “I leap into burning buildings?”
Alma was willing to grasp at any straw. “Should the occasion arise, maybe, yeah. But until then, you put your mind to doing something positive with what you have to work with.”
That might have sounded good on paper, but he had nothing to offer. “Like what?”
She thought of Olivia. “Like donate some of your time to helping people who are in a bind but can’t afford a lawyer. Lots of ways to save a life, Cash. Not all of them involve leaping into burning buildings. Some of them involve helping someone to get a life. Or get a second chance in life.” She’d warmed to her subject and was talking faster and more earnestly. “You could do a lot of good, Cash, if you just get over yourself.”
“Get over myself?” he repeated incredulously, staring at Alma. “You make it sound as if I enjoy feeling this way.”
“Well, maybe not ‘enjoy,’” she allowed. “But sitting in the dark, hating yourself, is a lot easier than going into the light and doing something positive.”
She was desperately trying to keep him from sinking into a bottomless depression. She’d seen the same expression that was now in Cash’s eyes in Edwin Walker’s eyes when he lost his wife of forty-three years. The rancher sank into a depression and never surfaced again. The sheriff found him floating in the river a year after his wife died. She wasn’t about to let something like that happen to Cash.
She took Cash’s hand in hers, as if willing him some of her energy.
“You’ve got a lot to offer, Cash. Don’t just throw it all away.” She looked into his eyes and whispered, “Please.”
Maybe he could make it, he thought. But to do it, he needed her at his side, he knew that. And he had no right to expect it.
“Why are you being so understanding?” he asked. “I abandoned you.”
Alma shrugged. The past was the past and it was time to let go. “You were young. Stupid, yes, but young.”
He shook his head. “It’s no excuse.”
Alma smiled at him. All she ever wanted from Cash was an apology—that and to have him come back to Forever. And, from where she was standing, it seemed to her as if she had just gotten both, just not in so many words.
“Work with me here,” she told him. “I’m on your side, even if you’re not,” she added.
He knew that now, and should have known it back then. “I think my first mistake was to forget just how good you could make me feel about everything.”
“Well, you can reflect on that while you’re recuperating. Doc wants you to get a couple of days’ bed rest,” she emphasized. “I can have him come by later today to give you a once-over now that you’re conscious, but he did say that he thought the best thing for you was just to rest.”
“Just to rest,” he echoed.
“Yes.”
“Here, in this bed.” It wasn’t exactly a question, but it wasn’t a statement, either.
This was the bed they’d made love in. Still, she played out the line. “Well, it seems to only make sense, since you’re already lying in it.”
“This is your bed.”
Alma shrugged. God knew she wasn’t territorial, and right now he was the one who needed to get his strength back.
“I’ll sleep in the chair. Or on the floor. I’ve got a sleeping bag in the closet,” she told him. “And I can more or less sleep anywhere.”
“How about in your own bed?” he suggested, patting the place next to him. “There’s plenty of room for two people.” He raised his eyes to hers, a seductive glimmer in them. “Remember?”
Alma grinned. She had a feeling things would be all right after all. “Something tells me from the gleam in your eyes that getting your rest suddenly isn’t exactly uppermost in your mind.”
“Suddenly, no, it’s not.” For the first time since he’d woken up, he felt alive. His eyes skimmed over the length of her. “But what I am thinking of will definitely help speed up my recovery.”
“The doctor didn’t mention anything about undertaking gymnastics,” she said, doing her best to keep a straight face.
“You can be on top,” he told her. “What you do with that position is strictly up to you.”
Alma laughed and shook her head again. “You sound like you’re feeling better.” And she couldn’t have been more relieved or happier about it.
“You make me feel better,” he told her with feeling. “Being with you makes me remember a better time.”
She kissed him lightly on the lips. “That time can be now, Cash. It doesn’t have to exist only in the past.” Alma cupped his cheek. “You want to atone for that sin you feel you committed? Do an occasional good deed. Help a person who otherwise would have nowhere to turn.”
She made it all sound so easy. “You’re right,” he told her. But he was a realist. “I can’t do it without you.”
“Who says you have to?” she asked. “You know where to find me.”
He’d known all along and been an idiot about it, Cash thought. It was time he owned up to that and made up for the time he’d lost. “I’d like to not have to look.”
“What?” She wasn’t sure what he was trying to tell her, and she was even more afraid of jumping to the wrong conclusion.
“As in my coming home to you,” he told her. “Every night.”
“Are you…?” He was, she realized. He was asking her to marry him. This wasn’t a town where people just lived with one another. “How addled is your brain, anyway?”
Cash threaded his fingers through her hair. Why had he been fighting this for so long? They belonged together
. She was the other half of his soul, she always had been. “Not enough for me not to know what I’m saying,” he assured her.
Okay, if he’d come this far, then she wanted to hear the actual words. “Which is…?”
His eyes held hers, and his world, he realized, came completely together. “Marry me, Alma.”
She got up and reached for the telephone on the nightstand. “I think I’d better get ahold of the doctor and have him come over now.”
He caught her hand and stopped her from picking up the receiver.
“He has his own wife. I’m serious, Alma. Marry me. I wanted to ask you to marry me the second I walked into town and saw you. The only thing stopping me was that I didn’t feel I had the right to be with someone like you. Not after what I’d done.”
As thrilled as she was to have him actually ask her to marry him, she knew this really wasn’t right. It was too much like taking advantage of him. She wanted him to ask her when he wasn’t suffering from smoke inhalation.
“You’re on an emotional roller coaster and not thinking too clearly right now,” she told him. Damn but this noble stuff wasn’t easy, especially when all she wanted to do was throw her arms around him and kiss him until they both couldn’t breathe. When she’d seen him leap into the burning house through the window, she’d been terrified that she’d lost him for good. “Two days from now you’ll wake up and regret asking me.”
“What I’ll regret two days from now is that I didn’t ask you to marry me sooner.” And then a thought hit him right in the pit of his stomach. What if she was saying this because their time together had passed? What if she didn’t want to marry him? “Unless, of course, you turn me down.” He watched her eyes as he talked. “That, I could have lived for years without confirming.”
Had he lost his mind? Or did he really not know her anymore? “You honestly think I’d turn you down?”
He wanted to say no, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. “You’ve got every right to get revenge after the way I treated you.”
He was serious. Wow. Alma sighed, then thrust her hand out to him. “Hello, I don’t think we’ve been introduced. My name is Alma. What’s yours?”
He laughed, knowing that she was telling him that if he believed any of what he’d just said, then he really didn’t know her.
But he did.
And he was looking forward to remaining forever in Forever, getting to know her even better. And loving the process.
For the first time in a long time, he felt that things were going to be all right after all. He’d told her his deep, dark secret and instead of being repulsed, or even horrified by what he’d said, she was determined to stick by his side and help him.
He didn’t deserve her, but Cash silently promised her that he would spend the rest of his life making her not regret her decision.
“I love you, Alma,” he said with feeling.
Alma’s eyes crinkled as she grinned broadly at him. The happiness she felt radiating inside her seemed almost too great to contain. “I guess you finally have come to your senses. I love you, too, you big idiot. And after you get back to normal, I’m going to enjoy showing you just how much.”
“I need a preview,” he said solemnly. “Something to hold on to.”
“A preview,” she repeated, and he nodded. “Okay, I guess that could be arranged.” Slipping under the covers, Alma turned her body toward his. Her eyes were shining as she said, “One hot preview coming up.”
*
ISBN: 9781459227705
Copyright © 2012 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
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