He sighed heavily. His grand intention tonight had been to not let her get to him. Tonight he was supposed to prove to himself he didn’t need her.
‘Well that sure worked,’ he muttered, glancing down at the front of his jeans where he half expected to see a fire blazing.
Even though his body seemed on the verge of rising up and killing him in revenge for what he’d put it through tonight, he thought he could just about manage to leave the house.
But then he heard her sob.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lane couldn’t seem to stop crying. All she could do was jam her fists against her mouth to stifle the sound of her sobs. Not that Adam would hear them, because he’d be gone by now. She could wail, she could beat her hands on the shower screen, she could—
Gulp.
She could be murdered by her own heart, because the door to the bathroom was opening and her heart had started to beat hard enough to punch a hole through her chest.
Through the semi-steamed glass door of the shower she watched Adam enter. Watched as he started stripping. As he kept going like a man on a mission until he was naked. He didn’t speak as he slid open the shower door, then closed it behind him, cocooning them together in the steam.
He took her in his arms, held her close. ‘Don’t cry, Lane, please don’t cry,’ he breathed against her hair. ‘God help me but I want you. I want you so much. I—’ He stopped, dragged in a breath. ‘I want you,’ he repeated.
‘I want you, too,’ she whispered back.
He kissed her. ‘And it’s true, what I said about women in men’s clothing.’ He looked down at the shirt she hadn’t wanted to take off. ‘Especially you in mine.’
Then his lips were everywhere, his hands tangling in her wet hair, running over the sodden shirt with a sort of reverence. Long luscious moments of touch and taste.
‘Come to bed,’ he said at last.
‘What about your appointment?’
Adam laughed—an odd, harsh sound—and shook his head. He led her out of the shower, stripped his shirt off her and let it drop to the floor. They didn’t pause to dry off, just kissed deeply from the bathroom to the bed. He pushed her down, put his mouth on hers, kissed her long and slow. And then he pulled back, stared down at her with eyes that burned. ‘Tonight is not for him, Lane. It’s for me. I want tonight for me.’
‘For you, yes,’ she said, aching for him. ‘Tonight I’m yours, only yours.’
He kissed her again, even more deeply. And as their limbs entwined and they breathed each other in, Lane could feel her heart swelling with something that both hurt and soothed her. Swelling, opening, surging … flooding her with the most glorious sense of rightness.
Love. She loved him.
Whether he stayed with her for ever, or for weeks, or days, or only moments, she loved him.
How stupid she’d been to think she could control this feeling. This deep, wrenching, terrifying, magnificent longing for the man who had taught her all she ever needed to know about love.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
As notes went, the morning missive from Adam wasn’t exactly sentimental: Is Friday OK? I’ll call you. A.
What was that, after the night they’d just shared?
‘I want tonight for me,’ he’d said, and she’d hoped it had meant something. But from that impassioned plea to Is Friday OK?
Lane sighed heavily. Well, what had she expected? She’d let herself fall in love with a man who had no interest in anything permanent—a characteristic she’d been insane enough to think was going to be a blessing—no matter how many impassioned words he whispered to her in bed.
Three weeks. That was all she had left.
On the bright side—she was no longer a one point five out of ten!
And the not-so-bright side—Adam would move on to a new lover.
Adam will move on to a new lover.
She repeated those words to herself, over and over, hoping that if she said them enough they’d have some magical desensitization effect, making the truth of them easier to bear. But all the repetition achieved was to make her want to scream.
Her mother called her three times that day—and considering she almost never called, Lane started to worry about her mother’s mental state. The subject of all the calls was Brad. The first was to share the news that Brad had dropped out of the course Lane had paid for. The second was to suggest that Lane take on the job of mentoring him. The third was to ask Lane to look into a way of separating Brad’s inheritance ‘meagre though it is’ from her own because it was time each of them started living their own life.
It seemed Jeanne hadn’t been kidding when she’d told Lane she was tired. If she was bowing out of her job as Brad’s cheer squad, she had to be exhausted.
Lane had no idea what to do or where to start when it came to her mother’s requests. She promised to look into them all, but that apparently wasn’t enough for Jeanne, who called again and left a message when she couldn’t get through. When Lane saw the missed call, she wanted to scream again. No way could she pick up the message without letting the scream loose, so she left the message safely where it was.
The scream was still inside Lane, locked in her too-tight chest, when she got home that evening.
Her phone started ringing the moment she was inside her house, but she was hesitant to pick up. If it was her mother again, she didn’t have the strength. If it was Adam … well, she didn’t have the strength for him either; she was scared she might beg him to come over immediately and never, ever leave.
The phone rang again a few minutes later. But she still didn’t feel ready to pick up.
Another five minutes, and it rang again. She suspected it was just going to keep ringing until she answered. And if it kept ringing, she really would scream. And the only way to stop it ringing was to answer it.
Deep breath as she looked fearfully at the caller ID, and then she closed her eyes in relief. Not Adam, not her mother, but Brad. Frustrating though she found her brother, at least her emotional response to him was manageable.
But when her simple greeting of ‘Hello, Brad,’ elicited a choked-off sob in response, alarm replaced every other emotion. ‘Brad? What is it?’
‘It’s Mum.’
She reached automatically for the nearest chair-back to steady herself. ‘What …?’ But her brain was closing down and she couldn’t find the question she had to ask. Not when somehow she knew. She knew.
‘We were arguing over a course I want to take.’
‘What course?’ It was something to focus on. Something to keep the news at bay for a moment, just a moment, until she was strong enough. She could feel herself blinking, as though she were already preparing for tears.
‘Tattooing. I want to become a tattooist.’
‘You don’t have any tattoos.’ Foolish thing to say, but she needed to not think. Needed to not feel. Not yet.
‘God, Lane! As if that’s important.’ There was another sob, choked off, and Lane clutched the chair-back harder. She looked at her hand, at the iron-like grip she had on the chair; it was like a claw, her hand.
‘Lane,’ Brad said, more urgently now. ‘Lane, I need you! Understand? You can’t close down now. I need you.’
The panic in his voice snapped her out of her self-imposed anaesthesia. He needed her. Needed her to be calm. She couldn’t fix this if she wasn’t calm.
‘Yes, yes, I understand. Tell me what happened,’ she said, and was stunned that she could sound so composed when what she felt was battered, and useless, and frightened.
‘We were arguing, fighting about the new course, and it doesn’t matter what course it was, okay? What matters is that she tore into me, said it was time for me to grow up and get a job. And I asked her what she thought I was doing all those courses for, if not to get a job at the end.’
‘Brad—’
‘Don’t say it, Lane. I don’t need to hear how I never stick at
anything. I don’t need to hear how I’ve fucked up. Not now. Later, you can say whatever you want, but not now.’
‘I’m not saying anything, not now, not later, I just—’
‘She said she’d asked you to take me in hand and sort me out because she was tired of me. Tired of being surrounded by memories of Dad, tired of me sucking the life out of her, and then—then—’ Another sob. One more. ‘She collapsed. She just … crumpled and fell. And I didn’t know what to do. I’m so useless, so hopeless, I couldn’t do anything.’
The scream was nudging at Lane again, but she fought it back. Back, back, back. ‘Have you called an ambulance?’ she asked.
‘We’re at the hospital now. They say it was a stroke, that she had a stroke. But you have to come, Lane. They say— They say she’s not going to make it.’
That was when instinct took over. Despite Brad dissolving into a sobbing mess, she got the name of the hospital out of him, then threw her phone into her handbag, grabbed her car keys, and let herself out of the house. She walked briskly—but didn’t run—to her car and drove, forcing herself to go, just get there, no thinking.
As she parked the car on the street, the heavens opened. Rain pelted her as she ran towards the hospital, but she didn’t care. She was completely focused on keeping the panic caged inside her.
Somehow she kept everything together as she got inside, found where she had to be, talked to the doctors, comforted her brother; as she discussed organ donation, as she signed consent forms.
Somehow …
Until her mother, without ever regaining consciousness, slipped away.
***
It was still pouring when Lane left the hospital. And Lane still didn’t care.
She’d spent so long keeping her own anguish contained for Brad’s sake, keeping the scream inside, that now she didn’t think she could dredge up any emotion at all.
She got into her car and simply sat there; she had no idea for how long.
And then she remembered the last phone call from her mother, which she hadn’t picked up. The message she hadn’t listened to. She dug in her bag for her phone, pulled it out and called her voicemail.
Lane, if you’ll recall, I suggested you might like some of your father’s things. I … I need them gone, Lane … There was a wobble in her mother’s voice at the end of that, and then came a pause, followed by a sound like a sob. I … I just want to … to disappear for a while. On my own. And I can’t do it with Brad hanging on my coattails and I can’t do it with all this … this stuff—another pause—I’m sure your father meant you to have them anyway. One can’t divorce one’s children, after all, the way one can a wife.
That was the end. Her mother’s last words to her. Plaintive, sad, querulous. And so bitter. It seemed a Hollywood-style reconciliation had never been in her mother’s plans. Lane imagined her mother stewing over their last meeting, growing more tired, angrier, as it really sank in that she wasn’t the only one in the world who’d known she was living a lie.
But the stupid thing was, she’d never had to live that lie. She could have kept whatever memories she wanted of her husband and her marriage, tainted or otherwise, and moved on at any time in the past thirteen years, but she’d chosen not to. Exactly as Adam had said to Lane the night of her birthday. ‘If she can’t get over him, that’s her problem, not yours. Her choice.’ And she’d made a choice that appeared not to have made her any happier than it had made Lane.
And sure, maybe one couldn’t divorce one’s children the way one could divorce a spouse, but it felt like that’s what Jeanne had done to her thirteen years ago. And it seemed to Lane that she’d been gearing up to divorce Brad now, too. And Brad—what had he done to deserve that except be the product of his upbringing, be a focus for a love that would have been so much healthier for all of them if it could have been shared? Brad had never had a chance, really.
Lane didn’t know how long she sat in her car—wet, numb, alone. A distraught Brad had gone to stay with friends. Erica had operated a flight to Hong Kong and had what she called a slip time 48 coming up—which meant she’d be on the ground there for two days. She thought about calling Sarah, but Sarah was like one of those curve balls Adam had talked about—one Lane wanted to catch, but she didn’t know if she had the skill or the strength to do it, with Adam such an intrinsic part of both their lives.
Curve balls. She felt like she’d had her fair share of them coming her way recently. How did her relationship with her mother fit within that analogy? All those fruitless attempts to make her mother proud. Was it considered a bat, a catch, a let-go, or an accidental drop, that she and her mother hadn’t managed to find a connection for thirteen years? And did it matter, now that the ultimate curve ball had whizzed right past her, snatching away any chance to catch it, any chance to fix things between them?
She needed someone to help her make sense of it. Needed someone to tell her how to let all the curve balls go.
She needed Adam.
Adam.
The need to see him now, right now, right away, suddenly became her whole focus—but it was like the need had been programmed into her brain, like an instruction to a robot. On autopilot, she started the car, drove the route exactly to the speed limit, parked outside his house. It was still raining but she didn’t notice any more. All she cared about was getting out of the car … walking to Adam’s front door … knocking.
No answer.
She knocked again.
Nothing.
Another knock. Longer this time, harder.
No response.
And at last the truth reached through her numbed mind. Adam wasn’t home. Not home. Not here. Her self-protective numbness fell away, buckling her, folding her in until she collapsed on Adam’s doorstep.
And as she put her head on her knees and closed her eyes, the tears finally came.
***
Damn but the weather was wild, Adam thought, as he drove along the back alley behind his house and hit the control on his key ring to raise his garage door. Wild and crazy enough to suit his erratic, unstable mood.
He’d driven to four of his sites today, which seemed to be located for maximum inconvenience in four different directions. He’d only intended to do progress checks, but had ended up pitching in and helping at the last job, hoping some hard physical activity would get his mind off Lane.
It hadn’t worked.
He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about last night—which had been heaven—and this morning—which had been hell, leaving her.
What had her reaction been, when she’d woken to find herself alone in the bed, and that curt little note, so at odds with the drenching emotion of the night before?
He laughed as he drove into the garage, but there was no mirth in it. Knowing Lane, it would have suited her way of pigeonholing their relationship. No embarrassing declarations. Just an impersonal note for their next ‘appointment’.
He needed to snap out of this maudlin state of mind. Needed to tear the vivid, arousing images of last night from his frazzled brain.
He needed … a cold shower.
He got out of the jeep, and instantly realized he had a nice cold shower already at his disposal, falling straight from the sky. So he exited the garage via the back alley and circled the long way around to the front of the house, welcoming the icy slap of rain. But it wasn’t quite enough to smack some sense into him. Well then, he’d stay out longer. Extend his wet-and-wild walk into the park opposite his house. Why not?
But as Adam turned into the full force of the storm, he stopped suddenly.
A car was parked outside the house. Lane’s car.
Lane was here.
Breath held, he ran to the car and peered inside.
Not there. So she must be—
He spun without finishing the thought, and raced towards the house. Let her be here, let her be here, why didn’t I give her a fucking key, a fucking key, a fucking—
Ah, thank God.
There she was. Her back against his door, knees drawn up, the side of her head resting on her handbag in her lap. His heart could stop choking him now.
‘Lane,’ he called, even before he reached her.
Silence.
He was beside her in a moment, kneeling. ‘Lane? Lane!’
Her eyelids fluttered, and he heaved a sigh of relief, gathering her into his arms.
‘Adam? I’m c-cold.’
‘Let’s get you inside, sweetheart.’ He got to his feet, drawing Lane up with him, then fumbled his key into the lock and threw the door open. Moving quickly, Adam shepherded Lane inside and down the hall into his library, where he sat her in his green leather chair. He left her briefly to fetch a blanket, then he was beside her again, kneeling in front of her, removing her handbag from her clutching fingers, tucking the blanket around her, taking her hands in his and chafing them with quick, efficient movements.
Her eyes were lifeless.
‘What’s wrong, Lane? What happened?’
‘My mother. Dead. She—She’s d-dead. S-stroke.’ She closed her eyes and tears fell from beneath her closed lids.
He kissed her hands then drew her against him until her face was pressed against his shoulder. Saying nothing, just holding her and letting her cry.
Gradually, the tears slowed, but she stayed with her head resting on his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know we’re not scheduled, I know I’m not supposed to b-be here, that you don’t want me here, but I n-needed you.’
A sweet agony twisted through Adam. ‘I do want you here, Lane. And any time you need me, I’ll be wherever you want me to be.’
She was silent, letting his hands soothe her as they stroked into her wet hair. It had come loose from its band and was tangled—that had to be a first for Lane. It was scaring the shit out of him, to see her like this.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he said. ‘I’ll run a bath for you and tuck you into bed. We can talk then, if you want to, all right?’
Lane nodded, narrowly missing Adam’s nose.
He kissed the top of her head. ‘I’ll carry you.’
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