by Becky Wade
The biggest surprise of all? Their house. Corbin hadn’t planned, upon retirement from the NFL, on taking up construction. When he’d first seen the seventy-five acre property in Shore Pine that would soon become his, he’d planned to hire out the renovation. His dad, who’d taken shop class in school and been handy all his life, was the one who’d expressed an interest in working on the house. Thank goodness he had, because their joint project was what gave their days purpose.
When Corbin finally reached the Inn at Bradfordwood, everything was as it should be. No sign of trespassers. He looped back in the direction of Shore Pine.
Willow was safe.
Some of the worry he’d been carrying since Willow’s fans had first appeared at the inn dissolved.
He’d been very concerned about the safety of the woman he had a lot of reasons not to care about. Even though he knew it would be best to follow his dad’s example and hang on to his grudge against Willow, to go out and find himself a new girlfriend, he’d spent most of the past few days at the inn, keeping a lookout for idiots.
Corbin had come from a rough part of a rough city before going on to achieve just about everything he’d ever wanted. But here, in Washington State, he was realizing that there was still one thing—one person—left to want.
Voice mail from Melinda to Willow:
I’m calling to let you know that I’ve heard from Sheriff Raney. He told me that my DNA returned no matches. None of the Jane Does in the database share my DNA.
Letter from Corbin to Willow:
Willow,
I’m mailing you a letter. You know why.
—Corbin
Chapter
Ten
Yes, she knew why he’d mailed her his two-sentence letter. Because mailing her a letter was against the rules.
Willow laughed.
She shouldn’t be laughing. Only . . . his letter was just a little bit funny. Corbin was a little bit funny. Worse, his actions three days ago, when he’d protected her from Todd, had been just a little bit heroic.
She lifted her head and looked out the bank of windows that spanned Bradfordwood’s den. She could not afford to soften toward Corbin.
She crumpled the letter, slam-dunked it into the nearest trash can, then fisted both hands in her hair.
Can. Not. Soften!
Yet she could feel it happening, deep within. Her best intentions were melting beneath the sun of Corbin’s charm and his insistent humor and his willingness to defend her at cost to himself.
She made her way to the mudroom. She’d walk to Bradfordwood’s inlet. Along the way, she’d do what she’d spent four years refusing to do.
She’d remember.
She’d remember every single thing about Corbin. She’d dig it all back up—each painful ounce of it—because remembering would replenish her ammunition against him.
Riding a fresh wave of determination, she slid on her rain boots, grabbed a light jacket, and let herself out. It had stormed earlier, but it was nearing lunchtime now, and bands of sun pierced the cloud cover. Dew tipped the grass, and the air held the clean, cool calling card of rain.
A well-established path led her into Bradfordwood’s forest. Only a daughter of these woods, only a girl who’d grown up playing make-believe beneath these sheltering braches, would know how to locate the narrow path leading to the inlet. Locate it she did, despite that it was even more overgrown than usual. Willow pushed aside huge ferns and listened to the drip drop of moisture against leaves and fertile earth.
At length she reached the ridge above the inlet. Below, the curving course of the Hood Canal formed a tiny, secluded beach ringed by cliffs and pine trees.
Her parents hadn’t allowed her and her sisters to go swimming unsupervised in the inlet when they’d been growing up. Nor had they allowed them to swim immediately after a meal. Every now and then, though, when Willow’s obedience to her parents in (almost) all things had mounted to such a high level that she’d felt more like a robot than a person with free will, she’d snuck down to the inlet and gone swimming. Completely, thrillingly alone.
She’d never gone after a meal because she hadn’t been brave enough to break two rules simultaneously. Also, she hadn’t actually wanted to drown.
Whenever she’d swum solo through the crystal cold waters of this inlet, she’d been hyper-aware of her solitude. She’d felt independent and free and courageous. This inlet was as close as she’d come to rebellion during her middle and high school years.
Then her small world had expanded in big ways when she’d left home to attend UCLA. Especially when, midway through her freshman year, she’d been approached by a modeling scout while shopping with friends at a flea market. She’d chatted with the scout, a stylish middle-aged woman, while surrounded by the flea market’s haphazard treasures.
The scout had asked Willow if she’d ever done any modeling. Willow replied that she hadn’t. The scout invited her to an interview the following week. Willow took the woman’s expensive business card, even though she had no real intention of attending the interview. For one thing, she was a student pursuing a design degree. She couldn’t envision herself as a model. For another thing, she was concerned that the scout was somehow trying to scam her for money.
Her friends were the ones who convinced her to go to the interview that had become the doorway to an entirely unexpected career and a whole new direction in life. Astonishingly, the scout who discovered her worked for the most prestigious international modeling agency in the world.
It dazed Willow each time she thought about how different her life might have been had she not visited that particular flea market on that particular morning.
From the start, Willow’s modeling career had taken off in a way that couldn’t be explained except by two words: God’s. Providence. She’d dropped out of UCLA in order to keep up with her work schedule and enrolled in online courses instead. She’d weathered her parents’ worries and moved into an apartment in LA with a chaperone and several other new girls who’d signed with the same agency. She’d lived there for a year and then in an apartment in Paris for two years.
Some of the girls she’d roomed with in those days, and so many others she’d met during the last twelve years, had been prettier than she was. Almost all had been skinnier. Many had been more talented at their craft.
But Willow had been the one who’d caught the eye of just the right designers and photographers and fashion magazine editors at exactly the right moments. Thus, her career, in the magical, hard-to-believe way of some rare things, had taken her to heights that she herself never would have predicted or even known how to imagine. Thanks to deals that had made her the face of a premier fragrance as well as a worldwide clothing company, she’d snuck onto the bottom of Forbes’ annual Ten Highest Paid Models list four different times.
Modeling had brought her mountaintop moments. It had also plunged her into valleys. Every aspect of her appearance and behavior was fodder for public scrutiny. Fellow models who viewed her as a competitor said hurtful and untrue things about her. She’d been propositioned by more men than she could count, frequently in vulgar or downright creepy ways. Rich businessmen had offered her huge sums of money in exchange for a night in her bed.
She’d responded to the mountaintops and the valleys by working hard, praying hard, and conducting herself like a lady.
When she’d attained a bachelor’s degree, her father had informed her that he wanted to give her a graduation gift that would help her make her way in the world. She’d known immediately what she wanted his gift to go toward: a house of her own. For months, she’d hunted the outskirts of Los Angeles for just the right property before unearthing, like a diamond from the wall of a cave, a 1930s cottage on a hillside plot dotted with trees. Since purchasing the cottage, she’d lovingly furnished, decorated, and stocked every square inch of it herself.
All those years ago, when she’d started modeling, it had seemed as though she had more than enough time to
find the perfect husband. She’d been able to picture it so clearly. The two of them would move into her cottage and, after approximately two and a half years of newlywed bliss, start a family.
Modeling may have flung open the world’s doors to her, but a family of her own had always been her highest, biggest dream. To that end, she’d chosen Christian boyfriends and behaved impeccably with each of them.
Then she’d met Corbin.
Pain made a grab for her heart. Slowly, she proceeded down the steep trail leading to the water.
Almost from the minute Willow and Corbin had started dating, she’d been certain that he was her future husband. His personality was the ideal complement to hers, and their chemistry was a rare and mighty force of nature. No, he wasn’t a Christian, but he had so very, very many good qualities.
His entrance into her life had come at the perfect moment—right on schedule!—and she’d fallen for him like a sack of stones off the edge of a ten-story building.
She’d known that sleeping with him was a terrible idea.
Of course she’d known. But by the time they’d been together for three and a half months, the girl who’d dutifully eaten the crusts on her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, who’d been virtuous for twenty-seven years straight, had wanted quite desperately to indulge herself in that particular way with that particular man.
Corbin had made it clear that he wanted her, but he hadn’t pressured her. No, the bitter truth of it was that she’d let a mix of hormones and her own desperate love for him carry her away.
From when they’d started having sex to the end of their relationship had been the most volatile period of Willow’s life. She’d been racked with guilt. She’d also been euphoric with happiness. She’d prayed on her knees for forgiveness. She’d been wildly in love. It had been electrifying. It had been horrible. It had been the most exciting thing she’d ever experienced. It had been a betrayal of her own beliefs.
Over and over she told herself that what they were doing had to stop. They needed to get married or break up or go back to drawing the line at kissing, like they had during the early part of their relationship. If they didn’t repent, God would surely step in and separate them. Repeatedly, she determined to make a change.
Then Corbin would wrap her in his arms, grin at her, and kiss the side of her neck, and she’d want nothing more in the world than to make love to him again.
Before and after her affair with Corbin, she’d been good. To this day, the thing that scared her most was just how much she’d loved being bad with him.
He’d shown her how deep her sins ran and just how fallible she could be when confronted with the right set of temptations.
Having sex with Corbin had been to her adult self what swimming in the inlet had been to her teenage self. She’d managed to escape the consequences of swimming in the inlet. But one day the consequences of sex with Corbin had come calling. And when they’d come, they’d come armed with knives.
Seven months into their relationship, she’d been on assignment in Germany when her period had failed to arrive on schedule.
Willow reached the crescent of sand that formed the inlet’s beach. With the kind of awareness that would have made a yoga teacher proud, she drew a few breaths right to the bottom of her lungs, filling them up. She clambered onto the flat-topped boulder where she, her sisters, and her parents had once set their beach bags and water bottles. Positioning her rain boots on the rock, she laced her arms around her bent knees.
Corbin hadn’t broken her heart all at once. No, he’d broken it with three distinct blows. The first blow had been delivered in a German hotel room that she could still see with startling clarity in her mind’s eye. The duvet cover. The sleek wooden furniture. The gray walls. The fashionable metal wall art that resembled a sun.
She’d said nothing to Corbin when her period was two days late. Then three. Then four. Instead, she kept willing it to arrive, while sleeping little and worrying much. No matter what activities she moved her body through during those days, her head was full of just one thought.
I might be pregnant.
Someone on the set would say, “Good morning, Willow,” and she’d think, I might be pregnant.
A waitress would ask if she’d like broccoli or asparagus with her dinner, and she’d think, I might be pregnant.
The night she’d finally worked up the nerve to tell Corbin, the air inside that hotel room had been frigid with loneliness. The sky beyond her window black and pouring rain. She’d felt so sick to her stomach with anxiety that she’d stood in the bathroom for several minutes, eyeing the toilet, wondering if her dinner would stay down.
He’d answered her call with an affectionate “Hey” that had communicated the message that everything was right with the world.
Hearing the pitch of his familiar voice caused tears to well in Willow’s eyes. All would be well. Why had she hesitated to share her fears with him? She could trust him with this, with anything. She could count on him. “How are you?”
“Good. I’m in the back of a limousine on the way to an interview with ESPN and I have you for a girlfriend, so all in all, my life couldn’t get any better.”
“I forgot about the interview. If this is a bad time, we can talk later.”
“No, I’m glad you caught me. I’d have hated to miss your call. You’re still in Germany, right? It must be late there.”
“It is.”
A brief pause. “Is something the matter, Willow? You sound sad.”
“Not sad, exactly. More like . . . concerned.” What a terrific understatement.
“About?”
The words stuck in her throat. A protective instinct within wanted to keep them unspoken.
“Willow? What are you worried about, sweetheart?”
“My period is late.”
Yawning silence.
She could hear both the roar of rain outside her hotel and the hum of a radio station playing indie rock music inside his limo. “Are you there?” she asked quietly.
“I’m here. How late is your period?”
“Five days.”
“We use protection.”
“I know. I’m probably not pregnant,” she hurried to say. “It’s likely that I’m worrying about nothing. But I’m not usually late and this is, well, starting to consume my thoughts.”
Another long stretch of quiet, during which Willow watched her pulse beat too fast in her inner wrist.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but the words held none of the warmth she’d heard when he’d answered her call.
She bit her lip, hard. She needed much more from him than I’m sorry. She was starving for him to reassure her and to tell her not to be afraid and to acknowledge that now was not the perfect time for a baby—he’d never even said I love you, and she was waiting for him to say it first—but that he’d be thrilled for her to carry his child and, now that he thought about it, this was a huge blessing in disguise and they’d make it work and the only thing he really wanted in life was to marry her because he loved her like crazy.
I’m sorry didn’t begin to cover it.
“And?” she asked.
“And what?”
“Is ‘I’m sorry’ all you have to say?”
“I don’t know what to say! I’m racking my brain. You can’t be pregnant.”
Her anger flared. “Contraceptives aren’t one hundred percent effective. The fact is that I can be pregnant.”
Soft indie rock music answered. She wanted to claw through the space between them and hammer the power button on the limo’s radio with her fist.
“I’ve wanted to be a mother all my life,” she said unsteadily. It was hard to speak while her hopes were swerving downward. “I’d never do anything to stop any baby of mine from being born. But the possibility that I could be pregnant now, at this point, is scary, Corbin. I mean . . . my family. What will they think? And I’m an ambassador for a Christian charity. I talk about my faith all the time in interviews and fr
om the podium at events that Benevolence Worldwide puts together. I’d be shunned by the Christian community if I got pregnant. Benevolence would fire me—”
“You volunteer for Benevolence. They can’t fire you.”
“You know what I mean. Benevolence would let me go. And they’d be right to let me go. What kind of role model would I be?”
“You’d be the same role model you’ve always been.”
“But a pregnancy would prove to the world that I haven’t been practicing what I preach.”
“Nobody’s perfect, Willow.”
Tears and hysteria pressed outward from her chest. “People think that I am.”
“Who cares what people think?”
“I do. And you do, too. The two of us live in a fishbowl, Corbin.” She hadn’t wanted to explain herself or to argue with him. She’d just wanted to be comforted.
“It’s crazy to stress about this. You’re not pregnant.”
“But what if I am? . . . Corbin?”
“I’m not ready for this.”
“Not ready to be a father? Or not ready to discuss what we’re going to do if I’m pregnant?”
“Both.”
That one word connected with her midsection like a punch.
ESPN interview that aired two days before Corbin and Willow’s breakup:
CORRESPONDENT: Are you in a relationship at the moment?
CORBIN: Yes. I’m in a serious relationship with the Dallas Mustangs.
CORRESPONDENT: [Chuckle] Let me rephrase. Are you in a dating relationship at the moment?
CORBIN: No, not at the moment.
CORRESPONDENT: I ask because you’ve been seen for months now with model Willow Bradford.
CORBIN: Willow’s great. We’re just having fun.
CORRESPONDENT: You’re not ready to settle down?
CORBIN: I might be one day, when the right woman comes along. I’m in no hurry. Like I said, my relationship with the Mustangs is pretty serious. It doesn’t leave room for much else.
