Okay, so it was pretty bad. Dirty dishes in the kitchen off to her left. Clothes strewn around the floor. Covers and sheets tossed in a heap near the side of her bed, the edge of which was clearly visible from her spot near the door.
“Yeah, well, I can’t afford a maid,” Cece said, curling her hands in her lap.
“You could if you stopped sending me money.”
Cece’s gaze jerked to Kate’s.
“Yeah, I know. Found out a few months ago, when you were in the hospital the checks stopped coming. I looked into it and surprise.”
That must have been when her paychecks stopped and her disability kicked in. Cece had wondered if there’d been a lag time, but to be honest, she’d had bigger fish to fry.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Kate.
“What was there to tell?” she said with a shrug.
“That you’ve been supplementing my income for the past five years.”
“So?” Cece said, pushing herself toward her kitchen. “Do you want a drink? I’m fresh out of sixty proof, but I might have some forty.”
“Cece, don’t,” Kate said, and Cece could hear the hoarseness in her voice. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” she asked, turning toward her with a spin of her chair. Actually, she’d gotten quite good at that. She could probably do pirouettes across the floor.
“Don’t act as if it’s no big deal. It is a big deal.”
“Really, Kate, it’s not—”
“Don’t,” she all but shouted, coming toward her. “Don’t, Cece,” she said, squatting down in front of her. And Cece saw the tears well up in her eyes. They’d been such good friends before Bill’s death. She’d missed her so much. But they’d never recovered from Bill’s loss. And now here she was.
“It is a big deal,” she said softly. “And I can’t thank you enough.”
The lump in Cece’s throat felt as big as the world’s largest ball of twine. “You’re welcome,” she said, wishing she could slip past her, move away, maybe show her to the door. Except that was kind of hard to do when one was in a wheelchair. Aside from mowing Kate down, she was stuck.
“Thank you,” Kate said again. “And I’m so sorry,” she implored, another tear escaping. “When Bill died I fell apart.”
“I know the feeling,” Cece said, because she knew where this was going and she wasn’t really in the mood to bestow absolution.
“I bet you do,” Kate said. “I bet you know exactly what it’s like to lose something you’d always thought would be there. Bill was my world. My whole life. I loved him despite the fact that he managed to knock me up five times.” She smiled wryly. “When he died, I fell apart. I was used to him going away for weeks at a time, but this was different. This was gone. And then you showed up at my door and I couldn’t deal with the fact that you’d survived and he hadn’t. I’ll admit it, even though I’m not proud of it. You survived and my Bill was…” She looked away for a moment.
But when their gazes met again, all sign of tears had vanished. “I wanted him back, Cece, because despite the ups and downs of our marriage, despite the fact that I absolutely hated his job, in the end I wouldn’t have changed a thing about Bill because he was my soul, my life, my love.”
She straightened, Cece’s head tipping back to follow her up. “And he would have hated seeing you like this.”
“Like what?” Cece tried to brazen it out.
“Like this,” Kate said, flicking a strand of Cece’s lank and, all right, dirty hair out of her face.
“So I’ve let myself go.”
“Bob tells me you’ve closed yourself off in here.”
“That’s not true. This morning I wedged myself in a grocery-store doorway.”
“He said you never get out,” Kate said, stepping behind her and grabbing the handles of Cece’s wheelchair.
“Hey. Whaddaya think you’re doing?”
“Taking you out.”
“The hell you are.”
“I’ve got a van waiting outside.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Cece said, trying to stop her chair by putting her hands on the wheels.
“Too bad. You are.”
“No, I’m—” The words died in her throat as she saw who stood out in the hall. Bob and his wife, Lorna, and two of her former co-workers, each staring down at her in determination, each unwilling to take no for an answer.
“Oh, damn,” Cece murmured.
THEY TOOK HER to a riding academy. Cece balked the whole way. She even threatened to make Kate pay back all the money. Kate didn’t listen. Neither did Bob and the rest of the gang. And so, against all her protests, Kate and company did what they called an “intervention,” forcing Cece up on a damn horse.
Cece didn’t want to do it. She hated horses, she told herself. They smelled.
And then the horse took a first step.
Cece felt instantly transformed.
It was like walking again, only…not. Like having her legs back. She felt free. And that was something Cece hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
She’d been feeling useless. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her self-worth. It returned the day she rode.
“Thank you,” she later told them all as they wheeled her back to the van.
But it was Kate who leaned down and murmured in her ear, “Thank you.”
And on that day a friendship was reborn. Kate came over whenever she could, which wasn’t that often, what with work and the kids—one in college now. But it was enough.
Before long, Cece went back to work. It was just a desk job, but Cece didn’t care. It got her out of the house.
It was the start of a new life. Yeah, it was hard to adapt to work in a wheelchair. But by God, she did it.
The pain began to fade. A little bit at first, but enough that she began to feel things again. Disappointment, sadness, regret. She missed the physical intimacy with a man, was wise enough to admit she’d likely never have that again. And even though it had been weeks since she’d said goodbye to Blain, it still hurt. Lord, how it hurt.
Then one day she got a call from Lance.
It wasn’t unusual to hear from him. They’d kept in touch. Actually, quite a few people from the track called her. Lance, Rebecca Newell, even Barry Bidwell had called to see how she was doing.
“You sitting down?” Lance asked.
That was the thing she liked best about him. He never ceased to make her smile, even when he was making fun of her.
“You know I am, you jerk,” she answered with a laugh.
She expected another rude comment, but Lance didn’t say a word. And that perplexed Cece enough that she sat up a bit straighter, something that’d gotten easier and easier to do in recent weeks.
“What’s up?” she said when almost half a minute went by without Lance saying a word. That was also unusual. “Is everything all right? It’s Saturday night. You never call me the night before a race.”
“You got cable?” he asked.
“Satellite, actually.” And then the oddness of the question struck her. “Why?”
“You need to watch Raceday.”
“I need to watch—”
The phone disconnected. Cece just looked at the handset in shock. She dialed Lance’s cell again, but got his voice mail.
What the heck was going on?
A check of the programming grid revealed the show would air in three hours. They must have done the show live back on the East Coast. Now she’d have to wait till six to watch.
But why did Lance want her to see it? She tried calling some of the other crew members, but none of them answered, something Cece found more and more suspicious.
Was Blain all right?
She shouldn’t care, she told herself. If something had happened to him, it was none of her business. But the panic she felt as she checked the Internet for news of Blain Sanders made the thought a total lie. She did still care. Why else did her hands shake?
It was the longest th
ree hours of Cece’s life. She tried to fill the time with exercise. There was a special bike she used to exercise her legs and she’d ridden that thing all the way to China by the time six o’clock rolled around.
“Welcome to Raceday.”
The familiar words brought another twinge to Cece’s gut. She used to watch the show all the time in her fan days. Now it was too painful to watch anything remotely connected to racing.
“I’m Rob Williams, and we’re here today with Blain Sanders of Sanders Racing and his driver, Lance Cooper,” said the twenty-something host, a guy with a fake-bake tan and slicked-back hair. “Blain, let’s start with you.”
There he was. And the moment she saw him again, Cece knew she’d sold herself a pack of lies. She wasn’ t over him. She couldn’t be over him. Not when it felt as if her whole body was hit by an electric shock when she saw him on the TV screen. Not when her breath caught in her throat as they zoomed in for a close-up. Not when just seeing him brought back every tender moment, every funny moment, every not-so-funny moment, just by looking into his blue eyes.
Oh, God.
“Blain,” Rob Williams said. “It must be a bit surreal to find yourself leading the points race after the wild start your team got earlier in the year.”
Blain gave the host an ironic half smile, nodding a bit as he said, “It wasn’t the best.”
“It was unreal,” the host said. “Your license pulled, someone trying to kill you, that deal at Atlanta Motor Speedway.”
She watched Blain closely, and so she saw perfectly when his face tightened, his smile freezing in place.
“How did you recover from all that and then get it together enough to start winning races?”
“Luck.”
A cameraman focused on Rob Williams, showing the wry look he shot the viewers. “Bull,” he said.
“All right then, hard work. After what happened in Atlanta we put everything behind us and moved on,” Blain said.
And for some reason, Cece didn’t think Blain was talking about his race team.
“But how?” the host asked.
Blain shrugged. “When bad things happen, it makes you see life in a different light. Makes you change. I think our whole team changed after that.”
The host nodded, then said, “Rumor has it that you loaned your home to one of the FBI agents injured in Atlanta, at least for a short while. Is that true?”
Cece’s hands flexed. So did Blain’s. She could see his knuckles whiten for a second as he rested his fists atop a checkerboard counter.
“It’s true. She was there for nearly two months.”
Rob Williams’s blond brows rose. “That was a pretty cool thing to do.”
“It was the least I could do, Rob. I was in love with the woman.”
Silence. And though she had a feeling it wasn’t easy to do, the host looked blown away.
“In love with her?” And then you could practically see the cogs of the host’s mind turn. “What’s this? Do I sense a story?”
Pain sliced into her palms. Her nails. She’d clenched her fists too hard.
“There’s no story to tell except I was an ass and I let her go.”
“You sure were an ass,” Lance said. The camera zoomed in the driver’s face. “Blain was a total jerk.”
“I was.”
“I almost quit driving for him,” Lance said.
Because of her? Cece hadn’t known about that.
“I would have understood,” Blain said.
“Cece deserved better,” Lance insisted.
“Cece—is that her name?” the host asked.
And Cece couldn’t believe it. She was having one of those out-of-body experiences. It was some other Cece they were talking about on national television.
“That’s her name,” Lance was saying. “She was an old high school flame of Blain’s.”
“She was never a flame,” Blain corrected. “But in hindsight, I would have been smart to snap her up.”
“What’s the story here, guys?”
Blain looked at Rob, and as calm as you please, relayed the details of how they’d met. Cece sat in her chair, dumbstruck, as he regaled the studio and the viewing audience with everything. The fact that they’d strayed completely off the topic of racing didn’t seem to matter to anyone.
“And then she got hurt,” the host said when Blain talked about Atlanta.
“And it was my fault,” Blain admitted.
“That couldn’t have been easy to deal with.”
Blain shook his head. “It wasn’t. She was so vibrant, so full of life—and then she wasn’t anymore.”
Vibrant? Full of life? She sounded like a shampoo commercial.
“But the worst of it was,” Blain was saying, “I never told a soul about us. A few people guessed, but after Atlanta, I let everyone think we were strangers.”
Was that true? Cece had been in such a void in the months following the accident, she hadn’t paid a lick of attention to the press. Had he played their relationship off like it was nothing more than a friendship? Apparently so.
“And she deserved better than that. She’s an amazing woman.”
“Man,” Rob said. “I feel like Jerry Springer.”
“Can I be the one who hits him?” Lance asked, waving a fist at Blain. Laughter off-camera. Cece hardly heard it. Blain stared into the camera, stared at her.
“Well, Blain, since we’ve regressed to trash TV, I may as well ask. If Cece’s watching, is there anything you want to say?”
It felt as if every organ in her body stopped working. She couldn’t move—well, she couldn’t really, anyway, but that was nothing compared to how she felt now.
“I’d tell her I was sorry,” Blain said at last. “And that I love her. And that she’s the sexiest woman in the world to me. I’ve always thought that, even when I was too scared to touch her. And that’s why I let her go—fear. I was afraid things would be different, and I didn’t want to face that.” He blinked a few times as he stared into her eyes.
There was silence in the studio. Not even the host moved for a couple of seconds. Then he grabbed a stack of papers in front of him, tapped the edges and said, “Well, okay then. Cece, if you’re watching, and you’re in a position to call back the hit man you sent after Blain Sanders, you better get in touch with this guy.”
“What about me?” Lance complained. “Don’t I get to say something to her?”
“No one wants to hear what you’ve got to say,” Rob quipped back.
The silence in the studio was once again broken by laughter. But Blain didn’t laugh. He never once looked away, never once cracked a smile as he stared into the camera, into her eyes….
Will you forgive me?
God help her, Cece wanted to.
BLAIN FELT THE ODD LOOKS the whole way to the garage. It wasn’t so much that people were laughing at him, it was more like they watched him.
Watching for what?
Granted, word had probably spread about his botched interview. The president of the Fortune 500 company that now sponsored his car even called to say he’d been watching. But to Blain’s shock, instead of reading him the riot act, the man had wished him luck.
Maybe that’s why everyone was looking at him so strangely, Blain thought as he headed toward his hauler parked along the edge of the garage. The race was scheduled to start in less than an hour. Race fans already swelled the stands, the pre-race entertainment already under way. Blain glimpsed some dignitary being driven around the mile oval.
He was late. Normally he liked to be at the track first thing on race day, but today his heart hadn’t been in it.
She hadn’t called.
Granted, he didn’t even know if she’d been watching. It was ridiculous to assume she kept track of him. But there’d still been that hope.
“Gonna be a good day,” his crew chief, Mike Johnson, said with an optimistic smile. Blain was surprised to see him at the hauler instead of at their pit stall. “I can feel
it in me bones.”
“Let’s hope so,” Blain said, looking down the long aisle of the big rig. “Lance at the driver’s meeting?”
“Actually, he’s in the lounge. Told me to tell you he needs to speak with you if you should happen to show up.”
What now? The kid had been pretty easy to work with lately, but drivers were a fickle bunch, prone to drastic personality changes the higher their stars climbed. Lance’s had been launched into deep space. Still, Blain liked the kid and appreciated the fact that he hadn’t given him grief after yesterday’s show.
But when he reached the step that led to the lounge, Blain happened to look to his right, and the sight of the wheelchair sitting there nearly brought him to his knees. It lay against the side door, the aluminum frame gouged with wear marks, the tires dotted with tiny pebbles and grains of sand.
Cece.
He shoved the door open, hardly daring to hope, hardly daring to believe….
And there she sat, her beautiful green eyes wide. The sight of her sitting at the black Formica table, her hands resting calmly on its surface, didn’t seem real. How could it be, when the only times he’d seen her in recent months had been in his dreams? When the image of her face had been so overpowering at times that he’d had to physically restrain himself from picking up the phone and calling her?
Bob and Lorna had told him she was fine.
By the look of her, they hadn’t been lying. She looked better than good. She looked fabulous. And as he took in her stunning green eyes, her long, blond hair loose over her shoulders, he realized he was on the verge of tears. Again.
“You came,” he said.
“I came,” she echoed.
“You look good,” he said, because he didn’t really know what to say to her. One of the drawbacks of having asked for absolution on national TV.
“You, too,” she replied.
They stared. Neither of them moved. Of course, only one of them could.
“Jeesh,” a disgusted voice said from behind him. “Do I have to kiss her for you?”
“Lance,” Blain said over his shoulder, “get out of here.”
“I will,” his driver said. “But you better get a move on. We’ve got a race to run.”
Dangerous Curves Page 24
