by Nora Roberts
"I trusted you," Josh said quietly. "I always trusted you. It's one thing for you to hit on Kate, and on Margo, but I'm damned if I'm going to stand back and watch you make it three for three."
His eyes went very cold, very hard. At his side his fist clenched, and in his mind he saw it strike out, fast. It took all of his will and a lifetime of friendship not to follow through.
"Get the fuck away from me. Now."
"You want to take a swing, you take one. We've gone around before."
Not like this, Michael thought as his system revved toward violence. Now they were men, and the stakes were higher. And if he had any family, any that really mattered, this was it, standing here right now, prepared to break his neck.
"Why don't we try this instead—I'll be out by the end of the week. I've already started making the arrangements."
Torn now between friendship and family, Josh narrowed his eyes. "What arrangements? You barely have your foundation up on the new construction."
"I'll probably sell it as is once I've relocated to L.A. Is that far enough away from your sister, Harvard? Or do I have to go to hell?"
"When did this come up?"
"Do I have to check that with you too? Go away, Josh. I'm busy here and you've made your point."
"I'm not sure I have." And as he watched his oldest friend walk away, Josh was no longer sure what the point was.
He knew she would come. There was no way to avoid or prevent it. They hadn't been together in two weeks, and she would expect him to want her. Of course he did, pitifully.
But he wouldn't touch her. It was only worse now. He'd nearly talked himself out of his earlier decision, had told himself he could find a way to make it work between then. The visit from Josh had snapped things back into reality.
He would make it clean, he would make it quick.
She would be hurt, a little. There was no way to avoid or prevent that either. But she would get over it.
Still, though he'd known she would come, he hadn't expected her so soon, hadn't expected himself to be so unprepared when he saw her standing in his doorway with the sun in her hair and her eyes so pure, so gray, so warm.
"I took off from the shop a little early," she began. She knew she was talking quickly, bubbling over with nerves. Something was wrong. She could have been deaf and blind and still have sensed it. "I thought since my parents were taking the girls into Carmel for dinner, I'd see if you'd like me to fix yours."
"Women like you don't cook, sugar. They have cooks."
"You'd be surprised." She came in, not waiting for the invitation, and swung past him into the kitchen. "Mrs. Williamson taught us all, including Josh, at least the basics. I make an exceptional fettuccine Alfredo. I thought I'd see what you had before I brought over ingredients."
Seeing her poking around the kitchen as if she belonged there, as if he could come home after a hard day and find her cheerfully waiting for him, tore him apart. So his voice was cool and careless.
"I'm not much on fancy sauces, sugar."
"Well, we'll try something else." Why wouldn't he say her name? she wondered, fighting panic. He hadn't once said her name since he'd come home. She turned to him and couldn't prevent herself from leading with her heart. "Oh, I missed you, Michael. So much."
She was halfway across the room, reaching for him. He could all but feel the way her soft, delicate arms would wrap around his neck. He stepped back, lifted both hands to ward her off.
"I'm filthy. I haven't had a chance to jump in the shower. You wouldn't want to mess up a nice silk blouse."
Why should it matter? He'd once torn one off her. He hadn't held her in days. Yet he stood there now with—was it boredom in his eyes?
"What is it, Michael?" Her stomach jittered, echoed in her voice. "Are you angry with me?"
Deliberately he tilted his head. "Why do you do that? Why do you always assume that whatever's going on around you is your fault or your responsibility? That's a real problem you've got there," he added as he walked past her to get a beer out of the refrigerator.
He twisted off the top, drank deep. "Do I look mad to you?"
"No." She folded her hands, gathered her composure. "No, you don't. You look vaguely annoyed that I'm in your way. I assumed you'd want me to come, that you'd want to be with me tonight."
"It's a nice thought, but don't you think this has run its course?"
"This?"
"You and me, sugar. We've taken this about as far as it's going to go." He tipped the beer back again, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Listen, you're a hell of a woman. I like you. I like your style, in bed and out. But we both know we've got to move on eventually."
She would breathe, she told herself. However tight the fist was around her heart, she would breathe, slow and easy. "I take that to mean you've decided to move on now."
"Some things came up when I was in L.A. Changed my plans. I like to be fair with a woman I've slept with, so I figured I should let you know I'm moving down there next week."
"You're moving to L.A.? But your house—"
"Never meant a damn to me." He jerked his shoulder. "Just a place. One's the same as the other."
One's the same as the other, she thought dully. One house. One woman. "Why did you come back at all?"
"I left my horses." He forced his lips into a grin.
"You went to Ali's recital. You brought her flowers."
"I told the kid I'd go. I don't make many promises, so I don't break the ones I do make." In this at least, he didn't have to improvise. "You've got terrific kids, Laura. I've liked getting to know them. And I wouldn't have let her down last night."
"If you go, they'll be devastated. They'll—"
"Get over it," he said, his voice roughening. "I'm just a guy who passed through."
"You can't believe that." She stepped toward him. "You can't believe you mean so little to them. They love you, Michael. I—"
"I'm not their father. Don't lay that guilt trip on me. I've got my own life to worry about."
"And that's it." She drew in another breath, but it wasn't slow, it wasn't easy. " 'See you around, it's been fun?' We meant nothing to you."
"Sure you did. Look, sugar, life's long. A lot of people walk through it. Both of us gave each other what we were looking for at the time."
"Just sex."
"Great sex." He smiled again. Then, because his reflexes were good, dodged by inches the bottle she picked up and heaved at him. Before he could recover from the shock of that, she was using her hands. Both of them shoved hard enough against his chest to knock him back two full steps. "Hey."
"How dare you! How dare you lower what we have, what I felt, to some animal urge? You son of a bitch, you think you can brush me off like an inconvenient speck of lint, then walk away?"
A lamp went next, and he could only watch, speechless, and duck, fast, when she threw whatever came to her hand at his head.
"You didn't think I'd cause a scene, did you?" She picked up an end table, toppled it. "Wrong. Finished with me, are you? Just like that." She snapped her fingers under his nose. "And I'm supposed to meekly walk away, sob into my pillow and say nothing?"
He backed up. "Something like that." So it wasn't going to be quick and clean, he decided, but messy. Nonetheless, it had to be done. "Break the place up if it makes you feel better. It's your stuff. I expect even royalty has to have its tantrums."
"Don't you speak to me that way, as if I were some interesting toy that's suddenly run amok. You came into my life, you exploded into my life and changed everything. Now you're just finished?"
"We've got nothing here and we both know it. It's just one of those times I saw it first."
She snatched up a bowl and sent it crashing through his kitchen window. Another time he might have been impressed with the force and velocity. And her aim. But at the moment he could only suffer.
"I ain't paying for the damages, sugar. And I never made you any promises, told you any lies. You kn
ew yourself what you were getting when you came looking for me. You wanted me to take the choice out of your hands. You wanted me to take you so you wouldn't have to say it. That's fact."
"I didn't know how to say it," she shot at him.
"Well, I did, and that was fine with both of us. You haven't got a choice here either. It's just done."
Her breath was heaving, shuddering as she tried to calm it. Temper—her temper—she knew, was horrible when unlocked. And when the key was turned with pain, so much the worse. "That's cruel, and it's cold."
Where the temper had missed its mark, the quiet words arrowed straight into his heart. "That's life."
"Just done." She let the tears come, they hardly mattered. "So that's how this sort of thing is accomplished.
You say it's just done, and it is. So much less complicated than divorce, which is the only way I've ended a relationship."
"I didn't cheat on you." He couldn't bear having her think that of him, or herself. "I never thought of another woman when I was with you. This has nothing to do with you. I've just got places to go."
"Nothing to do with me." She closed her eyes. The temper was gone now, quickly as always. Drained to exhaustion. "I never would have said you were a stupid man, Michael, or a shallow one. But if you can say that, you're both."
She lifted her hands, rubbed away the tears. She wanted to see him clearly, since it would be the last time. He was rough, wild, moody. He was, she thought, everything.
"I wonder that you don't even know what you're throwing away, what I would have given you. What you could have had with me, and Ali and Kayla."
"They're your kids." This was another hurt, just as deep, just as bloody. "Templetons. You wouldn't have given them to me."
"You're wrong, pathetically wrong. I already had." She walked to the door, opened it. "You do what you have to do and go where you have to go. But don't ever think it was just sex for me. I loved you. And the only thing more pitiful than that is that even as you turn me away like this, so carelessly, I still do."
Chapter Twenty
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Michael took a step forward, then stopped himself. She didn't know what she was saying. Couldn't know.
He forced himself to step back from the door, then turned and watched her walk away across the lawn. Continued to watch when she changed directions, broke into a run.
She'd go to the cliffs, he realized. She was angry and hurt, so she would go to the cliffs to finish crying. When she was finished she would think. She would stay angry and hurt for a while, and hate him longer than that, but he knew that eventually she would see it was for the best.
She wasn't in love with him. He scrubbed his hands over his face. It already felt raw and battered. Maybe she thought she was, or had talked herself into it, he decided. It was a knee-jerk female reaction, that was all. It fit a woman like Laura—sex and love, need and emotion. She wasn't seeing the big picture.
But he could.
Men who had lived as he had lived didn't end up happy ever after with women of her class, her breeding. Sooner or later she'd have come to the same conclusion, found herself drawn back to the country club style. Maybe she would never forgive him for seeing it first, but that couldn't be helped.
It would kill him to be with her and wait. To know that when the passion had dimmed she would still stay with him. She'd be kind. She couldn't be otherwise. But he would know when he had become just another obligation.
He was doing them both a favor by getting out of her life.
Josh was right. And no one knew him better.
But he continued to stand, staring out at the cliffs and the lone figure who stood there twisting the knife in his own heart. Finally he turned away and left the room that was as disrupted as his life to go down to his horses.
She hadn't known how completely a heart could shatter. She'd thought she knew. When her marriage had ended, Laura had been certain she would never grieve in quite the same way again.
She'd been right, she thought now and pressed both hands to the ache in her heart. This was different. This was worse.
Her feelings for Peter had eroded so slowly over the years that there had barely been any left by the time it was over. But this… she squeezed her eyes tight, and though the air was still and warm, she shuddered.
She'd never loved anyone the way she loved Michael. Wildly, outrageously. Brutally. And all those feelings were so fresh. So bright and new. She had treasured them. She'd treasured discovering that she could feel again, realizing she could want and be wanted as a woman. She'd admired what he was, what he'd made himself, and she had fallen as much in love with the rough and dangerous man as the kind and gentle one within.
Now he wanted it over, and there was nothing she could do. Crying didn't help, and her tears were already dry. Temper changed nothing, and she was already ashamed of the way she had snapped in front of him. He'd think her pitiful now, but that couldn't be helped either.
She stepped closer to the edge to watch the waves beat against rock. She felt that way, she mused. Battered by forces that were beyond her control, lapped in a violent, endless war with no choice but to stand.
It didn't help, it simply didn't help, to tell herself she wasn't alone. That she had her family, her children, her home, her work. Because she felt alone, completely alone, there on the edge of the world with only the thunder of the sea for company.
Even the birds were gone. No gulls cried today, none wheeled white toward the hard blue sky or dipped toward the spewing waves. She could see nothing but the rolling of the endless sea.
How could she accept it that she would never love this way again? Why was she expected to go on, to do everything that needed to be done, alone, always alone, and know that she would never turn in the night and find someone there who loved her?
Why had she been given this glimpse into what she could have and feel and want if it was only going to be taken away? And why was the one thing she had dreamed of all of her life always, always, just out of her reach?
She imagined that this was what Seraphina had felt as she stood here so many years before grieving the loss of her lover. Laura looked down, pictured that dizzying, somehow liberating plunge into space and the fierce, furious heart that had taken it.
Had she screamed as the rocks rushed up, Laura wondered, or had she strained to meet them?
Trembling, Laura took a step back. Seraphina had found nothing but an end, she thought, a horribly easy end to pain. Her own wouldn't be easy, because she would have to live with it. Live without Michael. And finally accept that she would live without her dream.
She barely noticed the rumble, took it at first for the sea's thrashing. The ground seemed to jitter under her feet. Blank for a moment, she stared down, watched pebbles dance. Then the roar filled her ears, and she knew.
Panicked, she tried to stumble back, away from the edge. The ground rolled, unbalancing her as she grabbed frantically for a rock. The wave of earth lifted her up and pushed her hard over the rim of the world.
The horses sensed it first. Eyes wheeling white, panicked whinnies. Michael reached up to calm the mare he was grooming. Then he felt it. The ground shuddered under him. He swore as the noise grew and horses plunged. Above his head came the sound of crashing glass, straining wood.
The freight train roar deafened him as he fought to keep his balance. Tack leapt off the walls and fell jangling on the shuddering brick.
He yanked stall doors open, focused on getting his horses out. In the wild confusion of the moment, one thought pierced like a lance.
Laura. My God. Laura.
He stumbled forward, fighting free when the earth tried to heave him back. He raced into the brilliant sunlight, ignoring the violent undulations of the tidy green lawn. When he was knocked flat, he clawed his way back up, skidded down the slope. No one would have heard him screaming her name as he ran toward the cliffs. He didn't hear it himself.
It lasted no more than two
minutes, that stretch and shift of the earth. All was still, preternaturally still, when he reached the cliffs.
She'd gone home, he told himself. She'd gone back to the house, was safe, secure. A little shaken perhaps, but a native Californian didn't panic at every trembler. He'd go check on things himself as soon as he… as soon as he made sure.
When he looked over the edge and saw her, his legs buckled. On a ledge fifteen feet below, inches away from oblivion, she lay white as death. One of her arms was flung out so that her hand dangled over that narrow bed of rock into space.
He wouldn't remember the climb down to her, the sharp bite of rock into his hands, the small, nasty avalanches of dirt and pebbles where his feet slid, the stinging slices as roots and rock tore viciously at his clothes and flesh.
Blind terror and instinct took him down fast where a single misstep, one incautious grip, would have sent him plunging. Cold sweat dripped into his eyes, skidded along his skin. He thought—was sure—she was dead.
But when he reached her he fought back the panic and fear and placed a trembling finger on the pulse in her throat. And it beat.
"Okay, okay." His hands trembled still as he brushed the hair from her cheeks. "It's all right, you're all right." He wanted to drag her up, hold her, rock her to him until this greasy sickness in his gut passed.
He knew better than to move her, even with thoughts of aftershocks spinning in his head. He knew he had to check the extent of her injuries before he risked shifting her.
Concussion, broken bones, internal injuries. Christ, paralysis. He couldn't get his breath and had to squeeze his eyes shut for a moment and force air in and out until he was calm. He made himself move slowly, carefully. Lifting her eyelids to check the pupils, gently moving his hands over her head, gritting his teeth at the blood that smeared on his fingers.
Her shoulder—she'd dislocated it, he realized as he probed. It would be screamingly painful when she woke. Dear God, he wanted her to open her eyes. His breath came fast and harsh as he continued to check her. No breaks—a lot of bruises and some bad cuts and scrapes, but nothing was broken.
