“You haven’t inflicted anything on me. I’m honored that you shared that confidence with me. You’ve listened patiently enough to my problems. I’m afraid we’ve both learned a lot more than either of us ever wanted to know about the pain of loss, the pain of rejection.”
He didn’t say, as he might have, that his pain was worse, that he’d done nothing to earn his rejection, as she had.
Why had she ever thought David Reid cold and withdrawn? It was a wonder he was able to function at all after what he’d been through.
“We have more than that in common, David. I berated you for withdrawing into your own closed little world, but just now I realized that in a way I did the same thing. I closed up when I found out what Tommy was doing. It’s true that my workload at the time was crushing. But to some extent I used that as an excuse not to deal with a situation I felt was beyond me. I was scared. I didn’t know how to handle it. I thought if I threatened to leave him, Tommy would come to his senses and quit the drugs. He didn’t.”
Her voice dropped. “The hurt was awful. I still feel like the survivor of a loved one’s suicide. I should have found some way to save him. Instead I failed him badly.”
She was looking down at her hand and twisting her engagement ring on her finger. It startled her when she felt the welcome warmth of David’s hand on her cheek. He gently turned her face to his.
“You didn’t fail. Tommy did.”
She tried to ignore how his touch turned her insides to warm jelly, and hoped that he couldn’t feel her tremble.
“I did fail. By the time I lost track of him, he was using heroin. That so frightened and confused me that I gave up on him much too soon. Maybe if I’d pulled out of my residency and moved to New York to be with him, it might have made a difference.”
David drew his fingers away. She resisted the urge to grab his hand and put it back on her face where it felt so good.
“Most likely it would have made no difference whatever. For a smart lady you suffer from a major blind spot. You can’t live another person’s life for them. It simply can’t be done. Each of us is responsible for ourselves. It’s not only patronizing to think otherwise, it’s useless.”
“It’s not that I’m trying to lead Tommy’s life for him,” she protested. “It’s just that I feel I owe him this. He never said in so many words that he was breaking our engagement. Neither did I. After your experience with your wife, I’d expect you to appreciate that simple loyalty to another person counts for something.”
“It counts for a great deal. SEALs have the bedrock of team loyalty to count on. We bet our lives on that loyalty. It saved my life in South America. A buddy came back and got me out of there at risk to his own life. If he hadn’t shown me that kind of loyalty, I wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
He turned his face away. “You might as well know, too, that for a long time I didn’t thank him for that. In fact, at one point, I even thought about—” He gave a short, quick shake of his head. “Never mind.”
She went cold. If those chilling words meant what she thought they meant, David’s retiring to his mountain retreat had been a positive choice rather than a negative one. He’d been dealing with his physical and psychological problems as best he could, yet she’d castigated him for it. His bout of ill temper back at the mountain house was now a lot more understandable.
The implications of what he’d said a moment earlier finally struck her.
“South America? You almost lost your life in South America? Oh, Lord, David. Not in Colombia? Tell me that didn’t happen in Colombia.”
His nonresponse spoke louder than words.
“It did.” She flopped back in her seat in dismay and closed her eyes. “Of course, it did. I should have realized that from the way you looked when Baker mentioned Colombia.” Willing her eyes not to mist up, she turned to him. “And now I’ve forced you to return to a place you probably never wanted to see again. Oh, David. I wish you’d told me.”
“You knowing it wouldn’t have made any difference. Coming with you was my choice.”
“But I —”
“Drop it. It was about time that I made a conscious choice about something other than myself. As for your unusual loyalty to Tommy, Cara, frankly I don’t believe it stems from true, undying love. I think you’re really doing all this for yourself more than him. At bottom this search is a way to salve your conscience for what you see as letting the guy down in the first place. I’m surprised that a woman as intelligent as you are can’t see that.”
Cara drew in a quick breath.
She couldn’t deny it. Guilt rode her like a fiend. “I do feel guilty for having failed him. And it’s true that I find that guilt very hard to live with.”
David Reid was more astute than he knew. He’d seen through a secret she’d never told anyone. Never had the courage to admit even to herself for a long time. She’d so concentrated on what Tommy had done to her, how he’d hurt her, that it had taken her a while to recognize how unfair she’d been to him.
David shrugged. “I still don’t see why you should feel so damn guilty. And how come you’ve got the job of finding him all by yourself? Doesn’t the guy have any family?”
“His parents are divorced. When I met him he was living with his mother and her new husband, and he didn’t get along too well with his stepfather. They were pretty cold when they learned about the drugs.”
“I suppose if it means that much to you, then maybe you’re doing the right thing after all. For your sake, I hope that all this will help you dump that useless load of remorse you’re carrying around.”
She wondered if there was any personal caring whatever behind his words. But why should there be? He wasn’t doing all this for her. As he’d said, he was helping her simply because Mr. Elliott had asked him to. That reminder always brought a strange tightness to her chest.
“I think I’ll close my eyes for a few minutes,” she said, as the flight attendant took their cups away. She didn’t feel much like talking anymore anyway. She pushed her pillow between the seat and the window and rested her head on it.
David looked over at Cara dozing against the pillow, and shook his head in wonder. She was for real, this lovely, graceful woman. These few engaging days with her had convinced him of that.
What he wouldn’t have given to have received just a fraction of the loyalty she offered to a man to whom she was merely engaged. He’d received none at all from a wife of three years. A wife who had elaborately taken him for better or worse in the august presence of Richmond high society.
He’d never met anyone who presented such an intriguing mix of cool professionalism and emotional sensitivity as did Cara Merrill. They’d given him a medal or two for heroism under fire, but he hadn’t one-tenth the bravery she had when it came to laying herself open to her feelings, and acting on them.
Maybe because he’d been out of practice in handling close association with a woman for such a long time, some of that emotional openness of hers was starting to rub off on him. He couldn’t believe he’d actually told her about that last horrible scene with Anita. The still-hurtful confession just seemed to burst out of its own accord. He’d never breathed a word of it to anyone else. Hell, a wife’s total rejection wasn’t something a man was eager to admit.
The shock of Anita’s blistering reaction had shoved him headfirst into hard reality. Lying in the hospital, he’d managed to convince himself that he’d ultimately come through his ordeal little changed from the man he’d been. The wounds would heal, he told himself, maybe leaving an intriguing scar or two. Perhaps that very self-delusion helped keep him alive. The gut-wrenching moment he realized it wasn’t going to happen was the moment he began his slide into despair. A despair capped by his wife’s desertion.
The scene remained as searingly vivid in his mind as if it had happened yesterday. They’d decided—actually Anita had decided—so as to allow him to rest properly during the night, that he should sleep for a time in the guest
room. When he hobbled into their bedroom on his crutches, he’d been seeking the comfort of her arms rather than sex.
The look on her face when she’d turned and seen him was branded deep into his memory. Complete disgust twisted her pretty features. She slapped a hand to her mouth and rushed to the bathroom.
While he stood there stunned, listening to the mortifying sounds from the bathroom, his reflection in the mirrored closet doors showed him exactly what his wife had seen. No wonder the sight of him had sickened her. A hollow-eyed man he could hardly recognize stared back at him. A man hanging between metal crutches like some loathsome living scarecrow. A frightening number of jagged red scars, stitched through with ragged lines of black thread, slashed down almost the entire left side of his painfully naked body.
After that, it had taken a very long time for him to screw up the courage to see any woman other than his grandmother and the nursing professionals.
Why the hell he hadn’t brought out his big guns to send Cara packing right there on the dock almost a week ago, he still didn’t understand. All he had to do was climb out of the water and stand in front of her. The ugly sight of him would have done it.
Or maybe not. She was a doctor. Maybe she would have calmly inspected his scars and offered the same coolly clinical comments the others did. No big improvement over her taking to her heels.
Restless, she shifted in her seat beside him and turned to drop her head against his shoulder. He looked down at the gentle rise and fall of the soft mounds of her breasts, and smiled. Never slept on planes, huh? She was out like a light, completely oblivious to the fact that she’d snaked her hand under his arm.
The perfume of her hair teased him. The nearness of her sent a soft prickle of want over him, just as it had been doing every time he saw her. A want that both gladdened and tormented him. A want he wasn’t ready to test. Not with this particular woman. Not after that humiliating experience in the darkened hotel room with the woman who’d been coming on to him for years, always unsuccessfully until that night.
Even thinking about what happened to him then—or rather what didn’t happen — made him cringe. From that day to this, he’d allowed no woman to touch him except in the most distanced of terms. Except for Cara. No way in the world could even the lightest of her touches be called distanced. When she’d fondled his thigh earlier, he was afraid he might actually whimper in pleasure.
And as unlikely as it seemed, he couldn’t deny that many of the thoughts about her sparking through his mind the past few days were definitely of the carnal variety.
She made a little mewling sound of distress in her sleep. Probably some unhappy dream about her fiancé. He stroked his hand gently down the side of her head and she stopped. Her commitment to the worthless Grant left her so vulnerable. He didn’t know what they’d find in Colombia, but it wasn’t likely to be anything good.
He pushed away the rush of sympathy for her that came over him. He didn’t want to feel anything for her. He’d never been a man to move in on another man’s woman. Certainly not after being on the receiving end of that game.
Still, Cara Merrill was the kind of woman he’d wanted once upon a time. The kind he thought he’d found until real life made mincemeat of that hope.
His body was shot to hell, but his head still worked. He knew damn well that this wasn’t a woman a man should become involved with unless he was on for heavy talk about commitment. A subject he wasn’t willing to think about, let alone discuss.
Why did she set all his hard-won promises to himself to shifting like grains of sand? He’d already made his decision on women. Except in the most impersonal terms, they weren’t to be a part of his life. The price was too high.
He could do it, he told himself one more time. He’d already done it for almost two years.
Chapter 5
The Spanish conquistadors came to the area of Bogota in search of El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold. They found that those mythical treasures didn’t exist. Present day Colombia found its fortune mainly in coffee, emeralds and flowers. Its most infamous export—cocaine—brought the country to the attention of most Americans and to the world.
David had already informed her that Colombia wasn’t the tropical jungle country she’d expected. Parts of it still held miles of steamy uncharted rain forest, but Bogota was built on a high plateau ringed by a ridge of the Andes. At eight thousand feet, the temperature usually ranged in the comfortable sixties. Within minutes of walking out the door of El Dorado Airport, she had to work harder to drag enough of the thin mountain air into her lungs.
He could never have prepared her for her first shocking sight of horrifying third-world poverty in the sprawling, squalid slum thrown up near the airport. On the edge of the barrio loomed a mountain of trash. People, many of them children, scuttled over the heap like a horde of miners digging for gold.
“They’re scavenging for recyclable material to sell,” David told her.
Beyond the soul-searing territory of the desperately poor rose the domain of the comfortable: a large cluster of modern apartments and office towers.
Jammed in among the traffic chaos of cars, trucks, long streams of busetas, and other traffic, their taxi was going nowhere fast.
A small arm jutted through the open window. The ragged child the arm belonged to was so young he—or maybe she — could barely peer in over the edge of the door. The little one’s face was filthy, black hair matted into clumps.
The driver’s shouted curse didn’t faze the tiny beggar. David reached across Cara and pressed a two thousand peso note, less than two dollars American, into the little hand. She quickly did the same. The small creature scampered off to the car behind them.
Cara twisted in her seat to watch the tyke. “He’s just a baby, David. We’ve got to do something for him.”
“We’ve already done the only thing we can do. The money we gave the kid means that he’ll eat today. Believe me, Cara, we’ll have plenty of opportunity to do the same thing every day we’re here. There are hundreds, thousands of these street kids in the cities. Begging and scavenging is the only way they can survive.”
The little boy disappeared into the traffic.
“It hurts to see it, David.”
He covered her hand with his.
“It hurts. But it doesn’t take long in a place like this to realize that you can’t save the world single-handed.”
That didn’t stop her from wishing she could wave a magic wand and give the little one—all the little ones—a decent life.
Impatient drivers unleashed a deafening crescendo of car horns. David cranked his window closed, and so did she. The wrathful outburst apparently blew away whatever obstruction had been holding them up. Their cab crawled ahead.
“Tomorrow I’ll show you the old colonial Bogota,” David said. “You’ll like it.”
“I don’t want to waste time sight-seeing. I’m not here as a tourist. I want to get on Tommy’s trail as soon as possible. We’ll start this evening.”
“We will not. You’ve got to give yourself time to adjust to the altitude. Take it easy for the first day or so, or you could find yourself laid up with soroche, altitude sickness. And as far as the rest of the world is concerned, you are here simply as a tourist. So am I. We don’t want to get the police or anyone else interested in us. We’re just a couple of harmless turistas in town to view their spectacular collection of pre-Columbian artifacts and pick up some emerald jewelry. While we’re here, we thought we’d try to look up a friend we heard might be in Bogota.”
David’s background in the military might be leading him to be overcautious, but she wasn’t up for debating the point. He seemed to win most of their arguments. Even when she was convinced she had logic on her side, it usually felt as if he were the one who was right about their difference of opinion.
He’d booked rooms for them in a large luxury hotel belonging to a well-known American chain. She was too keyed up to follow his suggestion that she tak
e it easy for the rest of the day. She didn’t like to admit that she might be feeling antsy because she hadn’t seen David for a couple of hours and came close to missing him. They’d spent so much time together these past few days, it didn’t feel quite right to be separated from him.
She felt a little guilty about ringing his suite. He picked up the receiver on the first ring, though, so he couldn’t have been resting, even though he’d ordered her to do that.
“I want to get started,” she told him. “Surely it won’t do any harm to go out for a stroll around the area while we decide how we’re going to go about our search.”
“I didn’t expect to have much luck keeping you quiet in your room for any length of time. I’ll meet you down in the lobby.”
She had mixed feelings about the gun-toting, security guards ambling around the pleasant tree-lined avenue holding restaurants and upscale shops. That the intimidating guards were necessary at all only made her wonder what she was being protected against.
They skipped an elegant French restaurant for a café that served a traditional Colombian specialty, a bowl of thick, creamy chicken soup with vegetables.
“After what happened with Baker,” Cara said, “I suppose there’s no point in hiring another detective here.”
“No. I don’t think we should chance it.”
“Tommy may have gotten a job in some kind of medical capacity at a hospital or a clinic,” she suggested. “He might even be practicing as a doctor somewhere, although he has no right to do that. I think our first step should be to contact the local medical associations and hospitals for any word of him.”
David agreed. “As a physician yourself, Cara, you should be the one to do that. They’ll probably open up to you quicker than they would me. You’d better see them in person, rather than talk to them by phone, so that you can show Grant’s photograph around.”
“Among medical professionals, I should find some who speak English.”
Unbroken Vows Page 7
