by Cara Colter
She saw how her initial assessment of the situation had been bang on: he needed to be busy right now.
And his initial assessment of her situation had also been correct: her house was a project that was too big for her to undertake.
“I am so grateful for your help,” she admitted.
He smiled and Kayla appreciated the slow unfolding of the new relationship between them. Even if she would have given in to the temptation, Bastigal had an intuitive sense of when the hum of electricity was growing too intense between them, and would become quite aggressive toward David.
His message was clear: I am the man of this house. But in a way it was a blessing that he was chaperoning them.
She had made the mistake of intimacy too quickly once before and the results had been disastrous.
If there was something here to be explored, she wanted to do it slowly, an unfolding of herself and of him.
Now she watched him out on her lawn. David was doing her lawn in sections, mostly because her lawn mower—which he had dubbed HAL Two—had, like the name suggested, a mind of its own.
It would roar to life, work for five or ten minutes and then sputter to a halt. From the first day, she had liked watching David fiddle with her cranky lawn mower.
Every time it broke down he would do the manly things required with such ease: checking the oil, turning it over and cleaning out underneath it. As she looked on he would run his finger along the blade and frown, but then apparently decide it was okay and flip it back up again.
Moments later the air would be filled with the sound of the mower once more. She had always liked that sound and the smell of fresh-mown grass.
Kayla had told herself to keep busy. She could look up the manual for her batch freezer on the internet after all! But there was no reason she could not do that from her perch on the deck.
So she ended up, day after day, taking the computer out on the deck, liking the feeling of being close to him, of covertly watching him work.
Seeing David—willingly working, liking to help out—was such a poignant counterpoint to the life that she had had and the choices she had made.
After watching David struggle through her jungle of a lawn until he was wiping the sweat from his brow, Kayla took pity on him and went in and made lemonade. She had it done by the time the lawn mower shut off, and she called him up from the yard.
He eyed her offering with pretended suspicion.
“This looks suspiciously like pee, too. Is it the Dandelion ice cream reincarnated?”
“No, but what a great idea! Fresh squeezed lemonade at More-moo.”
“You need to let me do some homework before you go any further on the More-moo thing.”
She went still. Oh, it felt so good to have someone offering to do things for her! But it was a weakness to like it so much, a challenge to her vow to be totally independent.
“Duh-veed,” she said, her tone teasing, “I can do my own homework.”
He lifted an eyebrow and put down his lemonade in one manly gulp. He handed her the empty glass. “I have people who do nothing else all day long. You should let them have a look at it.”
To refuse would be churlish, pure stupid pride. “I’d have to pay,” she decided.
“At least that would be a better investment than the batch freezer.”
“The ice cream eruption was just a minor glitch,” she said. “I can fix it. I’ve been on the internet looking at that model. The snap-down lid is missing, that’s all.”
“It’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, getting that contraption before you know about the ice cream parlor.”
“It was a good deal!”
He rolled his eyes but took the glass from her. He casually wiped the sweat off his brow. She refilled the glass and he took a long, appreciative swig.
There was something about the scene that was so domestic and so normal that she wanted to just stay here, in this sunny moment, forever.
His phone buzzed and he took it out of his pocket, frowned, read a message and put it back. “Could I tap into your internet for a few minutes? A video is coming through that I’d like to look at on my laptop instead of my phone.”
“Of course.”
He went and retrieved his laptop from where it was now stored on her kitchen counter. He sat outside on one of her deck chairs. He looked uncharacteristically lost.
Kayla refilled his lemonade one more time. “I hope you don’t get a splinter,” she said when he thanked her and settled more deeply into the chair.
He looked like he hadn’t even heard her.
“Because, Duh-veed, it would be very embarrassing for you if I had to pull a sliver out of your derriere.”
“That would be awful,” he agreed, but absently.
Suddenly, she was worried about him. He seemed oddly out of it since he had taken that phone call. Now he was scowling at his computer screen.
“Hey,” she said softly.
When he looked up he could not hide the stricken look on his face.
“David? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie,” she said.
“You’ve got to quit calling me a liar,” he said, but even that was a lie, because while the words were light, his tone sounded as if his heart was breaking.
She had never known a stronger man than him. Not ever. And so it was devastating to watch him turn his computer to her so she could see what he was looking at.
The strongest man she knew put his head in his hands, and she thought he was going to weep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
KAYLA TURNED HER ATTENTION to the screen to give David a moment to compose himself. It took her a minute to figure out what she was looking at. And then she knew. It was some kind of retirement home. Unbelievably posh, and yet...
“Oh, David,” she whispered.
“I have to put her name on a list. If they have an opening,” he said, his voice a croak, “I have to decide right away. I need to go meet with the director and look at the facility in person this afternoon. I’ll come back in the morning.”
“I’m going with you,” she said.
She could not leave him alone with the torment she saw in his face.
He looked at her as if he was going to protest. But then he didn’t.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
“I’ll go pack an overnight bag. And make arrangements for Bastigal to go to the kennel.”
And it wasn’t until she was in her room packing that bag that Kayla considered the implications of it. She sank down on the bed.
Life seemed, suddenly, to have been wrested from her grasp, to have all these totally unexpected twists and turns in it.
But there was something about making this decision to go with David that felt as if she had been lost in a forest and suddenly saw the way out.
She needed to be there for him. His need and his pain were so intense, and she needed to be there, to absorb some of that, to ease his burden.
Kayla realized there was the potential for pain here, tangling herself deeper in his world. And yet, she had to do it.
The word love whispered through her mind, but she chased it away. Now was not the time to study this complication.
Wasn’t it enough to know that something amazing was happening, and that it was happening to both of them?
She didn’t have to—or want to—put a label on it. She just wanted to sink into the sensation that they weren’t, either of them, as alone as they had been just a short time ago.
And she wanted to sink into the feeling of gratitude, that all the events of her life, even her difficult marriage—or maybe especially that—had prepared her for this, made her exactly the person she needed to be to rise t
o this challenge and more: embrace it.
* * *
David was so grateful that Kayla was there with him. It took his mind off what he was about to do. As they drove to Toronto she was the most pleasant of diversions—the way the wind caught in her hair with the top down, how childish she was in her wonder about the car, her lemony scent—what kind of ice cream stain was she trying to get rid of now?—tickling his nostrils.
He wanted to take her for lunch at a place he favored downtown, which was coincidentally close to the “retirement” home, but she took one look at his face and knew he was not up to even the rudiments of ordering a meal.
Instead she had him stop by a food truck, got out and ordered for both of them, and they sat in his car and ate.
“I’ll try not to spill, Duh-veed,” she said, but quickly saw he was not even up to teasing. She put out her hand and he took it, and it seemed after that he would never let go.
He left the car—she insisted he put the roof up, otherwise he was so distracted he might have left it down—and they walked to Graystone Manor. David knew from the video that it was a converted sandstone house that had belonged to a lumber baron at the turn of the century. It had a specialized wing for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.
The director, Mark Smithson, met them at the door. He was kind and soft-spoken, but nonetheless it reminded David of consulting with a funeral director over his father’s ceremony many years ago.
It was a beautiful facility. The rooms were like good hotel suites, the colors were warm and muted, the quality of the furniture and art was exquisite.
As Mr. Smithson talked about their programs for patients with all forms of dementia—people first, illness second, life maps and memory boxes, gardening and crafts—David knew he had come to the right place. He wondered if he should have made this decision long ago.
Still, it was with great sadness that he made the deposit and filled out the forms for his mother.
“We could have a vacancy very quickly,” Mr. Smithson warned him, kindly. “You will only have forty-eight hours to make up your mind.”
A vacancy. David realized his mother could come here when someone else died. He could not trust himself to speak.
Again he was aware of his hand in Kayla’s, and that that alone was giving him the strength to do the unthinkable and unspeakable.
When they left, she remained silent. She did not try to reassure him, or comment on the visit.
Fifteen minutes later, Kayla led him past the uniformed doorman into the lobby of his building. David felt as if he were the Alzheimer’s patient, dazed and disoriented.
His condo was Yorkton—arguably Toronto’s most affluent neighborhood—at its finest. His company had bought an aging hotel and completely gutted and refurbished it into condos. The lobby, with its Swarovski crystal chandelier, artfully distressed leather furniture and authentic Turkish rugs, could easily compete with the best five-star hotels in the world.
Each condo took up an entire floor of the building; their size was part of the reason they had commanded the highest prices ever paid in Yorkton for real estate.
The elevator, using the latest technology, was programmed to accept his fingerprint. He touched the panel and it began to glide upward to his penthouse.
“But what about company?” Kayla asked, her voice hushed as if she was in a church.
“I can give them a code.”
“Oh.” She seemed subdued. As the elevator doors whispered open, Kayla looked like a deer frozen in headlights. Her eyes went very wide and David saw his living space through her perspective.
“This is like a movie set,” Kayla said.
“Feel free to look around,” he invited.
Kayla glanced at him and then moved into his space, her mouth a little round O of astonishment and awe.
The space the elevator opened onto was large and open. The original plank flooring had been restored to distressed glory, stained dark, and it ran throughout.
Low-backed and sleek, two ten-foot white leather sofas, centered on a hand-knotted carpet from Tajikistan, faced each other over a custom-made coffee table, the glass top engineered around a base of a gnarled chunk of California Redwood.
Floor-to-ceiling windows—the window coverings could darken the room by remote control if needed—showed the skyline of Toronto, lights beginning to wink on as dusk fell.
Outside the windows was a generous deck with invisible glass rails. There was a good-sized pool—for a private pool in a condo, anyway—the infinity edge making it seem like the water cascaded off into the city lights. The pool lights on sensors were just beginning to come on, turning the water into a huge turquoise jewel.
The kitchen, open to the living room but separated from it by an island with a massive gray-veined granite countertop, was as sleek and modern as his living room furniture.
“Copper?” she said of the double ovens mounted into the cabinetry. “I’ve never even heard of that.”
“Everybody has stainless,” he said.
“Not me,” she shot back. “Where’s your fridge?”
He moved by her and showed her how the fridge and dishwasher were blended into the cabinetry, artfully hidden behind panels.
“I don’t think a fridge like this should be hidden, necessarily,” she decided after a moment.
She stared at the built-in espresso maker— also copper—then turned to inspect the copper-topped, eight-burner gas range. She tentatively pushed a button and the range fan silently appeared out of the granite.
“Wow,” she murmured. “HAL Three.”
He smiled despite himself, glad for the distraction, taking pleasure in her awe of his space. And yet as she looked around in amazement it occurred to him that in the short time he had been in Blossom Valley, her house, with all its unpacked boxes and its old yellow kitchen, felt more like home than this.
This was a space made for entertaining, personally, occasionally. Mostly professionally. The space was designed to impress and it did just that.
She looked at the wine cooler—copper—a dual-zone with French doors.
“How many bottles does that hold?”
“Forty-eight.”
“Do you want a drink?” she asked.
He shook his head, “I think that is the last thing I need right now.”
She looked so relieved that that was not how he dealt with stress, and he got another hint of what it must have been like with Kevin.
He reminded himself that it was her turn to be happy.
She moved out of the kitchen. When he had designed the condo he had loved it; that by necessity, the windows were only on one wall.
That meant all the rest of the walls, soaring to fifteen feet in height, could be used to display art. Systems of invisible wires, not unlike clotheslines except tauter, displayed dozens of canvasses that he could switch out at any time for others that he kept in a museum-quality storage facility.
“I don’t know anything about art,” she finally said, “But I stand in amazement. You don’t have to understand it. You can feel it.”
It pleased him that she got it so completely. For a moment a future shimmered before him, the two of them on that couch, sipping wine and...
He made himself stop.
“If you’re into a quiet evening in, I’ll order us a great dinner,” he offered. It occurred to him that Kayla was the only woman he had ever said that to, where he didn’t have an agenda.
* * *
She crossed over to him and put her hand on his arm. “Right now,” she told him sternly, “you do not need to look after me. You need to look after you. What do you need to do for you?”
“I need to swim,” he said, nodding toward the pool. “I need to swim and swim and swim. I hope you’ll come with me. There’s a hot tub, too
.”
“I didn’t bring a suit.”
“I keep a supply of them for visitors in the guest suite.”
“Ah.” She said this a little sadly, as if she was figuring out she did not belong in his world.
And yet the truth for him? His apartment had never felt as much like home as it did with her looking through his kitchen.
“Will you swim with me?”
For a moment she looked as though she was going to bolt for the door. But then she drew in a deep breath and nodded solemnly.
“I’ll show you the guest suite,” he said. “Suits are in the top drawer, left hand side, in the closet.”
* * *
Kayla heard the door of the guest suite whisper shut behind her. She looked around at the opulence, almost shocked by it.
There were in here, as elsewhere, floor-to-ceiling windows. The same beautiful, dark, aged hardwood ran throughout.
An antique four-poster bed, centered on a deep area carpet and beautifully made up with modern-patterned bedding that contrasted the age of the bed, looked incredibly inviting.
It was a walk-in closet with built-in shelves and drawers and hangers. She went to the top drawer on the left and found a huge selection of bathing suits, all brand-new and all sizes, from children’s to men’s.
Somehow it was a relief that he didn’t just entertain women here!
Tempted as she was to snoop through the other drawers, Kayla chose several suits that might fit her and went into the bathroom.
Again, she was nearly shocked by the opulence. There was a fireplace! In the guest bathroom! A beautiful painting hung above it. There were dove-gray marble floor tiles, honed, instead of polished. Despite the fireplace, the focal point of the room was definitely an egg-shaped, stand-alone soaker tub. Two lush and obviously brand-new white robes hung from hooks. Towels, plush and plump, also pure white, were rolled into a basket by the tub.
Kayla tried on three of the suits, feeling just a bit like Goldilocks. The first one was too skimpy, the next one was too frumpy and the third one was just right.
Darkness had fallen almost completely when, wrapped in one of the housecoats, she slid open the door of her suite that went directly onto the patio.
