by Cindy Dees
Rachel stared at him. After everything they’d shared last night, after all the intimacy and honesty and heartfelt sharing, he could still say that? Tearing pain bubbled up from somewhere deep inside her. But along with it came a generous measure of anger.
“Speaking of this supposed betrayal, I had a rather enlightening conversation with your brother yesterday before the tornado.”
“With Damien?” Finn asked.
She nodded, her fury gathering a head of steam. “I went out to the ranch to confront you. But you weren’t there. I cornered your brother in the barn and forced him to tell me why you dumped me the night of prom.”
Finn’s eyes went dark. Closed. Angry. “Surely you knew I’d react like that when I found out. You knew how much I cared about you. Hell, I was planning to ask you to marry me.”
Something sick rolled through her. Oh, God. He had been planning to propose. They could’ve had it all. All those years of blissful happiness and sharing life’s joys and sorrows…
“Here’s a news flash for you, big guy. Maisie was wrong.”
He stared at her blankly. Finally he said in a strangled voice, “I beg your pardon?”
She couldn’t stay in bed with him any longer. She had to get away from him. To get dressed. Cover herself and her pain from him. It was too raw like this. She rolled away from him and, horribly self-conscious all of a sudden, reached into her closet for a robe. She flung it about herself and knotted the belt jerkily. When she turned around, Finn was sitting on the side of the bed, a quilt thankfully pulled across his lap.
“Would you care to explain exactly how Maisie was wrong?” he repeated tightly.
Rachel jammed her hands into the robe’s pockets, her hands tightly fisted. “I was at a pregnancy counseling center in Bozeman the morning of prom. But not to have an abortion. My mom had just been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and I was there to have genetic testing done to see if I had inherited the gene or not.”
Finn was staring at her as if he didn’t comprehend a word she’d said.
She continued doggedly. “I was not pregnant. Heck, I’d never had sex.” She turned and paced the length of her bedroom and back. “You know what’s really ironic? I had decided that I was ready to make love with you. That I wanted you to be my first and only.”
Finn sat completely still. He might as well have been a marble statue for all the reaction he was showing to her revelations.
She flung a hand at the bed. “I knew it would be like that between us. And I wasn’t wrong, was I? We were made for each other. But you had to go and believe a lie. Why didn’t you at least give me a chance to defend myself? If you had bothered to ask me about it, I would’ve told you. The only reason I was in Bozeman having that stupid test done was because I wanted to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you, but I was afraid that I might get Alzheimer’s at age forty like my mom did.” She paced another lap of the room before adding, “And I loved you too much to saddle you with a burden like that.”
Still, Finn said nothing. She paused to glance at him on the next lap, and he looked pale, maybe a little ill, even.
He mumbled, “She’d bought a digital camera that day. She used it to take a picture of you in the clinic. She showed it to me,” he finally said. He sounded almost…confused.
“Maisie? I’m sure she did. She’s quite the interfering bitch, you know. And I was, indeed, at that clinic. For blood testing. Finn, I was a virgin. I never slept with any other guy, and I bloody well wasn’t pregnant. Besides, I would never have had an abortion—and certainly not without talking to you about it, your child or not. I love kids. How could you have thought any of that of me? I loved you.”
He opened his mouth to speak twice but closed it both times.
She couldn’t take it anymore. She was going to shatter into a million pieces, and she darned well wasn’t going to do that in front of him. Not after what they’d shared last night. Not after finally knowing the true measure of just what they could’ve had. Sleeping with Finn Colton had been the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her entire life. Now she would have to live out her remaining years knowing what he’d cost them. It had been so much better merely wondering what it could’ve been like between them. At least then she’d had the comfort of the possibility that they wouldn’t have suited one another at all.
She turned on the shower and was thrilled to feel hot water coming out of the tap. The power had come back on sometime in the night, apparently. She stepped under the pounding stream of water. And as she scrubbed the feel and taste and smell of Finn off her skin, she cried her heart out.
The water was starting to go tepid when she finally turned off the shower and stepped out onto the cold tile floor. Shivering, she dried quickly and jumped into the clothes she’d had the foresight to grab before she’d retreated in there.
She opened the bathroom door. Her bedroom was empty. Finn was gone. Her bedroom, her house, her life was the back the way it had been before last night’s crazy magic. Some of the light went out of the bright morning, and the colors of her grandmother’s quilt seemed a little duller.
The sense of loss within her was every bit as heavy and suffocating as the day her father had died. Something inside her shut down. Grief. She knew how to do that. One foot in front of the next. Make lists. Force herself to do each thing on the list. Sleep. Eat now and then. And eventually, after a very long time, the pain would begin to ease. A little. But maybe not in this case.
First, she had to take a step. Kitchen. She’d go in there. Make herself something tasteless to choke down. Feed Brown—
A new wave of grief and loss slammed into her. Her dog was gone, too. Her desire to do something nice for Brownie had backfired, and his pleasant afternoon on a sunny porch had turned into a disaster. She seemed to have a knack for doing that with the men in her life, apparently.
She turned the corner into the kitchen and stopped, startled. Finn was there. Cooking something on her stove.
“Scrambled eggs okay?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?” she asked blankly.
“We’re not done talking.”
She frowned. “Yes. We are.”
“I haven’t apologized yet. I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to apologize adequately for being such a colossal idiot, but I’d like to give it a try.”
She sat down at the kitchen table. “It’s not as simple as an apology, Finn.”
“Okay, so I’ll have to find a way to make it up to you.”
Pain rippled through her almost too intense to stand. As it was, she had trouble breathing around it. He took the eggs off the stove and shoveled them onto plates beside slices of toast. He set them down and slid into the chair across from her.
“I’ve just found you, Rachel. I don’t plan to lose you again.”
She closed her eyes in agony. She couldn’t believe she was going to say what she was about to. But for the first time in her life, she knew what she had to do about Finn Colton. “Finn, you never had me to lose. Last night was an anomaly. You and I both know it. It doesn’t change anything.”
Something dark flickered through his gaze, but he answered steadily, “I disagree. I was wrong to break up with you at prom. You never betrayed me. If I got into a relationship with you now, I could trust you. Don’t you see? That changes everything.”
It was a struggle to keep her voice even, but she did her best. “Maybe that changes things for you. But not for me. The fact remains that you were all too willing to believe the worst of me. You never gave me a chance to explain myself. You judged me without ever hearing me out. And I have a problem with that. You didn’t trust me or our love. And I have a bigger problem with that.”
Finn stared at her incredulously. “So what was last night, then? Revenge sex? You knew you were going to rip my heart out and shred it this morning, so you jumped into the sack with me to make sure the destruction was complete?”
“There you go again,” she said m
iserably. “Making assumptions about me. If you really think I’m capable of such cruelty, then clearly we have no business being together.”
He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. Then he said more calmly, “You’re right. I apologize. But please understand, this has been an incredibly stressful morning for me. I tend to lash out when I’m this confused and upset and angry at myself. It’s one of my worst flaws.”
She almost wished he would shout and rant and lose his temper. This tightly controlled, polite version of Finn was painful to see. It was all so civilized, and yet her world was crumbling all around her.
She took a wobbly breath. “I’m sorry, too, Finn. But I just don’t see how it could work between us. I’ve spent most of the last fifteen years hating myself for driving you away from me, even though I didn’t have the faintest idea what I’d done wrong. And then I found out yesterday that I hadn’t done anything wrong at all. And I realized that I had been far too willing to believe the worst of myself. How can I expect anyone else to love me, or for me to love anyone else in a healthy way, if I can’t love myself?”
“So that’s it?” he murmured. “It’s over?”
She couldn’t bring herself to say the words. She looked down at her hands, clenched tightly in her lap, and nodded. His chair scraped. She felt him stand up, towering over her, but she couldn’t look up at him. Her eyes were filling up fast with tears, and they’d spill over if she moved a millimeter.
“I’m sorry, Rachel. For last night. For everything.
Goodbye.”
And then he was gone.
Chapter 13
Rachel stepped out onto her back porch to see if Brownie had come back for his breakfast like Finn had predicted. But the food in the bowl was untouched and his bed of blankets wasn’t disturbed. And that was when the last spark of light in her world went out.
She visited her mother after breakfast because it was on the list of things to force herself to do today. Her mom was agitated and upset after the tornado, and for a little while, Rachel was glad of the wet blanket of grief smothering her emotions. Otherwise, the visit would have been deeply upsetting.
She got to Walsh Enterprises a little before lunch to find the place in an uproar. Although the tornado hadn’t hit the Walsh building, the hail and flying debris had knocked out a row of windows on the third floor. The accompanying rain had caused a fair bit of water damage on the second floor where she worked. As she picked her way past the mess and the cleanup effort, she was vaguely relieved that her cubicle was on the other side of the floor.
Until she reached her desk. Or rather the remains of her desk. A massive steel pipe lay diagonally across a pile of kindling and plastic that had once been her desk and chair.
“What happened here?” Rachel gasped at the man examining the wreckage. “Who are you?”
“Roger Thornton. Building inspector in Bozeman. Got sent here by the county to help check out structures in town. Make sure they’re safe.”
“Well, that doesn’t look very safe to me,” she said in dismay as she edged into her office and peered up into the dark cavern of the ceiling space overhead.
“I’ve never seen a plumbing main come down like this. Should’ve been bolted to the ceiling with steel bands. But it looks like they were never installed or were removed for some reason.”
“You mean the tornado didn’t do this?” she asked, aghast.
He shrugged. “Seems like it’s gotta be the twister. But I just don’t see how. Good thing you weren’t sitting at your desk when it came down. Thing would’ve killed ya if it landed on yer head.”
She stared at the pipe, horrified. “When did it fall?”
“Folks say it came down about an hour ago. I got here a few minutes ago.”
An hour ago? Had she not swung by to visit her mother first, she’d have been sitting at her desk when that pipe fell. She stared in renewed horror at her mangled chair. “Have you called the police?” she demanded.
“Why? It’s a structural failure caused by the tornado. It’s Walsh’s insurance company somebody oughta call.”
Rachel nodded warily. She might have argued with him that he shouldn’t rule out foul play so quickly, but Lester Atkins spoke from behind her, startling her. “Rachel. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? It’s going to take the cleanup crew a while to clear this out. You do have most of your work stored in a backup file or hard drive of some kind, don’t you?”
“Uhh, yes. I’ve got it all in my briefcase.”
He glanced at the case she clutched in her hand. “Perfect. Go home. We’ll see you tomorrow when we’ve got you a new desk and computer set up.”
She wasn’t about to argue with the uncharacteristic kindness from the man. But the idea of going to her lonely home and its painful memories was too much for her. She went over to the senior citizens’ center and spent the afternoon helping with the cleanup there. After eating a tasteless dinner, she went out and wandered the streets of her neighborhood, looking fruitlessly for a brindled brown dog with a limp.
Over the next few days, life went nominally back to normal. She got her new desk and computer and started working on the payroll audits Lester had assigned her to. She had to finish the Walsh Oil Drilling audit in her evenings at home. But that was just as well. It gave her something to do besides stare at her walls and slowly go crazy. The final tally for all the embezzled funds over fifteen years ran to in excess of ten million dollars. Mark Walsh must have lived nicely off of all that money.
She printed off a final copy of her report and put it in her briefcase. At lunchtime, she left the building and headed for the sheriff’s office. She parked down the street and took a careful look in the parking lot beside the building to make sure Finn’s truck wasn’t there before she got out of the rental car her insurance company had provided her until she could buy a new car. When she was going to find the time or energy to head up to Bozeman and take care of that, she had no idea. She’d put it on her list of things to make herself do soon.
She stepped into the sheriff’s office to the tinkle of the bell over the door.
“Hi, Rachel. How are you doing?” Wes asked warmly as he came out of his office.
She shrugged, dodging his question. It was easier than trying to lie about being just fine, thank you. “I’ve got the complete, revised Walsh Oil Drilling financial report. I thought you might want a copy.” She held the thick file out to him.
He took it and laid it on the counter. “Thanks.” He studied her closely enough that she had to restrain an urge to squirm.
“Any word on who might belong to that signature?” she asked in a blatant effort to distract him.
“The State of California claims it can’t find the Hidden Pines incorporation documents. I’m going to hire a private investigator to look into it. He might contact you, and I’d appreciate it if you could give him any help you can.”
“Of course,” she replied. She probably ought to say something chatty along the lines of how strange the weather had been, but she just didn’t have the energy for it.
She started to turn to leave, but Wes reached out and touched her arm. “Rachel. How are you really doing?” She frowned.
Wes continued, “I wouldn’t have sent Finn over to your place if I’d known how much it would upset you.”
Oh, Lord. What had Finn told his brother about their torrid night together or their disastrous argument the next morning?
“For what it’s worth, he’s a wreck,” Wes commented.
Vague sorrow registered in her heart that Finn was hurting. She couldn’t find it in herself to wish this sort of misery on anyone.
“Is there anything I can tell him for you?” Wes pressed.
She blinked, momentarily startled out of the fog that enveloped her life. “Uhh, no. No message.”
“Don’t be a stranger, Rachel. If you ever need anything, or you need to talk…”
She glanced up at him, surprised.
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He shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “Just take care of yourself, okay?”
“I will.” She left the office, bemused. What was that all about? Was Wes feeling that guilty about throwing her and Finn together, or was there more to it than that? What was going on with Finn?
She knew from the grapevine at Walsh Enterprises that Finn was still in town caring for Craig Warner, who was improving slowly. Apparently, no one but Jolene Walsh was allowed in to see Craig yet, though. Rachel certainly wanted the best care for her boss, but she couldn’t help counting the days until Craig left the hospital and Finn left Honey Creek.
She’d done the right thing, darn it. She had to learn to like herself. To come to terms with the fact that she hadn’t done anything wrong all those years ago. It was a lot to absorb. She was going to be mature, darn it.
A few days more after her disastrous night with Finn, the fog enveloping her was interrupted once more by Lester Atkins calling her into his office, which was actually Craig’s office, which Lester had appropriated while his boss was out sick.
“Rachel, you didn’t get Jolene’s signature on those documents, like I asked. You’ve interfered with a very important business deal.”
Fear blossomed in her gut and the usual litany started in the back of her head. She couldn’t lose this job. She couldn’t lose this job….
“I’m sorry, Mr. Atkins. Jolene was too busy signing medical release forms for treatments for Mr. Warner to look at the papers. She said she’d take a look at them later, when Mr. Warner was out of danger.”
She thought Atkins might have sworn under his breath, but she didn’t quite hear what he mumbled to himself. Then he said abruptly, “I want those documents back. I’ll get her to sign them myself.”
“Of course, sir. They’re at my desk. I’ll go get them now.”
