On Borrowed Time

by Jenn McKinlay

  “She didn’t!” Lindsey gasped. Out of anything he might have said, that she did not expect.

  Sully looked rueful at her outrage.

  “Yes, she did,” he said. He reached up and rubbed Heathcliff’s ears. “Believe it or not, it gets worse.”

  “She was pregnant,” Lindsey guessed.

  “No,” he said.

  “She already had a child?”

  “No,” he said.

  “What could possibly be worse?” she asked.

  “She managed to conceal her marriage from me for two weeks,” he said. “So while I was walking around all hearts and flowers, she was running a covert op to rival the skills of a CIA operative to make sure I didn’t find out the truth, which naturally, I did.”

  Lindsey noticed that he didn’t call her by name. She wondered if it was just habit or if there was a reason, like it was too painful for him. She was a librarian, an information gatherer of the first water, and details could not be ignored. She swallowed hard and then posed her question as simply and directly as she could.

  “What was her name?”

  “Kelly O’Laughlin,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “She was my wild Irish rose.”

  Lindsey had to force herself not to let her eyebrows shoot up at the affectionate note in his voice. She frowned instead. Sully sounded almost fond of the woman who had tossed him aside so callously. Surely, he could not still be in love with her.

  “Well, I should clarify that was the name I knew her by,” he said. “Her married name was different.”

  Sensing that would cause him pain, Lindsey did not ask for her new surname.

  “How did you find out?” she asked.

  “An officer from my ship was childhood pals with her husband,” he said. “He’d heard that Kelly and I were out together romantically and he called me out for hitting on his friend’s wife.”

  Lindsey cringed. That could not have gone well.

  “A fistfight ensued, which ended with me at Kelly’s house confronting her about her marriage,” he said. “It wasn’t pretty. I was hurt and angry. I said things I shouldn’t have. She was from a military family, and the man she married had been a friend of the family forever. While I was gone, they started dating and their wedding had been a spur-of-the-moment idea right before he shipped out.”

  He was quiet for so long that Lindsey was sure he wasn’t going to say another word. Really, she couldn’t fault him. It was much worse than her walking in on her fiancé while he was fornicating with one of his grad students. At least, her ex hadn’t lied to her about it. He hadn’t had the chance.

  “She was having second thoughts about her marriage when I showed up. The man she married was significantly older and had already done the kid thing and didn’t want any more. When I pitched my idea of the perfect life, I caused her to doubt her choice. She was feeling utterly confused, and I didn’t help,” he said. “When I asked her why she said yes, she said she couldn’t bear the thought of losing me.”

  His voice sounded as if every word cost him, and Lindsey felt terrible that he’d had to go through such a horrible time and that in order to prove himself to her, he was being forced to relive it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds like it was rough all around.”

  “Mostly for her. I wasn’t very nice or understanding about the situation,” Sully said. “I was immature and angry. I lashed out at her and said some truly awful things.”

  He sounded as if this was the part that bothered him the most. Lindsey couldn’t imagine why. Kelly had lied to him; she had betrayed him. Why did he feel bad because he was angry about it? It seemed perfectly reasonable to her. Of course, she’d had visions of running her ex over with a car, repeatedly, when he had cheated on her, so maybe she wasn’t the best judge of post-relationship niceness.

  “Kelly begged me to give her a chance to figure it out. She said she needed time,” he said. “I told her I was through wasting time on her and that she wasn’t worth it.”

  Lindsey could hear the raw pain in his voice, and the hair on the back of her neck tingled with dread. In a flash of understanding, she knew there was more here, much more.

  Her voice was just over a whisper when she asked, “What happened?”

  “A couple of days after our argument, she fell asleep at the wheel of her car, exhaustion they said, she hit a tree head on and died instantly.”

  Lindsey felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her stomach. Kelly’s death was a punch to the chest. She felt small and petty for feeling jealous of a woman who had made a disastrous choice and died too young to fix it.

  Lindsey knew Sully, and if she felt blindsided by the story’s end, she could only imagine how he felt having lived it. He was not someone who lost his temper. Ever. In fact, the most negative emotion she’d seen rise up out of him was annoyance or irritation, and a person had to push him pretty hard to get either of those reactions.

  To have spoken harshly to someone even if she deserved it, well, if Sully cared about the person, and obviously he had since he’d wanted to marry Kelly, then to have hateful words be the last words between them would dog him mercilessly.

  Finally, finding her voice, she said, “Oh, Sully, I am so sorry. It must have been awful.”

  “Her husband forbid me from going to the funeral. He blamed me for her death,” he said. “I did, too. If I hadn’t been so hard on her, if I had been more understanding and given her the time she asked for . . .”

  “Sully, you can’t take the blame on that one,” Lindsey said. “I know that the tragedy surrounding her death makes you feel obliged to, but truly, if she had told you the truth from the start, none of those tragic events would have played out the way they had.”

  “Or we would have argued earlier, and she could have died earlier,” he said. “I never should have bought the ring.”

  “That’s a lot of woulda, coulda, shouldas,” she said.

  “She was wearing the ring when they found her body,” he said. “Not her wedding ring but the engagement ring I’d bought for her. It was another reason I was barred from her funeral.”

  “That must have been brutal,” Lindsey said.

  “I shipped out the morning of the service so I wouldn’t be tempted to gate crash. I figured she deserved better than that,” he said. “I took the first available post and bugged out all the way to the Philippines.”

  Lindsey didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t imagine how awful it must have been. Sully was the sort who would feel responsible for Kelly’s death. It didn’t matter that it was a chain of events that he only played a small part in; he would still think that if he had never asked her to marry him, she would still be alive today.

  “It wasn’t, you know,” she said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Your fault,” she said.

  He made a grunting noise that she figured would translate into yeah, right in word form, a big blow off from any absolution. She had expected as much. She knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue with him. He would believe what he chose to believe and he wouldn’t be swayed, not about his responsibility at any rate.

  “Thank you for telling me about this,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. He looked up at her. “It was important to me to help you understand why I did what I did between us.”

  “You didn’t want to get burned again,” she said.

  “No question,” he agreed. “But it was more than that. I didn’t want you to feel pressured to make a choice that you weren’t ready to make. When I said I was walking away to give you time, I meant it.” After all these months, it finally came into focus why Sully had stepped back from their relationship when her ex had reappeared.

  “So you were just trying to make sure you didn’t put me through what Kelly went through?” she asked.

&nb
sp; “Yeah,” he said. His voice was gruff, but Lindsey couldn’t tell if it was exhaustion or emotion making it deeper than normal.

  She rolled onto her back and thought about all that he’d shared with her. This was by far the biggest glimpse into the inner workings of Mike Sullivan than he had ever given her. While she felt badly that it was obviously hard for him, she couldn’t help but be awed that he had willingly shared such a personal story.

  “You are a brave man. I really admire you for telling me all of this,” she said. He didn’t say anything, so she took it as encouragement that he didn’t grumble in denial. “I mean, I know it wasn’t easy for you to open up, and I know this experience must have been particularly painful to share.”

  Still he was quiet, so she wondered if he was feeling that vulnerable ickiness a person feels when they’ve overshared. Yeah, she hated that feeling. She hurried to reassure him.

  “You don’t have to worry. I will never tell a soul what you told me. And I don’t want you to feel badly for telling me all of this. Even before we were dating, I considered you a close friend and you can tell a good friend anything. I hope you know that.”

  He said nothing and Lindsey feared she had offended him by calling him a friend. Oh, why were words so hard for her? She had spent the better part of her life with her nose in a book; surely she should be able to articulate how she felt or at least rip off someone who knew what to say better than she did.

  Her brain did a quick scan of snippets from Emily Dickens, “Each life converges to some centre,” and W. H. Auden, “Let the more loving one be me.” No, no, no! These would not do.

  “Listen, Sully, I just want you to know that I truly appreciate what you told me, and I feel that I understand you and your actions better than I did before, and it truly helps me to rethink everything that happened . . . between us . . . before.”

  At this point Lindsey really expected him to say something, anything, or to at least acknowledge what she was saying. But in usual Sully fashion, he had gone silent. A flash of irritation lit up inside her.

  She sat up and turned around. She glanced over Heathcliff at Sully and found him dead asleep. She nodded. Well, at least that made sense. The poor guy had obviously taxed himself by speaking way more than usual and had plum tuckered himself out.

  Lindsey put her hand on his soft wavy hair and leaned forward to whisper, “Good night, Sully, and don’t worry, I have your back. Always.”

  A soft exhale was his only response. Lindsey burrowed under her blanket and contemplated all that Sully had told her. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for Kelly. Obviously, she had loved Sully, but she had wanted the status of wife to a higher-ranking officer more.

  Lindsey couldn’t pretend to understand that. Anyone could see that Sully was a great guy who would be successful at whatever he worked at, and if he had chosen to be career military, Lindsey had no doubt he would have been promoted right to the top.

  Then she reminded herself that Sully and Kelly, and didn’t those two names go together like salt and pepper, were very young. Navigating a long-distance relationship was hard at any age, but in the twenties it was particularly tricky.

  That made her think of her brother and the beautiful woman who had absconded with him. Had long distance made her miss him so much that she felt the need to kidnap him? Or was her husband really so dangerous that she had to snatch Jack to protect him?

  Lindsey felt the same sick dread she always felt when she thought about that moment at the pier when Jack was in the bottom of the boat speeding away. What had he gotten himself into? The dead man at the library made her feel like there was more going on than anyone was telling her.

  Why had that man been following her and Sully tonight? Were they just being paranoid, or did he want something from them, okay, more accurately from her because she was Jack’s sister? And if so, what?

  A yawn crept up on Lindsey and she realized that despite the crazy events of the past few days, she was snug and cozy with Heathcliff and Sully beside her. Her eyelids drooped and she felt the woozy abyss open up before her. Without any hesitation, she fell fast asleep.

  * * *

  Morning was unkind to people who slept on couches in their clothes, Lindsey decided as she examined her reflection in Sully’s bedroom mirror. She borrowed his hairbrush and luckily he had a spare toothbrush. Really, she could not face the outside world without a good scrubbing of the pearlies.

  Once they had fortified themselves with a pot of coffee, a stack of toast and some fluffy scrambled eggs, they bundled up in their coats and scarves and headed out into the crisp December morning.

  Neither of them had broached the topic of last night’s discussion this morning. Lindsey didn’t because she didn’t know what to say. She suspected Sully had said all he could muster, and she didn’t want to be one of those women who talked a subject to death. Although she could easily discuss his past at greater length, she was pretty sure he had shared as much as he could for now.

  She wondered if this new chattier version of Sully was going to stick around. She certainly hoped so, but she wasn’t going to get all tangled up with him again until she was sure. She glanced at him as he opened the passenger door to his pickup truck for her. He sure was handsome, even rumpled and unshaven and looking like he’d slept in an awkward position on a couch.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Anytime,” he answered.

  Lindsey got the feeling he knew she was talking about more than the lift home. She smiled and he returned it, and for a moment it felt as if they had never broken up. Then Heathcliff bounded into the truck with a bark and a wag, interrupting the moment.

  Lindsey climbed up after him and Sully closed the door. As he walked around the front of the truck, Lindsey scratched Heathcliff’s ears.

  “Remind me to work with you on your timing, big boy,” she said. “You pretty much ruined the moment there.”

  Heathcliff, with his mastery of the English language, glanced at her from underneath his bushy eyebrows and then he licked her cheek as if in apology.

  “It’s okay,” she laughed. “I’m taking it slow.”

  Sully climbed into the truck just as Heathcliff barked in approval.

  “He sure does love to ride in the truck,” he said.

  Lindsey nodded as she scooted over in her seat, so Heathcliff could have the window. Despite the cold, she rolled down the window so the puppy could stick his head out and enjoy sniffing the air. His tail kept a constant happy rhythm against her shoulder as he wagged the entire ride back to Lindsey’s apartment.

  When Sully pulled into the drive, Lindsey turned in her seat to face him.

  “I owe you dinner,” she said.

  “I’ll take you up on that,” he said. “Tonight?”

  Lindsey laughed at his eager expression. “I’m working tonight, but soon. I suppose I owe you a night’s sleep, too. I don’t know that I would have slept well after that episode on the beach.”

  “Hmm, how does one repay a night’s sleep?” he asked, sounding intrigued.

  “You leave the poor man alone,” she said with a laugh.

  “How disappointing.”

  “You don’t suppose the man following us was just someone out taking a walk who happened to be going the same way we did, do you?”

  “No, otherwise why would he go into the shack in the dark?” Sully asked. “And why was someone sweeping the tall grass with flashlights, looking for us?”

  “Good points,” she said.

  “Lindsey, I know you are worried about putting your brother at risk, but last night upped the ante,” he said. “I really think it would be a good idea to tell Emma what you know.”

  Lindsey turned away. She didn’t want to have this conversation again.

  “Well, thanks for the ride,” she said. She opened the door and hopped out before he could cont
inue the discussion.

  To her surprise, he got out of his side and walked her to the door. “I want to know you’re safe inside before I leave.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Lindsey said. They walked through the front door. Her landlady’s door was open and she gestured to it as they passed. “See? Nancy’s home.”

  Heathcliff darted inside Nancy’s, which was his daytime play place, and Lindsey followed after him.

  “Come here, buddy,” she said. “I’m off this morning. Nancy’s not babysitting you.”

  Heathcliff ignored her and rounded the corner, heading straight for the kitchen. It was hard to stop a puppy when he knew who was generous with the cookies.

  Lindsey stepped into the kitchen and her feet faltered, causing Sully to slam into her back as they both stumbled into the room.

  “Well, hello, love,” Robbie said from his seat at Nancy’s kitchen counter. “Late night?”

  “Robbie!” Lindsey cried. “What are you doing here?”

  Robbie was looking past Lindsey with a glower at Sully, who she noticed had a decidedly pleased look on his face.

  “The lovely Nancy saw me come calling on you, and when you didn’t answer, she invited me in for breakfast,” he said. He gave her a pointed look, and Lindsey was suddenly very aware of how the situation looked given that she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday.

  “It’s not how it looks,” she said. “We went for a walk.”

  There was a beat of silence and Robbie said, “Must have been a long walk.”

  Lindsey noticed Robbie was still looking past her at Sully when he said this, and he was still glaring. She glanced over her shoulder at Sully, who was smirking. Smirking!

  “You’ve got the wrong idea,” she said.

  “Reeeeally?” Robbie asked. “What idea would that be?”

  “I spent the night at Sully’s—” she began, but he interrupted.

  “Oh, I’d say that was the exact idea that I have,” he said. “How about you, Nancy, same idea?”