She straightened, crossed one arm over her belly and used the other hand to cover her mouth as she stared at the stones. He stood at her side, his hands forming fists in his jean pockets while he debated hauling her in for a hug. Muscles bunched in her jaw and then released as she huffed out a sigh.
“You heard what happened that morning, at the inquest.” They were alone, but her voice only just rose above the twittering birds hopping around the headstones. “How I found my dad on the seabed and dragged him up. How I tried to resuscitate him, how I knew he’d gone. And then how I couldn’t get his body onboard the boat by myself, so I had to let him go.” Piper smeared a runaway tear off her cheek.
“What I didn’t tell the inquest was of my own cowardice. While I was trying to get Dad onto the boat, I glimpsed a shark—” She glanced at him, but before he could hold her gaze it skipped to the trees encircling the cemetery. “One of the big bastards, I think—”
Bloody hell. He and Ben had all but forced her back into the water with them.
West called himself every foul name he could think of. “I’m sorry—”
Piper patted his arm and he winced at the brotherly touch. His game plan didn’t include being relegated back to the role of her old friend, but he hadn’t a clue how to stop her pulling more and more away from him.
“It’s okay. I was stuck there in the water, trying to hold onto Dad. The weather closed in and a shark was somewhere below. I’ve never been so terrified.”
“God, Pipe—you weren’t a coward. There was no way you could wrestle a man who outweighed you by over a hundred pounds onto that boat, and only a crazy person would remain in the water with a Great White. I don’t know how you went through that and stayed sane. No wonder you freaked out that first time.”
Piper swallowed. “Yeah, but it’s strange. I’m not terrified of them anymore. The sharks are what they are and I don’t blame them.”
“You blame yourself, though.”
“Oh, yeah.” The pain emblazoned in her words drilled him as mercilessly as her gaze when it swung back to his. “I was moping over you, West. I’d cried myself sick the night before, and all I could think of while I waited for my dad to hurry up and finish his dive was what I could do to change your mind. Maybe if I somehow transformed myself into a hot chick with big tits and a curvy ass, you’d want me again.” She snorted out a bitter laugh, which just killed him.
“I didn’t see my dad struggle. I didn’t see him reach the end of the guideline—” Piper’s voice rose to fingernail-on-blackboard level. “I didn’t see him get into difficulties, because all I could see—” she nailed him with a finger in the center of his chest “—was you, and how much I fucking loved you.”
West recoiled. Each word, each jab of her finger punched like a nail gun. Piper had loved him. But what had that love turned into when she lost her father? She’d carried the weight of her father’s death on her conscience for all those years, linking it to her old feelings for him. How could she bear to touch him? How could she stand making love to him? How could she even look at him, when he shared just as much culpability in Michael’s death?
He opened his mouth to speak, though God knew what could fall out to make things better—but she interrupted. “Please, don’t say you’re sorry again.”
Right. That limited his options. So West buttoned it, his heart rending into useless shreds when Piper sank down in the dewy grass, a sob escaping from somewhere deep inside her.
“Daddy, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry I screwed up.” She squeezed the words out in a croak as she traced her father’s etched name with a fingertip. “But you screwed up too and somehow I’ve got to believe you’ve forgiven me, so I can forgive myself.”
West dropped to his knees at Piper’s side and tugged her into his lap, fully expecting an elbow to the ribs or a fist in his nuts. Instead, she wrapped herself around him and clung. He bowed his head, his arms full of warm, weeping woman. At least she trusted him to hold her while she grieved. Piper burrowed into him, her face pressed to his neck, tears soaking into his collar while he smoothed his palm over her shuddering back.
When her sobs finally tapered off to sniffles, West brushed back her fringe and looked at her face. Even puffy-eyed and blotchy with emotion, her loveliness still smacked him upside the head every time. “It’s a lot to ask, but can you ever forgive me? If you blame anyone for that day, it should be me.”
Her brow creased and her fingers slid into his hair, caressing his scalp until they suddenly gripped his nape. “I realized sometime in these last six weeks that I’d already forgiven you—that I needed to take ownership of my feelings for you back then.”
Bittersweet relief coursed through him. “Honey, if you can forgive me, surely you can forgive yourself? Your father never held a grudge in his life longer than ten minutes. How could you think he’d blame you when he broke so many of his own fundamental rules?”
She sniffed, loud and long. “I’ve carried this guilt with me for so long, I don’t know how to stop.”
“Leave it here. Leave it right here with these stones.” His eyes stung. Must be the sea spray.
She sighed, and laid her head back on his shoulder. “He waved at me before he dived, you know. I remember the whiskers on his face, the glitter of his wedding ring in the sunlight. He’d been quiet all the way out on the boat, but as soon as he hit the water he started to smile again.”
He stroked her hair. “He loved to dive and he loved sharing that with the three of us.”
“I’ll never stop missing him.”
“No, none of us will. But it’s time to see his death through a different lens.”
“Yeah.” She pulled back to look at him, choking out a wry laugh. “I sure could’ve used some of your wisdom while I fixated on all the ‘if onlys’ over the years.”
“There are so many, huh? But the biggest is—” he grazed a thumb across her cheekbone “—if only I hadn’t taken the easy way out and broken things off before you could leave me.”
“I wouldn’t have left you.”
His forehead touched hers and he breathed her in. “I know.”
And as unavoidable as a jab to the throat, there lay the problem. He swallowed, though the spit in his mouth had turned to ash. Piper would’ve stayed with him and eventually become restless and miserable. All those years ago she didn’t know what she’d be missing. Now, she had a whole other life in the city. A life with different friends, a challenging job, and men who could offer her more than being a pub owner’s wife.
Wife? That was outta left field.
Wind stirred her hair, blowing strands of it up to tickle his jaw. He cradled her face, loving her silky skin under his fingertips—couldn’t imagine not touching her a week from now.
She sighed, her breath puffing softly against his chin. “West?”
Piper, becoming his wife. So, was he really going there? “Mmm?”
Her spine stiffened vertebrae by vertebrae under his arm, and she leaned back, her expression guarded. After a short hesitation she said, “Will you still dive at Lake Taupo?”
Piper’s question derailed his thought train, currently chugging along the one-way-track to commitment-land. “Oh. Um, yeah. I’ve already got Ben on board as one safety diver and I hoped you’d agree to be my second…”
Piper’s eyes popped open wide and her fingers hooked like cat’s claws in his shirt. “You can’t ask me that.”
His glance skipped to the memorial. “Well, I hadn’t planned to ask you here—”
“No, no, no—here or anywhere, the answer’s no. After what I just told you, after you blacked out on me only a few weeks ago, how can you still compete?” She wrenched away and nearly kneed him in the nuts as she scrambled to her feet.
“Whoa, hang on. You’ve seen me still training every morning at the pool and never said a word.”
She whirled on him. “What word could I have said? Is there anything I could say to stop you competing in the Nationals?”<
br />
His stomach plummeted like he’d descended a flight of darkened stairs, miscounted and stepped off into the void. West stood, every nerve, sinew, and muscle thrumming with tension. Stop him? Piper wanted to stop him from the one thing he loved, the thing that gave him an identity and a purpose?
“This is important to me, Piper. I’ve worked too hard to quit free-diving because you don’t approve.”
Color drained from her flushed cheeks. “I’m not asking you to quit free-diving. But competitive apnea has a lot more risks than if you just enjoy spearfishing or diving without a tank on your back.” She stalked over to him, her chest heaving. “You’ll push yourself to win, I know you will—and I won’t watch anyone else I care about kill themselves for a sport.”
Piper shoved both palms against his chest, which rocked him back a little on his heels. They glared at each other, gasping like marathon runners. When she uttered a sound suspiciously like the snarl of a small cornered animal and went in for another shove, West grabbed her wrists.
“This isn’t about me, it’s about your dad. But I’m not your father. I’m not fifty years old or an ex-alcoholic on a bender. I’m not going to die!”
She cringed away from him, her eyes haunted. “Maybe not, but you’re wrong. It is about you—it’s about you, and me, and if there can be an ‘us’ that lasts longer than tomorrow.”
Fire broiled in his veins, taking every lick of oxygen with it until it reached flashover point in his mind. He threw down her wrists and jerked away. “Are you giving me an ultimatum? Is that it? Give up your dream, West, or there is no ‘us’?”
Talk about your frickin’ irony.
He’d worried he couldn’t ask her to sacrifice her job and the dive squad to be with him. Yet Piper would manipulate his feelings for her? Would use her power over him to try and snatch something vital from his grasp, just to ease her fears?
“Haven’t you learned anything from your parents’ mistakes?”
Piper blinked at him, tilting her chin. “Oh, I learned something. And that’s why I’m not making any demands at all. As for me walking out of your life, are you offering me a place to stay in it? Or am I destined to become a sob story you can tell future girlfriends, as the reason you believe a woman wouldn’t want to stay with you forever?”
He gaped at her, his rampant heartbeat firing so much super-charged blood into his head that any logical thoughts got blasted into oblivion.
“Uncomfortable when the table’s turned, isn’t it?” She folded her arms and retreated another pace back, the gap between them wider than Foveaux Strait. “If you’re not my father, West, then I’m not your goddamned mother. I would’ve come back to you after Police College. I would’ve loved you, had a family with you, and made a life with you.” She flung her arms open and a gull perched on a nearby headstone arrowed into the sky with a flurry of wings. “If a man loved me with all his heart and soul, nothing would make me leave his side for long—ever. But I suspect you’re not that man.”
She stood there, palms spread wide and tremors ravaging her slender limbs, imploring him to say something, anything.
He had nothing. Zero, zip, nada. She may as well have asked him to communicate the contents of his heart to her in Swahili. And so he remained, as impassive as the carved monuments surrounding him.
Piper gave him one last, silent chance to speak, then turned and walked away.
Chapter 20
Piper waited until she was well out of West’s sight before she allowed the tears to come. She swiped at her face as she jogged back along the road, Donny at her heels.
She gave him a cuddle and a belly rub at West’s back door and ordered him into his ratty bed of blankets. He whined and shivered. One of life’s little ironies—West loved Donny, but he couldn’t love her.
Guess the mutt was easier to love.
Piper blew him one last kiss and slipped inside.
It didn’t take long to stuff her belongings into her backpack. The whole time she moved around West’s bedroom her bruised heart thrashed out a frantic rhythm—wishing, hoping, yearning for him to walk in the door.
She walked over to the bureau, where only a few weeks ago he’d emptied the top two drawers for her without comment. She plucked out the pair of red lace panties she’d bought on that shopping trip with the girls. Remembered him peeling them off her legs, of him teasing her with them the next morning after a night of blissful lovemaking. She winced. Lovemaking, huh? Hot and steamy, mind blowing and world altering, but if she believed he made love to her, then she was a moron.
Piper grabbed handfuls of panties, bras, and socks, and carried them to her bag. Oh, sure, what West felt for her was more than just sex. He cared about her and probably even loved her, in a way—the way you love someone you’ve known forever. Someone, perhaps, related to your best mate. He wouldn’t cut her out of his life just because she was dumb enough fall in love with him.
And yep, good folks of Oban, she was just, that, dumb.
But like hell would she hang around to experience West waving her off from the wharf with a casual, “See ya later.” While she tried not to sever her tongue in an effort not to beg him to love her back.
No begging. Begging was bad.
She glanced at one of the framed photos on West’s bureau. In it, a much younger West, Ben, and Piper stood in front of Due South, mugging for the camera. It’d been West’s sixteenth birthday, a month before Claire Westlake left the island for Los Angeles. Piper stood between the two boys and Claire captured the photo at the same instant Piper and West snuck a glance at each other. The expression on her face was unmistakable: hero worship. Complete and utter devotion, even before she fell in love with him. And on West’s face? She shook her head and replaced the photo face down.
West never even noticed.
Piper emptied the drawers and then with still no sign of West, she rang her sister.
“Shaye? You think you can clear your bedroom floor off for one night? I need somewhere to stay until tomorrow.”
Three long beats passed before Shaye responded, her voice gentle with unspoken sympathy. “Sure, Piper. My floor is your floor. Just drop your stuff in whenever.”
Piper could’ve kissed her when Shaye left it at that—no sly questions, no demanding explanations, no what-the-heck-happened? “Thanks, sis. I owe you one.”
“Yeah, yeah, what else is new.”
Piper hung up and hauled on her backpack, the weight of it on her shoulders bowing her spine. Surely it hadn’t been this heavy when she first arrived? Well, it weighed a ton now, and every ounce of it killed a little more of her spirit as she trudged down the stairs and out of West’s life.
***
“I never thought I’d say this to my own son, but, Ryan, you’re a fool.”
West looked up from his overcrowded desk at Claire, frowning, in his doorway. When he said nothing, his mother folded her arms and huffed down her nose.
“The ferry leaves in twenty minutes and here you are, pretending not to care that Piper will be hugging everyone goodbye right now—everyone but you.”
He could’ve switched his laptop off and with a withering tone asked Claire just who was she to judge, but instead he dropped his gaze back to his spreadsheets. He’d blinked at the same one for the last hour, without adding anything. Great improvement to his temperament.
“I’m working. We’ve already said our goodbyes.”
A big, fat lie.
Something shriveled and died in him last night when he returned from work to find her stuff gone. He’d gone straight to Due South after the cemetery. A mountain of paperwork awaited him and why not an end-of-summer stock-take? So he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t ventured into the restaurant kitchen, and part of him hadn’t been surprised walking into a silent house. What he hadn’t expected was that the empty dresser drawers and the framed picture turned face down on top would hurt as much as it did.
Piper had left him again. While her barely disguised ultimatum stil
l rankled, he understood the fear driving it. He also understood that by saying nothing, he’d once again pushed her away.
Claire entered his office and turned to shut the door.
As her fingers rattled on the handle he glanced up. “Don’t shut it. You’re not staying, because you don’t get to tell me what to do.”
She stopped mid-swing. The door squeaked as she pushed it open again and she stood beside it, cocking her head as she studied him with the same patient look that used to cause him and Del to confess within seconds. “I lost that right when I walked out on you and Bill. Does that about sum up the situation?”
West hissed out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Yeah.”
“Then I won’t tell you what to do,” she said softly. “Instead I’ll tell you how decisions can change the course of your life. That, at the time, it never occurs to you the repercussions of those decisions could one day come back to haunt you. My decision helped shape who you are today, a man who would let the woman he loves walk out of his life because he’s convinced history will repeat. For that alone, I’ll never forgive myself.”
West leaned back in his chair and tried to maintain a disinterested expression. “Quite a speech, Claire. But Piper made her choice.”
“Before or after you told her how you feel about her?”
He swiveled his chair around to face the window.
“I can see why you’ve made comparisons between the two of us,” she said. “However, Piper loves this place as much as you do, and more importantly, I believe she loves you. If you’re not in love with her, then tell me to shut up. I won’t be offended. But if you’re letting her walk away because of fear, then you’re about to make the biggest mistake of your life.”
“Fuck,” West dropped his head into his hands.
In Too Deep Page 29
