Ten Years Later...

by Marie Ferrarella

Tiffany collected herself and stormed away.

  Chapter Four

  “I think you’ve got more than enough photographs now.”

  Something in Sebastian’s voice must have told the photographer there was no room for argument. Resigned, the man nodded and lowered the camera that he had been firing at them in rapid fashion.

  “Yeah, I guess maybe I do,” the photographer murmured.

  The next moment, he was turning his attention toward other alumni, his camera once again shooting.

  Sebastian became acutely aware of Brianna beside him and the silence that seemed to seal them into their own private bubble, despite all the people and noise around them.

  “I guess I should have asked you before sending that guy away,” Sebastian said.

  For old times’ sake, Brianna decided to absolve him of any guilt, especially since, unlike Tiffany, she had absolutely no desire to be digitally captured and immortalized pretending she was still a teenager.

  “He was getting on my nerves, too,” she confided to Sebastian.

  “Good to know,” he murmured, feeling more awkward and at loose ends than he could recall feeling since...well, since more than ten years ago when he’d initially walked up to her and struck up a conversation. At the time, he’d tried hard not to trip over his own tongue because he thought she was just so genuinely pretty, without resorting to any of the usual enhancing beauty aids that the other girls used.

  He took a long breath. This was the part where he took his leave. He’d say a few vague, noncommittal words, something generic and nonspecific about it being nice to see her again, or it was fun catching up, and then he’d get the hell out of there as fast as he could.

  The fact that they hadn’t caught up wasn’t really supposed to matter.

  Except that it did.

  This was the girl he’d left behind, the one who “got away,” as his mother had told him more than once over the past ten years.

  Not that Brianna had made a single move that took her out of his reach.

  No, he was the one who had made all the moves. He was the one who had left Bedford alone after they had initially made plans to leave together.

  But the plans that he could have sworn had been written in stone turned out to have been written in tapioca pudding. He had gone on to the college that had accepted them both, while Brianna had staunchly remained at home, nursing her father back from the jaws of paralysis to become the healed man he was today.

  In a word, she had just continued being Brianna.

  And now he was here, trying to collect himself after just having held in his arms the only woman, if he were being truly honest, who had ever mattered to him in that all-important way.

  And, yes, damn it, he was experiencing regrets. Very real regrets. Something he’d thought he was finally beyond having. He was an intelligent, successful man and that meant he’d moved on.

  Or at least he’d thought he’d moved on.

  Except that now he wasn’t so sure. “Moving on” didn’t have the painful, gut-twisting feeling attached to it, the one he was experiencing now.

  Did it?

  And, if he’d genuinely moved on, he wouldn’t have heard himself saying this little gem: “Listen, would you like to go get a drink somewhere, or maybe go out to dinner sometime? I’m in town for at least another week....”

  Abruptly running out of steam, Sebastian let his voice trail off.

  Another week. Seven days, and then he’d be gone again. He would be here just long enough to rip open all her old wounds and then he’d go again, his job here done.

  Say no, Bree. For God’s sake, save yourself and say no.

  Her problem was that she never listened to that little, all-important inner voice, the one that always made such sense.

  The one that had urged her, ten years ago, to go on with her life. To hire someone if she could for her father and get her degree the way she’d planned for years, instead of standing there with tears in her eyes, telling Sebastian that she couldn’t just leave her father with strangers.

  That same lack of common sense—as well as lack of self-preservation—now had her saying to Sebastian, “That would be nice.” It was a phrase that opened up the door to a world of possibilities she knew she wasn’t emotionally equipped to deal with at this point.

  Too late now.

  “How about tomorrow night?” Sebastian asked, even as he told himself that what he was actually supposed to say at this point was “Good. I’ll call you,” or even “Great. I’ll get back to you about details.” And then leave it at that.

  The last thing he was supposed to do was get specific. And citing a date like tomorrow didn’t give his common sense enough time to kick in and talk him out of this extremely rash move.

  Why am I nodding? her little voice demanded.

  Worse, she thought, why was she asking Sebastian, “Is six good for you?”

  Six is terrible for me. I misspoke. How about we change that from tomorrow to the twelfth of never?

  The handful of lifesaving words raged in Sebastian’s head, helplessly caged and unable to break free in order to slip off his tongue.

  So instead, what he heard was his own doom being sealed, his death knell sounding as he responded—rather than saying, “No, no, a thousand times no”—“Perfect.”

  “All right, then I’ll expect you at six tomorrow.”

  “What’s your address?” Sebastian asked, piercing a hole in the rubber balloon of her desperate thoughts.

  Brianna blinked as she looked at him, her mind a sudden blank. “What?”

  “Your address,” he specified. When she still looked at him as if he was using a foreign language, he added, “So I can come and pick you up.”

  The fog lifted. “Right.” The smile she flashed at him was bordering on anemic. “I still live in the same house,” Brianna told him. “Never had the time to move out,” she added.

  The smile he saw on her lips was fast—but lethal nonetheless.

  Just as lethal, he realized, as it ever was.

  Perhaps even more.

  Time had been very good to her. The pretty little high school senior was now a strikingly beautiful woman.

  “That’ll make it easy for me to find.” As he stood there, drawing out the conversation when he knew he should be running for cover, he had a sudden, strong and nearly irresistible urge to kiss her, despite the fact that approximately half their graduating class was milling around to bear witness to his insanity.

  He called himself seven kinds of a fool. It was enough—for now—to stop him.

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” he finally heard himself volunteer.

  Panic vied with a surge of pulsating excitement. “You’re leaving, too?” she asked.

  He nodded, glancing over his shoulder. He spotted the former cheerleader looking their way. “Thought I should make good my getaway before Tiffany comes up with something else.”

  Brianna nodded. “Tiffany’s married to a doctor now. Well, a dentist,” she corrected, not because she thought of one career as being superior to the other but because she wanted to be accurate. “Actually, it’s rather lucky he is a dentist.” Sebastian raised a quizzical eyebrow, waiting for an explanation. “They have three kids and all three are in braces. When they smile on a sunny day, the glare could blind you.”

  Brianna heard him laugh at that and found the low, sensual sound oddly comforting. She tried to persuade herself that his reaction one way or another didn’t matter to her.

  She reminded herself that she had come a long way since she’d been that heartbroken, starry-eyed girl who’d cried into her pillow every night for a month.

  Right now, though, none of that could get her to change the way she was responding to him. Couldn’t erase the warm glow gr
owing inside her, created by his nearness.

  He’d always had that sort of effect on her, she recalled.

  “She never forgave you for dumping her, you know,” she told Sebastian.

  The protest was automatic—and with feeling. “I didn’t dump her.”

  She was only telling him what she knew that Tiffany believed. “I think it felt that way to her.”

  He wanted to correct the record, strictly for old times’ sake, he silently insisted, not because it mattered to him to be blameless in her eyes.

  “To dump someone, you have to be going with that person to begin with,” he reminded her. “And we weren’t going together.”

  “She certainly thought that you were going together,” Brianna dutifully pointed out, recalling the vicious looks she’d been subjected to by Tiffany and her circle of friends.

  They had begun walking toward the exit and he found himself quickening his pace just a little. The conversation wasn’t on a path he wanted to take.

  “I can’t help what she thought. I just know that it wasn’t anything I said to her—or even alluded to. To be honest,” he continued as they walked out of the gym and down the empty, dimly lit hallway, “Tiffany kind of scared me.”

  He was kidding, right? “She weighed all of ninety-eight pounds to your one-eighty.” Brianna knew that, because back then Tiffany was forever bragging about losing weight and hardly ever allowed herself to eat anything of substance.

  “Her weight had nothing to do with it,” he maintained. “A stick of dynamite can blow up a barn. And irrational people are capable of doing some really very scary, unhinged things.

  “Where’s your car?” Sebastian asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  The last thing he wanted to do was talk about Tiffany and the past. He didn’t really want to dwell on the past at all, because if he allowed himself to do that, then he would start to remember just how much he’d once loved Brianna and how irrationally hurt and cheated he’d felt when he was made to choose—not in so many words but in actual fact—between the woman he loved and going on to pursue his dreams.

  Brianna was supposed to have been part of those dreams, not an alternative choice.

  But looking back now, he couldn’t help but wonder, if only for a brief, unguarded moment, if his choice had been the right one.

  Sure it was. Don’t start second-guessing yourself. You see? This is why you should never have come back to Bedford.

  Except that he had to and he knew it. To willfully not come back when his mother had made it so clear that she needed him would have been, if nothing else, incredibly selfish on his part. And that didn’t even begin to take into consideration the fact that if something had actually happened to his mother, he would have never forgiven himself for not seeing her one last time.

  Especially since she’d made a point of requesting it.

  It was that moment, as this thought began to sink deep into his mind, when for the very first time he actually understood just what Brianna must have gone through all those years ago. Understood how she felt when her father had survived the accident but had been given the prognosis that he would never walk again, never function independently in any manner, shape or form.

  Never be the man he had been until that terrible accident.

  Now he understood how very torn she had to have been between following her conscience, which bound her to the man who had done everything to give her the very best possible life, and following her heart and going away to college with him.

  Sebastian looked at her and, before he could think to stop himself, he heard himself saying to her, “Bree, I’m sorry.”

  They were out in the parking lot now, walking toward the spot where Brianna had parked her car. His words, coming completely out of the blue and cocooned in such heart-wrenching sadness, left her utterly confused.

  She needed an explanation. “Sorry about what?”

  By then Sebastian’s instincts of self-preservation had finally kicked in, the same ones that told him there was no purpose in revisiting the past.

  They supplied the right words to get him out of this verbal grave he had managed, so quickly, to dig for himself.

  “Sorry if I was a bit rusty back there. You know, on the dance floor,” he added, knowing this had to be up for an award somewhere as one of the lamest excuses of the decade, if not the century. “It’s been a while since I’ve done any dancing.”

  She had a hunch that wasn’t what Sebastian had initially alluded to with his apology, but she just couldn’t see the point of making him twist and turn in the wind.

  What on earth for?

  So instead, she just shrugged it off and said something equally bland.

  “Really? I would have never known. Not that I’m exactly a double threat on the dance floor myself, but you seemed pretty smooth to me back there.”

  To be honest, having him hold her in his arms had effectively destroyed the ability on her part to take notice of anything else.

  Sebastian laughed softly under his breath, another group of memories popping out of hiding and scampering lightly across his brain in toe shoes.

  And then he smiled at her. “You never did find fault with me, even when I said it was okay to, did you, Brianna?”

  She shrugged again, the movement more deliberate than careless.

  “Life’s too short to nitpick,” Brianna answered. Suddenly aware of where she was in the parking lot, she stopped walking. She’d almost walked right past her vehicle. “Well, this is my car, so your escort service is no longer needed.”

  Nice going, Bree. Could you be more awkward sounding? she upbraided herself. She was never an out-and-out wit, but she also never sounded as if her tongue didn’t quite work right, either.

  His attention drawn to her car, Sebastian looked at the light blue vehicle and recognition set in. “Hey, isn’t that—?”

  “Yes,” Brianna answered, anticipating what he was about to ask. “It’s the old Toyota my dad gave me as an early graduation present just before the prom.” At the last minute, she’d decided to leave J.T.’s CR-V behind and drive this car instead. It seemed more in keeping with the evening’s whole nostalgic mood. “It still runs like a dream—well, close to a dream, anyway,” she amended with a nervous little laugh. “But I really don’t see the need to get rid of it just because it’s an old model and the paint could use a little freshening.

  “I guess I just tend to stick with things,” she added.

  Too late she realized what that might have sounded like to Sebastian: a rebuke for choosing to move on, to shed the city he’d been born and raised in.

  The city where she had remained.

  Pressing her lips together, Brianna searched for the right words to help her fix what she’d just done.

  When none occurred to her, Brianna fell back on a tried-and-true excuse. “But that’s just me, I guess. Just an old stick-in-the-mud.”

  “Old sticks never looked so good,” Sebastian murmured with appreciation before his mind had a chance to filter his words.

  He was developing a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease, he upbraided himself.

  Sebastian stood back as she unlocked her car door on the driver’s side. Then, reaching past her, he opened it and held the door open for her as she slid in.

  The skirt of Brianna’s street-length dress rose up on one side, climbing up rather high on her thigh before she had a chance to pull it down again.

  She still had the best legs he’d ever seen, Sebastian caught himself thinking.

  Some things, fortunately, never changed.

  And then he forced himself to focus on making his final getaway. “Okay, then. Tomorrow at six. Your place, right?”

  “Right.”

  She had no one to blame but herself, Brianna thought. She kn
ew she could still change her mind, still act on the second thoughts that she was now experiencing at a prodigious rate. Act on them and come up with some kind of an excuse.

  Plausible or not, Sebastian would have to accept whatever rationale she gave him. After all, he couldn’t exactly force her to come to dinner with him, now, could he?

  Of course not.

  Brianna was still thinking this as she drove away, watching Sebastian get smaller and smaller in her rearview mirror.

  Chapter Five

  With a sigh, Brianna stepped out of the latest dress she’d just tried on and tossed it onto the growing mountain of fabric on her bed.

  Why didn’t anything look right on her?

  This was getting serious. Her frustration doubled and grew by the nanosecond.

  When she’d pulled back the sliding mirrored door of her wardrobe in her bedroom, approximately forty-five minutes ago, Brianna was fairly certain she knew exactly what she was going to wear to this dinner, which she should have never agreed to. But once she had put the dress on, it just looked all wrong, so she had gone on to choice number two and put that on.

  It met the same fate.

  As did choices number three through five.

  And, at the same time, with each discarded garment, the butterflies in her stomach multiplied.

  Exasperated when yet another choice seemed woefully inadequate on her, several disparaging, less-than-flattering words rose to her lips, poised for release. But she remained silent when she saw Carrie curiously stick her head into her room.

  The old soul trapped in a child’s body looked at the ever-growing pile of clothes that had accumulated on Brianna’s double bed. After a moment, the blue eyes shifted from the bed to her.

  “Why are all the clothes out, Mama? Are you cleaning?”

  “No, honey. I just can’t find anything to wear,” Brianna answered, doing her best not to allow the growing despair to surface in her voice.

  Why had she ever agreed to this? And why hadn’t she noticed before tonight that nothing she owned fit her the way it was supposed to?

  Her response confused her ordinarily unflappable daughter. Carrie gestured toward the bed. “Sure you can, Mama. It’s all right there, on your bed. Lots of clothes,” she emphasized.