Ten Years Later...

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Is it hot in here?” Barbara asked suddenly, futilely fanning herself with her hand. “Do you feel warm?” She swayed slightly as she tried to get up. “Oh, I feel so weak, so dizzy....”

  Brianna was back beside her in a moment, her arms going around the other woman’s girth. Despite its size, she felt she had a good grip on Sebastian’s mother. Only then did she ease Barbara back onto the sofa.

  “You’ve got to be careful about making any sudden moves,” Brianna gently cautioned her. “Let me check your heart rate,” she requested.

  Her slender fingers already on the woman’s wrist, she searched for Barbara’s pulse. Placing two fingers over the quickly vibrating area, Brianna silently counted the rapid beats.

  Brianna frowned slightly as she released the wrist. “Certainly feels like A-fib to me.” She took note of Barbara’s expression and misinterpreted its origin. “Don’t look so worried, Mrs. Hunter. I’m sure your doctor told you that the condition is totally controllable. You’ll be back running those literacy courses of yours at the library in no time,” she promised.

  As Brianna began to turn away, Barbara caught her hand. She dispensed just the right amount of truth to get what she wanted. “If it’s all the same to you, dear, I’d like to take my time getting better.” Her eyes met the young woman’s. “I had a friend who rushed back into her day-to-day life right after she had a similar incident, and she wound up in the hospital with another stroke, far worse than what she’d had the first time around. I don’t want the same thing happening to me.”

  Brianna gave her a reassuring smile. “I understand perfectly and I didn’t mean to make you think anyone’s rushing you to do something you don’t feel ready for. Everyone has their own inner pace,” she added. “And you have to be true to yours.”

  “This ‘incident’ has its upside,” Barbara confided. “I mean, it did bring Sebastian rushing back to see me.” Her mouth curved fondly as she spoke about her son. “He wasn’t going to come for a visit until December, if then.” When Brianna raised an eyebrow, she explained. “Things have a habit of coming up at the last minute in his world, and he’s canceled trips to the States before,” she said with a sigh.

  “Oh.”

  A few things clicked into place in Brianna’s head, but she didn’t want to say anything out loud just yet. If she was wrong, she’d be guilty of offending Sebastian’s mother and she didn’t want to do that. She had a feeling, though, that for whatever reason, Barbara wasn’t being entirely truthful about what had happened and her condition. Just how much was true and how much wasn’t, she didn’t know, but Brianna was certain of one thing.

  “Sebastian would be relieved to know that you’re not standing at death’s door with a Now Serving number in your pocket,” she pointed out diplomatically. The expression on Barbara’s face did not match that of a woman whose mind had been set completely at ease. “What would you like me to tell him?” she asked, qualifying the word like.

  “That I’d feel a great deal better and more confident if I had someone staying with me for a little while.”

  “You mean him?” Brianna assumed that getting Sebastian to stay for an extended period of time was the woman’s ultimate goal.

  “Like a nurse,” Barbara corrected.

  Brianna needed to be perfectly clear on this. She’d initially thought Sebastian was just asking for an evaluation of his mother’s condition so he’d know what he needed to do for her.

  “Mrs. Hunter, are you asking me to take you on as a patient?” Brianna asked.

  Barbara looked at her hopefully, as if she were mentally crossing her fingers. “Could you?” she asked.

  Well, her schedule was clear, but she needed to get a few things out in the open and understood first. “I usually move in for the duration of a patient’s care.”

  Barbara nodded. “Even better—I’d feel more secure knowing you were close by,” she quickly added.

  There was one more very important thing. “Mrs. Hunter—”

  Barbara held up her hand, stopping her. “Barbara, please,” she requested. “If you’re going to be here taking care of me, you should at least be able to call me by my first name,” she told the younger woman with a smile.

  “I don’t move in by myself,” Brianna began.

  Barbara nodded. “Oh, I’m sure that Sebastian wouldn’t mind helping you bring your things over here,” she assured Brianna.

  Physical logistics was not the problem. She was strong enough to carry her own things. This was far more important than moving suitcases. This was, in essence, the deal breaker if she got the wrong answer.

  “No, what I’m trying to tell you is that I’d be bringing my four-year-old daughter, Carrie, with me.”

  Sebastian had already told her about Brianna’s daughter. He’d been so taken aback initially and then just blown away by the scope of the little girl’s mind, he’d shared the whole story with her.

  After her initial surprise—much like his, she suspected—she’d summoned her courage and gotten on the phone with Brianna’s father, a man she’d met briefly at a couple of PTA meetings dating back to when their children were in their last year of high school. After identifying herself, she’d asked him to supply the rest of the answers she needed.

  The man had been quite helpful once he understood what she was attempting to do. And he’d been exceedingly charming as well. She’d stayed on the phone quite a while.

  “I would insist on it,” Barbara told her now. “A child belongs with her mother. Especially a little girl.” The soul of innocence, she went on to ask, “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes,” Brianna replied. “When would you like me to start?”

  “The sooner the better,” Barbara told her in all honesty. Taught to always seal the bargain, she put her hand out. “So it’s a deal?”

  Brianna slipped her hand into his mother’s, feeling as if she was taking advantage of the other woman. She was sealing a bargain that seemed just far too advantageous for her.

  But, for whatever reason, Barbara Hunter truly felt she needed to have her around and to make use of her services. The first rule about nursing was to make the patient feel better, so she was not about to argue the point with the woman.

  “It’s a deal,” Brianna confirmed.

  Barbara’s grin widened even more.

  * * *

  Brianna stopped moving and just watched her father in uncertain awe.

  “You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that you were eager to get rid of me,” she told him. For the first time in her recollection, her father was helping her pack her things as well as Carrie’s beloved collection of toys and books. Clothes were only incidental to Carrie and not nearly as important as her possessions.

  “Eager to get rid of you?” her father echoed, then declared, “Never,” in a voice that could have easily belonged to the hero of a melodrama. “I’ll be standing by the window, my face pressed against the glass, a candle burning in each hand the entire time that you’re going to be gone.”

  Brianna laughed and resumed selecting and discarding various articles of clothing.

  “Very funny. I guess, after all this time, you’re probably looking forward to having the house all to yourself,” she surmised.

  “I promise to keep the wild parties down to a minimum,” he quipped.

  “How are you going to party?” she asked. “I thought you were going to be standing with your face pressed against the glass, holding a candle in each hand, remember?” she asked, doing her best to sound as if she was at least semiserious.

  “Man’s gotta eat and take a couple of bathroom breaks occasionally,” her father pointed out. “That’s why the parties’ll be kept to a minimum.”

  She shook her head. Inside every man was still a wild, spirited teenager, she couldn’t help t
hinking. “Well, you’re certainly old enough not to need a lecture.”

  Her father laughed. “Knew getting old was good for something.”

  She paused to pat his cheek. “You’re not old, Dad, just a little slightly used,” she told him fondly.

  Looking around the room, she and her father had managed to pack everything she and Carrie were going to need for what she hoped was a short duration. Otherwise, she was going to have to make a few trips back. She supposed that wasn’t really a bad thing. It would allow her to look in on her father.

  She turned toward him now. “You know where to find me if you need me.”

  She’d given him the phone number as well as the address the moment she’d walked in. “It’s on the refrigerator. You wrote the number in letters big enough for a helicopter pilot to see if he was circling the house.”

  “If a helicopter pilot is circling the house, we’d have bigger problems than you seeing the phone number I wrote.” She grew serious for a moment. He, along with her daughter, had always been her first priority. Time hadn’t changed that. “You’ll be okay?”

  “I’ll miss you,” he told her. “And the pip-squeak,” he added, referring to Carrie. “But I’ll muddle through.” He kissed the top of her head. “You just go do what you do best. Bully some patient into getting well,” he instructed fondly.

  “Between you and me,” she confided, “I think she’s halfway there already.”

  He looked at her for a moment, wondering just how much his daughter suspected. Bree had always been a very sharp girl.

  “Then this should be a piece of cake for you,” he told her. “Speaking of which, I picked one up for you this afternoon when you called to say you were taking on a new case. It’s waiting for you in the kitchen whenever you and the pip-squeak want a break.”

  “Cookies-and-cream?” she asked. It had been her favorite flavor since she was fourteen.

  He grinned at her. “Would I get anything else?”

  She brushed a quick kiss against his cheek. “You’re one in a million, Dad.”

  “I know.” He laughed, putting an arm around each of “his girls.” “Let’s go break the cake in.”

  Together, they went to the kitchen to do justice to the cake he’d bought.

  Chapter Ten

  He was pacing.

  Sebastian forced himself to stop. The thing of it was, he hadn’t been aware that he was doing it until just now.

  This was stupid. Why was he pacing and looking out at the driveway every time he passed the window? He was an adult, not a kid fresh out of puberty. It wasn’t supposed to matter to him one way or another if Brianna moved into his house.

  His house.

  He laughed shortly. After all this time, he still thought of the place where he’d grown up as his house. His home. His home even though for the past four years, he’d lived in a sleek, ultramodern apartment in Tokyo.

  But this was home and Brianna was moving into it. And despite his attempt at a devil-may-care, nonchalant attitude, he kept right on glancing through the window. Moreover, he was listening for the sound of an approaching vehicle.

  And when he finally heard it, his damn pulse quickened.

  To make matters worse, when he turned, he nearly tripped over his mother’s damn cat. Stopping short of just clipping the feline’s nose with the tip of his shoe, he managed to catch himself just in time.

  He bit back a curse. “Damn it, Marilyn, you’re going to wind up flatter than a pancake if you don’t stop getting in my way.”

  Marilyn strolled out of the way, completely unfazed by the fate she’d almost suffered.

  When Brianna pulled up into the driveway—at exactly the time she’d told his mother she would arrive—he was at the front door before she had even turned off the CR-V’s engine.

  Getting out of the vehicle, she looked at Sebastian quizzically. Had there been a change in plans? She couldn’t think of another reason for him to have come out to meet her car so quickly.

  “Hi,” she said a bit uncertainly, waiting for him to say something that would tell her what was going on.

  But all Sebastian said in response to her greeting was a more formal “Hello.”

  Rounding the hood, she made her way over to the passenger side and then opened the rear door.

  “We’re here, honey,” she told Carrie as she leaned in and began removing her daughter from her car seat. Sparing Sebastian a glance, she gave in and finally asked, “What are you doing here?”

  He’d been asking himself that all day. He said, “I used to live here, remember?”

  “Yes, I know that. That’s not what I meant.” And you know it. “You came out the minute my tires hit your driveway. Something wrong?” she asked. She scooped Carrie up in her arms and then set her down.

  Carrie’s attention, like her own, was focused on Sebastian.

  “No,” he replied, wondering why she would think there was something wrong—other than his having stepped out of her life for the past ten years. “I just thought I’d see if you needed any help moving in.”

  Something told her that wasn’t all, but she let it go. Maybe she was just overthinking things. She’d been doing that since she’d bumped into Sebastian—and all those memories—at the reunion.

  “Oh, well, that’s nice of you,” Brianna acknowledged.

  “Despite what you might think, I can be a nice guy.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say something that would put the veracity of his statement in doubt, but what was the point of that? Of rehashing everything? The past was gone and there was no going back and fixing it or changing it. She knew that.

  So instead, she said, with a complete economy of emotion, “Never said anything else.” Then, wanting to change the subject as quickly as possible, Brianna went on to tell him, “And just so you know, I’m not ‘moving in.’ I’m just in a temporary holding pattern until your mother feels more secure about managing her day-to-day life on her own.”

  He shifted so that he was directly in front of her just as she was about to open up the vehicle’s hatchback door. “You really think she’ll be able to?” Sebastian asked.

  “No doubt in the world,” Brianna answered him honestly. “From our little talk yesterday, I got the feeling that your mother is really a lot better than she thinks she is. She just needs to have her confidence restored and bolstered a little. Once that happens, Carrie and I will be on our way again, riding off into the sunset,” she added wryly.

  “Like the Lone Ranger,” he quipped, amused at the image she used.

  Both Brianna and Carrie chimed in together, “Who?”

  “Obviously your education has a hole in it,” he said, then decided to fill them in. “The Lone Ranger was a lone survivor of an outlaw raid on a company of Texas Rangers. He was nursed back to health by an Indian he’d befriended as a young boy. After he recovered, he put on a mask and rode around the countryside on a white stallion, fighting injustice wherever he found it. He always handed out a silver bullet before he rode away.”

  “Did he shoot the silver bullet?” Carrie asked.

  She’d been so quiet that, for a moment, he’d completely forgotten she was there. “No, I think he just saved them to hand out as souvenirs. Presents,” he amended, thinking she wouldn’t understand what the other word meant.

  Carrie gave him a look that was at once resigned and ever so slightly irritated. “I know what a souvenir is,” she told him.

  “Sorry.” Despite his apology, Sebastian was unable to suppress a grin. The little girl just kept surprising him.

  As far back as he could remember, it had been just his mother and him. His father was a soldier who’d perished halfway around the world. Sebastian had grown up always looking for ways to bring in a little money and help his mother. He’d gon
e through a nostalgic period early in his life, picking through garage sales and the like, looking for old movie and television memorabilia in the hope of stumbling across something rare that would bring in a sizable amount of money. He had wound up getting hooked on old movies and classic TV programs for a while, before deciding his time and effort could be better spent elsewhere.

  But the Lone Ranger had always remained one of his favorites. He supposed that was because, at one point in his life, he had identified with the loner who, after having gone through typical—at least for those times—childhood and young adult years, had a life-altering experience that left him with only one friend he felt he could trust.

  One friend was all that was necessary when it counted. And his “one friend” had been Brianna.

  That, too, was in the past, he reminded himself.

  About to comment on the little girl’s rather extensive vocabulary, the remark evaporated from his lips as he looked into the rear of Brianna’s car.

  From what he could see, it was completely filled.

  He glanced back at Brianna, then looked again into the interior of the vehicle. For someone who’d claimed not to be moving in, she’d brought everything with her but the kitchen sink.

  “Are all these suitcases filled with clothes?” he asked incredulously, gesturing at the squadron of dark gray cloth suitcases that were packed so tightly together, had they been people, they would have suffocated.

  “No, actually they’re filled with stuffed animals and books,” she corrected. She could tell that he was looking at her to see if she was kidding. She wasn’t. “There’s just one suitcase with clothes,” she told him. “Both of our clothes,” she clarified, adding, “Carrie and I don’t require much in the way of clothing. She just needs a few changes of play clothes, and I’m in a uniform most of the time.”

  “You don’t have to be if you’d rather not,” he told her.

  Brianna’s mind froze for a moment. Was he telling her she could dress casually, or was he telling her that she didn’t need to dress at all?