Ten Years Later...

by Marie Ferrarella

Sebastian laughed and nodded his head. “All I know is that if she were my kid, I’d be studying every night just to try to stay ahead of her.”

  “I don’t know how long I’d be able to keep that up,” she told him. “She’s already got a mind like a steel trap. It’s like she remembers everything she sees, reads, learns—”

  Sebastian looked at Brianna in disbelief. “She reads?”

  Brianna smiled. It was so common in her life, she forgot that there were many who were fighting illiteracy. She needed to get back in the game.

  “Like an old person. My father initially started to teach her. She was reading to him in less than two weeks. He’s completely crazy about her.” Brianna smiled fondly as she gazed down at the sleeping child. “She is rather hard to resist, as I think you might have found out today,” she added drolly, referring to the games Carrie had corralled him into playing with them.

  “A lot like her mother.” Brianna laughed at that and then rolled her eyes. “What?” he asked, not seeing anything particularly funny about what he’d just said.

  “Oh, please, don’t even go there,” she requested. The man obviously needed a quick summary. “You so resisted me,” she reminded him, but there was no bitterness or rancor in her voice, no look of recrimination when she glanced in his direction.

  “About that...” Sebastian began hesitantly.

  She raised her hand to stop whatever he was going to say. “It’s okay. I didn’t say that to make you feel guilty, or even to get you to apologize, or anything else along those lines. I just wanted to point out that I wasn’t irresistible to you, no matter how you ‘choose’ to remember the past.”

  Instead of saying anything, Sebastian took hold of her wrist and drew her aside. He didn’t want to have Carrie overhear them should she suddenly wake up. Glancing at her now, he wouldn’t have put it past the little girl to feign sleeping just so that she could listen to them talk. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy being around adults rather than children her own age.

  Brianna began to tug her hand away and found that, although his hold on her wrist felt relaxed, it was really quite strong. Her wrist was staying exactly where it was for the time being.

  With a mental shrug, Brianna allowed him to take her over to one side of the room.

  “What I ‘choose’ to remember,” he said, keeping his voice low despite the distance now between them and the sleeping child, “is feeling hurt.”

  Now he wasn’t making any sense at all. Brianna blinked, then stared at him, completely confused. What did he have to be hurt about? “What?”

  “Hurt,” he repeated for emphasis. “Because I had this big, romanticized dream, for lack of a better description, of the two of us going off to college and beginning our lives together. You and me against the world, that sort of corny thing,” he admitted, growing more uncomfortable, not to mention hot. Who had taken out all the air from around here? “And then suddenly, you weren’t part of that—you were telling me you weren’t coming with me.”

  There was a reason for that and he knew it, she thought. “It wasn’t exactly because I was going off on a month-long holiday touring Europe. I was staying home to take care of my injured father. My injured father who’d almost died in a car accident,” she underscored, stunned that he had felt and thought that way.

  “I know, I know, I was being an idiot. A self-centered, thoughtless, selfish idiot, but I’m just being honest about the way I felt at the time.” He broke it down to just a few words. “I felt cheated and abandoned.”

  “Well, that made two of us,” she retorted, doing her best not to revisit that time, because it always brought tears to her eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said, the emotion leaving his voice, “but you were the only one who actually had a right to those feelings. I am really sorry for leaving you to cope with everything on your own back then. I should have stayed to help you, to be supportive of you, and I didn’t. I just thought about how you should have been there with me, not vice versa.”

  That he felt that way, that he was saying all the things that had, at one time or another, crossed her mind, took the sting out of all the pain that she’d felt over the past ten years. She could be magnanimous now. She couldn’t before.

  “You had a degree to earn,” she pointed out, her tone completely compassionate.

  “So did you,” he reminded her.

  And if she could stay to help her father, he should have stayed to help her. With his mother ill now, he understood every emotion she had to have experienced, every emotion that had chosen to use her body for a battlefield. Since she’d come to them, she’d worked hard at being a pacifist.

  “Yes,” she agreed, but things had worked out in that area as well. “I was far more flexible about it than you could ever be. If you had stayed here with me, you would have felt I was holding you back, and things might not have gone well for us eventually.”

  “You mean compared to the way they actually have?” he asked with a touch of sarcasm.

  “Compared to the way things actually did turn out,” she amended tactfully. “You have a career you love, as do I, and I have a huge bonus on top of that. Had you stayed, then I would have never had Carrie come into my life. That little girl has opened up a brand-new world for me, Sebastian. She’s made me a much better person,” she confessed.

  He looked at her for a long moment, new and old feelings all crowding together in his chest, bringing a host of memories and whispers of the past with them. He pushed them to one side, not having enough time to sift through them now.

  “Not possible,” he told Brianna.

  “But she did,” she insisted. “Carrie has made me a—”

  He touched her face then, lightly skimming his fingertips along her cheek. Remembering that old feeling of how his day hadn’t actually started until he saw her. “You can’t improve on perfection,” he whispered.

  “Now you’re just making fun of me,” Brianna protested.

  “No,” Sebastian told her just before he gave in to the overwhelming yearning that ate him alive from the inside out and brought his mouth down on hers. “I’m not.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Nothing had changed.

  And everything had changed.

  Sebastian’s kiss still had the power to set her pulse racing, to set desire exploding in her veins, swiftly growing and wiping out every thought in her head. That part hadn’t changed.

  But life in general, their lives in general, had changed enormously. They had changed in focus, progressed and moved on. Brianna had worked tirelessly to help her father regain the use of his legs, had in effect brought his soul back from the dead. In the interim, she’d gone on to become a nurse as well as kept his store open and running until he was able to resume working there, something that had taken the better part of more than three years.

  And, as if that wasn’t enough, after that she had also taken on the mind-staggering responsibility of being a single parent and raising her late fiancé’s daughter as her own.

  As for him, he’d gone on to get his degree, then had restructured his life and moved to Japan, where he was currently putting his skills to use.

  Neither one of them was the optimistic and eager teenager on the brink of tomorrow, as they’d been ten years ago. And yet, the essence of those people, those dreamers, was buried deep inside of each of them and had somehow reconnected with this simple, albeit inflaming, pressing of lips.

  Unable to pull away, Sebastian tightened his arms around her as he deepened the kiss, deepened it to the point that there was no viable way out for him. Without realizing it, he’d hit the point of no return, at least in this instance, and discovered that Brianna still had a way of speaking to his soul, of making him think of nothing else but her.

  Want nothing else but her.

  What was to have been just a
very simple kiss steeped in nostalgia was anything but simple. It made him remember the one night that had, all those years ago, seemed like the beginning of everything. He hadn’t realized at the time, a scant few hours before they’d found out about her father’s car accident, that it also marked the end of their time together.

  Her heart pounding, Brianna threaded her fingers through his hair. She’d always loved the feel of his thick, silky hair. Her head reeling, she leaned into the kiss.

  Leaned into him.

  Even as she did, she told herself that this was only going to lead to heartache, but that small voice of logic was getting weaker.

  Her desire was blotting out all resistance.

  Any moment now, she would throw caution to the winds and allow him to take her to his room. To take her where they were inevitably going.

  Where she desperately wanted to go.

  Everything had changed.

  And yet, nothing had changed, because her feelings for him hadn’t changed.

  “Mama?”

  Like a thin, sharp blade, the tiny, almost inaudible voice effectively pierced what had, until just now, felt like an impenetrably thick, clear bubble.

  Startled, Brianna practically sprang back, not knowing what she was going to say. Dazed, disoriented, she swiftly tried to clear her head so that she would be able to give Carrie a coherent answer to whatever her daughter was going to ask.

  “Yes, honey?”

  Dear God, her voice was all but shaking—just like the rest of her. Was that because of her daughter, or because she realized that Sebastian’s kiss had opened up the door to a room she had promised herself had been sealed shut?

  Carrie looked from her to Sebastian, a puzzled expression on her small, oval-shaped face. “Are we going somewhere again?”

  Brianna exchanged glances with Sebastian. He was as mystified as she was.

  She turned toward her daughter. “No, honey, we’re not going anywhere for a while. What makes you think that we are?”

  “Because you’re kissing Sebastian goodbye,” she said innocently.

  “Your mom wasn’t kissing me goodbye, Carrie. She was just thanking me,” Sebastian told the little girl without hesitating.

  Brianna looked at him, amazed at how easily the excuse had flowed from his tongue. Did lying come easily to him these days, or was he just trying to cover for her and set the little girl’s mind at ease?

  She wasn’t sure which it was and it just reminded her that, for the most part, the man standing before her was really a stranger. He’d had the past ten years to become one.

  Carrie gazed up at him, clearly confused. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she stretched a little, then asked him, “What was Mama thanking you for?”

  This time, there was a short pause. Was he waiting for her to come up with something? Because right now, her mind was a complete blank.

  And then she heard Sebastian tell Carrie, “Because I told her that I was going to go get a pizza for dinner tomorrow night. Your mom told me how much you like pizza and I do, too.” Sebastian sat down beside Carrie on the sofa.

  The little girl beamed. “What kind of pizza?” she asked.

  Instead of answering, he asked her a question. “What’s your favorite?”

  “Pepperoni and sausage,” Carrie piped up, wiggling her feet in anticipation of sinking her teeth into a slice.

  “No kidding,” Sebastian marveled. “That’s my favorite, too.”

  His words earned him another wide, all-inclusive grin from the four-year-old.

  Brianna knew for a fact that his favorite toppings consisted of four different cheeses and no meat.

  Nice save, she mouthed over her daughter’s head, impressed with his quick thinking.

  She also appreciated his being so thoughtful of Carrie. The little girl had really taken to him. Carrie had been just an infant when her father had died and Brianna always regretted the fact that Carrie was going to grow up with no memory of either of her biological parents. For a short duration, Carrie would see what it was like having a father figure in her life.

  Turning toward Carrie, Brianna announced, “It’s time to get you to bed, pumpkin.”

  Carrie appeared crestfallen. “Do I have to go to bed right now, Mama? Can’t I stay up for a few more minutes?”

  It was hard not giving in to the child. Every day, Brianna had to fight her own inclination to spoil her and let her have her own way. Enforcing a few rules was for her daughter’s own good.

  “It’s already past your bedtime, Carrie,” she said as sternly as possible.

  “I was asleep before my bedtime, so can I have that time back now?” Carrie asked without even missing a beat.

  Sebastian could only stare at her, blown away by her reasoning process. He shook his head as if to clear his own brain.

  “I’d start saving up for her college tuition now if I were you. This kid has the makings of a really great legal mind,” he predicted.

  Brianna laughed as she gathered Carrie up into her arms. Like a little monkey, Carrie scrambled over to one side, resting against her hip bone. Holding her with one arm, Brianna stroked Carrie’s hair with her free hand. “Carrie just likes to argue.”

  The remark made Sebastian smile. “Like I said, a great legal mind.”

  “Can Sebastian tuck me in?” Carrie asked suddenly.

  Her daughter was just trying to stall, Brianna thought.

  “Carrie, you can’t just assume someone is at your beck and call just because you want him to be,” she pointed out, looking for a way to keep Carrie’s feelings from being hurt while extricating Sebastian from what seemed like an awkward situation.

  But the one thing Brianna already knew was that you couldn’t extricate someone if they really didn’t want to be extricated.

  And Sebastian obviously didn’t.

  “I’d love to tuck you in,” Sebastian said.

  Carrie beamed triumphantly. Her small, sweetheart chin rose up just a tad as she bragged, “See, Mama, Sebastian said he’d love to. That means he’s okay with tucking me in.”

  Sebastian’s warm chocolate eyes shifted over to look at Brianna. “I’m sorry. Did I just wind up undoing years of discipline?”

  From the dreamy expression in Carrie’s eyes, Brianna could only deduce that her daughter had just developed her very first crush. She could only shake her head in response to his question.

  “Something like that.” She laughed, dismissing the apology. “Don’t worry about it. The bottom line is the same as it’s always been—that she’s happy.”

  “I think that’s safe to assume at the moment,” he replied, looking at Carrie.

  Because the little girl opened up her arms to him, Sebastian stepped forward to take her from Brianna. “If it’s okay with you,” he prefaced.

  “Sure, be my guest,” Brianna told him. “You want to carry her up the stairs, go right ahead.”

  “She weighs less than a feather,” Sebastian said as he took Carrie from her.

  “I weigh more than a feather,” Carrie protested. “More than a sack of feathers,” she insisted.

  “A small sack of feathers,” he allowed, easily carrying her up the stairs. “Are you happy, Carrie?” he asked, deliberately keeping a serious expression on his face as he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” she answered immediately, tightening her small arms around his neck.

  He hadn’t expected to feel something tugging on his heart just now, hadn’t expected to experience a strange, bittersweet feeling in response to the exceedingly simple, uncalculated action. He was beginning to understand what the expression “wrapped around her little finger” was all about. He was wrapped around Carrie’s—and he didn’t even mind.

  “Your bottom line’s been met,” he told Brianna. “Carrie sa
ys she’s happy.”

  “Yes,” Brianna acknowledged, “I heard.”

  Entering the room Carrie shared with her mother, he placed her on the queen-size bed.

  “Now tuck me in,” Carrie told him, patiently waiting for him to comply.

  “Like this?” he asked, taking the edge of the blanket and bringing it to cover her up to her chin.

  Carrie wiggled up higher in her bed, moving so that the blanket was a little farther down. “Very good,” she pronounced as if she were a teacher and he the student.

  “Okay, then, good night,” he said to her, beginning to back away.

  “What about my story?” she asked, stopping him in his tracks.

  “What story?” he wanted to know.

  “You’re supposed to read me a bedtime story,” she informed him. Then, in case he didn’t know that she could read, Carrie told him, “I can read it myself, but I fall asleep faster if someone else reads it to me.”

  This was getting out of hand, Brianna thought, stepping forward. Carrie was stalling. The little girl obviously had a crush. While she could totally understand why Carrie felt that way, she didn’t want Sebastian to feel obligated to sit by her bedside and read to her. That went way above and beyond the call of duty.

  “I’d run while running is still an option if I were you,” she advised. “I’ll read to Carrie.”

  But rather than thank her for coming to his rescue, Sebastian pretended as if he hadn’t heard her. Instead, he said to Carrie, “I’d love to read to you. What story would you like to hear?”

  Carrie didn’t need to hear any more. Scrambling out of bed, she made a beeline for the shelves where her books were housed. After selecting one conveniently located on the bottom shelf, Carrie handed the eight-by-eleven illustrated storybook to Sebastian, then dashed back into bed.

  Pulling the covers up to her chin, she happily declared, “Ready!”

  Sebastian could feel Brianna looking at him. He wasn’t sure if she was waiting for him to begin reading—or to bolt. He wasn’t about to do the latter. For reasons he didn’t fully comprehend, the idea of reading a bedtime story to an eager audience of one pleased him.