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“Tory, are you still there?”
She sent a swift glance over her shoulder at her daughter, who, thank the good Lord, was concentrating on her tuna casserole. “As a matter of fact,” she said into the phone, “I am eating dinner now.”
Yet another silence, but this time a brief one. Then he said, “Look. I know I’ve got no damn right to ask you. I know I told you to forget all about me. But I…Tory, I’d really like to see you. Can you meet me somewhere? For a drink, maybe?”
He does know, she thought. He must know. That’s why he’s called. He probably talked to his father and that awful old man has finally told him.
Tory closed her eyes—and saw Blake Bravo’s face. Grinning at her, that ugly, mean grin of his. She shook her head to banish the image—and found herself wondering why, if Marsh knew, he didn’t just say so.
“Listen,” she said, “is there a number where I can call you back a little later tonight?”
“You mean you can’t talk now.” It was a statement, and a grim one.
“Yes, that is what I mean.”
“Let me give you my cell phone number.”
Those words caused faint hope to rise. Maybe he wasn’t even in town yet. Maybe he was miles away, in another state. Maybe it was all just talk, and he would never come at all. Maybe—
But then he spoke again. He mentioned the name of a certain hotel, and an address less than two miles from her house. Her dread returned full force, making her heart thud loudly and bringing a faint taste of copper to her mouth. He said something about his father. About a heart attack.
Still painfully aware of Kimmy behind her, she gave out a bland expression of sympathy. “I am so sorry to hear that.”
“Why?” he asked dryly. “I don’t think anyone else is.”
“Is he—”
He answered before she completed the question. “He’s still alive. As of now. But it doesn’t look good. They’ve got him over at Norman Regional.”
She wanted to cry out, What did he say about me? Did he tell you? Is that it? Is that why you’ve called?
She asked, very carefully, “Have you…talked to him yet?”
“I saw him a couple of hours ago.”
“And?”
“He’s very sick. Other than that, he hasn’t changed a bit. What time will you call?”
She bit the inside of her lip and accepted the fact that if Marsh did know about Kimmy, he wasn’t going to talk about it now.
Which was a good thing. She couldn’t afford to talk about it now, anyway.
She glanced at the stove clock—6:23. After dinner Kim would be busy with homework. “In an hour?”
“Good enough.”
She hung up, gave herself a few seconds to compose her features, then turned back to the table and slid into the chair across from her daughter.
Kimmy, always a good eater, had finished her casserole and her salad. She’d started in on a drop biscuit. The biscuit was giving her trouble, breaking apart as she tried to butter it.
“Here.” Tory held out her hand—which surprised her by not shaking one bit. Kim passed the biscuit across. Tory buttered it. Kim watched the process with great interest. “Jam?” Tory asked.
“Um. Yes, please.”
Tory spooned a dab of strawberry jam onto each crumbly biscuit half. “There you go.” She set the halves back on Kim’s plate.
Kim picked one up and brought it to her mouth. Before she bit into it, she asked, “Who was that you were talking to?”
Tory’s smile felt like something glued onto her face. “Just an old friend.”
Kim set the biscuit half down again. “You said that before. What old friend? Who?”
“No one you know.”
“You said that before, too.”
Tory faked a warning frown. “And that is all I am going to say, Miss Nosy Pants.”
Kimmy groaned. “Mama. Pants can’t be nosy.”
“Eat that biscuit. And finish your milk.”
“Then can I have a Ding-Dong?”
“The milk and the biscuit. Now.”
Tory spent the next hour trying not to let her daughter see her distress, and seesawing back and forth between acceptance of the fact that she would have to meet with Marsh and frustrated fury that such a thing should be necessary.
After all this time.
After she’d accomplished what she would once have called impossible—letting go of her lovesick dream that Marsh would someday return to her, would go down on one knee and beg her to marry him, would swear he couldn’t live another minute without her at his side.
It hadn’t been easy, but lately Tory had managed to achieve a pleasant, peaceful kind of balance in her life. Her parents, in their forties when she was born and now both nearing seventy, had retired to New Mexico. They had left their roomy ranch-style house to Tory and their beloved granddaughter. Tory owned her own business and enjoyed her work. Her daughter was beautiful, healthy, bright and well adjusted.
Things were going great.
And now this.
Marsh Bravo—back in town.
His return could shatter everything, could turn her peaceful life upside down—just as his leaving had done a decade before.
Still…
Marsh Bravo was her daughter’s father.
That fact remained, undeniable. He had a right to know his child.
And Kim did ask about him. More and more often of late. In the end Tory really didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, and she knew it. She would have to meet with him.
When Tory called Marsh back, she did it from the privacy of her bedroom, with the door closed. She’d already gotten hold of Betsy, the high school girl who lived three doors up the street. As a general rule, Tory used Betsy Tilden whenever Rayanne Pickett, next door, was unavailable.
Rayanne Pickett was like a member of Tory’s family. She was a dear friend to Tory’s mother and as good as an extra grandma to Kim. Tonight, though, Tory didn’t want to take the chance that Rayanne might question her about where she suddenly had to get off to, after nine on a weeknight. Rayanne, like Tory’s parents, would not be thrilled to learn that the boy who had gotten Tory in trouble had returned to town.
True, chances were that Rayanne would have to know eventually.
But “eventually” was not tonight.
So Tory had asked Betsy first. And Betsy had agreed to come over at nine-fifteen, after Kim went to bed.
Tory kept the second phone conversation with Marsh brief. “I’ll meet you in the lobby of your hotel,” she said after a terse exchange of greetings. “About nine-thirty?”
He didn’t try to keep her talking, only said, “That’s fine—and Tory?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks. For agreeing to see me.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything, just quietly set the phone in its cradle.
Tory agonized over whether or not to tell Kim that she was going out. As long as Kim stayed in bed where she belonged, she didn’t have to know. But then, if Tory said nothing, and Kim woke up and found her gone—no. That wouldn’t do.
So when bedtime came, Tory told her daughter that she had to go out for a while, that Betsy would be there if Kim needed anything. Kim asked the logical question, the one Tory had been dreading.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s grown-up business,” Tory said, choosing evasion over an outright lie.
Kim got the message. “You mean you won’t tell me.”
“That’s right. But I promise. I won’t be gone too long.”
A crafty light came into Kimmy’s big dark eyes—eyes she’d inherited from the father she’d never met. Yet. “You know what? I think I should stay up. I can keep Betsy company and wait for you to get home.”
Tory cut that idea off at the pass. “Uh-uh. Betsy will have homework to keep her busy. And you can wait for me just fine—right here in your comfy bed, with the lights out.”
“Aw, Mom…”
“Give me a kiss.”
“Oh, all right.”
Betsy arrived at exactly 9:15. Tory thanked the girl for coming on such short notice, invited her to help herself to anything in the refrigerator and promised to return by eleven at the very latest. Betsy waved a hand and told Tory not to think she had to rush.
Tory went out to the garage and got into her car. It was then, as she slid behind the wheel, that her heart decided to start racing and her hands began to shake.
She flipped down the visor and lifted the cover on the lighted mirror built into it. “Calm down. Take it easy. Everything is going to be all right,” she whispered to her own reflection.
It didn’t seem to do much good. Her heart still pounded too hard and her hands kept on quivering.
She shut the mirror, flipped the visor up and started the car.
The drive was a short one. And the closer she got, the faster her heart seemed to beat. She was nothing short of a nervous wreck by the time she nosed her car into an empty space about twenty feet from the hotel’s front entrance.
Was this really happening? Somehow it didn’t feel real. Would she even recognize him? Would he recognize her? And what, if anything, did he know about Kim? What should she say if he did know? And what if he didn’t?
Lord. It all went around and around.
And at the center of it was Kimmy.
Tory had never lied to her daughter about Marsh. Kim knew that Tory had loved Kim’s father with all of her heart. Tory had explained how he had had to go away suddenly, how she had tried to get in touch with him, but never knew where he had gone and so could not find him.
The story, which was the truth, had been enough until just recently. But lately Kim’s questions kept getting tougher.
“Don’t you think we better look a little harder now?” she would ask. “Don’t you think he needs to know he has me? Don’t you think it’s something that he would really want to know?”
“Yes,” Tory always answered, a catch in her throat. “Of course he would want to know. And we will start looking. Very soon.”
That kind of reply wasn’t going to work for much longer.
And now, well, maybe it wouldn’t have to.
That would be good.
Wouldn’t it?
Tory got out of her car. The wind was up and a light, misty rain had started falling. The wind plastered her skirt to her thighs and blew her hair across her face. Absently Tory raked her hair back out of the way and made for the wall of glass that led to the hotel lobby.
The automatic doors swung wide as she reached them. Tory stepped between them, entering a vestibule. She felt windblown and a little soggy and more nervous than ever. Just keep moving, she thought. And she did, taking big, determined strides. Another set of doors swung open for her and she entered the lobby.
She saw him immediately.
He stood near the marble-topped check-in desk.
Oh, God. Her silly heart was flopping around in her chest like a landed trout.
He was different—and yet not different. The square-jawed, full-lipped, wonderful face—a face she’d always thought belonged on a poet or a priest—was the same. So was the thick brown hair, though it was cut somewhat shorter now. And those eyes—deep-set, heavily lashed. Those eyes had not changed at all.
He had filled out. He was broader in the shoulders, deeper in the chest.
No trace of boy left, she thought with a sinking feeling that might have been dismay. All man, now…
And his clothes…expensive clothes. Good slacks, a high-dollar polo shirt with a tiny designer monogram on the pocket. And his shoes…
Fine, beautifully made shoes.
Shoes that looked as if they cost a good sight more than the 150 baby-sitting dollars she had pressed into his hand on the night he left her—money he did pay back. She’d found it tucked into the only letter he sent her three months later, the one that said she should forget him, that he was no good and she could do better and he wasn’t coming back, after all.
He was never coming back….
For some crazy reason, looking at him now, Tory felt the heart-stopping pain of that letter all over again. Standing in that hotel lobby, windblown and rain-damp, her gaze locked with his, she was spinning back in time.
She was sixteen again, and four months’ pregnant, barely a child herself, about to have a child—a girl who had waited with longing in her heart. A girl who had trusted. A terrified girl who loved with fierce abandon, a girl who was going to have to get used to the idea that she and her unborn child would be facing the future alone.
That had been the lowest point, the worst for her—reading that letter. Worse even than that last night—the night he finally turned on his father and gave Blake Bravo a large taste of his own bitter medicine.
He had cried in her arms that night.
And there had been blood—most of it dried by then.
She remembered that so clearly, how black bloodstains can look in the moonlight.
When she sneaked out to meet him and saw the blood smeared all over him, she’d had to put her hand over her own mouth to keep from crying out.
He saw her fear for him in her eyes and shook his head. “It’s not my blood—not most of it, anyway. It’s his. My dad’s blood…” With a low, anguished moan, he reached for her.
And she went into his arms, held him, though she feared that the blood would smear on her, too, that later she would have to hide that pair of pajamas in the bottom of a drawer until she could sneak them outside and bury them deep in a full trash can.
He whispered to her between ragged sobs. “I hit him. Hard. More than once. And when he finally went down, he cracked his head on the side of the table. God, Tory. I think I killed him….”
She held him tighter, stroked him with soothing hands, murmured tender lies—that it was okay, that everything would be all right.
He said, “I called the ambulance. And then I hid, in the trees, until they came. They took him out. He was so still, but maybe…he could have been alive. There were cops, too. They looked around the property, but they didn’t find me. Tory, I have to get away. I have to get out of town….”
She begged him to stay. But he said he couldn’t. He’d end up in jail if he stayed. So she said she would go with him.
“You can’t. You’re sixteen. How would we live? It would never work. But I’ll come back, Tory. I swear. Someday…”
Someday.
She hadn’t liked the sound of that at all. Someday could be forever. Someday could mean years.
But what could she do? She sneaked back into the house to get what money she had there, and then came out again and gave it to him. And after he left, in the house once more, she tiptoed to the hall bathroom, locked the door and turned on the light, expecting to find dark stains all over herself.
There was nothing. Her eyes looked wide and haunted in the big bathroom mirror, but her blue pajamas bore not a single dark smear. The blood had all dried on him before he came to her.
Before he left he had asked her to find out what she could about Blake. He promised to call. In a few days…
And he had called. Once. Three days after that terrible night. He called in the late afternoon, when her father was still at his clinic and her mother was at the beauty shop.
By then Tory had thought that everything would be all right. Because Marsh’s father had not died. Blake was out of the hospital and back on his feet. She told Marsh the news, bursting with joy that it would all work out, after all.
“You can come home now, Marsh. Your father didn’t die, and it’s safe to come back.”
“No, Tory. I can never go back there. He’ll kill me if I do. And if he doesn’t kill me, I’ll kill him….”
He’d sounded so very far away. And so desperate. A fugitive from justice. He’d actually called himself that. He wouldn’t tell her where he was calling from. He said he had to keep moving, he couldn’t let Blake find him.
“You don’t know him, Tory. You don’t know how he is. Nobody gets the better of him….”
She was crying when she hung up the phone, thinking she’d go crazy waiting for Marsh to call again.
But she hadn’t gone crazy, though sometimes in the weeks to come it had felt like she was. And as it turned out, he never did call again. That was the last time she ever spoke to him—until a few hours ago, when she’d picked up the phone and heard his voice saying her name.
A dark-haired woman wearing too much perfume brushed past her murmuring, “Excuse me,” as she went.
“Oh.” Tory blinked. “It’s okay…”
A black leather wing chair waited a few feet from where Tory stood. She ordered her numb legs to move, to take her there. Once she reached it, she sank stiffly into it.
Marsh came toward her. So strange. Her heart was breaking all over again. It shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t feel like this, not after all these years.
He stopped just a foot from her chair. Concern had turned those dark eyes to velvet. “God. Tory…”
Almost, she lifted up her arms to him.
Almost, she surged from that chair and into his embrace.
Almost.
But not quite.
She hesitated, thought, Do I really want that—his arms around me? And how can I be certain that he will welcome me there?
Then she realized it didn’t matter whether she wanted him to hold her, whether he wanted her body pressed close to his. Somehow, while she hovered on the brink of throwing herself at him, the dangerous moment had passed.
Tory stayed in the chair and stared up at him. “Why now?” The hushed words seemed to come out all on their own. “Why now, after all this time?”
“Tory, I—” He cut off his answer before he even said it. “Please. I think we’d better go somewhere more private. To my room, all right?”
She probably should have said no to that. But she didn’t. People kept strolling by them, and there were three clerks behind the check-in desk. She didn’t need any of those people witnessing her distress, let alone hearing whatever she and this man ended up saying to each other.
She stood on shaky legs and smoothed her rumpled skirt. “All right.”
For a moment she thought he would take her arm. She didn’t know if she could bear that—his touch, right then.
But then he only gestured. “This way.”
She fell in step beside him. They strolled across the lobby and down into a central court area paved in stone. Then up three carpeted steps to the elevators. He pushed a button. They waited. She didn’t look at him. It seemed better not to.
A set of doors opened. They got on with two men in business suits. The elevator had glass walls. They rode up with a view of the open court area retreating below them.
The two businessmen were arguing, speaking in tight, hushed tones. Tory ignored them. It wasn’t hard. Most of her energy was taken up in painful awareness of the man beside her—the man she still would not look at. She stared blindly down at the courtyard as it moved away beneath them.
The businessmen got off on the fourth floor, leaving Tory and Marsh alone the rest of the way. Marsh didn’t speak. And Tory felt that she couldn’t speak, that if she’d opened her mouth only a strangled, crazy moan would come out.
At last, they reached his floor—the top floor. The car stopped, the doors slid open.
He said, “This way,” for the second time. She walked beside him, down a hall that was also a long balcony overlooking the courtyard below. When they reached his door, she stepped back as he used his key card. The green light blinked. He turned the handle and signaled for her to go in ahead of him.
It was a suite, she noted with some relief. She wouldn’t have to try to talk to him in a room that was more than 50 percent bed.
They entered a small entrance hall that opened onto a living area done in forest-green and maroon. Soothing colors, she thought, though the last thing she felt at that moment was soothed.
He gestured at the forest-green sofa. Obediently she lowered herself onto one end of it.
“Can I get you a drink?”
Her stomach rebelled at the thought. Yet she heard herself answer, “Plain tonic water?”
“I can do that.”
He turned for the bar, which had a mirrored wall behind it, and got busy fixing the drink she’d asked for that she really didn’t want. Once he’d poured the tonic water, she watched him mix himself a whisky and soda.
She couldn’t help staring at his hands. Very fine hands, long-fingered and strong. They appeared much better cared for than in the past, the nails filed short and buffed smooth.
She found herself thinking how they used to hold hands all the time, thinking that she could still recall exactly the way his hand had felt in hers—warm and firm and rough.
And then she thought what she should not have allowed herself to think.
But holding hands wasn’t what got us into trouble…
What got them into trouble had happened out by the river at Ten Mile Flat, in the back seat of that old Plymouth Duster he used to drive. They would lie all wrapped up together, clothes unbuttoned, but never fully undressed—after all, someone might come along. Surprising, the trouble a couple of kids can get into, and all without ever taking off all their clothes.
As if he were touching her now, she could feel them—those long hands on her skin…
Tory blinked. Gulped. Cut her eyes away.
When she looked back, he was watching her in the mirror over the bar. She became certain, in that instant, that he could see inside her mind, that he knew what she had been thinking, about those nights out at Ten Mile Flat.
She felt defiant, then. And angry. That she should still remember so vividly. That this man who had left her to have his baby alone could still call forth such a powerful response in her.
He turned, a glass in each hand, and came to sit in the armchair nearest her end of the sofa. He passed her the tonic water. The glass was cold, beads of moisture already sliding down the sides. She took one sip. Her stomach lurched.
No. Better not try to finish it. She set it on the coffee table in front of her. He drank, the ice cubes clinking together in his glass.
She found herself staring at his watch. A Rolex. Unbelievable.
She said what she was thinking. “It looks like you are doing well.”
He lifted one of those broad shoulders in a half shrug. “I own a business. Boulevard Limousine of Chicago. I started it eight years ago, with one twelve-year-old Cadillac limousine and one chauffeur—me. Originally, it was just a way to support myself while I was earning my degree.”
His degree? Marsh Bravo, who had barely managed to graduate from Norman High, now had a college degree?
He chuckled. “Hard to believe, huh? Me, a college graduate. But I have to confess. It’s not from any college you would have heard of. You went to OU, I suppose.”
“Yes. I did.”
“Figured you would. Dean’s honor list, right?”
She nodded. “And…how is your business doing now?”
He brought his glass to that sensual mouth again, sipped, shrugged once more. “Revenues this year should top five million. I have 250 employees and a fleet of 85 limousines.”
Tory could hardly believe what she was hearing.
I’m no good, he had written. You can do better….
Eight years ago, he’d said. Eight years ago, in Chicago, he had started his business. And since then, he must have been making a living at least, must have been doing all right.
Yet he had never called. Never written. Never made the slightest effort to see her, until now.
That hurt. That hurt way too much.
She couldn’t afford that—to start hurting for this man all over again. Couldn’t. And wouldn’t.
She had to remember. This meeting was not about her. It was about Kim. For Kim. Kim was the one who mattered now. And if Kim’s long-lost daddy owned a fleet of limousines, well, that was all to the good.
Marsh looked into his glass, and then back up at Tory. “What about you?”
She stared at him blankly, still trying to accept the fact that the poor boy she had so passionately, utterly loved, the poor boy who had turned his back on her because he had nothing to offer her, had spent the past decade becoming a rich man.