by Laura Taylor
* * *
Emma opened her eyes several hours later. David, again attired in his pajama bottoms and bathrobe, stood before the window in her hospital room, his facial expression remote. The dawn was slowly lighting the sky, and she heard a hint of the morning activity taking place beyond the locked door of her private room.
“Have you been awake long?” When he didn’t answer, she frowned. “David?”
“Morning, babe.”
The quiet cool tone of his voice put her on immediate alert. She sat up, combing her hair back from her face with her fingers. Despite her desire to believe that all was well between them, Emma knew better. She felt too vulnerable, so she reached for her discarded nightgown and slipped it over her head.
“What kind of day is it?” she asked.
David turned finally and looked at her. He made no move to approach her, though. Neither did he answer her. Instead, he searched her face with a probing gaze that she found even more disturbing than his silence.
“Talk to me, David. Don’t shut me out this way. Not again.”
She watched him close his hands into tight fists, growing apprehensive when she heard his harsh exhalation. Worried that he was still having trouble adjusting to his newfound freedom, Emma pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
“Stay where you are,” he ordered. “There’s something I need to say, and I can’t put it off any longer.”
A chill passed over her, and she shrank back. She watched him while she drew on her robe. Then, she straightened, pride forbidding her to huddle beneath her renewed fear that she might lose him. “I’m listening.”
“Once I walk out of this room, I won’t be coming back. I’m leaving for Washington this morning.”
She smiled, something akin to relief flooding her. “I understand. You’ve probably got all kinds of debriefing sessions ahead of you. We can…”
“Emma!” he interrupted sharply. “Listen to me. You think you love me, but you can’t be sure of your feelings. Especially not after what’s happened to you.”
Startled, she insisted, “I do love you. How can you think that I don’t know what I feel?”
He shook his head. Sadness seemed to etch his gaunt face, and his eyes looked haunted. “You think you love me,” he said. “But once your life’s back to normal, I probably won’t have a place in it except as part of an unwelcome memory. What happened between us would have happened to any couple in our situation. We needed each other. I was your lifeline, just as you were mine. Yes, we wound up caring about each other, but it was a result of our situation and the constant threat of death or torture. The feelings that you believe you have for me are bound to change, so making a commitment to a relationship based on three weeks spent in hell would be a real mistake … a mistake I’m not willing to let you make.”
“I trusted you, David.” She couldn’t help that her words sounded accusatory.
“I haven’t betrayed your trust. What I’m trying to do now is what’s best for us both. I would never betray your trust, and you know it.”
Do I? she wondered, so shocked by his attitude and his words that she simply stared at him for several long moments.
David remained perfectly still, so still that Emma had the sudden impulse to grab him by the shoulders and shake some life, not to mention a whole lot of sense, back into him.
Instead, she demanded, “What are you feeling? What do you feel when you touch me? What do you feel when I touch you? What, David?”
“I don’t have the time or the desire to play twenty questions.”
“What do you feel?” she asked a second time, ignoring his comment.
“Too damn many emotions to even try to name them all, let alone understand them right now.”
She paled. “You don’t love me, do you? You just said you did, because you thought I needed to hear the words. Telling me that you loved me was nothing more than your way of giving me hope, of motivating me through the days and nights.”
She stopped speaking, horrified at the thought that he’d manipulated her and then told himself that it was for her own good. But the entire idea was nuts, and she knew it – knew it deep inside of her soul. “Damn you, David. You’re lying … to me and to yourself. Why?”
He started to say something, but in the end he stayed silent.
“Why are you lying?”
“Please don’t do this to yourself, babe.”
“Don’t do what?” she asked. “Don’t try to understand why you claimed to love me two days ago and now you claim not to love me?”
“You can’t be certain of your own emotions right now.”
“Quit saying that!” she shouted. “Quit behaving as though I’m incapable of coherent thought just because I spent some time in a jail cell on the wrong side of the world. I lost weight, not my mind!”
His expression hardened. “You’re making this more difficult than it has to be.”
“No, I’m not. I’m just trying to understand, and I think I do now.”
“Is it so hard to comprehend the fact that I’m not sure if what we feel is real?” he asked. “And is it so difficult for you to believe that I don’t want either one of us to make a mistake in judgment that could have disastrous results?”
“Real?” she said, repeating that one word.
“Yes, Emma, real. Real enough to be a part of my life. Real enough to endure living life as a virtual gypsy.”
“I can’t believe that you’re questioning my feelings for you.” She asked, “How can you doubt me this way? You know me better than anyone, including my own family.”
“I have to question your emotions because there’s too much at stake here. How do you think you’ll react if you’re uprooted every two or three years? Is your idea of love strong enough to get you through weeks, maybe even months, of being by yourself when I’m deployed?” When she opened her mouth to speak, he waved her to silence. “Are your feelings real enough for you to be separated for long periods of time from your family and friends? Can you find a way to maintain your commitment to Child Feed and still be a part of my life? What would you do if you had to face a pregnancy alone? Can you handle sharing your life with a man who could go to war tomorrow?”
He paused. When she said nothing, he reminded her, “My life is very real, Emma. I’ve already had one wife who couldn’t hack the reality of it, and I sure as hell don’t want another one. Surely you can see that we both need time to be certain that our feelings for each other are strong enough to withstand the pressures of my career.”
She stiffened, humiliated that he could reduce the emotions they’d shared to simple happenstance and hurt that he would underestimate her ability to make a commitment to him in spite of the demands of his career.
“What I see is that you obviously feel trapped,” she said, her tone level despite her chaotic emotions. “There’s no need. I love you, David. I probably always will, but I don’t intend to pressure you, nor will I crawl or beg in order to demonstrate the sincerity of my emotions. Another man in my life thought I should behave that way, and he was very disappointed when I didn’t. You will be, too, if that’s what you expect of me right now or in the future. And just so we’re clear on this entire situation, my career is just as demanding and just as important as yours is, and I can’t help wondering if you could hack it as my husband.”
“That’s my point. I don’t expect anything of you. I haven’t the right.”
“I gave you the right,” she said, “the first time we made love, and every other time since then. Do you think I gave my body and my heart to you out of idle curiosity about your skill as a lover? Not my style, Major. Never has been, never will be. And hasn’t it even occurred to you yet that I would never have been intimate with you if I wasn’t deeply in love with you?”
As if he were talking to himself, David murmured, “I can’t and won’t be swayed by anything you say or by the pain I’m causing you.” Then he stubbornly shook his head and
crossed the room. With his hand resting on the doorknob, he looked back at her. “You and I cannot build a life together on the basis of a negative experience. It won’t work. We’re both smart enough to know how uncertain emotions can be, even in the most ideal of situations. And that cellblock sure as hell wasn’t ideal.”
She stared at him, shock and fury comingling within her heart. “I don’t believe you’re doing this to us.”
David gripped the doorknob until his knuckles whitened. “One of us must think clearly. Your feelings for me are the result of a life-and-death crisis. At the very least, you deserve the time to come to terms with being imprisoned and the emotional bond we forged in that cellblock. There’s nothing even remotely normal about what we just went through, so how can you possibly think your feelings are normal?”
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” she insisted. “A mistake you might not be able to repair.”
“It’s a risk I have to take, for both our sakes. I owe you time, Emma. Time to understand what you really feel – about yourself, about me, and about us, if there is an us. I intend to give you that time, whether or not you want it. I also owe myself time, because I don’t want either one of us to wind up as an emotional casualty.”
“Is this your idea of being honorable, Major Winslow?”
He flinched, his hazel eyes filled with icy shards of green and brown. “Yes, it is.”
“It doesn’t matter that I love you?”
“Of course, love matters,” he replied.
“But not my love for you?”
“Damn it, Emma, your love matters. It matters so much to me, I won’t risk damaging it or you.”
Emma knew David well enough to realize that he wouldn’t bend. He obviously believed what he was saying, so she stopped trying to persuade him of the depth of her love for him. She also understood rejection. She’d experienced it once before, but she couldn’t recall ever feeling totally disabled in its aftermath.
Slipping out of her hospital bed, Emma smoothed her robe into place and tightened the tie belt at her waist. She lifted her chin as she looked at David. Whatever empathy she felt for him only minutes ago disappeared. She consciously buried it beneath the wreckage of their relationship before she said in as steady a voice as she could manage, “This conversation is over. Have a nice life, Major Winslow.”
Emma jerked in surprise when she heard a crisp, oddly patterned knock at the door. Let it be Sam, she prayed. Please, God, let it be Sam.
David frowned. His eyes swept over her one final time before he jerked open the door. A tall, dark-haired, and meticulously groomed man pushing forty stood in the hallway. He wore a three-piece charcoal-gray suit that shouted Armani, and he carried an extravagant bouquet of fragrant roses. Grinning widely when he spotted Emma, he stepped into the room.
“Sam … ” She took a step forward, ready to hurl herself into his arms – something she hadn’t done since childhood.
“Be well, babe,” David said quietly.
Emma went parchment pale. “Don’t ever call me that again.”
David’s jaw hardened. After nodding at Emma’s visitor, who watched the byplay between the two of them with frank interest, he exited the room, spine stiff, hands clenched at his sides, and emotion blurring his vision.
“Hey there, baby sister, who’s your tough-looking friend?” Sam Hamilton asked after he closed the door.
Emma blinked back the tears stinging her eyes. “He’s not a friend. He was, however, in the cell next to mine. We escaped together.”
“Marine Corps Major David Winslow, I take it. The media people are chafing at the bit to get at him.”
“Well, they’re out of luck. He leaves for D.C. this morning.”
“He’s big news. Bona fide hero material, from what I hear. They’ll want a piece of you, too, but you don’t look up to a press conference.” Sam strode across the room and placed the bouquet of roses on the nightstand. “Winslow may not be your friend, but he obviously cares about you.”
Emma visibly flinched. Then, she squared her shoulders. “You’re wrong, Sam. You couldn’t be more wrong. I may love him, but he doesn’t love me enough to trust my feelings for him. He thinks I’m suffering from some bizarre form of Stockholm syndrome.”
Sam flashed a sympathetic glance in her direction and didn’t try to change her mind. Pulling her into his arms, he hugged her. “You gonna be okay?”
She trembled as she held tightly to him. Resting her forehead against his chest, she sighed. “Physically, I’m fine. Emotionally, I’m a total train wreck, and I’m not sure how to clean up the mess I’ve just made of my life.”
“How about a good meal and then some first class shopping in Paris? Mom said you’d need lots of great food and a new wardrobe once the doctors declared you fit to travel.”
She nodded as she moved out of his embrace, slipped across the room to stand before the window, and idly fingered the slats of the blind.
Sam Hamilton frowned. “Emmaline?”
A tear slid down her cheek, then another, but she responded to the brotherly worry in his voice when she turned to face him. “Get me out of here, Sam. I need to feel safe again.” And loved, she thought, her heart so hollow, it hurt with every beat. I need to feel loved. If not by David, then by my family.
He nodded. “I left a small bag for you at the nurse’s station. I’ll go get it. Once you shower and dress, we’re out of here. Paris first so you can shop and rest up for a few days at my place … Mom’s orders, by the way … and then a flight home to San Diego. Sound like a plan, baby sister?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I’ll shower now. I’ll need those clothes in ten minutes.”
CHAPTER 11