Sacred (Forbidden Flowers Book 4)

by Donya Lynne

  Journey sadly touched the picture with her fingertips. How long would it be from the moment this picture was taken before Sarah would be gone, breaking Paul’s heart?

  Not wanting to get caught snooping, she lowered her hand and quickly started down the stairs. At the bottom, she came around the corner to find Paul seated at the fireplace, eating.

  “I got you another beer and made you a bowl of chili,” he said, turning and raising his spoon like a pointer. “It’s on the . . .” His voice trailed off the moment his eyes landed on her. “ . . . counter,” he finished a little breathlessly.

  He stared at her for a long moment, then cleared his throat and looked into his bowl. “How do they fit?”

  Biting her bottom lip, she glanced down at the green-and-black pajamas. “Fine. A little long in the leg, but I fixed that.” She lifted one foot, showing off the roll job she’d done on the hem.

  His gaze flicked toward her, then quickly away. “Yeah, I thought they’d be long on you.”

  In the awkward silence that followed, Journey retrieved her fresh bowl of chili from the counter, along with the Heineken he’d set out for her, noting that he had cleaned up the kitchen and put away the rest of the chili.

  “I noticed you had added crackers to your first bowl.” His eyes remained glued to the fireplace as if he were afraid to look at her. “I hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty to fix this one the same way.”

  “It’s fine,” she said, her socked feet padding silently across the hardwood floor to the chair beside his. Only a small table separated them.

  She settled into the plush leather and gently stirred the crumbled Keebler wafers into the thick-and-hearty chili. She’d barely eaten half of her first bowl before he’d carted in her ruined luggage, so she was still hungry.

  The warmth of the fire, the crackle of the wood, and the soft flannel pajamas were as soothing as a hot bubble bath, and before she knew it, Journey was sinking pleasantly into the plush leather, feeling refreshingly relaxed. The swelling had receded on her head, which no longer hurt, and the exhausting effects of her chaotic day were beginning to catch up to her. She would sleep well tonight, especially given how comfortable the bed in her room looked.

  They ate in relative silence for a few minutes. Paul seemed uneasily quiet, as if he were allowing the difficult emotions of seeing Journey in his wife’s pajamas burn off. He was also probably still reeling from what had happened earlier.

  After a while, as the mood in the room began to feel more normal again, Paul glanced across the short space that separated them, stirring the last few spoonfuls of his chili as if he’d had his fill. “So, you said you live in the city? Soho, was it?”

  He seemed to need the small talk.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  He faced front again, his head angled downward, eyes briefly in his bowl before he scooped out a meager helping. “I used to live in the city.”

  Given the metropolitan decor inside his home, she wasn’t surprised but pretended to be. “You did?”

  “I worked in Manhattan.”

  Journey had no idea why he suddenly felt the urge to open up about himself, but it felt a little like he was purging, so she went with it.

  “Doing what?”

  His shoulders bobbed like it didn’t really matter. “Investment banking, financial planning, that sort of thing.” Was he intentionally being vague?

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “It was work.”

  Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

  “The wellness center I own is in Midtown,” she said, setting aside her empty bowl and picking up her half-full Heineken.

  “You own a wellness center in Midtown?”

  She quickly swallowed a sip of beer. “Mm-hmm. Sunflower Health and Wellness, but everyone just calls it Sunflower.”

  “Why Sunflower?” he asked.

  Like her name, she often got asked how she came up with name of her wellness center, so she was already prepared to answer him. “The sunflower is my favorite flower, but it also symbolizes spiritual health, hope, and renewal. It’s also symbolic for reaching for a higher light. So it was the perfect branding for what I do.” She flexed her feet, letting the warmth from the fire sink into the soles. “Plus, I love the color yellow—it’s so bright and cheery, don’t you think?”

  “Sure, I guess.” He didn’t sound sold, but he was grinning as if he were amused by her exuberance.

  “Just walking into work brings a smile to my face,” she said. “The yellow walls, the sunflower logo. It’s my favorite place. I like my shop even more than my apartment.”

  “So, is that where you do all your woo-woo stuff?” He wore a cheesy grin, so she knew he wasn’t making fun of her, just teasing her a little.

  “All my woo-woo stuff?”

  “Yeah, you know”—he set his spoon in his bowl and lifted his hand, wiggling his fingers—“your Reiki whatever. That healing thing you do with your hands that makes them so warm.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “That ‘healing thing you do with your hands.’ Wow. You really ought to let me give you a treatment so you can see for yourself how powerful it is.”

  She knew he’d felt the energy earlier when she’d had her hands on his chest. He’d looked down at them like he was trying to figure out where all that soothing warmth was coming from.

  “Eh.” He took a swig of his beer.

  “Consider it my way of paying you back for helping me so I didn’t have to freeze to death in my car.”

  “Helping you was on the house.” He went back to picking at the last of his chili. “No need to pay me back. I was just being a Good Samaritan.” He tapped the tip of his spoon thoughtfully against the inside of his porcelain bowl. “The world needs more Good Samaritans.”

  “Yes, it does, but I still feel like I should do something to say thank you.”

  There needed to be an equal exchange of energy. Like with Reiki. If she treated everyone she met without receiving anything back, there would be no appreciation for the healing she’d given, and balance would be lost. That was why she charged for treatments. The energy exchange of money for healing maintained the balance.

  This situation with Paul followed the same principle, and right now, it wasn’t balanced. He had rescued her, tended to her wounds, fed her, provided her clothing and shelter, and she’d given him nothing in return. Before she left, she needed to even out the karmic scales.

  “So, what’s your story?” he asked, before she could push the issue further.

  “My story?”

  He set his bowl on the table beside hers. “I’d just like to know a little something about the person who’ll be sleeping down the hall from me tonight, so I know whether I need to put the shotgun next to the bed.”

  Did he really think she would stand a chance against him in a fight? “Do you think I could be some kind of serial killer or something?”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “See, I feel safer already.”

  She cocked her head at him.

  He chuckled. “Hey, I’m just making small talk.”

  Sighing, she relaxed in the chair, extending her feet a few inches closer to the fire. “Okay, fine, what do you want to know?”

  He tipped his beer bottle toward her left hand. "You asked me earlier if I’m divorced too.” He crossed his ankles.

  She already knew where this was going. “Yes.”

  “So, you’re divorced?”

  Averting her gaze, she picked at the ruching on the arm of the chair. “Yes.”

  Talking about Craig wasn’t one of her top ten favorite things to do. But he’d told her about his wife. She could at least tell him a little bit about her own past.

  “How long were you married?”

  “Not long. We divorced eight years ago.” When she met his gaze again, the old hurt and resentment must have shown in her eyes, because his expression instantly tightened as if he could sense he’d to
uched on a nerve.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have—”

  “No, I’m fine. It’s just . . . our marriage ended badly.”

  “What happened? Did he cheat on you?” He almost sounded like he was ready to hunt Craig down if he had. And how sweet was that? Paul didn’t even know her, and he was willing to slay her ex if he’d cheated on her.

  People always assumed Craig had cheated on her, which, in the end, he had, but that wasn’t what killed their marriage. Their marriage had been over a long time before he began sleeping in the bed of another woman.

  “No, it was nothing as cliché as that,” she said.

  She felt his eyes on her in the following silence, studying her, as if he were realizing that her marriage might not have ended the way his had, but it was still just as painful.

  She pressed her lips together and expelled a heavy breath. “The crux of it is that I can’t have children.”

  He grunted quietly as if a sharp pain had stabbed him in his gut. Then his thick black eyebrows dug down over his nose. “Are you saying he divorced you because you couldn’t get pregnant?”

  She held up her hand and shook her head, making it clear he didn’t need to get up in arms. “He became a major asshole because I couldn’t get pregnant, so I divorced him.” She shrugged. “In the end, the divorce was mutual, so it doesn’t really matter. We just couldn’t make it work.”

  He remained silent for a long time, then said, “I’m sorry, Journey. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to make you think about that and—”

  She reached over the table and placed her hand on the back of his wrist, quieting him. “It’s okay. I’ve accepted it and put it behind me.” She glanced at her hand resting on his arm. The electric buzzing in her palm and fingers was so strong it was distracting. The Reiki energy coursing through her really wanted a go at him. “And, honestly,” she continued, trying to ignore the tingling sensation, “if Craig and I couldn’t make our marriage work through something like that, we weren’t meant to be together. It was the universe’s way of telling us we were both meant for other people, not each other.”

  Journey had already gone over this a million times in her head. Craig had laid a lot of blame on her, but she hadn’t been totally innocent. She had laid a lot of blame on herself, too, as well as on him. And, sure, if Craig had been a more devoted husband, he would have been there for her. He would have gone with her to marriage counseling and grief counseling and all the different kinds of counseling it took for their marriage to survive. He had refused to do that. He couldn’t. His coping mechanism had been to self-medicate by having an affair with a woman who worked for one of his clients. A woman Journey had never met and never wanted to. She didn’t even know her name, and she wanted to keep it that way.

  “Sarah and I wanted children,” Paul said quietly, as if he were revealing a secret he hadn’t spoken of for ten years and hated bringing it up now, because this was her fragile moment, not his. “I wanted to wait a few more years. She didn’t. She won. I always let her win. That’s how much I loved her. So we began trying to get pregnant.”

  Given the way his eyes shimmered and he averted his gaze, Journey knew what he was going to say before he said it.

  “She was three months pregnant when she died.”

  The air rushed out of Journey’s lungs. There was only one thing worse than not being able to get pregnant, and that was getting pregnant and losing the baby. Except Paul hadn’t just lost his unborn child, he’d lost his wife too. Paul had experienced one of the worst tragedies a person could go through.

  “Oh my God.” She slid her palm from his wrist to his hand and wrapped her fingers around it, trying to ignore the insistent buzzing under her skin as it intensified. “I am so sorry.”

  Less than two hours ago, they’d been strangers. Now they were friends bonding over mutual misfortune.

  Wasn’t it strange how life brought people together? Everyone you crossed paths with had a purpose in your life. Maybe they were meant to teach you something, or maybe you were supposed to teach them something. Or perhaps they were meant to be a mirror of something you were failing to see in your own life, a device to alter your perspective, or one of a million other agents intended to alter your life in some way, whether to nudge you in this direction or that one, and put you back on course.

  The question was where did she and Paul fit with each other? What was the reason their paths had crossed? Who was meant to help whom here?

  “Your hand . . .” He brought his gaze around, breaking her from her thoughts. “It’s . . .” He looked up at her. In his eyes, wonder had replaced sadness, curiosity had shoved aside heartbreak. It was the same look he’d given her earlier when her palms had been pressed to his chest. “It’s like it’s vibrating or something.”

  “Reiki hands.” She gently reminded him, pressing her palm more firmly against the back of his hand.

  He stared at the seemingly insignificant physical connection for at least thirty seconds, then lifted his twinkling eyes to hers. “So, this Reiki thing. This is what it feels like?”

  “For some.” She pressed her fingers together the way she did when she worked on a client. “For others, there’s just heat. Others feel something like an electrical current. And some practitioners and clients feel nothing at all. It varies from person to person.”

  It was nice to change the subject from one so sad to one she actually enjoyed talking about.

  He nodded like he was beginning to understand how Reiki worked, then focused on their joined hands for a while, as if he were taking in the sensations, processing them, trying to make sense out of what he was feeling.

  “And this heals people?” He seemed in no hurry to pull his hand away from hers.

  “In my experience, yes,” she said tentatively. She knew she technically couldn’t say Reiki healed, but in laymen’s terms, and in her experience, that’s exactly what it did. “I’ve helped people alleviate chronic pain and migraines, cured insomnia, helped people take control over their food cravings so they could lose weight, eased labor pains for women about to give birth, lessened the side effects of chemo . . . I’ve even helped one of my clients recover from heart surgery twice as fast as other cardiac patients who didn’t receive Reiki. The possibilities are endless. I’ve even—”

  “Can it heal a broken heart?”

  Paul delivered the question with such quiet humility that her voice locked up in her throat, her heart clenching like he’d reached right through her rib cage and wrapped his fist around it, squeezing.

  An hour ago, he had no interest in Reiki. Now he almost sounded like he was begging her to tell him Reiki could take away his emotional pain.

  All she could muster in reply was a broken, breathy, “Uh . . .”

  “Can it?” he asked again.

  His earnest gaze searched hers, bearing a shadow of desperation that nearly undid her. There was no sarcasm in his tone. No cynical dismissal of her woo-woo abilities. None of the doubt he had displayed earlier. He had finally felt what her hands could do, and that had changed his perspective.

  If she could wrap her arms around him and take away his pain, she would, but this was his path to walk, not hers. All she could do was help in whatever way she could. She wasn’t sure if healing a broken heart was within the realm of Reiki’s ability, but it was worth a shot. She had seen it work miracles on other conditions in ways she’d never thought possible, so why not this?

  But even if broken hearts were beyond the scope of Reiki healing, maybe giving him a treatment would at least lift some of the burden and kick-start the healing process. Her hands did come to life around him, so the Reiki energy was telling her there was something her abilities could do to help him.

  Believe in the impossible.

  That was the quote written on a plaque that hung next to her front door. She read that quote every time she left her apartment.

  “I can try,” she said, thinking of that quote now.<
br />
  And she would believe in the impossible. Right now, if it could help him, she would believe in the impossible enough for both of them.

  Chapter Six

  “Take a seat over there.” Journey pointed toward the same barstool she’d sat when he bandaged up her forehead and finger. She usually had clients lie on a massage table for treatment, but she didn’t have her table with her, and she wasn’t going to do this on a bed or the floor, so a seated treatment would have to work.

  She washed her hands as he got situated.

  “This good?” he asked when she joined him. He was seated with his hands propped on his solid quadriceps.

  “As long as you’re comfortable, that’s what’s important.” She began drawing the sacred Reiki symbols on her palms with her index fingers.

  “Should I take off my sweater?” He lifted the hem and began pulling one arm out the sleeve.

  “No, that’s not necessary.” But she wasn’t quick enough to stop him before she got an eyeful of exposed skin and the toned muscles of his abdomen. She blinked and looked away as he pulled his sweater back down.

  The truth was, it didn’t matter if he left his sweater on or took it off. Reiki worked either way. She just wasn’t sure she would be able to concentrate if she had to stare at—and touch—his bare, muscular body for thirty minutes. Just seeing the sliver of his naked stomach and his obviously toned muscles had made her pulse jump.

  Journey hadn’t been intimate with a man in ages. So long that her closest friends sometimes asked her if she’d forgotten how to have sex. Now she was standing next to natural selection’s ideal man. Tall and perfectly proportioned, handsome in a way that would turn the eye of every woman in Manhattan, Paul was almost too good to be true.

  In ancient times, Paul would have been the champion gladiator every noble woman wanted to procreate with to give their offspring the best genetic advantage. At war, he would have been the soldier who gave the Roman army its reputation for being the mightiest in history. As a caveman, Paul would have singlehandedly ensured the survival of humanity by passing on his superior genes to sons and daughters far and wide.