Stupid heart. She reminded herself that this man had already disappointed her more than once.
“Why are you here?” she asked coolly.
“Nate called me.” He remained in the doorway, unprepared to make even the small commitment of entering her room.
“I see. And you rushed straight to my bedside, I take it?”
She was being sarcastic, but the fiery blush that swept up his neck and into his cheeks gave her pause.
Had he really come rushing to her side, then? Was that what that fierce blush was about?
“Why? Why bother when you didn’t even want to give me the time of day back on the island?”
His gaze slid over her shoulder to focus on the water jug on her bedside table. “Wanted to make sure you were all right.”
She pushed herself higher in the bed and eyed him across several feet of scuffed linoleum.
“If we’re going to have this conversation, could you at least come into the room so I don’t have to shout? I assume there might be some patients next door who’d like to get some sleep.”
He entered the room with visible reluctance. If it wasn’t so heartbreaking, it might almost be funny.
“I thought you weren’t interested in me?” she asked.
“I never said that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“Well, someone has to, since you never say anything for yourself.”
Bugger being polite. She’d tiptoed around him enough.
“I was doing what I thought was best. That’s all you need to know.”
Elizabeth slapped her good hand palm-down onto the bed. “No, damn you, that’s not all I need to know! I’m your daughter, Sam. The very least you can do is look me in the eye and tell me why you don’t want anything to do with me. I’ve had a bloody gutful of people deciding what’s best for me—my grandparents, my fiancé. I’m the one who gets to decide what’s best for me, not you.”
Sam frowned. “Fiancé? I thought you and Nate were on with each other? Don’t tell me he’s proposed?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “No. I’m not telling you a thing until you explain why you left and why you’re here now and why it’s for the best that you ignore me.”
She eyed him belligerently. She wasn’t going to give an inch until he offered her something. Some sign that he cared.
He stared at the ground, his hands opening and closing on the hand rests of his crutches. The fierce frown on his forehead told her he was debating something internally. She held her breath, waiting. If he turned away now, she knew in her heart that she would never see him again. It would be over, for good.
His chin came up and at last he met her eyes.
“All right. You want to know, I’ll tell you. Then you can tell me to go to hell and we’ll be right back where we started from.”
She didn’t say anything, simply waited.
“I met your mother in Greece. She’d just finished school and was traveling with friends. She was good fun, beautiful, loved a party. We, um, hit it off right away. Then her friends went home and Elle decided to stay on, and even though I had a charter I was supposed to crew on, I stayed on, too, and we got a little place on one of the islands, down near the water.”
Elizabeth frowned. It was strange to hear her mother’s name shortened and to hear that the cool, slightly sad woman she’d known as her mother had once been a party girl, someone a young man could “hit it off” with.
“Did you love her?”
Her father shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “We were both nineteen years old. What did we know?”
Elizabeth decided to count that as a yes.
“She told me she was pregnant after the first month. I—” Sam brushed a hand over his face, momentarily hiding his expression from her. After a minute he started talking again. “I didn’t take it well. I was angry. She was supposed to be on the pill. I thought she was trying to trap me. I took off. Took a charter to Turkey. Left her all on her own, with nothing.”
Elizabeth frowned. “What does that mean, with nothing?”
“What does it sound like?” Sam said, his tone sharp. “No money, no food, no way of getting home or getting help. She was in trouble with her parents for staying on, so she couldn’t turn to them. Her friends had gone. But I didn’t think about any of that. I wanted to take off, so I did.”
Elizabeth could hear the self-condemnation in his tone. She spared a thought for her nineteen-year-old mother, pregnant and abandoned by her lover in a foreign country.
“What happened then? I take it she went home to England?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t around, was I? I always assumed she called your grandparents.”
Elizabeth looked at her hands. It wasn’t exactly a beautiful romance, but there was nothing particularly surprising in it, either. Her father had behaved like a selfish, immature young man, and her mother had paid the price for her youthful impulsiveness. It was a story as old as time.
“After a while, I got to thinking. I’d had a few good charters, I was offered a steward’s job, regular work. I started thinking that maybe having a kid wouldn’t be so bad, that I’d be able to look after the two of you without things changing that much. So I hitched a ride to England with a mate and went to find Elle.
“She’d had you by then. I tracked her down, went around to see her at your grandparents’ place. They didn’t want me to talk to her, but she said she wanted to see me. She brought you downstairs with her. You were—”
Sam cleared his throat.
“You were really small. Lots of blond hair. Big blue eyes, like my mom’s. Elle told me that she’d met a new bloke, that they were getting married. That the new guy wanted to adopt you. Then he came in and I realized I’d left my run too late. I’d stuffed up and I’d missed out.”
Sam lowered his head and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.
She frowned. She didn’t understand. If that was the extent of the story, what possible reason could he have had to keep her at arm’s length? From what he was saying, he’d come looking for her. A little late in the day, perhaps, but he had still wanted to claim her. And yet he was standing here, unable to look her in the eye.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” she guessed.
He glanced toward the door, his reluctance palpable. Then he sighed and lifted his head.
“I could dress it up, tell you how your new dad sweet-talked me and your grandfather leaned on me. But it doesn’t change what happened. After Elle took you upstairs to put you down for your afternoon nap, your grandfather came in with his checkbook.”
Elizabeth stared at him. “They offered you money to stay away from me?”
“And I took it.” He held her eye as he said it, and she could see how deeply the shame ran in him. “How much?”
“Ten thousand.”
“What did you do with it?” Her throat was tight.
“Drank it, mostly. I kept telling myself I was going to put it toward a boat, or put it in a trust and send it to you when you were eighteen or something noble like that. But I drank it, bit by bit. Pissed it up against the wall.”
There was a profound silence in the room. Elizabeth could hear the squeak of rubber soles in the corridor outside and the rattle of a curtain being pulled around a bed in the room across the way.
She didn’t know what to think. What to say. At the ripe old age of twenty her father had taken ten thousand pounds to disappear from her life and pretend he’d never existed. He’d sold off his claim to her.
“So now you know.” Sam’s voice was gravelly with suppressed emotion. “You know what kind of man I am, and you know why I figured it was best to make myself scarce.”
He turned toward the door. White-hot anger burned inside her as she watched her father prepare to walk away from her for the third time in her life.
“I get it. You don’t deserve to know me and so you’re taking yourself off. Am
I getting this straight?” she said.
He stilled. His face was in profile to her but she knew she’d struck home.
“You’re a real saint, aren’t you? Sure, you walked away from me once for money, but this time it’s because you’re protecting me from yourself. How very damned noble of you.”
He swung to face her.
“You telling me you want me hanging around? A man who’d sell his own kid?”
“As opposed to what? Having nothing? Knowing there’s a man out there in the world who gave me life who I don’t know anything about?”
“Some would say that’s a better deal.”
“Well, they’re not me. They didn’t grow up in a big house with two old people who didn’t know what to do with a little girl who missed her parents so badly she cried herself to sleep every night for six months.”
Her voice had risen and a nurse appeared in the doorway to her room.
“Is everything okay in here?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said at the same time that her father did.
They looked at each other. After a moment the nurse shrugged and walked away.
“I want to know where I come from,” Elizabeth said. “I want to know my own father.”
She could hear the emotion vibrating in her voice and she blinked furiously. Her father stared at her for a long moment. Then he made his way to the chair beside her bed. He slid his crutches from beneath his arms but didn’t immediately sit. He looked at her, as though he was waiting for her to object. As though he still couldn’t quite believe she was giving him this second chance.
She didn’t say anything. He was her father. She wanted a relationship with him, even if he wasn’t perfect.
After a few seconds he lowered himself into the chair.
13
THEY TALKED INTO THE small hours, until Elizabeth couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. She learned that her father had had an interesting life, full of adventure. A lonely life, too. He’d never settled down with another woman and she was his only child. Reading between the lines, she guessed that the events of thirty years ago still weighed heavily on him.
He was as interested in her life as she was in his. He listened quietly as she filled in the blanks for him, asking questions, occasionally passing comment. By the time he stood to take up his crutches again she had a solid sense that there was a relationship to be had—if they both wanted it. She hoped that the habit of isolation wasn’t so ingrained in her father that he’d revert to his earlier distance. But only time would tell.
She asked about Nate before Sam left. He had no information for her. Nate had called him to let him know what had happened, told Sam where she was, and ended the call without saying anything else.
Despite being bone-weary, Elizabeth lay on her side staring out the darkened window for a long time after her father had gone.
Why hadn’t Nate called or come by?
A nervous, fluttery anxiety tightened her belly as she tried to understand. Perhaps he had been unable to find someone to drive him to the hospital. Just because he’d conquered his fears to drive during an emergency did not mean he was cured, after all. Post-traumatic stress was an ongoing condition, not something that was healed with the flick of a switch.
But even if he’d been unable to catch a lift, he could have called. And he hadn’t.
Something was wrong, and she was worried.
When she’d woken and remembered Nate driving, her first thought had been that he’d had a breakthrough. But maybe there was something she was missing here. Maybe being forced to confront his fear had pushed him backward, not forward.
Impossible to know without seeing him, and all this speculation was making her head ache. She closed her eyes and forced herself to think of something else, and after what felt like a long time she finally fell sleep.
The first thing she did when she woke the next morning was roll over and check the chair beside her bed. Again it was empty.
Disappointment descended on her, along with anxiety. She didn’t understand what was going on. Then she pulled herself up in the bed and glanced toward the door and he was standing there.
“You’re here,” she said stupidly.
She waited for him to come to her side, to kiss her, but Nate didn’t move.
“How’s your arm?” he asked.
“It’s fine. A little tender, but in the end I only needed a dozen or so stitches. Pretty amazing, huh?”
She smiled but he didn’t smile back. All the doubts she’d fought off in the small hours returned tenfold. She’d been telling herself there was an explanation, warning herself not to jump to conclusions, but now Nate was standing there looking cold and distant and she was afraid.
“Nate…? What’s going on?”
Then her gaze moved beyond him and for the first time she saw her suitcase sitting just inside the door, her overnight bag set neatly beside it.
“I think I got everything. If there’s anything else, I’ll send it on,” he said.
“I don’t understand.” Although she did. Of course she did.
“You should go home. Spend Christmas with your family.”
“But…what about us?”
“You should go home,” Nate repeated.
He was starting to really scare her. The flat, dead look in his eyes. The cool, resolved finality in his voice.
This was how he’d been with Jarvie. He’d cut Jarvie out of his life just as coldly. And now he was trying to do the same with her.
“What’s going on, Nate? Talk to me. Whatever it is, we can work it out.”
“There’s nothing to work out. This should never have happened in the first place.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was never going to work.”
“That’s not true, Nate—”
“I’m a mess. My life is screwed. I had no right dragging you into any of that.”
“Your life is not a mess, Nate. You’re recovering from major trauma, yes, but that doesn’t mean your life is over. Every day you get better. The night sweats have stopped. And you drove, Nate. You got in a car and drove. Doesn’t that tell you that the way you’re feeling has to shift?”
“Right. And then all the little bunny rabbits will skip down rainbow lane. It doesn’t work like that, Elizabeth. Take it from someone who has lived with this shit for six months.”
There was so much bitterness and anger in his voice. She set her jaw. He might not be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but she could. And she would continue to be the lamp holder for him on this if that was what it took to get him through.
“I know what you’ve gone through is hard. But you’ll get there. I know you will. You’ll get your old life back. I firmly believe it. We’ll take it slowly, step by step. But it’ll happen. We’ll do it together. We’ll do whatever it takes—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You didn’t hear her scream. You didn’t watch them zip her into a body bag like a lump of meat. Nothing will ever be the same. Nothing.”
Elizabeth sat back against her pillows. She’d seen Nate’s anxiety, his fear of driving, she’d seen him in the grip of night terrors. She’d watched him anesthetize himself with alcohol to take the edge off. She’d read about hypervigilance and depression and broken sleep. She’d seen the way he’d corralled himself into a corner, turning away from his old life and using his self-taught coping mechanisms to get through each day. She’d seen the pain and the shame and the fear.
But what she hadn’t seen or understood until now was that underneath it all lay deep, soul-destroying guilt.
Nate blamed himself for his sister’s death.
It was so simple, and yet she hadn’t seen it until now.
He blamed himself. And he punished himself.
On some unconscious level, he welcomed the symptoms of his post-traumatic stress as due and just penance for his crime. The anxiety, the inability to drive, the loss of his business—these were all fit punis
hments for a man who’d taken the life of the one person he loved above all others. The woman he’d raised almost as a daughter. The woman he’d strived so hard to provide for. The woman he would have died for.
Then Elizabeth had come along, and things had shifted, gotten better….
“You don’t want to get better, do you?” she asked. “You think you deserve it. Don’t you?”
“Spare me the pop psychology. What we had was a holiday fling. It’s over. End of story. We both move on.”
“No, Nate. What we have is a relationship, present tense, and I love you and you love me and the thought of having so much happiness within reach scares the hell out of you. The past few weeks, things have been changing for you, haven’t they? You’ve been feeling better. Happier. More content. Which is why you sacrificed the business. God forbid you have Smartsell and me. One of those things had to go. And then you drove, breaking down another barrier and suddenly I’m on the chopping block, too.
“I thought you couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? You can see it—you just don’t think you deserve it. You won’t let yourself have it. You want to keep paying penance for Olivia.”
“This is bullshit. I’m selling the business because it’s the right thing to do. And I’m ending things with you because there’s no future in it.”
“Answer me this, then, Nate. How did you get here today? Did you drive?”
It was a stab in the dark, but she knew Nate well enough to know that once he knew he could beat something, he wouldn’t allow it to beat him. The expression on his face confirmed her guess and she smiled sadly.
“You’re getting better. But it doesn’t make you happy, does it?”
Nate’s gaze fixed on a point over her shoulder. “I spoke to the travel agent on Main Street. There’s a flight to London tomorrow night and there are plenty of seats.”
“Were you speeding?”
He was taken off guard by her abrupt question and his gaze snapped back to her. “What?”
“Were you speeding, the night of the accident?”
Hot Island Nights Page 18