The Promise of Lightning

by Linda Seed

  She sat up straighter and held the sheet around her body, facing him. “Look, Drew. I don’t want you to think that I … I know this looks bad, me cheating on Liam, but …”

  He gave her a wry smile. “Does it look worse than me sleeping with my cousin’s girlfriend?”

  “Yes! It does! And I don’t do this. I’ve never … But Liam and I …”

  “Don’t.” He cut her off. “Don’t make what happened between us something you’re ashamed of. Please.” He didn’t think he could stand it if he turned out to be a mistake she’d made, or a thing she felt guilty about.

  “I’m not doing that. I just want you to understand. Things between me and Liam haven’t been right for a long time.”

  “All right.” There it was, her expression of regret again. He didn’t want to be something she regretted. He didn’t want that at all.

  They were quiet, and he lay back and pulled her into his arms.

  He’d thought that he didn’t want to talk about Liam, but after a while, he couldn’t help asking.

  “So … what went wrong?”

  She sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. A lot of things. He’s angry. He’s sad. A lot of it has to do with grief over Redmond, I think, but … I also think some of it’s just Liam. I couldn’t break through it. I couldn’t get through the anger and the sadness to the real him, you know?”

  He nodded and stroked her back. As she spoke, he could feel the vibration of her voice in his chest.

  “And things between us just moved too fast. We started dating while he was out here for Redmond’s funeral, and that was good. That was fine. But then just a few months later, he moved out here to be with me. I didn’t ask him to do that! I didn’t know where we were going at that point. We were just getting to know each other. And then … he made this gesture! And it was a really big gesture.” She sat up again and looked at Drew. “You know, nothing puts a relationship on the fast track like moving halfway across the country to be with someone. I just wasn’t ready for that, but nobody asked me. It just happened, and I was kind of pulled along for the ride.”

  He rubbed at his forehead and winced. “You know, that was partly about Julia. About Colin moving out to Montana to be with her. He and Liam switched places. At the time, Colin said it was a win-win. I guess it wasn’t a win for you.”

  “I wish he’d said he came out here to be with his family. Then it might have been okay. But he said he came for me. And it was just all too much.”

  He didn’t want to ask the question, but he needed to.

  “Is that why you’re here with me? Because you need to distance yourself from Liam? Is this some kind of—I don’t know—some kind of gesture of independence?”

  She shook her head, and tears pooled in her eyes.

  “No. No. This is … God. I couldn’t not be with you.”

  It was the answer he’d wanted to hear. It was how he felt, himself. He couldn’t not be with her. It was as though the choice had been made for him long ago, by some force beyond his understanding.

  “Yeah. I know.” She lay on top of him and he kissed her, and at least for the moment, everything else went away.

  Everything but the two of them.

  She was at the door of the hotel room, about to leave, with her clothes carefully arranged and her purse in her hand, when Drew asked the question.

  “When are you going to break up with Liam?”

  He was standing there looking impossibly appealing, wearing nothing put a pair of jeans. His hair was still mussed from bed. She could see that he was trying to be casual, but she could also see from the tension around his eyes and the way he didn’t know what to do with his hands that it was an act.

  “I was planning to do it after the wedding,” she told him. “You know—to avoid wedding drama.”

  He nodded, rocking back and forth slightly on his feet.

  “I think you’ve got to do it now. Unless … I mean, if we’re going to keep seeing each other. And I hope to God we will.”

  For a moment, Megan was amazed that he could wonder whether she wanted him. Of course there was no question of whether they would be together. How could he believe there was?

  “Of course we will. Drew. Of course.”

  He relaxed visibly.

  “Okay, then … I think you need to do it now.”

  She leaned in and kissed him once, though it was so hard to stop at just once.

  “I will.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Okay, that’s … okay.”

  She said goodbye to him, got into her truck, and sat behind the wheel in the hotel parking lot for a while, just sitting there, looking out at the ocean with the sun still high above the horizon.

  After a minute, she got her phone out of her purse and turned it on. She’d turned it off when she’d arrived, knowing Liam would call her, and knowing she wouldn’t be able to face the guilt if he did.

  When the phone powered up, she did see missed calls and texts from him, as she’d expected. But there were also several others from Ryan, Colin, and Breanna. That was unusual. What was going on?

  She checked her texts.

  From Ryan:

  Call me as soon as you get this.

  From Colin:

  Megan, I need to talk to you right away.

  And from Breanna:

  WHERE ARE YOU???

  She felt a chill run through her. Something had happened. Something bad.

  The way Ryan told it went something like this:

  When they’d all come back from the kayaking thing, he and Liam had gone out into the pasture to check on the stock. The mare Liam usually rode had thrown a shoe, and she was out of commission until they could get the farrier out there to fix it. So, he was riding a big, black Arabian that they hadn’t had very long.

  It was late afternoon, with the sun sinking down below the tree line, when Ryan and Liam were bringing in a pregnant heifer that Ryan thought would deliver that night. The heifer was agitated—part of the reason Ryan was convinced that it was almost time for her to calve—and didn’t want to go.

  Ryan didn’t see exactly what happened, and later, Liam would say that he didn’t remember much of it himself. Maybe the heifer spooked Liam’s horse somehow. Maybe the horse just wasn’t used to Liam. Maybe something else happened—a snake, or a problem having to do with the tack.

  Whatever it was, Liam’s horse reared up just as he was leaning over to secure the heifer. He wasn’t ready for it, and he toppled off the back of the horse and hit the ground hard. That, in itself, probably wouldn’t have done much damage. But then the horse brought one of his front hooves down onto Liam’s lower leg.

  Ryan heard the bone snap from twenty feet away.

  Liam hadn’t lost consciousness, but the leg was badly broken. There was no bone poking out anywhere—thank God for that—but legs weren’t supposed to bend the way Liam’s had.

  Ryan had called Orin, who’d brought a four-by-four truck out into the pasture.

  Ryan and Orin had hoisted Liam up onto his good leg and loaded him into the truck, with Liam spewing a string of obscenities that was extreme even for him.

  There had been some discussion about whether to call an ambulance, but Orin decided that by the time it got out there, they could have Liam halfway to the hospital in Templeton.

  The drive out of the pasture had been long and arduous because Orin was doing his best not to let the truck jostle too much, in an effort not to torture Liam. But that wasn’t easy, as they didn’t have the benefit of a road. Orin tried to balance the need to get Liam help quickly with his desire not to make his son wish the horse had killed him.

  The results were mixed.

  By the time they moved out of the pasture and onto a relatively level road, they’d had to stop once to let Liam open the passenger door and vomit into the grass.

  By the time Megan got to the hospital, most of the Delaneys were gathered in the emergency room waiting area,
Liam was drugged up on painkillers, and a series of X-rays had shown that Liam had a comminuted fracture of the tibia and fibula—which meant that both of the bones in his lower leg had been crushed.

  “He’s gonna need surgery,” Orin told her as he stood there in the waiting room, blinking and shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I guess things like this happen, especially with a horse you don’t know and who doesn’t know you. Couldn’t have been helped, I suppose, with Liam’s mare being sidelined.” He shook his head. “It’s a hell of a thing to see your son hurt like that.” He sniffed slightly and rubbed at his nose. “A hell of a thing.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Drew heard about Liam shortly after Megan left the hotel room. First Julia texted him, and then Sandra called.

  He didn’t think he’d ever known Sandra to be shaken by anything, but when he heard her voice over the phone, his first thought was, Someone’s dead. She had that sound, that mixture of shock and despair.

  As it turned out, nobody was dead, but Liam’s accident posed the real risk that he might have permanent disability to the leg—pain, lost range of motion, a persistent limp. Liam was a man who did hard physical work. What would he do if he couldn’t perform that work anymore? Of course he didn’t need to work to make a living—in that way, he was so much more fortunate than others facing similar injuries—but he needed the work for his self-image, for his emotional well-being. Drew didn’t have to know Liam well to know that.

  “It’s all going to depend on the surgery,” Sandra told him. “The surgery goes well, then I suppose he’ll recover, though it’ll take awhile, and he’s likely to climb the walls while he’s waiting. But if it doesn’t …”

  “Is there anything I can do?” Drew asked, feeling completely ineffectual.

  “Well, you’re family, boy, and I figure family belongs at the hospital right now. Liam might not like you much, but he’ll appreciate the gesture. So would I.”

  Drew was silent.

  You’re family.

  He knew this was a potential turning point in his relationship with the Delaneys. Sandra was explicitly inviting him into the fold. If he showed up, then he’d be accepting his role as a Delaney. If he didn’t, then he would be rejecting his place in the family in a way that wouldn’t be easy to undo.

  He’d been rejecting them for the past few years, in ways big and small. But now, he had to decide what stand he would take moving forward—what kind of man he meant to be.

  He had to make the call.

  “Okay. What’s the name of the hospital?”

  He showered, dressed, and was walking through the front door of the hospital in Templeton in under forty-five minutes. The Delaneys were gathered in the emergency room waiting area, huddled together on a bank of chairs near the reception desk.

  Megan sat next to Breanna, looking sick and miserable. She avoided eye contact with Drew when he came in.

  The family had been told about the results of Liam’s X-rays and about the fact that he would need surgery to repair the damage. But they were still waiting for the orthopedic surgeon to meet with them to go over exactly what had to happen and when.

  There was some discussion of whether to have Liam transferred to a bigger, better hospital—maybe someplace down in Los Angeles. But Ryan had Googled the surgeon to find out whether the guy knew what he was doing, and it turned out he did, so they decided it was best to avoid the trauma and hassle of a move and stay put.

  While they waited, Liam was moved from the ER to a regular room, and the doctor arrived after what seemed like hours—he’d been doing arthroscopic surgery on somebody’s knee.

  The surgeon, a guy in his fifties with gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses, said a lot of words like “crush injury,” “complications,” and “rehabilitation.” Drew felt a little woozy. He could only imagine how much worse Sandra and the others must have felt.

  “Does Liam know all of this?” Megan asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

  “I told him, but he’s on morphine right now, so I’m not sure how much got through.” The nametag on the surgeon’s lapel said dr. m. hart.

  Sandra had been concerned about possible head injuries, so that was one bit of good news: Dr. Hart reported that Liam’s CT scan had shown no evidence of concussion.

  “Okay. Okay,” Megan said. Her eyes were welling up with tears, and Drew felt a rush of complex emotions he could barely sort out. One of them was concern for Liam, certainly. But the sight of Megan crying over another man—never mind that it was a man she’d been with since long before she knew Drew—made him want to hit somebody. But that would be distinctly counterproductive, so instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at the clean, white tile floor.

  In an effort to think of someone other than himself, Drew asked, “Is he in a lot of pain right now?”

  The surgeon shook his head. “No. With the pain medication, he’s comfortable for now. There’s going to be a certain amount of postoperative pain, but we’ll manage that with medication as well.”

  Drew thought about that—about the cycle of pain and painkillers and potential addiction. He didn’t know if Liam was prone to that sort of thing, and he hoped not. But he did know enough about Liam to know that he would be impatient with the recovery process. He’d want to get back to work as soon as possible, and that just wasn’t going to be as soon as he would like. That part was going to be hard.

  Julia was a few feet away, standing next to Colin and listening to the surgeon. Her face was tense, and she gripped Colin’s hand so tightly her knuckles were white.

  Drew went over to where she stood and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked at him gratefully.

  After a while, some of the family went into Liam’s room to see him. Drew didn’t think he’d be particularly welcome, so he stayed back in a waiting room, where plastic chairs stood in sterile rows facing a wall-mounted TV in the corner.

  A coffee urn stood on a table near the entrance, and Drew poured some into a Styrofoam cup just to give himself something to do.

  “How is he?” he asked, when Sandra and Orin returned from Liam’s room.

  Megan was still with Liam, and Breanna had taken her boys to the cafeteria to find something to eat. Julia and Colin sat beside Drew in the waiting room. A few feet away, a family that included a harried-looking woman and three kids ranging in age from about two to ten sprawled across a bank of chairs.

  “Well, I guess he’s doing okay, considering,” Sandra said. Her face looked pale. “He’s pissed off at himself for letting it happen. Which is stupid, if you ask me. He didn’t tell the damned horse to stomp on him.”

  Orin looked ruddy and vaguely ashamed—of what, Drew didn’t know.

  “You all can go in and see him,” Sandra told them.

  “Ah … no, that’s all right,” Drew said.

  “You came all the way here from Cambria to show some damned support, so get on in there and show it,” Sandra barked at him as he stood up from his chair. With hands that were wiry and strong from years of work, she took him by the shoulders, turned him around, and gave him a gentle but firm shove toward the waiting room door. “You, too,” she told Colin and Julia.

  At least Drew wouldn’t have to go in there alone. He held back and let Colin take the lead as they trooped into the cool, white hospital room where Liam lay looking smaller than usual beneath a sheet and a thin cotton blanket.

  Colin made small talk with Liam about how he was going to be fine, and not to worry about anything, and Julia said a few things about how she was just glad it wasn’t worse.

  But Drew didn’t say anything, because he couldn’t stop looking at Megan.

  She was sitting in a chair next to Liam’s bed, holding his hand. Drew couldn’t take his eyes off that point of contact—Liam’s hand in hers. His chest hurt, and he felt a pressure building up in his head.

  Megan was looking at Liam with such compassion and love that Drew’s first impulse was to leave the room, to run
away, to fly back to Salt Spring Island and never come anywhere near Cambria again.

  Was it possible that he’d misread the situation? Could it be that she really was in love with Liam, and that all it had taken was a badly broken leg for her to realize it?

  He felt a sharp kick to his ankle and turned to see Sandra standing next to him, glaring at him with her particular Sandra scowl.

  “You better pull it together, boy,” she whispered as Colin and Julia talked with Liam. “You keep staring at that woman, everybody in this room is going to know you’re in love with her. Unless you’re ready to declare yourself right here and now in a damned hospital room.”

  He was not.

  He took a deep breath to clear his head, then excused himself to use the men’s room.

  When he was safely hidden away amid the tile and porcelain, he went to a sink and splashed some water on his face, then dried it with a paper towel. He wadded up the towel, threw it into the trash, and stared at himself in the mirror.

  Just what did he think he was doing, trying to steal a woman away from a man who was facing surgery and potential long-term disability? Especially when that man was his own family?

  “This is stupid,” he told his reflection. “This is just stupid. And … and wrong.”

  But even as he said it, he knew that what really seemed wrong was the idea that Megan might choose Liam over him.

  He didn’t know if he could go back in there and watch the two of them together and pretend nothing was wrong. If he tried, he was sure to give himself away to everyone the way Sandra had warned him he would.

  As he stood there looking at himself, at his guilty face, he had one impulse: to run like hell.

  Fuck it.

  He’d come to the hospital, he’d shown his face. He’d done his family duty by being here. But now, he had to get out of here before he either started breaking things or declared his love for Megan in front of every Delaney in the place. Neither of those options seemed viable, so he left the men’s room and headed past Liam’s room, down the hall, and toward the exit.