“Help me to understand, Stefanie.” Dustin’s softly spoken words cut through the stillness. He caressed her bare shoulder with gentle strokes, his fingers drawing circles on her skin. “If you still insist that we end this, even after everything tonight, you’re going to have to explain why.”
He tilted her face toward him. “Is it that you don’t think Jacob is ready to see you with another man? If that’s the case, he doesn’t have to know just yet. We can be discreet.”
“I would never hide you from my son,” Stef said. “It’s not likely I could even if I wanted to. He’s very perceptive for his age.”
“So, is it you? Are you not ready to take this step yet? Is it still too close to your husband’s death?”
Stef almost grabbed on to the gift he’d handed her, but guilt wouldn’t allow her to do it. She would not besmirch her late husband’s spirit by using him as an excuse.
“I loved Brandon,” she started. “He was one of the kindest, gentlest souls I’ve ever known. But over the last couple of years of our marriage, we were more like friends than husband and wife.” She felt Dustin’s arms stiffen around her. “There was love—there had always been love between us—but there was never real passion. Not even in the beginning.”
It pained her to reveal such intimate details about her marriage. Stef had never shared her secret with anyone, not even Tania.
“Why did you marry him?”
“Because Brandon was the kind of man I needed in my life. He kept me grounded, reined me in when I needed it the most.” She twisted around so that she could look at him. “Do you want to know why being with you scares me? Because you bring out feelings in me I’ve tried to suppress for years. You make me want to do the kind of things that led to one of darkest parts of my past. I promised myself that I would never be that girl again.”
“But why? What’s so wrong with being that girl?” When she didn’t answer, he squeezed her shoulders gently but firmly. “Stefanie, talk to me.”
“I can’t be her! Because that girl…” She stopped, sucked in a deep, fortifying breath. “That girl nearly killed her best friend. That girl is the reason my best friend, Tania, has a prosthetic leg.”
Dustin stared at her for several heartbeats, saying nothing. When he finally spoke, Stef’s heart lurched at the tender understanding in his voice.
“What happened?” he asked.
Her eyes fell shut. It took her a moment before she could bring herself to continue.
“I was in my early twenties, before I joined the army. I was always a bit of a wild child, but once I got to college it got worse.”
“Drinking?”
She shook her head. “I never drank. I just don’t like the way alcohol tastes.”
“Drugs?” he asked
“I didn’t need drugs. I got high on adrenalin. One night my best friend and I went club hopping. These guys challenged us to a street race. I wanted to prove how badass I was, so I pushed the car to its limit and it spun out of control. We hit a guardrail.”
“Thank God it wasn’t a tree or a concrete wall.”
“I was lucky.” She swallowed audibly, her throat growing drier with each word. “I escaped with a few cuts and bruises and a broken ankle. My best friend, Tania, wasn’t so lucky, though. She was drunk and hadn’t buckled her seatbelt. She went through the windshield. The glass damaged her leg so badly that it had to be amputated just below her knee.”
That night had been a turning point—the turning point—in her life.
Seeing the disappointment on her father’s face when he came to pick her up at the hospital was one of the most devastating experiences she’d ever endured. She still didn’t know what kind of strings he’d pulled to keep her out of jail, and she’d never asked. She’d just vowed to never go back to being that girl again.
“And you blame yourself,” Dustin stated.
“There’s no one else to blame,” Stef returned. “My dad, who was respected and well-liked by law enforcement in the area, managed to prevent me from getting arrested. I was cited for reckless driving. That’s it. He made me join the army soon after and told me that if I didn’t straighten up I could forget about him ever saving my ass again.”
“What happened to your friend? Do the two of you still talk, or was that the end of your friendship?”
“She helped me pick out the shirt I wore tonight,” Stef said with a sad smile. “She has never blamed me, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not the one to blame.”
Several charged seconds ticked by before Dustin spoke again. “Stefanie, I’m sorry for what happened to you, and to your friend. But I still don’t understand what it has to do with us being together.”
Regret thudded against her chest with every heartbeat, but it would pale in comparison to what she would feel if she ever slipped into her old ways again and caused another catastrophe.
“I…” She cleared her throat. “I can’t be with you, because you make me feel like that girl I used to be,” she said. “You make me crave the adrenalin rush. When I’m with you, I do wild and crazy things, like breaking into the Chalmette Battlefield and skinny-dipping in your backyard, and I love it.”
She looked him in the eyes.
“Do you understand now, Dustin? I love that feeling. I crave it, like a drug. That’s what scares me the most. When I’m with you I want to be that carefree and reckless Stefanie I used to be. And I just can’t afford to go down that path again, not when I have Jacob. I have to consider how my actions would affect him.”
“You were a young, reckless girl with no responsibilities back then. But you’re older and wiser now. There’s a difference between being reckless and enjoying the occasional adrenalin rush. You can trust yourself to tell the difference.”
“Can I?” She looked out over the pool again and then back up at him. “That’s just it, Dustin. I don’t know if I can trust myself. It’s a slippery slope. It can start with something as innocent as what we’ve been doing over these past two weeks, then the next thing you know, I’m pressing harder on the pedal on my way from work, trying to see how fast I can push my car.” She shook her head. “It’s safer if I just stay away from that path altogether. I don’t care if it makes me a boring, suburban mom.”
“So that’s it then,” Dustin said. The frustration in his voice tore at Stef’s soul. She never meant to hurt him. But, then, he wasn’t the only one hurting.
“That’s it,” she said, placing her head on his broad chest one last time. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, but it does. I have too much to lose.”
~ ~ ~ ~
Stef stood just outside the security checkpoint of Concourse B at Louis Armstrong International Airport. She stared through the Plexiglas walls, looking for the first sight of her mother-in-law’s short, natural afro, or Jacob’s head bobbing between the airline passengers making their way to their respective gates.
The moment she spotted them a smile broke out across her face. It was the first time she’d felt anything other than despair since leaving Dustin’s home that morning. Jacob came through the gate and ran into her open arms. Stef held him to her chest, kissing the top of his bristly hair. She held onto him for several seconds longer than necessary. She would have to think long and hard before she allowed him to leave for this long again.
She finally released Jacob from the bear hug and walked over to the Plexiglas. Boarding for Shelia’s return flight to Tampa would start in just a few minutes. They had already decided that she wouldn’t chance going back through the security line.
Stef put her hand up to the glass. “Thank you,” she said.
“Thanks for sending him.” Her mother-in-law’s eyes glistened with tears. “Grandma will miss you,” she said to Jacob before blowing him a kiss.
Once Shelia left for her gate, Stef and Jacob headed for baggage claim. Her son insisted that he was strong enough to roll his luggage to the covered parking garage. He fumbled a couple of times trying to get it to stand upright, but
once the casters were all pointed in the right direction it was smooth sailing.
Watching his confident stride caused a pinch in Stef’s chest. She wasn’t ready for this little show of independence just yet, but she knew there was no way to stop it. He was growing up so much quicker than she’d anticipated.
Jacob’s initial questions were about Sandy. Even though Stef had held the cat in her arms several times during their web chats so that he could see with his own eyes that his pet was being well taken care of, he still wanted to know how she was doing. He then started in on all the rides he’d been tall enough to ride at the various Florida theme parks. He’d become a bona fide chatterbox.
He stopped to take a breath and Stef saw her opening.
“Hey,” she said as she took the on-ramp onto Interstate 10. “I’m off for the rest of the day. I thought we could go to that bouncy house place where Durrell had his birthday party.”
“But I’m sleeping over at Andre’s tonight,” Jacob said from his booster seat in the back.
Stef’s eyes flashed to the rearview mirror. “Since when?”
“He asked me last night. Grandma said I could.”
“The same Grandma who is on her way to Florida?” Stef asked. “I thought you were going to a sleepover at Travis’s house tomorrow so that I can go to Uncle Stefan and Aunt Callie’s party.”
“Yep, I’m going to Travis’s, too.”
Her son, the social butterfly.
Jacob reached over and patted her arm. “Don’t worry, Mom. We have time to hang out later once I’ve seen all my friends.”
“Thanks a lot.” Stef released a rueful laugh. “It’s okay. I’ll just have to find some friends of my own.”
“You should,” Jacob said with a head nod. Then he went back to playing whatever handheld device Shelia and Robert had bought him.
Stef divided her attention between the long stretch of the Causeway Bridge ahead of her and looking at the top of her son’s bowed head in the rearview mirror. If she were being honest with herself, she could admit that she had slowly come to realize that she was never in any real danger of slipping back into her old, reckless ways, because she could never do anything that would bring him harm. The little boy whose fingers were flying furiously over the handheld game was her life; he was the reason she even bothered to take a breath. How could she ever think she was capable of putting anything as trivial as an adrenalin rush before him?
Yet, that’s why she’d broken things off with Dustin. She’d turned away the first man to make her feel alive in years, all because she was too afraid he would turn her into something she was never in danger of becoming.
A soft cry escaped her throat at the thought of what she’d given up.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“Nothing,” Stef said quickly. She smiled at him through the rearview mirror. “Nothing’s wrong, baby.”
It was a lie. Something was definitely wrong. And, once again, it was all her fault.
But this time she would fix it.
~ ~ ~ ~
Dustin pressed his steepled fingers against his lips as he studied the words he’d just typed in the e-mail. The knot that had been residing in his stomach for the past few months was still there, but had started to loosen the tiniest bit.
He’d decided to take Stefanie’s advice and bring his employees—his family—in on the discussion about Global Offshore Drilling. He should have done this a long time ago.
He hit send, mailing the meeting request to the eight men and women who had been employed at Hawk Transpo the longest, along with Stefan, whose opinion Dustin trusted the most out of all of them. He’d instructed them to meet him in the conference room in an hour.
The deadline to accept or reject Global’s offer was next Monday, and Dustin wasn’t any closer to figuring out what he should do than he’d been three weeks ago. He shot off another e-mail to Stefan, asking him if he could come to his office. A couple of minutes later there was a single knock on the door, followed by Stefan’s head poking in.
“What’s up?”
Dustin gestured for him to come inside. He waited for Stefan to take a seat before he gave him an abbreviated version of the back and forth he’d had with Global and several other companies that had inquired about buying him out over the past year. Dustin purposely left out the dollar amounts. The money didn’t matter.
“Well, damn,” Stefan said. “Your poker face has gotten better since those days on the carrier in the Persian Gulf. I had no idea you were even contemplating selling. You hid it well.”
“I hid it for too long,” Dustin said. “Now I’m up against the clock and have no idea what I’m going to do.”
“Do you want to sell?”
“I want to fly,” Dustin said. “I’m tired of being stuck behind this desk all the time.”
“Damn, man. Do you have cotton between your ears?” Stefan sounded disgusted.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s what my dad used to ask me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. I usually wasn’t, but that’s beside the point.” He pointed at Dustin. “You, on the other hand, need to pay attention when I tell you stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“You don’t have to do it all,” Stefan said. “I understand that big Einstein brain of yours thinks that it can do everything, but that’s bull. You need to bring in a corporate organizer to help restructure the company. They come in, figure out what different departments you need, and help you find the right people to bring in.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“I’ve been looking into it since we talked the other day.”
“Well, why didn’t you say anything to me about it?”
Stefan shrugged. “You never asked.”
Dustin ran a hand down his face. “You can be a real asshole sometimes, you know that? I was on the verge of selling my company. Do you know how miserable I would have been if I’d given this all up for that eighty million dollars?”
“Eighty million dollars?” Stefan sprung up from his chair. “You didn’t say they were offering that much.”
“It’s not about the money,” Dustin said, rising from his chair and walking around his desk.
“The hell it’s not,” Stefan said. “Sell it. Wait, no, bring me in as a partner and then sell it.”
“Come on,” Dustin said, putting his arm around his friend’s shoulders. “I think I’ll order some pizzas for the crew. They don’t have to know what I originally called them into the conference room for, do they?”
His steps felt lighter now that he’d tackled this problem with Global that had been weighing so heavily on him. Now, he just had to solve the problem weighing on his heart.
Chapter Eight
Stef handed her keys to the valet before entering the wrought iron gate he held open for her.
“Follow the path to the rear gardens, ma’am,” he said, pointing to the lighted walkway that curved around the left side of the house.
She took a minute to collect herself, taking several deep breaths.
You can do this.
Yes, she’d made a mistake, and over the past twenty-four hours she’d convinced herself that she was a big enough person to own up to it. She’d come to know Dustin well enough over these few short weeks to know that he would forgive her for her stubbornness, but that didn’t make having to apologize and admit just how wrong she was any easier.
“But you’re going to do it,” Stef muttered to herself.
He deserved her apology. He deserved to know just how much he’d come to mean to her—the sheer bliss he’d brought into her life these past few weeks. He deserved to hear her say that she wanted what they’d started in Turks and Caicos to continue.
Following the path the valet had directed her to take, Stef came upon the second gate, the one that led to the side of the backyard where the hedge garden was located.
She was only forty minutes late, but the party was alrea
dy in full swing.
A deejay played old-school hip hop and R&B—Stefan and Callie’s music of choice—from a table tucked along the backend of the gardens. There was a full bar near the pool house, along with several servers who walked around with trays of hors d’oeuvres courtesy of Kiera Coleman’s catering company.
She spotted the dessert buffet Dustin had told her about when she’d come over on Thursday. The desserts looked more like works of art than anything that was edible. They all were decorated in the wedding colors of coral and sage, which Dustin had purposely used as the party’s color scheme.
Her gaze traveled over the crowd, searching for the one person she most wanted to see. Their eyes connected and a bolt of electricity shot through Stefanie’s bloodstream.
Dustin stood at the other end of the pool, in a group with three other men. His legs were braced slightly apart, with one hand slung casually in his pocket while the other nursed a glass of amber liquid. From the outside, he was the picture of relaxed indifference. Except for his eyes. They bore into hers, penetrating. Intense.
Channeling the resolve that she’d built up over the hour-long drive from Maplesville, Stefanie started toward him.
A second later, she heard, “Hey, Stef! Over here.”
She looked to the right and saw Callie waving her over to join a group from the wedding—Kiera and Jada, with their respective boyfriends, Trey Watson and Mason Coleman. Before she could decide which direction to take, Stefan intercepted her.
“Hey, you. It’s about time you got here.” Her twin greeted her with a kiss on the cheek.
Stef looked over his shoulder and saw Callie vigorously shaking her head. Good. She hadn’t missed the big reveal. “How’s my nephew?” Stefan asked. “I meant to stop by the house to see him yesterday, but got caught up at work.”
“He wouldn’t have been there. He’s got too many social commitments.”
Her brother’s brow creased in confusion.
Stef waved her hand. “Don’t ask. Just know that he is doing fine. Shelia and Robert spoiled him silly.”
I Dare You! (Moments in Maplesville Book 4) Page 11