Shocked silence hung for a moment while the women digested her news. Becca wished Will were there with her.
“Thank God!” Janice broke the silence with words that were more a release of held breath than actual words. Becca looked up. Janice was crying—and grinning so hard it must have hurt.
So were Betty and Rose.
“CONGRATULATIONS, OLD MAN!”
“It’s about time, you son of a gun!”
“Congratulations, sir.”
The number of well-wishers took Will completely unawares early Thursday morning as he entered the plush meeting room in the administrative offices at Montford. He made his way through the group and assumed his seat at the head of the table.
He smiled at his colleagues, then at his personal secretary as she brought him a freshly brewed cup of Colombian coffee. His mind had been on the finance meeting about to take place. Not on his personal life.
Although he should have been prepared. Becca had told her mother about the baby the day before. It wouldn’t have taken Rose twenty-four hours to let the entire town know the news.
“Thanks, all of you,” he said, hiding behind his coffee cup. He took a sip, and scalded his tongue. Damn.
“How’s Becca feeling?” Dr. Sherman Long, dean of Montford and Will’s right-hand man, asked him.
“Fine.” If you didn’t count how tired she was.
Will spread out his papers. John Strickland was in town; they had a meeting in an hour and he didn’t want to be late.
“When’s she due?” Associate Dean Dr. Linda Morgan asked.
“Early October.”
“Have you started decorating the nursery yet?”
Nursery? Hell, no. Hadn’t even occurred to him. He and Becca would have to decide which room they were going to give up. The guest room? But then where would people sleep when they came to stay? His office? Hers?
“Not yet,” he said, and then, noticing the looks of surprise facing him from around the table—due, at least in part, to his lack of evident excitement—he knew he’d have to put forth some real effort. “Give us a break, guys,” he said, smiling at them, allowing himself to feel, for just a moment, a bit of the very real joy that lurked deep inside him whenever he thought of the coming baby. “We’re just getting used to the idea ourselves. We can wait a week or two before setting up a college fund.”
A college fund. He’d been working with parents for years as they established funds for their children’s education. Odd, after all this time, to think of himself on the other end.
So many things to consider. So many changes.
Had Becca thought about college funds? A nursery?
Somehow he was fairly certain that she had.
AFTER MEETING with the expansion committee, another meeting that began with a shower of felicitations, Will and John Strickland headed out for a round of golf. It had been only a month since their last game, yet so much had happened to him in this quiet little town that Will felt like an entirely different man. An older man.
His shot was still on, though. He found comfort in that.
“So after twenty years, you finally get lucky,” John cajoled as Will entered in his birdie on a par four. Along with John’s one over par. “Must’ve been something I said.”
“Yeah,” Will grunted, rocking his weight from foot to foot as he lined up his next drive. It was a measly par three. He wanted to be on the green in one shot.
He made that and the putt in one, as well. And ended up with the best round of golf he’d ever shot. He could have been on the PGA tour playing like that.
Walking to the clubhouse, golf bags slung on their shoulders, the two men discussed John’s swing and whether the light breeze blowing across the desert could have affected a drive or two.
“You know,” John said, his voice different, quieter, “tell me to mind my own business if you want, but it seemed to me you were far more driven out there than that ball was.”
Was he? Will shrugged. But he had to admit it had felt damn good to send that little white ball sailing.
And to turn his energies to something he understood.
“I never would’ve noticed five years ago, but after the accident, you know, you live on a different level, become aware of things—of feelings—you’d never realized were floating around before.”
Will nodded. In the last month he’d learned a few things about himself. He’d existed on a superficial plane and hadn’t even known it. He’d always believed that growing up in Shelter Valley had been one of his biggest blessings, that the town offered him all he needed to live a happy productive life. But lately he’d begun to wonder if maybe he hadn’t been too sheltered. If growing up in the valley had somehow robbed him of the chance to test himself. For the first time, life was testing him, and he had no idea of his ability to pass muster.
He’d always thought he adored Becca. But his love for her had never been tested, either.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WITH THE SPRING SEMESTER coming to a close—and graduation drawing near—Will’s schedule picked up considerably. From teas to formal awards dinners, he was in demand, it seemed, every waking minute of every day those last few weeks in April. Many of the occasions required that Becca accompany him.
These were bittersweet times. Times he both welcomed and dreaded. Being with Becca was difficult these days. The rules had all changed, but he’d been unable to figure out the new parameters. And yet, sometimes when he was out in public with his wife, things seemed exactly as they’d always been. He could count on Becca. They functioned well together, read each other’s signals easily. A united front.
“You almost ready?” he called, coming in from work and heading straight toward their bedroom. It was the last Friday in April, just a little more than two weeks since his golf game with John.
They’d been invited to an encore performance of a multimedia production at the university, put on jointly by Montford’s Dance, Theater and Music departments. Will had been asked to say a few words before the award-winning play began. People had been calling for weeks, seeking tickets to it.
After the play, he and Becca were hosting a private party at the university for the cast and crew, the faculty and all the visiting dignitaries.
Instead of finding his wife finishing her preparations for the evening as he’d fully expected, he found her curled up in bed, sound asleep.
Will stopped immediately, alarm shooting through him. Had something happened? Was there a problem with her blood pressure? With the baby?
“Becca?” he said softly.
Other than the steady rise and fall of her breathing, she didn’t move. Surely if she was ill, she wouldn’t be lying there so peacefully.
She’d been writing grants all week, preparing presentations for her Save the Youth funding drive. But other than Wednesday, when the town-council meeting had lasted until ten o’clock, she’d been in bed before nine every night. And she was still tired, despite that.
Glancing at his watch, Will wished he didn’t have to wake her.
And yet, just the fact that she was fast asleep before seven in the evening was unsettling to him. He knew that pregnancy was physically exhausting. But Becca had always been able to get by with very little sleep. Her energy always outlasted his.
Her fatigue was scaring him.
He crept closer to the bed. “Becca?”
“Mmm?” She rolled over, but didn’t wake up. The covers dropped away from her shoulders.
Another sensation shot through Will, rendering him weak and needful. What he felt was desire. Red-hot desire. Becca had obviously crawled into bed in the middle of getting ready for the evening. She was topless, her burgeoning breasts a gloriously welcome sight. Feasting his eyes on them, Will swallowed.
He should wake her. Turn away. Stick to the business at hand. The business of seeing his wife safely through this pregnancy. Period. He stared, instead. And fantasized. Remembering her softness, the way her nipples hardened into peaks that
he’d take into his mouth. Suckle.
He hadn’t had sex in more than six weeks. Far longer than he’d ever gone before. And she was his wife, dammit. The only woman he’d been with in his entire life.
With no conscious thought, no permission sought or granted, even from himself, Will reached out with both hands, taking those breasts into his palms, covering them, caressing them.
“Will?” Becca’s voice was groggy with sleep. Her eyes, when they opened and met his, were filled with desire—and questions.
Feeling like a first-class jerk, he stepped back from the bed, turning his head away from his wife’s beauty.
“It’s time to go,” he said, grabbing the clothes she’d laid out on the divan and handing them to her.
“What time is it?”
She still sounded half-asleep. And confused.
“Six-thirty.”
He should leave the room. Wait for her in the kitchen. He had to close all the blinds, anyway, turn on the outside lights and the lamp in the living room they always left on when they went out for the evening.
“We have time…” Hesitant invitation colored her words.
Will stood frozen, his throbbing body demanding one thing, his mind another.
He heard the covers rustling behind him and waited, poised, for Becca to approach him. Or had she merely moved over, making room for him to join her?
“Dr. Anderson said we should…”
Hating himself for the pleading he heard in her voice, Will swung around. It made him sick to think he’d reduced his strong vibrant wife to begging.
Dark hair tousled, she lay in the middle of their king-size bed, completely open to his gaze, completely nude except for the tiny scrap of lace panties.
“Becca…” He didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t think for the desire burning through him. God, he needed to sink himself so deeply inside her that he consumed her. And she him.
He could tell by the seriousness of her gaze that she understood his doubts. He suspected she had some major doubts of her own.
“Making love might help,” she said softly.
She was so open, so trusting, as she lay there exposed to him, while he stood above her, a stiff-necked prig in a suit and tie.
And yet…
“What I want right now has nothing to do with love.” He had to be honest with her.
He could sense the impact of his words as they slammed into her, almost as though he’d actually struck her. Sitting up, she hugged her knees to her breasts, pulling up the covers—as closed to him now as she’d been open a moment before.
“You don’t love me?” she whispered, dry-eyed but trembling.
How did he explain something he didn’t understand himself?
“I—”
“Tell me, dammit!” she cried. “Has the love completely died?”
“I don’t know.”
“Uuuoooo.” The pained sound, almost an animal’s howl, sliced through him.
The pool of tears gathering in Becca’s eyes began to fall silently down her face, forcing Will into action.
“I don’t know what I feel, Becca.” He tried to be clear when nothing was clear at all. “I don’t know what I’ve ever felt.”
He’d hoped to comfort her in a way, to let her know that this wasn’t just about the abortion. The words only seemed to make her feel worse. She stared at him wordlessly, pain written on her face.
“I’ve never before asked myself what I felt. I just knew from junior high that I was going to marry you and so I did.”
“I know our parents encouraged our relationship, but there was no shotgun involved, Will,” Becca said bitterly. “You make it sound like we live in some medieval age with arranged marriages.”
“Of course I don’t mean it like that,” he said, frustrated, hurting, sorry beyond anything else that he was hurting her.
“It wasn’t like you had to marry me to get me into bed,” she reminded him. Will’s body flared again at the memory. He and Becca had been far too young when they’d first explored their powerful desire for each other. But after keeping constant company since they were twelve years old, seventeen had seemed ancient.
Wiping Becca’s tears, Will held her head gently between his hands. “I never had to make a choice, either, Bec. I never tested what I felt for you. Never examined it. Never questioned myself about it.”
She stared up at him, her blue eyes searching. “Your feelings for me are being tested now, aren’t they.”
Determined to be honest with her, he nodded slowly.
Becca climbed out of bed and gathered her bra and other things. “Just be aware that inside, where it counts, I am the same woman now that I’ve always been, Will.” Telling him she’d be ready in five minutes, she slipped into their bathroom and shut the door.
Will stood there, hands in his pockets, wishing he could take some comfort from her words. As he looked back over their years together, the memories fading with the pain of the present, he wondered if he’d ever known the woman Becca was inside. Or had he merely seen what he’d expected to see and looked no further?
“THEY’VE HAD A LEAD on Tory,” Christine Evans told Phyllis Langford as her friend arrived at her apartment on the first Saturday in May. The two women lived in the same complex and had taken to having their weekend meals together.
Dropping the bag of Mexican takeout on the table, Phyllis grabbed both of Christine’s hands. “Where is she?” she asked. And then immediately, “Is she okay?”
Christine, with tears in her eyes, pulled her hands away as imperceptibly as she could and nodded. “She was seen a couple of weeks ago in Florida.”
“Was she alone?”
“No.” Christine’s gaze dropped, then lifted again.
“But according to the hotel clerk who recognized her from the photo, she looked good. No obvious bruises.”
“So he found her again,” Phyllis said. She turned away, busying herself with the food she’d brought. Food was a comfort to Phyllis, evidenced by her somewhat plump figure.
“The man with her fit Bruce’s description,” Christine confirmed.
“You’ve got a private detective searching for her, a man who was referred to you by an FBI agent, and the maniac still finds her first.”
Christine shrugged. Tory wouldn’t be surprised by that fact at all. Bruce Taylor was obsessed with Christine’s beautiful younger sister. “Their divorce didn’t keep him away from her. The restraining order didn’t. Why should her running away have made any difference?”
Unwrapping tacos, taking the lids off a container of salsa and refried beans, bringing out little bags of chips, Phyllis set the table.
“Bruce is beyond obsessed,” Christine went on.
“Thanks to his parents’ money and the fact that his father has been buying off various officials for years, Bruce has lived his whole life above the law. His entire life he’s been coddled by his mother. And his father—who virtually ignored him for years because he was too busy being important and making money—compensated for his neglect by giving Bruce everything he could possibly want. Everything money could buy, that is. No is meaningless to him. And apparently, so is everything else—except Tory.”
And Christine had encouraged her sister to marry the man. She’d never stop feeling guilty about that, even though she hadn’t known what Bruce really was until much later. She’d believed that Tory, at least, was going to escape before permanent damage was done.
“As long as I live, I’ll never understand the workings of the mind of an abuser,” Phyllis said, sinking into one of the two chairs in the tiny breakfast nook.
“He scours the earth for her, and then, when he has her, he beats her up. Wouldn’t you figure he’d be nice to Tory? Try to convince her to stay with him?”
Biting her lip, forcing herself to hold back tears she’d given up shedding years before, Christine nodded. A psychology professor, Phyllis knew all the analytical studies of abuse, but that wasn’t what she was refer
ring to. Her friend was questioning something much deeper than science—the human soul. And how one could be so damaged. Christine had given up wondering about that.
“Instead, he sees everyone she looks at or speaks to as a threat—someone who might take her away from him—and he has to punish her. If he could only get her to quit looking or speaking, he’d be home free.” Christine said the bitter words aloud, but she was barely conscious of being in the room. She sank into the empty chair across from Phyllis, elbows on her knees, and leaned forward, staring at the swirled gray pattern in the tiled floor, afraid the smell of food would make her sick.
“Along with his father’s fortune, there’s a huge number of employees to do his bidding, to hunt Tory down. And considering all the officials the old man’s paid off over the years, there’s an unending supply of connections, too.” Christine sighed. “He says if he can’t have her, no one else will,” she told her friend, feeling as helpless as she had most of her life. Somehow she had to be strong for once. Had to step in and do something for Tory.
Phyllis got up and began to rub Christine’s back. Christine almost flinched at the contact, willing herself to remember that Phyllis was her friend. That her touch was safe.
“What are you going to do when you find her?” Phyllis asked.
Christine noticed that Phyllis hadn’t said if, and was grateful. After all, a couple of weeks was a long time. Anything could have happened between then and now.
“I’m taking her to Arizona with me,” Christine said. “He’d never expect that. He has no idea where I’m going, would never think to look for me at a school that isn’t Ivy League and would never expect her to be with me, anyway. He knows I’m terrified of him. Besides, Shelter Valley is hardly big enough to be noteworthy.”
“And small towns have their own laws,” Phyllis added, sounding as though she approved of Christine’s plan. “Bruce’s contacts won’t have power there.”
That was exactly what Christine was planning on. Tory was the only thing that made living bearable. And she’d gotten Tory into this mess. Somehow she’d get her out of it.
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