After the scene with Ryan, she couldn’t face going home to her cabin or returning to Albion Bay. Just as she’d imagined, everything had gone horribly wrong. The look on Ryan’s face told her more than she needed to know. Though she hadn’t directly lied to anyone, she had lied by omission and she knew it. Omission was just as much a lie as telling a direct untruth. It didn’t matter what her motives were, what her dreams had been, what scared her. There was no way to paint her actions in any other light but a negative one.
She’d walked the streets for hours before checking in to the hotel, and though it was now well past midnight, there was no way she could sleep. She replayed the scene with Ryan over and over in her mind. He hadn’t given her a chance to explain. She hadn’t expected that he would. And she didn’t blame him. How exactly was she going to explain the motivation for her deceit? Or tell him she was waiting for the right moment to reveal that she’d kept her true identity from him—that at her core and in her heart she really was the simple woman he’d fallen for? That her money didn’t make any difference?
But the money did make a difference. It was the reason she’d run from her roots and started her quiet life in Albion Bay, away from all the hype and constraints and expectations.
He’d reacted with such burning anger; likely everyone else would as well. On the outside they might not be unkind, but she’d never live again at the heart of the town, as one of their own.
She’d lost Ryan and when the news broke, she’d soon lose everything else she’d spent three years building, moment by moment, action by action.
At least she’d felt for a brief time what it was like to belong to a community. Maybe that was enough. Maybe she could start over somewhere else.
Of course she could. People did it all the time.
She closed her eyes.
She didn’t want to start over. She wanted Albion Bay and Molly and Sam and Belva.
She wanted Ryan.
She opened the lock on the mini bar and fingered a bottle of wine. Then she put it back and snapped the lock shut. What she had to sort out would take more than a miniature bottle of wine.
No part of her wanted to return to New York and go through the motions of being Caroline Barrington again. That was the coward’s way out.
She had to burn a new path no matter how much it scared her. And now that she’d met Ryan, now that she’d felt what it was like to love a man—a man who lit a fire in her that time could never extinguish—a flame of courage burned in her. She could only hope that its power was strong enough to fight back her fears.
Exhausted by adrenaline and drama, she drew the curtains, shutting out the lights of the city, and then fell across the bed.
In the morning Cara picked at the breakfast she’d ordered from room service. It hadn’t helped her state of mind that she’d slept fitfully and when she had slept, images of Ryan had snaked through her dreams. Worse, an anguished Laci had risen in the darkness, reaching pale arms toward Cara and crying out. But Cara couldn’t reach her, and she’d slipped back into the blackness. In the strange fog between dreaming and waking, Cara knew that Quinn was right: she wasn’t Laci. They’d tried to help her friend fight her demons, and they’d failed. But they’d failed because Laci couldn’t, wouldn’t, face what it would have taken to pull her life together. Though her grief for Laci might never dissolve, Cara felt the tight knot of guilt release in her belly.
And she made the decisions she’d fought with in the dark night.
She shoved her breakfast aside, pulled her cellphone from her purse and called Alston. He listened as she told him to draw up the papers for her to sign, that she intended to start running the foundation immediately. He asked if she wanted him to draft a letter to fire Dray Bender, but she told him she wanted to do it herself. She owed her grandfather that, at least.
And she might as well get some pleasure out of her new position. She was looking forward to telling Bender what she thought of him and his shady practices and his kickbacks.
Her cellphone rang as she went to slip it back into her purse.
“Cara, thank goodness you answered.” Jackie sounded alarmed.
“Is something wrong?”
“When you didn’t return home last night, Ryan called here. I had to talk both him and Alex out of calling the police.”
She glanced at her phone and saw that there were messages.
“You heard what happened at the club?” she asked Jackie.
“In colorful detail; I can understand why you didn’t answer any calls. I knew you were holed up somewhere, that you were okay, but the guys were hard to convince.” She heard Jackie take in a breath. “I would’ve done the same.”
“I stayed in the city last night. I needed to think. But I’m headed back now.”
“You sure you’re okay? Do you want me to come with you?”
“And leave the marine mammals of the world without their champion for an entire day?”
“I could do some work up at the lab.”
She told Jackie about her decisions and her conversation with Alston.
“I have to do this on my own, Jackie. All of it. And I have to talk with Ryan. He may slam the door in my face, but I have to try.”
“The madder he is, the more you mean to him.”
“You don’t know Ryan.”
“It’s true, I don’t.”
There was a commotion in the background. Cara heard Jackie tell someone to put an animal under anesthesia and that she’d be right there.
“Anesthesia sounds good to me right now,” Cara said, trying for a humorous tone. “I’ll stop by. Maybe you could numb my heart.”
“The trouble with anesthesia is that when you wake up, nothing will have changed. Look, drive safely, okay? I have plans for you.”
Jackie hung up without explaining. Cara stared at the phone. What plans could Jackie have for her?
Cara called for her car and headed back to Albion Bay. She didn’t care if it was seven in the morning—Ryan had awakened her earlier than that, was it only a week ago?
She would say her piece. And then it was up to him.
Hope was a devious devil. It drove her ever forward while at the same time the ground was washing out from under her feet.
Ryan’s Jeep was in his drive. She stepped out of her car, smoothing her moist palms against the silk of her party dress. It was hopelessly out of place against the backdrop of the ranch. And perhaps so was she.
But she would make Ryan say it to her face.
Chapter Twenty-four
Ryan gave up on the espresso machine after the third try and made coffee in a pan on the stove. He grabbed at a mug and heartily wished that after he’d returned from the Pacific-Union event the night before that he hadn’t dived into the bottle of scotch that now sat empty on his kitchen counter. His head was thick and his thoughts thicker.
The knock at his door sounded like a giant hammering on an anvil. He really shouldn’t drink scotch. He shot a look to the clock in the hall. Seven forty-five. Adam had finished the last of the stalls in the barn the day before, so Ryan wasn’t expecting him. Maybe he’d left some tools.
He threw the door open.
Adrenaline flooded him when he saw Cara. Cara safe. Cara unharmed.
Even his best anger management tools hadn’t prevented him from putting his fist through his bathroom wall at three in the morning when he’d driven to her place for the third time and she still hadn’t returned home. Not that he’d wanted to see her. He just wanted to know she made it home safely.
He only hoped he could rope in his driving wish to throttle her.
“May I come in?”
He hated that voice. It was the proper voice of highfalutin’ city people, of TV news anchors, the measured voice of cold reason.
But as he looked into her eyes, he thought maybe not. Maybe he was mistaken. She didn’t look like a woman driven by reason. If she were, she surely wouldn’t be standing on his front porch. Not in the face of wh
at he had loaded up to say. Not wearing a party dress that looked like she’d slept in it.
Against his better judgment, he nodded and stood aside to let her in.
“Thank you,” she said.
He heard the waver in her voice and saw the tremble in her lips. But his heart shut, hard, like steel walls around a compound. A wavering voice and trembling lips weren’t going to do her any damn good.
“I had hoped to tell you about all this properly, in due time.”
There it was, that formal, snotty, tone. It stoked the fire in him, and he barely contained his roar.
“Properly? All this?” He waved his arms. “Like there’s a proper way to tell a person that everything about you is a lie? Like there are specific words that make deception okay?”
He was roaring now and couldn’t stop.
“The bake sales, Cara? The community raising money to tide you over? Do you even know how hard it was for some of those people to give? Some of them are on social security and welfare—how will you explain to them that you took their money when all along you had billions of dollars?”
He crossed his arms. It was the only way to keep from punching another wall. “I earned my money. I know what it takes—what it took—for them to give.”
“No one earns ten million dollars a year. Or a billion. It’s a responsibility, Ryan. At least I don’t spend my money on fancy cars and houses and God knows what else.”
The pounding in his head intensified. He tightened his grip on his elbows. Maybe he would smash a wall.
“You’re going to lecture me about responsibility? About how I spend my money? That’s ripe. Really ripe.”
“And you—what about you? What about the walls you’ve built around yourself? Not even Mother Teresa could gain entrance to the inner kingdom of Ryan Rea. How long will you let events of the past color what’s happening now, color how you see people?” She drew herself up. “I’ll have you know that I never lied to you.”
Her voice didn’t waver now. And from her comments, evidently she knew about the paternity suit. She’d known and still she’d kept up her deception. She was in full-on defense mode—he could see it from the way she squared her shoulders. Good. If she wanted a battle, she’d have it. He planted his legs wide and fisted his hands on his hips.
“Deception is the silent partner of lying,” he said hotly.
The veins in his neck throbbed, and her eyes went wide as she backed away.
“I can see that you can’t forgive me,” she said in a quieter voice. “But don’t say anything to anyone.” She took another step back. “Please. I want to tell the people here in my own way.”
“And in the meantime you continue to hoodwink them like you have me? Are you a pathological liar? Or do you just get your kicks from fooling those who trust you?” He felt heat rush through him. Instead of cooling down, his anger was ramping up. “And how do you figure out the right way to tell people that you’ve been hiding who you really are? That you took their money, that you could’ve funded a clinic on your own? That you could’ve funded ten clinics? I suppose you have some fine-tuned plan for that?”
She shrank back against the wall. Great. All his studied practices for turning up the good did absolutely nothing when he needed them.
“I couldn’t have funded the clinic,” she said in a low voice. “In fact I can’t fund it until next month, maybe even longer. I don’t expect you to understand that. But please, Ryan,” she said with a look that made him feel like the bully he was being, “just give me this—let me break the news in my own way.”
She turned to the door. And then she turned back. “I wasn’t lying when I told you I loved you.”
She tossed her hair and walked to her car. And drove off without looking back.
A wrecking ball could have hit him and he wouldn’t have felt it, he was that stunned. She loved him? Sure. The woman was damned good at deception. And she was still practicing it.
No, not practicing; she’d already perfected her technique.
He closed his eyes.
He rubbed at his head, then found himself rubbing at his chest, at a spot over his heart. Both his head and his heart ached. But Alex was wrong: pain and inconvenience did not add up to love.
He slammed into the kitchen and downed two Tylenol with a mug of cold, bitter coffee. Then he stared at nothing.
And he let his brain exercise some control over his emotions.
He could’ve probed deeper about the painting and the book—his instincts had told him they were out of place in the home of a woman who had little money.
And he should’ve pressed her about New York. She hadn’t said she wasn’t there; she’d just put him off with that crack about a familiar face. He’d overlooked the way she evaded personal questions with her smooth manners and easy way of turning conversations. He’d fallen for her misdirection because he wanted to believe it; he wanted her answers to fit his illusion.
He could’ve asked her more about her life, but no, he’d just spilled his guts about his own life, rambling on about his dreams and blathering about his fight to get his head around money.
And she’d let him.
She’d listened to him.
She’d listened...
Even through the throbbing in his head he began to recognize the role he’d played in this charade. He’d been stuck in his own damn deception.
He’d been one hell of a fool.
Chapter Twenty-five
The next morning Ryan slipped into a seat in the last row of the crowded town hall meeting room. Evidently everyone in Albion Bay had seen the flyers plastered around town announcing the special meeting.
A few hours before, he’d ordered the same breakfast at the diner that he always did, but he’d pushed it around his plate, unable to eat. The fight raging in him snuffed his hunger and made it hard for him to think. He had a game later; he should’ve stayed home and worked out, stretched, and then driven to the stadium. As it was, he could stay for only half an hour; he had to make batting practice on time.
But no amount of working out or stretching was going to dissolve the heaviness that hung in him. He’d spent the hours he should’ve been sleeping tracking back through every conversation he’d had with Cara and then, when he was sure he wouldn’t sleep, he’d spent hours reading about her on the Internet. And while it was true that she hadn’t directly lied to him, the result was the same: she’d managed to trigger every distrusting cell that still lived in him and trigger them good. And though he didn’t want to admit it, the woman she was—Caroline Barrington, wealthy socialite—kicked up a wall of wariness he’d never felt as strongly before. He’d never been outflanked by a woman, and Cara could outflank just about anyone on the planet if she wanted to.
Excitement buzzed in the room as Belva and Perk stepped up to the podium. Ryan gave a silent prayer of thanks that he’d had the foresight to have Belva take the pledges at the fundraiser. There was no way he could stand up in front of the good people of Albion Bay and say anything at that moment. What should’ve been a celebration to announce the funds they’d raised for the clinic had morphed into a macabre charade. At least for him it had.
He looked around the room and didn’t see Cara. A public meeting probably wasn’t her idea of a good forum for breaking her news. She probably had an army of PR people helping her figure out how to spin her confession. PR people could spin anything—they’d made aborigines believe they needed deodorant, hadn’t they?
But as he sat there, the thoughts he’d wrestled with all night and through the morning kept surfacing—relentless, nagging and undeniable. They gnawed through his cynicism and forced him to face the role he’d played all along in Cara’s drama.
“This thing working?” Belva said as she tapped at the microphone. A sharp squeal of feedback from the PA system shot through the room. “Guess so,” she said with a shrug. She drew herself up and held out an index card, squinted at it and then laid it on the podium. “I don’t need notes
.” She tilted her head toward the mayor. “Perk here thinks I do, but I don’t.” She tapped the card with her finger. “The zeros on this card are a bit overwhelming, but I can tell all of you that thanks to Mr. Rea’s efforts and those of every one of you who pitched in, we have two and a half million of our four-million-dollar goal for the clinic build-out.”
Ryan’s heart sank as the crowd cheered. He’d thought his teammates and some of the front office brass would’ve been more generous, would’ve given enough to move the needle closer to the goal. But they didn’t live out here, and a remote country clinic wasn’t at the top of their lists. And two and a half million was a good start.
Cara came in through the side door that led to the kitchen. The purplish circles under her eyes told him she hadn’t slept any better than he had. To his surprise, she didn’t take a seat but instead walked up to Belva and whispered to her.
“Cara would like to speak to us,” Belva said as she stepped aside and stood by Perk.
Even from where he sat in the back of the room, he could see Cara’s hands trembling. She placed them on the podium.
“Nothing has ever meant so much to me as the relationships I developed since moving to Albion Bay,” she said.
It was a good thing there was a microphone, because her voice was barely above a whisper.
Ryan saw the puzzled looks on the faces of the people seated near him. Cara speaking about the relationships she’d developed with people in the town wasn’t the segue they’d been expecting.
“This town is a true community,” Cara went on, her voice becoming steadier. “You help each other, care about each other, reach for the future together while at the same time helping each other heal the wounds of the past.” She stopped and looked out at the crowd, but the sweep of her gaze didn’t reach him. “I’m not sure that you realize how rare that is in today’s world.”
People were listening intently now, but Ryan felt tension building in the room. Belva had crossed her arms and though a half smile curved her lips, her body language betrayed her bewilderment at Cara’s speech.
Love on the Line Page 23