Jordan felt sympathy for the poor woman. He’d hired her through a pet-sitting referral agency, and she had impeccable credentials, but the cockatiel had picked up some choice language lately, especially with Penny not around to correct her. Jordan had realized one day that the way to stop his little sister from fixing him up was to fix her up. He’d introduced her to the echocardiologist on his valve team, and now he was lucky to get a call from either one of them.
Love changed everything. He wasn’t sure why it had taken him forty years to figure that out. He’d also discovered that problems didn’t go away just because you were an expert at avoiding them. Nor did pain. That was the point at which he’d stopped burying himself in work and braved the fire-breathing dragons—loneliness and grief. He’d learned to cry that day.
A bowl of fresh fruit sat prominently on the dining room table, and Jordan snapped off a bunch of grapes for Birdy. Since Penny’s departure, he’d been paying more attention to her diet and his own. He drank less beer now, ate more grilled fish, and spent more time in the hammock on the front porch. Sometimes he even slept out there.
Birdy was halfway through her grapes when a tap at the door brought her head up.
“Come on in,” Jordan called. He threw his sweater over his shoulder and reached for his bag as the door swung open. But that was as far as he got.
He couldn’t see the woman on the threshold. The sun was too bright, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t the baby-sitter.
“Jordan—”
If he’d been blindfolded and tied up on the floor of a jungle hut, he would have recognized that voice. “What took you so long?”
That was all he could say, and all she could do was lift her shoulders helplessly and coax back hair that wasn’t there. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he could see that she was wearing mostly black, still her favorite color, apparently. But there was a bloom in her cheeks and a directness in her gaze that hadn’t been evident before. Neither one of them could seem to move, so they spoke to each other from across the room.
“I was so afraid you wouldn’t be here,” she said.
“Where was I going to go? What else was I going to do?”
“Did you get my letters?”
He nodded. “Three of them. I still have them.”
Memorized, he thought. The first time she’d written about her progress in dealing with the damage done by her foster father. She’d checked herself into a clinic that dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder, and Dr. Fremont, who consulted on her case, arranged for her to see the surveillance tapes of her father’s death. They’d revealed that her father intended to take his own life when he summoned her to the examining room, and what happened next was a form of cop suicide. He wanted her to kill him and bear the responsibility for the monstrous things he’d done.
The tapes made the abuse stark and real. She’d been controlled and manipulated in ways that were subversive beyond a child’s ability to comprehend or withstand, and seeing them helped her to accept that she was responsible to herself first and to her own healing. The second letter dealt with her deep aversion to her looks, a difficult and resistant disorder called facial dysmorphia. But with the steady support of her therapists and daily group sessions, she had begun to see a woman who deserved compassion instead of self-hatred.
“I can look in the mirror now without wanting it to be someone else,” she’d written to Jordan. “Sometimes I even wink.”
He’d received her last letter a couple of weeks ago, and she’d expressed a strong desire to return to the real world and to see him again, if he was willing. But she had been vague about a date, and the tone had seemed faintly impersonal. That’s when he had the first inkling that her feelings might have changed, along with all the other changes. He’d found it difficult to write back. In fact, the letter was still half finished on his dresser.
Her gaze had dropped to his bag, and he felt compelled to explain. “A music festival,” he said. “It was something to do.”
“Did you miss me at all? Is it silly to ask that? I have to.”
“Miss you?” The pain that caught him nearly knocked him off his feet. “Angela, every minute. There are over five hundred thousand of them a year, did you know that? And I had to live through every one of them without you.”
He was angry, too, he realized. He had suffered without her, and he didn’t like suffering, no matter what he might have learned from it. Women seemed to handle that stuff so much better than men. Losing and finding themselves. He wasn’t discounting her ordeal. She had suffered, too, all her life, more than he ever had or ever would. But her suffering wasn’t solely because of him, and that pissed him off. He wanted to be the absolute center of her universe, her sun.
God, what colossal ego.
Men were stupid, selfish bastards, he decided. And men in love were worse. They needed a woman’s every thought to be of them, her every response to be about them. Or at least he did, with this woman. But then again, he’d been without her for a year, and he wanted to make up for every empty minute, which meant every new minute had to be filled to the breaking point with her presence.
He never got a chance to tell her any of that, however, because something totally unexpected happened before he could. Even Jordan was surprised by the tiny yellow missile that flew over Angela’s head and shot through the open door.
She ducked and looked up. “What was that? A bird?”
“My bird,” Jordan said.
“Birdy?” She gaped at him. “Birdy can fly?”
“I let her wings grow back.”
“Oh, Jordan! Oh, my God.” She clasped her hands and nearly doubled over in her acute distress.
Jordan thought she was going to collapse again, the way she had when she first discovered the clipped wings. He was at her side in seconds. He couldn’t let her go through that again. Of all people, he had been sure she would understand.
“Every time her wings beat the air, I thought of you,” he tried to explain.
She shook her head, struggling to speak. “I’m not upset that you did it. Please don’t think that. I’ll never be able to tell you what it means to me. But Jordan, now she’s gone.”
No one knew the fiery pain of loss like Jordan did. He took her in his arms and held her.
“I’m beginning to believe this is the risk we take every day,” he said, smoothing her hair. “There aren’t any guarantees that you won’t lose what you love. That’s why you have to make it all count.”
“But not Birdy—”
She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tight, clinging and sighing, feeling the terrible joy of that moment. Of love without guarantees. But God, it was better than the alternative.
“There’s a good chance she’s coming back,” he whispered. “She’s pulled this once or twice before.”
Angela drew back to look at him, making it clear from her knitted brows that she meant to hold him to that statement. She shook her head, then quickly nodded, perhaps realizing her mistake—and almost made him dizzy. She only had to show up to make him dizzy.
It was also clear that they couldn’t be this close, couldn’t stare into each other’s eyes this way, without kissing. Bird or no bird. Their bodies came together, their lids drifted almost shut, their hearts were pounding like mad, at least his was, and she let out a soft gasp.
“Duck!” Jordan pulled her down with him as a feathery UFO buzzed them on its way back inside.
“Shut the door!” Angela laughed, tugging at him. “Before she does it again.”
They tumbled inside, crazy with relief and happiness. And once the door was safely shut, the runaway bird on her perch, and their world intact, they had that kiss. They had several kisses, each one sweeter than the last. Jordan wished they were in the jungle. He wished he had some rope. God, how he wanted this woman . . . at his mercy. He was sure as hell at hers.
“You’re beautiful,” he observed. “Is it okay to say that?”
“It’s o
kay. I don’t mind how I look all that much anymore.” Her smile hinted of the struggle she’d had. “It doesn’t even feel like a curse.”
“Now, there’s progress.” He searched the big eyes and the soft mouth, aching to kiss her again, but not at the risk of discounting her efforts to recover. “I don’t think I understood what you were going through until I got your letters. Each one was like opening the page of a kid’s pop-up book. Things kept appearing before my eyes that I hadn’t seen before. This is who she is, I remember thinking. This is the real Angela. I almost couldn’t fathom the pain . . . or the joy of that journey.”
She nodded, her eyes bright with tears.
“I read them all,” he said, “many times, but the last one was different.”
“Yes, I know it was. I wasn’t sure how you would react to my coming back or if you wanted me to. I guess I was trying to prepare you, and then you never wrote back. I was crushed, Jordan. I was almost afraid to come here today.”
Maybe it was people in love who were stupid, not just men.
“Despite that,” she pointed out, “you do realize that I kept my part of the bargain. I came back.”
Her voice was so clear and steady he wondered how she did it. She had come back, and now she was declaring herself, no hesitation, no equivocation, and no evidence of fear, despite her protestation. He wasn’t certain he could have been so forthright if their situations had been reversed and he was returning after a years’s separation. But then, there was just this one thing in all of life that frightened him. Her.
“Does it feel to you like the flame’s gone out?” His fingers detected a skittering pulse in the softness of her throat. Perhaps not as calm as she sounded, he realized.
“No,” she said, “it doesn’t.”
A dark tendril of hair fell onto her face. She didn’t brush it away. Neither did he.
“It will never go out,” he said.
When he spoke next, his voice was almost harsh. “It burns for you and you alone, Angela. I want it to be your warmth on a cold day, the kindling fire in your blood, the passion that sparks your imagination. I want it to be whatever you need it to be, and as long as I’m alive—”
She pressed her lips to his fingers. “As long as we’re alive,” she vowed, “it will never go out.”
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