Loving the reverent, hungry look in his eyes.
“Yours, too,” she whispered, locking her fingers on the elastic around his hips and easing his briefs downward.
He lifted up, but his arms buckled and then he caught himself. Attempted to help her, and got the waistband caught around his knee. Blake had never once shown a moment of awkwardness when they’d done this in the past, just a powerful drive to be one with her.
In his controlled, rather quiet way.
She’d loved that man. Loved everything about him.
She liked this one, too. Maybe even, in some small way, a little bit better. There was something about knowing that she could move him to the extent that he wasn’t quite himself. That their time together mattered.
And then his underwear was on the floor with hers and he was back, sliding himself against her body, the hair on his legs brushing the skin of her thighs, and Annie wanted to laugh with sheer joy. To shout out the rightness of his return.
His fingers explored her feet and her calves, as he lightly massaged his way up her body. She lay there before him, completely comfortable now, secure in the knowledge that all their choices had been made and she was Blake’s. For now. She would give herself up to needs and wants and desires that were far beyond her comprehension, her control. For a few short hours she would leave worries behind and just live.
And when, some time later, one knee found its way between her thighs, and his other leg followed, settling him in the crook of her body; when she opened to him completely, felt him nudging against her, searching, and finally, finally, sliding into her wet readiness, Annie started to cry with the wonder of it all.
After six long years, Blake truly had come home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THERE WERE NO LIGHTS ON at the Wild Card Saloon when Blake pulled into the parking lot at five after seven on Wednesday night. The guys weren’t due until 7:30, but Verne should be there, getting the cards out.
Getting a little drunk.But then, Blake was forty-five minutes early. Time he’d allowed himself in case he’d had a call from Annie. In case she’d wanted to see him. She knew Wednesday nights were poker nights.
Was it only seven days since she’d crashed the party and made her absurd request?
And here he was, one short week later, possibly having fathered a child. Probably having fathered a child with her.
They’d not stopped at one try the night before, but had come together again and again, until Blake had been afraid he could stay awake no longer. And then he’d left, unwilling to risk a possible nightmarish episode.
One of the things he’d learned in his attempts to manage his condition was that any change in his environment or emotional status was likely to elicit an attack.
He made certain he was alone to handle them.
Thirty-five minutes until poker time and there were still no lights on in the saloon. There never were out front—not since Verne had let the place fall into such disrepair that, after only two years of managing it, he’d had to close the business. But there should be a light on in his apartment at the back.
Blake thought about waiting in his car. He didn’t know Verne all that well, as the old man hadn’t been part of the game six years before, when Blake had played with Cole and a few other guys in town. And in the two years he’d been back, Verne had only joined in the game a handful of times. Mostly he just came to collect the few bucks they paid him to let them use his place.
Whiskey money.
Blake didn’t know Jake Chandler, Verne’s nephew and the bar’s true owner, at all, in spite of the fact that the younger man was an original member of the Wild Bunch. A throw-over title from the old days, when Cole and Jake and Brady and Luke had been at River Bluff High School together and had sneaked illegal games of Texas Hold’em in between all the other exploits they’d managed to dream up.
Blake would have liked to have known them back then. Hell, he’d have liked to have been a part of any group of friends. Growing up as he had—on his own much of the time, while his uncle traveled, and then on the road himself, first with his uncle and then in his stead—Blake hadn’t noticed the loneliness. It wasn’t really until his return from Jordan, finding healing in the camaraderie of the old friends who’d accepted him as one of them as soon as Cole had pulled him back in, that he’d begun to realize all he’d missed.
No wonder Annie had struggled so hard to understand him. To believe he cared about her. She’d been seeking an emotional closeness that he hadn’t begun to understand. Even if he had, on some level, recognized it, he’d certainly not have known how to express it.
Funny how having your freedom, your dignity, your very life stolen from you had a way of waking a man up to the deeper things in life. Of opening him up to his own needs. His own weaknesses.
Blake had been stripped of the defenses that had kept him safe, leaving him vulnerable and aware.
And still living alone.
As was Verne Chandler.
Half an hour to go, and there was still no sign of life in the old saloon. On his way to the back door, Blake dialed Cole’s number. Left a message when the line switched over to voice mail. Cole had been Jake’s best friend, back in the days of the original Wild Bunch, and had known Verne forever. His friend would be there soon.
In the meantime, Blake was going to try to make certain that the old man was just asleep—or some-place else, forgetting the time. Not that Blake held out much hope for the latter.
The elder Chandler was too eager for his money to miss unlocking the Wild Card’s doors on Wednesday nights.
“Verne?” He knocked on the door leading into the back. “Verne!” he called again, after several knocks brought no response.
Looking for any sign of life on the upper level of the rickety old saloon, Blake made his way around to the front of the place, hoping to find Verne passed out on the broken-down veranda that, in its day, so he’d been told, had been one of River Bluff’s most popular hangouts.
Verne wasn’t there. Nor did he answer any of the other doors leading into the saloon.
Cole would be along any minute. As would Luke and Brady. And whoever else Brady, who was this week’s host, had asked to fill the seats at the table that evening. Blake could wait for them.
Or he could go check the riverbank. Just in case.
He made his way down to the water in the dark. He’d taken the trip several times when he’d first started playing these weekly games. Back then, more than an hour in an enclosed place had had him jumping out of his skin.
None of the guys had ever said anything about his frequent absences, and as time went by, the need for them disappeared.
“Verne?” There was no sign of the old man along the edge of the river. “Verne!” No sign that anyone had fallen in, either, no broken brush. Or even freshly trampled weeds. But how would the man have managed to make it down here in a wheelchair? “Verne?”
Blake turned. Surveyed the area as best he could without a flashlight.
He’d once seen Cole grab a key to the back door from a crack in the old wooden windowsill by the kitchen. He could get inside.
At the least, maybe he’d find a flashlight stashed someplace.
Jake Chandler, a man who, from what Blake had heard from his friends, had been a rebel more because it had been expected of the bastard son of a town barkeep than because he’d been a bad kid, hadn’t been home since he disappeared at eighteen. Hadn’t been heard from since that time. Blake wondered what the man would think if he could see the place now.
Wondered what would happen to the Wild Card Saloon when something eventually happened to Verne Chandler, considering that his nephew, the actual proprietor, was nowhere to be found.
The key was right where he’d seen Cole find it. Feeling a little odd, Blake entered the darkened bar, turning on what lights he knew worked as he made his way farther inside.
“Verne?”
The card room looked as if no one had been in it since
the game had ended the week before. There was still a bag of chips on a side table. And empty cans in the trash bin.
“Verne! You in there?” he called at the door to the apartment.
Flipping on a light, he made his way slowly, not wanting to startle the old man if alcohol had just made him hard of hearing.
The place was filthy. So much so that Blake raised a sleeve to cover his nose and mouth as the stench hit him. He found the source of at least one putrid smell all over the kitchen counter. Sour milk. And a tipped-over carton beside it.
“Verne?”
Still no answer. But yesterday’s newspaper was open on the table.
“Verne!” He could see the entire apartment with a glance down the one long room. The only place left to check was the bathroom.
Moving quickly to the bathroom door, and growing more concerned by the second, Blake rapped.
What person who lived alone ever closed the bathroom door? Especially when one used a wheelchair most of the time?
“Verne?” After the second knock, Blake gave up all pretense of giving a damn about any possible invasion of privacy.
Shoving open the unlocked door, he stepped forward, to find the unconscious man lying prone on the floor beside the toilet, his pants down around his ankles.
ANNIE WAS ALMOST ASLEEP when Cole called just after the nightly news on Wednesday.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, sitting up, instantly awake when she recognized her little brother’s voice.“Verne Chandler had a stroke.” Cole’s voice sounded strange. Lost.
“Is he alive?”
“For now. But he’s still unconscious. Blake found him.”
“When?”
“Tonight. He got to the game first and was concerned when he didn’t see any lights on. If he hadn’t found him when he did, and hadn’t administered artificial respiration, Chandler probably would have died. Apparently, from what the paramedics and police could piece together at the scene, he’d been drifting in and out of consciousness since sometime last night. He must have just gone into cardiac arrest when Blake arrived.”
It didn’t surprise Annie a bit that her ex-husband had been the one to save the day. Or that he’d had the emotional wherewithal to remain calm and preserve a life.
“Has anyone called Mercedes?” she asked.
River Bluff’s favorite postal worker had been married to and divorced from Verne before Annie could even remember knowing them. But she still kept an eye out for her ex, and Annie had always suspected that while the older woman hadn’t been able, or maybe willing, to live with Verne’s drinking, she’d never been able to fall completely out of love with him, either.
Verne Chandler, who’d come back to town upon his younger sister’s death to assume responsibility for her saloon, and her then-twelve-year-old son, wasn’t a bad person. He was just weak.
As Annie’s father had been.
“She’s with him now,” Cole was saying, and Annie realized she’d missed the first part of her brother’s response to her question.
“Thank God Blake was there,” she said, wondering how Cole was taking this indication of another man being too weak to help himself, putting his life in danger rather than getting help. Especially when the man had been the father figure, however inadequate, of Cole’s best friend during their pivotal high-school years.
“He was a rock,” Cole agreed. Annie, still predisposed to mother her younger brother, hated the fatigue she recognized in his voice.
“Brady and Luke showed up before I did, and they were already cleaning up the mess before I even knew what was going on. When the rest of the guys showed up, I sent them home and then stayed to help get the place sorted out. It was a wreck.”
Annie leaned over, elbows on her knees. She studied the hems of the sweatpants she’d thrown on after she’d realized that she couldn’t possibly climb into the bed she’d shared with Blake the night before.
Not until she’d had time to put a little more distance between that particular night and the rest of her life.
“Would you like to come over?” she asked. “There’s still half a six-pack in the fridge.” They’d shared more late-night beers than she could count in the months immediately following the breakup of Cole’s marriage to a spoiled socialite who’d run home to Daddy after Cole lost his shirt in a realestate deal she’d helped to orchestrate.
“No. I’m okay,” Cole said, though he didn’t really sound as if he meant it. “Blake stopped by and we had a couple of beers already.”
Blake was still in town, then? Her stomach muscles fluttered, refusing to settle as she bade them to. They’d been acting up all evening, in spite of the fact that she’d made it perfectly clear to herself that Blake’s presence in River Bluff for his weekly poker game had nothing to do with her. He’d been coming to town every week for the past two years, and she’d never once so much as seen him on the road.
Last night hadn’t changed anything. He wasn’t coming to see her.
To pretend that they needed one more night of loving in order to be certain she’d conceive the first time out.
“He said he was in town last night,” Cole added, almost as an afterthought.
Except that she knew her brother.
“Oh.” She wasn’t discussing this with him.
“Said he was at your place.”
“Yeah.” Her tone dared him to make something of the fact.
“I’m glad. That’s all.”
“You pretty much ordained it,” she reminded him.
“So, is everything…okay?”
“Fine,” she said, aching to know what Blake had had to say about the night.
Aching to know, as always, the secrets so closely held inside Blake Smith’s heart.
And the fact that she didn’t know, had never known and would never know, was the reason why it was a damn good thing he hadn’t stopped at her place before leaving River Bluff.
She couldn’t fall for him again. Couldn’t handle the doubts and insecurities, the jealousies that came with loving a man so private he couldn’t even tell her he loved her. And every time she’d tried to coax his feelings out of him in words, every time she’d failed, she’d felt herself turning back into the frightened and confused thirteen-year-old who’d come home from school early with cramps to find her father in a body bag, and her mother being treated by the paramedics who’d answered her frantic call.
Annie had felt abandoned.
“We aren’t getting back together, if that’s what you’re waiting to hear,” she told her brother plainly, when it became clear that he was waiting for more.
“I didn’t think you were.”
“You hoped it, though. I know you, Cole.”
“And I know you.” Her brother’s words were full of regret. “You’re so locked into your idea of everyone else’s expectations of what a healthy person looks like, and your own perception of a healthy relationship, that you can’t see what’s really there.”
Sucking in her breath, Annie fell back against the beanbag chair, tempted to just hang up on Cole. “That has to be the cruelest thing you’ve ever said to me.” She barely got the words out. Cole had always been her champion.
Her believer.
“It’s not meant to be cruel, Anster,” he said, the love in his voice doing something to soothe the wound he’d just inflicted. “It’s meant to be an attempt to help. I’m scared to death that you’re never going to be happy, because you’re stuck in the mind-set of a frightened young girl.”
Cole’s words, on top of her own thoughts, hit Annie hard. Too hard for her to cope with so soon after the emotional experience she’d lived through the night before.
“Do you ever think about Daddy?”
“Sometimes. Mostly the good stuff. Especially now that I’m a carpenter again. Do you remember when he’d come in from the workshop, smelling like sawdust? And remember him taking us to Six Flags?”
At least half a dozen times.
“Yes.” She�
��d been afraid of a costumed character once and her father had held her hand, walked her up to it and asked it to show her it was really a person with a big hat. The young man had quickly complied—though he’d taken them behind a building first. Annie’s father hadn’t laughed at her or told her it was ridiculous to be afraid. Instead, he’d treated her concerns with tenderness, respect and love. But she couldn’t think about the good times much. They made what came after hurt that much more.
“Do you ever think about what he did?” she asked Cole. “Or wonder why?”
“Not if I can help it,” Cole said slowly, his tone unusually serious. “I don’t get it, Annie. And it’s not like he’s here to ask.”
“I worry sometimes that I could be like him.” She couldn’t believe she’d put the words out there. Cole was quiet for so long, she wondered if he’d hung up.
“Me, too.” His voice, when it came, was barely audible. “But I learned a long time ago not to dwell on what I had no control over and couldn’t change,” he added more strongly. “And that’s where I worry about you. You’ve spent your whole life letting the event control you.”
“I’ve grown up a lot in the past six years,” she said, to remind her brother. And herself.
“I know, and I’m proud of you. I just want you happy.”
“I am happy,” she replied. And it was true, she had perfect moments. She just needed to have them a little more often. “Once I know there’s a baby on the way, I’m going to be happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
“I hope so.” Cole didn’t sound at all sure of that. “I hope you aren’t just bringing more hard times and loneliness upon yourself. Raising a baby alone can’t be easy.”
But Annie was no quitter. No weakling.
She was fully in touch with herself and what she had to have to experience life fully and completely.
ON THURSDAY, after discussing a series of prospective investments with Colin, who was in the office every day, Blake left work right on time to make it to the county hospital closest to River Bluff before visiting hours were over. There was no strong reason for him to be there, he acknowledged as he rode the elevator down from Verne Chandler’s room. He’d heard from Cole, before he made the drive, that the old man was still unconscious. And that he was in the advanced stages of cirrhosis of the liver. But Blake had come anyway. River Bluff was calling out to him.
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