by Anna Adams
“But do you know where her family lives?”
Helene hesitated. “Why? Zach won’t want you to talk to them.”
“Because he thinks he’s responsible for what happened to her, and he doesn’t want to remind them.
“They’re in Maryland, somewhere near Annapolis. He spent a couple of holidays with them while they were at the Academy together.”
“How about her maiden name?”
“She kept her name when she married.”
“Can you tell me anything else about her?”
“No, but you’re wrong. You’re the one he needs. He might still want to wear a hair shirt because of Salva, but I’ve seen you together and I know you’re the one.”
Olivia ignored Helene’s suspicions. She was hardly in a position to scorn them. “Talking to the Salvas can’t hurt. If they don’t want to speak to Zach, I’ll never tell him.” She swallowed, staring at the newspaper. “Helene, you won’t tell him either?”
“Of course not, but listen to me. Don’t get in touch with them through the Navy.”
“Why?”
“They might not want anyone to dig up the story again—especially not a journalist. Why involve them if you don’t have to?”
“You’re right.”
“Actually, I was wrong about one thing.” Helene said. “What I asked about you and Zach—I shouldn’t have. I’m married. I’m not in love with Zach, and I should stop being annoyed that he didn’t turn out the way I wanted.”
“I can’t hear about your marriage.” She wasn’t brave or kind enough to be civil about it just now.
“I’m trying to suggest you shouldn’t be a fool. You may be what’s wrong with Zach Calvert. He is different now. He looks at you with tenderness he never felt for me. He wants you to be happy. If he could dump that mountain of guilt he carries around, he would for you.”
Olivia nodded, bewildered. “Why are you saying this?” It wasn’t a good response, but what did you say when a woman offered you the redemption you’d been looking for?
“Because I didn’t care if Zach suffered when I left. I tried to hurt him. You’re trying to help him, and I guess that means you really love him.” Helene sniffed as if she’d had enough. “And one more thing.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Lily tells me you love her, too.”
“I’m glad she knows.” Olivia smiled. “She’s a lovable girl.”
“She’s the only reason Zach and I were right to marry.” Helene swallowed hard enough for Olivia to hear it over the phone. “Well, I still make mistakes with her, too, when I get mad at him. But overall we do all right with her. Who knew you could be so screwed up with each other and yet raise a healthy child if you both try hard enough?”
OLIVIA TOOK Helene’s advice and started dialing Salvas in Annapolis. After an hour and a half, she found Kim Salva’s mother, who connected her with Kim’s husband, Joel Bestowe.
“I’ve wanted to talk to Zach since the day they told me about the crash,” he said. “But he was in the hospital, and then Captain Gould told us about his injuries. I got smothered in raising my daughter, and I guess I let it go. Please tell him I’d like to meet.”
Kim’s mom, Linda, broke in. “We’re not talking about an interview for your magazine?”
“No.” Though she’d used her name without a second’s trouble to her conscience, she wasn’t a monster. “But I’m interfering without Zach’s permission. I had to make sure you wanted to talk to him before I brought it up. He misses Kim, and he feels responsible.” She broke off, hearing a sound behind her. Naturally, when she turned, Zach stood in the doorway, his collar open, his tie dangling, death or something close to it on his face.
“What have you done?” he asked in a voice she didn’t recognize.
She said goodbye and hung up the phone. Turning back to Zach, she lifted her chin, prepared to take a punch, even if it came in the form of dismissal. “She was your friend, but your guilt is more demanding than any lover. You won’t be a whole man until you fix this, and Lily and Evan are eventually going to notice their father’s determination to be alone. They deserve to know you when you’re happy.”
“And what do you deserve, Olivia?”
She looked at herself honestly. “I think deep down I wanted you back or I wanted you to suffer. I needed some sign that I mattered to you.” Apparently, nothing was too childish and mortifying for her to admit. “Now I just need to be sure I’ve done what I would have done then. I loved you, and I would have helped you any way I could, even if helping meant I never saw you again.”
ZACH GRIPPED the airplane armrest with sweat-slicked hands. This flight included a map that projected their progress across all the land they could crash on.
“You could have used the company’s jet.” Olivia’s edgy tone at his side didn’t help. “You didn’t even have to ask me along.”
“I thought you’d want to see how it all came out.” He took refuge in sarcasm because he needed her, and he couldn’t say so. If talking to Salva’s family didn’t help, he didn’t want to harm her any more.
She leaned into the plane’s bulkhead, as far from him as possible. “How it comes out is none of my business.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. If he could change for anyone, he’d change for Olivia. He loved Lily and Evan, but he wanted to be right again for Olivia. She’d risked facing his rage. And he believed she was trying to help, knowing she might be freeing him so that he could love someone else eventually.
After six years of never letting Joel’s name cross his mind, he should have been thinking of Salva’s husband and her family. Instead, for once, he wanted the right to think of his own future, his children and the woman he loved. Olivia mattered more.
Zach had taken his seat on this plane, thanked Joel for agreeing to see him and accepted a dinner invitation from Salva’s mother, all in the hope that their forgiveness would give him a glimpse of a future with Olivia.
At BWI, she hung back after he signed for the rental car. “Why don’t I wait for you?”
He hunched his shoulders in his jacket. Every curve of her face had become vital to him. Her slightest glance had the ability to change his mood for good or bad.
“I want you to come with me.”
Surprise widened her troubled gaze. “Oh. Okay.”
They discussed only directions as they drove to Salva’s childhood home. Joel had agreed to meet them there.
Olivia displayed atypical nerves, tapping her nails on the console between them. When he couldn’t stand the sound any more, he covered her hand with his—surprisingly, in offering comfort, he found it.
“Next exit,” he said.
A few turns after the off ramp brought them to a line of federal-style townhouses. A tall, dark-haired man waited on the steps outside the Salvas’. Zach parked, studying the man he’d hardly known, whose life he’d changed irrevocably.
“He looks anxious, too.” Olivia unlocked her door. “Unless you want me to wait here?”
“No.”
Together, they climbed the steps. Joel met them halfway. He held out his hand, and Zach took it to shake. To his utter amazement, the other man pulled him into a loose hug.
“Hey, man. I should have thanked you years ago.” Backing up, he shook Olivia’s hand. “I’m glad you called.”
“Why would you want to thank me?” Zach asked.
Joel made a scoffing sound. “Because you tried so damn hard. You almost brought Kim home.”
“Almost,” Zach said, feeling his friend’s loss more than ever. Olivia slid her fingers into his, and he pulled her closer. “It’s the ‘almost’ I can’t live with.”
Joel frowned. “What do you mean? I admit I missed her—I still do, but I have a daughter who needed a living, functioning father. I’ve had to go on, but I’ll do that with a clearer conscience now that I’ve finally thanked you for trying to save my wife. I don’t know if they told you, but she aborted the first rescue attemp
t and had to go deeper into hiding. She didn’t trust the pilot, for some reason. So they chose you for the second try because you were such good friends. They knew when she saw you, she’d run for the chopper.”
The memories evaded him, but he heard her screams in his head. “She ran, but she needed help.”
“They told us she was shot in the leg when she tried to climb aboard.”
“If I’d only yanked her by one hand, I might have gotten us out of there. But I left my seat to drag her in and she was shot again.”
“Do some time in the real world.” Joel gripped Zach’s forearm for a second, softening the blow. “How long would your arms have to be to reach her? Your choice was help her or leave her behind. I don’t know what I would have done if you’d left her.”
The meaning behind his words made Zach feel sick. Joel and Kim’s daughter had a grave to visit. Her parents could say a prayer over her once a year, maybe on her birthday.
“You did everything you could.” Joel rubbed his hand down his own throat, as if to facilitate swallowing. “I can’t ever thank you like I should. You brought my wife home.”
Zach glanced at Olivia, whose hand had to be aching. He loosened his hold. “How can you forgive the man who failed Kim?”
“You were one of her best friends at the Academy.” Joel braced his hands on his hips. “You almost gave your life to help her. How can I hold a grudge against the man who nearly died trying to save her?”
Even Zach knew from the tapes that he’d done all he could. Thanks to his training, he’d been able to fly the broken chopper out when he was hardly conscious. He’d never thought he should do more. Being unable to do enough had haunted him.
“Come meet my daughter,” Joel said. “And my fiancée.” He smiled, giving Zach time to absorb the shock. “Kim’s mom has made her favorite meal for you. We’ll toast her, and I’ll know she’d think we’ve finally thanked you and we’re all square.”
Zach eyed Olivia, who nodded in a your-choice gesture. Before, he would have made for the relative safety of the flight home. But if Joel Bestowe could find someone else to love maybe it was time he let Kim rest in peace, too. “I guess we’re having turkey with the fixings?”
Joel’s laughter reminded Zach of attending Kim’s wedding. She’d given Joel his bridegroom’s gift, a model of her first ship assignment. Joel had declared himself the happiest war bride in history because he was going to meet her when she docked in Naples.
“Turkey with the fixings,” Joel said, his voice reflective. “We haven’t heard that around here in a long time.”
“She could eat it on the Fourth of July.” Zach looked down at Olivia. “Thanks.”
“You’re okay?”
The other man started up the sidewalk, as if he knew they needed privacy. “Joel’s still living. I haven’t been in a lot of ways.”
Joel must have heard. He came back, stopping in Zach’s face. “Hear what I say, because I don’t need any guilt for not finding you myself.” He glanced at Olivia, but then fastened dark, resolute eyes on Zach. “You knew Kim almost as well as I did. She’d kick your ass if she suspected you were wasting time. To fight that hard for her, and then to give up on yourself? She’d say you’ve been wasting her time.”
Her husband was right. Remembering her without agony for the first time in six years, Zach chuckled. “If anyone could come back to dispense an ass-kicking, I guess it’d be Kim.”
SURROUNDED BY BOXES he hadn’t opened since the Navy had packed his apartment for him, Zach tapped a knife against his hand. Which one to open first?
He’d hated leaving the Navy and the job he’d dreamed of from the day he’d first sat in a cockpit. Once the boxes arrived, he’d only unpacked clothes and papers. Everything else he’d simply shoved into the attic.
Four boxes into the pile on his first night back from Annapolis, he found pictures of Olivia. A different Olivia. Laughing, uninhibited, striking a gangly ballet pose in front of her father’s front porch. In another one she sprawled in short shorts and a tank top on the hood of a car he didn’t recognize.
In a third, she was beneath the branch of a weeping willow, smiling pensively with more joy than he’d ever seen on her beautiful face. He could just see his hand wrapped around her wrist. Holding her to him.
He must have taken these pictures. He brushed dusty fingers over her face. He’d robbed her of all that joy.
He rummaged through the rest of the boxes, but found nothing else that seemed to belong to Olivia. Wiping his hands on the seat of his jeans, he carried the photos downstairs to find her on the threshold of his unlocked door.
He held up the pictures. “The Navy packed these, but I never looked in the boxes.”
She moved to his side. Her hair brushed his forearm, arousing him, like a slide of silk over his skin.
“They’re me,” she said. “I don’t even remember them.”
“If I’d seen these, I would have looked for you.”
With a slight smile, she took the photos from him and then set them on the nearest table. Her bland gaze suggested she wasn’t interested any more in how he felt about her. “I promise I won’t keep dropping in, but I was worried about you.”
He reached around her to shut the door. “You look as if you’re freezing.” He breathed in her scent. It was like oxygen to him. “Come in and stay, Olivia.”
She checked the time on her watch. “For a few minutes. I left Evan with Dad, and you never know what’ll happen. He may be teaching the boy to drive the camper by the time I get back.”
“Are you trying to tell me your work here is done?”
Her fine black eyebrows tilted upward. “Isn’t that what you want?”
He shook his head, tenderness for her flowing all the way to his fingertips as he took her face in his hands. “You have everything I want.” He touched her hungrily, needing a response she didn’t offer. “You’re everything I want. I thought I’d all but killed Kim Salva on my last mission, and I honestly believed I wasn’t safe for you to know.”
She covered his hands. “You have to be sure, Zach. I don’t have one more rejection in me. If you tell me you don’t want me again, I can’t come back, and I can’t stay in the hope you’ll commit. I’m not asking for forever as of today, but I have to know you feel the possibility.”
He shook his head. “It’s so much more simple than that. I want you now. I love you. I’ll want you the rest of my life.” He kissed her forehead, enjoying the subtle scratch of her bangs against his mouth. “Safe or not, I’m exhausted with wasting time.”
She pulled free, leaving him cold, empty-armed and alone. “Then we should wait until you’re rested enough to know you’re not settling for the woman in front of you.”
He reached for her, but she caught his hand. “I must have put that badly.” He twisted his hand gently from hers and pressed his thumb to the corner of her mouth. She stood her ground as he leaned toward her.
Without preliminaries, he nudged her lips open. He kissed her, offering his future, his broken past, his children, his life. A surprised, vulnerable sound from deep in her throat made him wrap her in his arms. She linked her hands behind his neck.
“I didn’t want to love you,” she said.
“I could tell at the spring, but I liked it.” He kissed her again, but lifted his head when the matters they needed to settle began to recede from his mind. “Do you think Chicago needs a sheriff who can chase moonshiners and bank robbers with equal skill?”
Warmth filled her laughter and seduced him. He stroked the curve of her waist. This woman belonged to him.
“I think we should live here,” she said, as if everything else were decided.
Zach smiled, happiness coming back to life inside him. He pretended to take her acceptance in stride. “I really would have moved to Chicago, but I’m glad Evan will get to know his Calvert family, too.”
“We’ll have to build a guest house for Dad,” Olivia said.
“Befor
e or after you marry me?”
She went a little rigid in his arms. “Let’s make sure of each other. We both have time, and if it happens I want bells and whistles and shooting stars, not a sense that we’re finally making things right.” Her kiss held a plea for understanding. He couldn’t blame her for needing security. “But I have a request.”
“Anything.” He tightened his arms. He’d win her with time, because he wouldn’t change. “But be generous. I feel like a fool for not seeing the Salvas before and I’m so angry I didn’t open those boxes, I’d promise stuff I couldn’t possibly give you.”
“Just promise that if you ever plan to leave again, you’ll say exactly why—and when you’ll come home.”
That last word had resonance. They were both where they belonged. Together.
“You never ask enough for yourself.” He leaned back, forcing her to meet his gaze. He wanted her to see how much she meant to him. How much he wanted her future tied to his. “I go nowhere without you.”
“Never?”
It was a harebrained vow, but her hopeful, trusting smile drove him to swear.
“Not ever.”
EPILOGUE
HE MADE THE SAME PROMISE every morning in the bed they shared, and then he asked her to marry him. On the six-month anniversary of the day she and Evan had moved to Tennessee for good, Olivia finally believed.
She stretched in his arms as he kissed a disturbing path down her breastbone, and the spring sun spread warmth across them, and her father’s workmen drummed away on the office/guest house down the ridge, and Evan slept peacefully in his bedroom down the hall.
“Yes,” she said.
“What?” Zach lifted his tousled blond head, distracted, but willing to listen.
She laughed, drowning in eyes filled with the turbulence of loving lust. “We’ve already been together three times as long as before. I guess you are staying.”
“Let’s tell everyone.” But he lowered his head, and his mouth, suckling a freckle he professed to love on her ribcage, spoke of more interesting intentions.