SULLIVAN'S MIRACLE

by Lindsey Longford

  Fighting fatigue, Lizzie watched as Sullivan rooted through her dresser for a nightgown. What she wanted, though, was his long, muscled self next to her through the coming night. Through the open windows of her bedroom the distant ka-thump of the gulf could be heard. She lived with its sound always in her ears, waking, sleeping to the endless rhythm.

  Her heart was racing threadily and her lungs labored with each breath, but the pain was endurable. She hadn’t seen Sullivan for two days. This pain was nothing compared with the aching need for him—not just his voice on the phone, but him, his strength, his tenderness masked by teasing.

  “Lift your arms.”

  His face was close to hers, filling her world, and she held out her arms and let him ease the flannel shirt he’d found over her shoulders. His rough fingers rasped the soles of her feet as he pulled thick white socks over them. He arranged the pink-flowered blanket around her.

  She crooked her finger in the notch of his shirt. Against the back of her finger, his chest was smooth and muscled. “You need to change into something dry, too.”

  “Not yet.” He wouldn’t look at her as he ran the towel over her hair and separated the drying strands.

  “We have to talk.” She regretted the huskiness in her voice and cleared her throat, resisting the cough that came pushing up.

  His fingers were so warm against her ear. He lifted a wet strand of hair and tugged it gently. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she echoed. “Go change.”

  “Bossy woman.” He leaned over her. “I’ll get you some tea first.”

  “Don’t call me stubborn,” she muttered as he walked through the doorway.

  “I heard that,” he shot back.

  “You were supposed to.” Raising her voice took the last of her energy and she coughed repeatedly, cramming the sheet into her mouth to smother the sounds. Drained, she sank against the pillows. Her hand shaking, she reached into her nightstand and took out her pain pills. She swallowed four, quickly forcing them down when they stuck in her dry throat.

  A cabinet door banged and she heard his muffled curse. Metal clanged against metal. Sullivan was only patient when he was tracking a story. Apprehension nibbled at her in between waves of drowsiness. She was worried about him. Yesterday in a catch-up-with-old-times phone call, Charlie had hinted that there were unsettling rumors connected with Sullivan’s investigation. Greed could warp even the most respectable people, and Sullivan would keep plugging away at the knotted strings, seeing where they led. And who held the ends.

  She had to make him see how dangerous his curiosity could become if he stayed on the story he was digging up.

  And she had to tell him the decision she’d made when she’d seen the agony revealed in his face in the mirror.

  Her eyelids drifted partly shut, and in the twilight moments, she watched the shadows in the corner of the room, listened to the ticking of the clock, its companionable beat a quiet sound against the roar of the gulf.

  She heard the small clink of teacup on saucer and forced her eyes back open.

  Carrying one of the Wedgwood teacups she’d brought from her house in town, Sullivan entered through the arch between the kitchen hall and bedroom. His wide, sloping shoulders filled the doorway. The stark light struck his face, shone on the shaggy brown hair curling onto his T-shirt. As he ducked under it, the unshaded bulb swayed on its long black cord, highlighting the angles of his face, the wariness in his alert blue eyes.

  She’d put that wariness in his eyes. She loved him more than life itself, and she’d harmed him. She tried for a light note, teasing him. “You changed your clothes after all.”

  Hearing her, he stopped, and his lopsided smile held her transfixed. “While the water boiled.” One straw-brown eyebrow lifted. “Hey, I’m real good at following orders. Yours, anyway,” he added as she wrinkled her nose disbelievingly.

  The light seesawed above him, shadow, light, shadow. His eyes, bright then dark, filled with the sight of her. He’d always looked at her like that, as though she were the only person in his world. She smiled back, comfort she hadn’t found in the blankets seeping through her.

  “Here.” He handed her the tea. The wicker headboard banged against the wall and the bed dipped as he sat down. He settled her on his lap, and she grabbed the cup. Bringing her feet close to him, he tucked her in the crook of his arm. Its corded strength bunched against her breast as he turned her to him. “So. Let’s talk. Bad day?”

  The hard, comforting thump of his heart drowned out everything, and she yearned to stay safe in his arms forever.

  “No.” She evaded the see-all blue of his eyes.

  “You don’t lie worth squat. Don’t you know that by now?” He stroked her cheek and put his ear to her chest, listening against the worn flannel of her buttoned-up shirt.

  Over the living bridge of his ear against her heart, she felt her breath pass from her straining lungs into him, through him.

  Frowning, he raised his head and glanced toward the corner, at the oxygen tank with the nasal cannula and tubing. “You want anything?”

  “No,” she said, and his slow breath of frustration tickled her ear.

  He touched the skin under her eyes, watching her carefully the whole while. “I shouldn’t have gone to Tampa.”

  “You had to. The records are at the federal court house.”

  “There were other sources.”

  “All right, then, I wanted you to go.” She wadded up the bed sheet with her free hand, looked down into the teacup and tried to figure out how to tell him what she’d decided in those twilight moments, the only decision she believed possible. Still trying to keep the moment light, she tilted her head and smiled up at him. “Besides, you’re a pain in the patooty when you hang around all the time, Sullivan.”

  “Patooty?” He cuddled her closer. “Fanny I know. Ass, yeah, that too, but patooty?”

  “Same geographic location,” she answered, wiggling her patooty as she laid her head on his shoulder.

  “Now I get it,” be teased as he curved his palm over her. “And a very nice area it is. Hills, valleys,” he murmured. “Geography always was my favorite subject.” His palm rested at the top of her thigh. The cup tilted. Tea slopped onto the sheet, and she put the cup on the end table. “I’m done.” His palm moved once as she continued, “I know my illness is tearing you apart. We’re—”

  He started to interrupt, but she silenced him with her fingers against his mouth. Sullivan wasn’t used to running into immovable objects or situations he couldn’t fix. If possible, he wasn’t going to let her tell him what she had to.

  He ran his hand up and down her arm and bent over her feet, pulling up her socks, playing for time. “Look, while I was gone, I talked to some people about this idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis thing.”

  Reverting to childhood, she covered her ears and shut her eyes.

  “Look at me, Lizzie.” He pulled her hands down, and a broad palm cupped her cheek.

  Basketball-player hands, she thought wistfully, remembering an out-of-focus photograph he’d reluctantly shown her when she’d teased him once about being a man with no past.

  “Don’t shut me out,” he said and slid his lips across her eyelids, making her open them to the pain she saw in his eyes.

  “Sometimes I have to,” she whispered, watching the blue darken like storm-driven waves.

  “When you turn away—” he gripped her chin “—I don’t exist anymore.” Uncharacteristically, his words tumbled out. “It’s never been like this for me. I never knew I could be so lonely until you came into my life. When you’re not with me…” he hesitated, searching for words “…there’s nothing.” He stroked her calf, her thigh, her throat until he finally touched her mouth, outlining her lips with his forefinger over and over until she felt blood rush to fill them, felt them grow warm under his touch, felt warm herself for the first time in two days.

  He glanced again at the cannula with its utilitarian prongs and tubing. He t
ook a deep breath, and his chest moved against her ribs. “Lizzie, I’m so damned angry all the time. I can’t think straight. I can’t think about anything except you. I’m scared sh—”

  “I didn’t think it would be like this,” she said, her throat closing with her own loneliness and fear. “I never wanted you unhappy.”

  “Hell, I know that.” His frustration boiled over, and she wanted to ease his pain, but couldn’t. “Where were you all those years I was roaming the world like a lost soul?”

  His pain, hers, intermingled. “Me, too.” She slid her arm around his neck. “I needed you, and I didn’t even know you existed.”

  Lifting her, he brought her as close as cloth and skin could get. “What kind of damned world is this? Why couldn’t we have had years instead of months? I wish—”

  She squeezed the old childhood words out through her tight throat. “If wishes were horses—”

  “Beggars would ride,” he finished, holding onto her as if she’d disappear before his eyes. “I can’t stand…” He stopped. “No, I can stand anything I have to.” He kissed her forehead. “But watching you struggle and not being able to do a damn thing about it, Lizzie, it’s…” There was rage in the touch of his lips. Frustration.

  His anger overwhelmed her. It was more than she could handle. “That’s why I want you to leave.” The words burst from the well of her own fears. She dropped her face into her shaking hands, Sullivan’s grief and anger exhausting her.

  “Is that what you really want?” His feet hit the floor, and his back was to her, rigid with control.

  “Yes.” She made herself say the words. She couldn’t make herself mean them—not at the most basic level, in her heart. “You said, whatever I wanted. Give me what I want, Sullivan.”

  The sound he made was as close to a growl as a human could come. “Leave, huh? Fine. Terrific. Grab my toothbrush and go?”

  She nodded. Sobs were jarring her, but she wouldn’t let them out, not now.

  “No.”

  Her strength nonexistent against his hard chest, she pummeled him with her fists, trying to make him understand. “Don’t you think I’ve tried everything? I have! I lie awake at night thinking about how things could have been for us.”

  White lines scored his mouth. “Listen, I said I can deal with whatever happens. I can handle anything except losing you.” He looked toward the shadows haunting the corners. “Anything but that.”

  Gathering her so tightly to him that she knew he was walking the fine edge of control, he was silent. In the quiet, the ticking of the clock echoed the beating of her heart. She’d always taken his strength for granted. She’d never imagined she would become his Achilles’ heel.

  When he finally spoke, he chose his words carefully, though his tone was bitter. “I’m not leaving. No matter what, you’re stuck with me, Mary Elizabeth. I still want you to marry me. Nothing’s changed for me. I want to be here with you every day, not just when you decide to let me past your drawbridge.”

  Her sobs slipped out. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I’m forty-one years old, Lizzie. If I don’t know what I want by now, God help me.” He smoothed the tears from her cheeks and raised her face. “Do I look like a man who has trouble making up his mind?”

  With his bright blue eyes filling her vision, she yearned to take the comfort he so carelessly extended, but she wouldn’t let him sacrifice himself. “You’re the kindest man I’ve ever met,” she whispered. “But I won’t marry you.”

  He squeezed her shoulders. “Then let me move in.”

  “I can’t.” She twisted away. “Don’t you understand? I couldn’t stand it if you started feeling trapped. I don’t want you growing to hate me.”

  “Hate you? You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in my whole life, Lizzie. You opened your door that day I came to interview you about your daycare center, and it was like someone taking a rock and slamming it into my gut. After so many years, I never expected to fall in love, but there you were, cobwebs on your nose, twenty curtain climbers screaming around you, holding a kid in a dirty diaper with one hand and blocking the door with the other. You weren’t about to give an inch to some damned nosy reporter, and I felt like I’d been slum-dunked. How can I walk out of your life? You might as well marry me, you know,” he said, his words like water dripping on a stone, wearing it away.

  “Sullivan, I used to believe in miracles, but happy-ever-after isn’t in store for us.”

  “I’ll settle for what you will give me right now. I never believed in miracles, anyway. Never saw any reason to.”

  “What do you believe in, Sullivan?” She needed to know now more than ever. His world was so dark.

  “Not much.” He placed her palm over his heart, slid his own hand under her shirt and pressed his wrist, with its strong pulse, against her breast, where her heart thrummed out its love for him. “This.” His palm bumped her nipple, scorched it with his heat. “Us. What I feel for you. Nothing else.” He lowered his head to her breast. “Everything else is bull, pointless.”

  For his sake, she wouldn’t give him the one thing he’d ever asked of her, but she could set him free. She knew Sullivan’s stubborn persistence too well. She knew how things would be if she gave in. “I’m not giving you a choice,” she said gently. Relentlessly, truth settled like dust motes between them. Raising her hands to touch him, she dropped them to her lap instead. Touching him gave her more comfort than she could allow herself.

  “Well, Lizzie, it’s like this.” His anger buzzed through the room like frenzied wasps. “I didn’t want to love you, but I had no choice about that, either. Now you’re telling me to get out of your life, and I don’t even want to live in a world without you. I wake up, and I can’t move because I’m so damned frightened you won’t be here when I unlock that damned sticky door.” He lifted the ends of her hair and slid his fingers along her neck. Trailing his mouth down her throat, he kissed the fretful pulse at the base of it. The planes of his face were bleak as he said, “You can’t keep me away. Nothing can. Not even God and all his angels.” His voice cracked. “I’m begging. Let me stay.”

  “No.”

  The strident buzzing of his beeper on the nightstand shrilled, and they both jumped. Sullivan swore. Glancing at the read-out, he slummed the beeper to the floor. “It’s the damned night desk.”

  Released from his hold, grateful for the interruption, she crumpled against the pillow and shut her eyes. “Take the call.”

  Picking up the phone, he punched out numbers while he frowned at her. “Yeah. It’s me. Can’t someone else handle it?” Scowling, drumming his fingers, he listened. “Yeah, yeah. I know I’m on the spot already, but someone else will have to— Damn it, find someone.”

  She tugged his shirt and mouthed, Go. He shook his head.

  “Yeah, I understand. Everybody’s on vacation, but that’s not my problem. I’m not going. So fire me.”

  Yes, she insisted with the last of her strength.

  “I don’t care if I’m just up the road—”

  “Please,” she whispered. “I can’t take any more.”

  At her entreaty, he stopped in midsentence and covered the receiver. His lips thinned as he spoke to her. “Okay. But this discussion isn’t over. If you think for one cotton-picking minute that you’re getting rid of me with this damned nonsense, better think again, sweetheart.” He flattened her hand hard against his leg and turned to write down the address of the Quik-Deli ten minutes down the island from her cottage. Hanging up the receiver, he ripped off the piece of paper. “A robbery. Cop’s shot. Hostages.” His eyes were grim as he twined his finger gently in the strands of her dry hair.

  “I’m okay,” she murmured, answering the tenderness in his touch. “I’ll be all right.” She took as deep a breath as she could through pain and heartache. “But I mean it. Don’t come back, Sullivan.”

  “Damn you, Lizzie.” His voice was ice. “I could almost hate you for doing this to us
.”

  “See what I mean?” She wrapped her arms fiercely around him. “We can’t go on like this. It’s destroying you.”

  “I’m a big boy, Lizzie. Let me make my own decisions. Let me have whatever time we have left.”

  So hard, harder than she’d dreamed to let him go. “I don’t want what we’ve had spoiled. Let me believe that you’ll remember me a little, that your memories won’t be ugly ones—”

  She couldn’t go on without squalling like a baby. “Let me have my pride. It’s all I have left.”

  Sullivan saw her exhaustion and knew he had to give her space, at least for the moment. “Lizzie, you can have whatever you want. Your pride. My liver, my nose, my toes. Anything except my leaving.”

  Her watery half sob broke his heart. He would have given her everything he had. But the fates had decided differently.

  “A toe transplant. Wouldn’t I look darling in my sandals with ten extra toes on each foot?” It was the humor that had first drawn him to her, but her chest vibrated with the movement of her straining lungs, reminding him.

  He would leave now because she was at the end of her endurance, but he wouldn’t think about never seeing her small toes in sandals again. “Here. Lean forward.” He lifted the tail of her shirt and wiped her face. “We’ll do it your way.”

  For now, he’d give her what she asked.

  He spread his hand over her throat, his thumb warm against her frantic pulse. “But don’t leave me alone, Lizzie. I’ll never forgive you if you do.”

  “Later, Sullivan, when you’ve forgotten all this, try to forgive me.” Tears slipped down her pale cheeks.

  “Forgotten?” he said. He was furious. “You’re the one with no faith. You never believed enough in what we felt to marry me. You’re a coward, Lizzie, but I love you more than you’ll ever know. Somehow I’ll find a way to forgive you, but it’ll take me a long time.”

  His kiss was hard, filled with angry despair, and he tasted the bitter salt of her anguish on his lips. “You know the beeper number if you need me, but one way or another, I’ll be back before midnight.”