The Millionaire's Homecoming

by Cara Colter

  The view was breathtaking and the pool was gorgeous, lights inside it turning the water to winking turquoise.

  Aware David was already in the water watching her, she slipped off the housecoat and slid into the water.

  She made her way over to him and sat on an underwater bench beside him.

  “Thank you for coming today,” he said hoarsely, “I don’t think I could have made it through without you.” And then wryly, “Kayla to the rescue.”

  “She’ll be safe there,” Kayla told him. “And as happy as can be expected. I liked the memory box idea. What will you put in it, I wonder?”

  David was silent for a long time. When he spoke his voice was so low that Kayla had to strain to hear it.

  “I’ll put the pinecone Christmas ornament I made in the second grade in it,” he said. “And the corsage my dad gave her for their fifteenth anniversary that she dried and always kept by the bed. I’ll put the dog’s worn old collar that she kept long after he died and that still sits on the mantel. I’ll put in my graduation diploma. I’ll put her favorite recipe book in there, and a picture of her sister and the old sepia photo of the farm she grew up on in Saskatchewan. I’ll put in the ugly dish that she made in ceramics that we all laughed about, and the earrings I gave her for her birthday when I was ten, and that she wore even though they looked like Ukrainian Easter eggs.

  “A whole life,” he said, his voice breaking. “How can I put her whole life in a box? How do I put in Canada Day fireworks, and the look on her face as she looked upward? How do I put in the memory of her fingers on my back as she smoothed cream on a sunburn? How do I put in waking up to the smell of bacon and eggs? How do I put her laughter when the snowman toppled over? How do I —” But he didn’t finish.

  He was crying.

  She had never seen a man cry. It seemed to her it was the strongest thing she had ever seen a man do.

  It seemed to her she had never seen a man so capable of deep love and the sorrow that it brought.

  She slowly moved her hand and caught one of his tears and lifted the saltiness to her lips with gentle reverence and tasted it.

  He caught her hand and he kissed it and then he moved away from Kayla, sliced cleanly through the water and began to swim.

  And after a moment she dove into the water and she swam beside him, silently, matching him stroke for stroke, swimming through the silent beauty of a dark city night, swimming through the memories that swirled around them, swimming through the pain.

  She would not have chosen to be anywhere else at that moment but beside him, swimming through life in all its grief and all its glory.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WHEN IT SEEMED like they had swum for hours, David hoisted himself out of the pool and then helped her out.

  His body was extraordinary, beaded with water, the city lights and the reflections from the pool casting it in bronze. His swimming trunks clung to the perfect muscle of his legs.

  “Can I interest you in that dinner now? I’m hungry.”

  “Liar,” she said, softly. “You’re just saying that because you think I should eat something.”

  He smiled tiredly.

  “Why don’t you go to bed?” she said. “I’ll look after myself tonight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. After he had gone, she sat on his big couch and watched the lights outside.

  After a while, she went into that opulent guest suite, put on her pajamas and got into the giant bed. She could not sleep and got up, took the housecoat from where she had dropped it on the floor, wrapped it around herself and wandered restlessly around the gorgeous apartment. She was drawn to the art.

  Even in the darkness, it held light. She moved slowly from one amazing piece to the next. It was almost too much beauty to take in.

  Then Kayla froze when she heard a sound. She moved out of the living room and went down a wide hallway in the direction she thought the sound had come.

  It was a different wing than the guest room was in, and she realized it was his wing, where his private bedroom suite was.

  She found herself standing outside his bedroom door.

  It was slightly ajar and she could hear the steadiness of his breathing behind it. She was going to move away when the sound came again, a stifled sound of pain, like a wounded animal.

  She gave David’s bedroom door a faint shove with her fingertips and it whispered open. Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom could have been from a movie set, or a hotel suite that rented for thousands upon thousands of dollars a night.

  He had not bothered to close the drapes, and the floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the dazzling lights of the city. The pool lights were reflecting in the room, making it seem like an underwater dream.

  It was a deeply masculine room, done in many shades of gray, but saved from being too cold or too modern by an exquisite large abstract painting—an explosion of warm colors—that hung above a bed that was enormous.

  The bed, despite its kingly proportions, struck Kayla as being faintly sad, like two people who didn’t like each other very much could sleep here and never know of the other’s presence.

  The sound came again, a muted sound of torment, and she slipped deeper into the room and tiptoed over to the bed.

  He was fast asleep, his lashes long and thick and casting faint shadows against his cheeks. A faint bristle was rising along the line of his jaw. The covers were thrown back and David was bare-chested.

  The masculine lines of his chest put the beauty of the canvas above his head to shame!

  His legs, clad in Slugs and Snails pajama bottoms in a different shade than the other ones she had seen, were tangled in the sheets. It was obvious, from the messiness of the bed coverings that his sleep was restless and troubled.

  In his sleep, David’s brow furrowed, and he made that sound again, tormented.

  Tentatively, she put her hand on his forehead and was satisfied when, under her touch, he was soothed and the line of distress left his brow.

  It felt like a stolen moment, a guilty pleasure, to study him like this without his knowledge, to drink in the now oh so familiar planes of his ruggedly handsome face. It was with the utmost of reluctance that Kayla turned away.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  At first she thought he was talking in his sleep, talking about the decision he had made for his mother, that he did not want her to have to leave her home of forty years and go to Graystone Manor.

  But when she turned back, prepared to soothe again, David was awake, if groggy. He drank her in, then propped himself up on one elbow and drank her in some more.

  It was probably only the lateness of the hour, the magical light reflected from the pool outside his bedroom, but it seemed to her that the look in his eyes might be identical to the one she had just looked at him with.

  He scooted over in the bed and tapped the empty place beside him with the palm of his hand. Her mouth went dry. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to jump or to back away.

  To jump held the danger—and the thrill—of the unknown. To back away did not really feel like an option at all.

  Feeling powerless she slipped in beside him, and felt not the danger of a leap into the unknown at all. She lay on her back, studying the ornate plaster work on his ceiling, feeling the exquisite touch of linen warmed through by his skin.

  She felt that softness within her swell like a bud in early spring about to burst.

  He covered her with the sheet. “What have you got on underneath that housecoat?” he asked gruffly.

  “My pajamas.”

  “Are they sexy?”

  “No.”

  He growled something that she was pretty sure was thank God.

  She nest
led into him, cherishing this moment, feeling as if she were in a dream that she didn’t want to wake up from.

  “David,” she said after a long time, trusting the sense of intimacy between them, “I need to know something.”

  “Anything.”

  “Why did you stop talking to me that night after you kissed me?” she whispered, needing, finally, to address the last of the unfinished business between them.

  He closed his eyes again. She heard a ragged regret in the quietness of his deep voice.

  “Kevin told me he’d asked you to the prom. To me, it was an honor thing between friends. You don’t take your best friend’s girl. He had spoken for you. I took the step back.”

  She was silent as she contemplated this. Kevin had not asked her to the prom until after David had kissed her. She had only said yes because it was evident that David regretted the kiss, and had no intention of taking his relationship with her anywhere. Maybe she had even hoped it would make him jealous.

  Certainly, picking out the prom dress, she had been thinking of David as much as Kevin. That she would be gorgeous, and he would be sorry that he had let her get away.

  But David had not reacted to her at all that night. He’d seemed engrossed in Emily Carson, who had been wearing a pure black strapless gown that made her seem sophisticated and worldly and that had made Kayla feel like a small-town girl and a hick that a guy like David would never look at.

  This knowledge—that Kevin had betrayed her, betrayed both his friends, manipulated and lied to have his own way—did not have any taste of bitterness to it.

  She had already forgiven him.

  And she had already forgiven herself.

  She saw no point in telling David. Wouldn’t the knowledge just cause him more pain when he was dealing with enough?

  Plus, it was as if knowing that final truth about Kevin set her totally free.

  To love another. Or perhaps to return to the love her heart had first recognized.

  “David?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You loved him, didn’t you?”

  There was a long silence, and then he said, “Yeah. He was not just my friend. He was my brother.”

  A floodgate that had been closed opened between them.

  The water of forgiveness flowed out of it and washed over both of them.

  “Tell me something wonderful that you remember about your brother,” she said softly. “Remind me of the Kevin he once was.”

  And so he did. And then she did. And then he did. And by the time the morning light had softened the room, they were exhausted.

  “I always thought,” David said, “if I stopped being angry with him that all that would remain would be a pool of sadness so deep I would drown in it.”

  “And?” she whispered.

  “It doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels as if the love remains, strong and true, even after all we went through. I wish I could tell him.”

  “I think you just did,” she said softly. “I think you just did. He gave us more than he took, didn’t he? Even his flaws helped shape both of us into the people we are today.

  “Do you think,” Kayla went on, “that is what love does? Performs this kind of alchemy, where it turns lead into gold?”

  No answer. She turned and gazed at him. David was sleeping, not restlessly now, his arm curled around her, his nose buried in her hair.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  Maybe he was not sleeping after all because she felt a sudden tension ripple through him and she braced herself for his rejection.

  But it did not come. Instead, he sighed and relaxed, and the arm that was curled around her touched her hair, and then pulled her in yet closer to his heart.

  Any thought about going back to her own room evaporated. She could not resist lying beside him, just for a moment, just to drink in his scent and the feel of his skin, to feel the heartbeat of the man she had come to love so completely.

  His essence.

  But somehow, her eyes closed and she fell asleep beside him.

  * * *

  David awoke feeling groggy, as if he had a hangover, when he knew he had not had a drop to drink. That was the power of grief.

  He stretched and then froze, opened one eye and then the other cautiously.

  Kayla was in his bed, her small frame wrapped in the plushness of the housecoat, her face squished against his skin, her beautiful honey-colored hair scattered across his naked chest. If he was not mistaken, there was the tiniest little pool of drool on his chest.

  The feeling of grogginess left him, as did the feeling of being hungover.

  It seemed to David, in a life that had everything—glamour and adventure and success beyond his wildest dreams—that he had never had a moment sweeter than this one.

  It occurred to him he loved her.

  And that maybe he always had, from that first kiss.

  And so he savored her head on his chest, and the lemony scent of her. Had she said those words last night?

  Had she whispered I love you to him?

  The moment of sweetness was replaced with sadness. There was a responsibility with loving someone. As she had said last night, loving Kevin had shaped them both. Even his flaws had shaped them. And this was one of the things David had learned.

  To love someone was to protect them from harm.

  It made David feel like a colossal failure, given the decision he was about to make concerning his mother.

  To love someone was to protect them from pain, not to cause it.

  He thought of what that meant in terms of what he had been discovering over the long, lazy days of summer, about what he felt for Kayla.

  There was no chance—absolutely none—that they would grow to love each other less. No, he knew that.

  He knew each tumbling snowman, and each summer night lit with fireworks intensified the love. He knew that old dogs died and new puppies came home, and that these events intensified the love.

  And so did making ice cream.

  And so did cleaning up messes that dripped from the ceilings and covered their clothes in yellow splotches.

  And lying on the lawn looking up at Orion and listening to her name the stars.

  And swimming fully clothed in a cold lake on a hot summer day.

  And what did that mean, that the love kept deepening and intensifying? It meant it would hurt Kayla more when that day came.

  When the doctor’s reassurances about his heart proved incorrect and, just as it had done for his father, that vital organ exploded inside his chest and left him lying on the floor, keeled over, dying in front of her, all the chest compressions in the world not enough.

  Or when they were walking through someplace like Graystone, only this time it was her decision to make. About him. About what to do with him.

  All the money in the world and all the success could not stop the march of time. All the money in the world could not rip the “E” gene from your body and replace it with something else.

  All the money in the world could not prevent the inevitability of causing those you loved pain.

  Kayla woke up slowly and he cherished her waking. He cherished her slow blink, and then nodding back off, a stir of her leg, and then her arm, her hand pushing her hair from her face.

  And then that hand settling on his chest. And going still. Her eyes popping open wide, taking it all in.

  And then her smile.

  He would hold that smile in his heart forever. And then she leaned over and kissed him. And for one horribly weak moment, he let himself believe he could have this. That he could really have it all.

  And then he yanked himself back from her, sat up, swung his legs off the bed and kept his back to her.

  In a voice strip
ped of emotion, he said, “What are you doing in my bed?”

  He could not turn and look, but he could feel the sudden stillness in the air.

  “Isn’t that exactly what got you in trouble before?” he said into her stricken silence. “Weren’t you trying to make someone feel better who was in pain?”

  Again, the silence that was worse than words.

  He made himself look at her. He made his voice as hard and cold and mean as he could. He said, “I don’t need you to rescue me, Kayla. I don’t need you at all.”

  All those times she had seen him so clearly, all those times she had called him a liar. He held his breath hoping, maybe even praying, that she would see the lie he was telling her now.

  But she didn’t.

  Her face went blank with pain. After the intimacies of their conversation last night—of finally reaching that place where the love and forgiveness flowed, instead of the anger—he felt his own treachery deeply.

  And then she got up out of his bed, stiffly, and with her head held high, without glancing back, she walked out of his room, shutting the door quietly behind her.

  It was only after she was gone that he let himself feel the pain of what he had just done. And he couldn’t just let her go. How the hell was she going to get home? Walk? Take a bus?

  He went and threw open his bedroom door, folded his arms over his naked chest, watched her heading for his door, her little overnight bag so quickly and haphazardly packed that something pink—the panties he had caught sight of that first day—were caught in the zipper.

  When she heard him open his bedroom door, she tucked her head down so that her hair fell in a smooth curtain over her face, and hurried faster toward the elevator.

  “I’ll have a car sent around for you,” he said, his voice still stripped of emotion, cool.

  Her head shot up and she looked at him.

  “Let me tell you something, David. Kevin never asked me to the prom until after we kissed that night.”

  He schooled his features not to show the distress that made him feel, not to let the thousand what-ifs that leaped instantly to his mind show on his face.