by Sandra Brown
He stroked Laura’s cheek. “But Elaine is no longer here. You are. And I’m in love with you.”
He spent that night with her. Most nights following that, they spent together. In the office, they continued as they always had done, performing their individual jobs, conducting themselves in a professional manner, treating each other no differently than they treated their colleagues. They were confident no one knew about their personal relationship, but Laura learned later that they had fooled only themselves. Everyone knew.
One morning, she walked into his office unannounced and laid an envelope on his desk. “What’s that?”
“My resignation.”
He struggled to contain his smile. “We’re not paying you enough? You’ve had a better offer?”
She sat down in the chair facing his desk. “Foster, the last four months have been the happiest of my life. Also the most miserable.”
“Well, I hope that being with me has been the happy part.”
She gave him a soft look. “You know how happy I am to be with you. But the secrecy makes it seem…”
“Sordid?”
“Yes. And sleazy. I’m sleeping with my boss. As a career woman, I don’t like what that suggests about me. I don’t like the connotation co-workers would apply to it. I don’t want to give up my job. It’s what I’ve worked so hard to attain. You know how much I love it.
“But I can’t possibly give you up,” she said, her voice turning husky with emotion. “Between the two, I love you more than I love my job. So…” She gestured toward the envelope lying on his desk. “I must leave SunSouth.”
He picked up the envelope then and looked at it, turning it this way and that as though contemplating the contents. “Or,” he said, “you could marry me.”
Elaine Speakman had set a precedent by serving on the board of directors, so no one cried nepotism. No one wanted to anyway. When Foster and Laura announced their plans to the other executives and the board members, the only discussion was the date the nuptials would take place and if they would be taking a SunSouth jet on their honeymoon.
If there was watercooler talk about her marrying Foster for his money, or any other self-serving reason, Laura never knew of it. Even if she had been aware of such scuttlebutt, she would have ignored it. While some may have regarded what had happened as a Cinderella story—in those very words it had been hinted at in a newspaper column—she knew her only reason for marrying him was that she loved him wholly and completely. She couldn’t be bothered by the conjectures of mean-spirited people.
Their marriage was covered extensively in the press, although there were no pictures accompanying the stories. They kept the wedding itself private, inviting only their most intimate friends to the chapel service and the dinner following it.
Foster paid lip service to moving from his family estate, but Laura realized what a sacrifice that would be for him. He loved his family home and hugged her tightly when she told him she loved it, too, and that that was where they would stay and make their life together.
She moved in, changing very little of Elaine’s decor. Like his wealth, his love for Elaine was only another aspect of him. Laura didn’t feel threatened by his late wife’s memory, any more than she was intimidated by his fortune.
Foster would have preferred her to be pregnant by the time they returned from their honeymoon in Fiji. When she demurred, he had teased her about her biological clock. “I’m thirty-one!” she exclaimed.
He placed his ear against her lower body. “But I can hear it ticking.”
Even so, she had begged for time to be a bride before she became a mother. It was a decision that later seemed terribly selfish, and one she would always regret.
That first year they were kept busy with the burgeoning airline and settling into married life. Although Laura was to learn that “settling” was a foreign concept to her husband. The man never rested. The more he had to do, the more he got done. He was a tireless, incessant generator of energy. He had the work ethic of a Trojan but was also a proponent of la dolce vita. His enthusiasm for life and living was contagious. Laura reveled in the whirlwind of their life.
Foster used the media to his advantage, regularly feeding them tidbits of information about his airline even when there was no actual news to report, so that SunSouth was kept constantly in the minds of the public. His name, along with Laura’s, appeared frequently in the business sections of the newspapers.
They received national magazine coverage, once pictured playing doubles tennis with the president and first lady. The television newsmagazine 20/20 did a segment on them, touting them as the team that had, despite industry naysayers, resurrected a failed airline. They appeared on Good Morning America to talk about the Elaine Speakman Foundation and the medical research it was funding.
The gossip columnists who had snidely implied that Laura was a gold digger were soon extolling her intelligence, business acumen, impeccable taste, and unaffected charm. The Speakmans became the darlings of the local society pages, and their photographs began appearing regularly as hosts, guests, or sponsors of one event or another.
As they were leaving one such event, a decision was made that would change the course of their lives forever.
It was a Tuesday night. They had attended a retirement dinner for a notable Dallasite. The hotel where the dinner had been held and the Speakman estate were separated by only three miles of city streets.
When the parking valet brought up Foster’s car, Laura went around to the driver’s side. “You toasted him more times than I did,” she said.
“I’m fine to drive.”
“Why chance it?”
She got behind the wheel. He sat in the passenger seat. They were talking about the next day’s agenda. She had just reminded him of a meeting the following afternoon. “I have a busy day,” he remarked. “Any chance we could change that?”
Then everything changed.
The driver of a delivery truck ran a red light, an error that cost him his life. Opposed to wearing a seat belt, he was ejected from his truck through the windshield.
Otherwise he might have had to be cut from the mishmash of metal caused by the collision, as Foster had been. The cab of the truck fused with the passenger side of Foster’s sedan. It took rescue workers over four hours to extricate him from the wreckage.
Laura was rendered unconscious by the impact. She came to in the ambulance, and her first thought was of her husband. Her rising hysteria concerned the paramedics treating her. They answered honestly, “We don’t know about your husband, ma’am.”
It was agonizing hours before she was told that he was alive but that his condition was critical. She learned later that he underwent emergency surgery to repair extensive internal injuries causing life-threatening hemorrhage. Because she had sustained only a concussion, a broken arm, some scrapes and bruising, she was finally permitted into the ICU, where Foster struggled to survive. Specialists came and went. In hushed voices they conferred. None looked optimistic.
Days passed; Foster clung to life. Laura kept vigil at his bedside while monitors telegraphed in blips and beeps his extraordinary will to live.
In all, he had six operations. From the outset, she realized that the orthopedists knew he would never walk again, but they performed the surgeries as though there was hope. They used pins and screws to reattach bones that would never move unless someone moved them for him. Other specialists spliced blood vessels to provide better circulation. He underwent a second abdominal surgery to repair a tear in his colon that had gone undetected during the first.
She couldn’t remember what the other surgeries were for.
It wasn’t until weeks after the accident that Foster was fully apprised of his condition and prognosis. He took the news with remarkable aplomb, courage, and confidence.
When they were alone, he reached for Laura’s hand, pressed it between his, and reassured her that everything would be all right. He looked at her with unqualified love and
repeatedly expressed his gratitude to God that she had escaped the accident without serious injury.
He never implied that she was responsible. But as she gazed down at him through her tears that day, she said what she knew must have crossed his mind, as it had hers a thousand times. “I should have let you drive.”
Two years later, staring sightlessly through the window in SunSouth’s conference room, she was still anguishing over her decision to drive that night. Would Foster have driven a bit faster, a bit slower, preventing them from being in the center of the intersection when the truck failed to stop? Would he have seen it ahead of time and swerved to avoid the collision? Would he have done something she hadn’t?
Or, if fate had dictated that they were in that spot at that precise moment, she should have been the one sitting in the passenger seat.
Foster had never suggested she was to blame. He had never even referenced their brief conversation about how much each had had to drink and who should drive. But, although it remained unspoken, the question was always there between them: Would this have happened if he’d been behind the wheel?
Laura acknowledged how pointless it was to ask. Even so, the suppositions tortured her, as she knew they must Foster. They would go to their graves asking, What if?
Griff Burkett had somehow learned about the accident. She hadn’t stayed to have a conversation with him about it, but if he knew the details of why Foster was in his wheelchair, he surely understood why she would go along with this or any plan Foster devised.
Foster hadn’t died, but his previous life had ended the night of the wreck. And Laura was left guilt-ridden.
Having a child, conceiving it in the way Foster wished, demanded very little of her, considering everything he’d had to give up. A child and heir was one of the dreams that had been snatched from him that night. Maybe by granting him that dream, she would relieve her guilt and, by doing so, get back a portion of her former life.
Impatient with her self-pity, she turned away from the window. As she did so, a pinching sensation between her legs caused her to wince, as much from the memory it evoked as from the physical discomfort.
It had been difficult for Griff Burkett to penetrate her. That she was dry and inflexible said much about the status of her private life, and that had been mortifying. But at least he’d had the sensitivity to realize her condition and to hesitate. He’d even seemed reluctant to proceed, knowing it would hurt her. In fact, he had…
No. She wouldn’t think about it. Wouldn’t think about him. Doing so would make it personal. If it became personal, her argument wouldn’t hold. The argument she’d used to convince herself to go along with Foster’s plan was that using a surrogate father to conceive was just as clinical as, and no more emotionally involving than, undergoing artificial insemination in the sterile environment of a doctor’s office.
But the tenderness between her thighs was a taunting reminder that she had been with a man. A man moving inside her. Climaxing inside her.
How could she have thought for one foolish moment that it would feel clinical?
CHAPTER
11
THE SPORTS BAR WAS CROWDED AND NOISY, BUT GRIFF HAD thought if he spent one more evening cooped up inside his apartment, he was going to go round the bend.
Without anything constructive to do during the day, the evenings were particularly long. His tan was already too deep to be healthy. Although he kept to a strict exercise regimen, he was bored with working out. He’d seen all the current movies, some more than once. He’d caught up on his reading. Everything he found entertaining anyway.
Marcia was completing her recuperation at home, and via Dwight, she had asked Griff not to visit her there. “She’s dealing with a lot just to recover. Then she’s facing the plastic surgery,” Dwight had told him. “She needs some space. I’m sure she’ll contact you when she’s back to her glorious self.”
The message had been polite enough, but Griff could read between the lines. He was an additional complication she didn’t need. She didn’t blame him for what had happened, but distancing herself from him would be safer and healthier, for herself and for her business.
Consequently, he didn’t even have his daily trips to the hospital to look forward to. He was bored. And, possibly for the first time in his life, lonely. Being a social outcast was different from choosing to be alone.
One of the things he’d hated most about his incarceration was the lack of privacy. During those five years, he’d yearned for solitude, and swore that when he got out, he was never going to take it for granted again. But at least when he was in the mood to talk, there were other prisoners to shoot the bull with. His meals were eaten in the company of other people.
Now he had nobody with whom to do anything. Days would pass when he didn’t exchange a single word with another person.
Not that he was gregarious by nature. As Bolly had so candidly pointed out, he’d always been a loner. No doubt that tendency was a holdover from his childhood. His mother’s neglect had taught him to be self-sufficient. He’d relied only on himself for everything—sustenance, pacification, and entertainment.
That mandatory self-reliance developed into a personality trait. It also became a weapon he used to keep other people at arm’s length, out of either dislike or mistrust. He didn’t see the percentage in letting anyone hold sway over him. Even the most casual friendship required too much. To be a friend, one must give as well as accept. Griff found both equally difficult. Coach and Ellie had finally figured that out and had stopped pressuring him to make friends, resigning themselves to his preference for his own company over anyone else’s.
But in his former life he’d at least been around other people even if he didn’t mingle with them. At school, with the Cowboys, at Big Spring. Now he was actually lonely. So a few days ago, out of desperation, he’d called one of his former teammates, one with whom he’d been comparatively friendly.
The former tight end, who owned a successful software company now, congratulated him on getting released and lied by saying that it was great to hear from him. But when Griff suggested they get together for a beer, the guy ticked off a dozen excuses in the span of thirty seconds, one being that he’d gotten married.
“She’s a great lady, don’t get me wrong. But she keeps me on a tight leash. You know how it is.”
Actually, he didn’t. But what he did know was that this big, tough former NFL player would rather Griff think he was a henpecked husband than drink a beer with him.
Tonight, unwilling to spend another night in the solitary confinement of his apartment, Griff had dressed and gone looking for a crowd. He’d found one at an expensive sports bar in an upscale neighborhood. The place was sleek and snazzy, serving more fruit-flavored martinis than beer. It catered to the young, beautiful, and fit. Griff’s was the palest tan among them.
He was ogled by the twenty-somethings in skimpy summertime tops and short skirts. He ogled back, but not ambitiously. Which was somewhat surprising, since he hadn’t had sex with anyone since Marcia.
Well, and Laura Speakman.
Don’t go there.
That was what he told himself every time his thoughts went there.
People were standing three deep at the circular bar. He had to wait almost half an hour before a barstool became available. He claimed it, ordered a beer and a burger. While he ate, he watched a baseball game on the large-screen TV suspended over the center of the bar.
He’d become aware of a brunette sitting on the far side of the bar, facing him. She flashed him a smile and a glimpse of tit every time her boyfriend—or husband or whatever he was—wasn’t looking. Beyond that, Griff let the barroom dramas pulse around him without taking notice.
He stretched his meal out over five innings of the Rangers game. To maintain ownership of his barstool, and to keep from going back to the empty apartment, he ordered a second beer he didn’t want.
The Rangers were up by three. They were having a good season. I
f they made it to the play-offs, he would become interested. Otherwise, he didn’t much like baseball. He couldn’t make sense of a sport where the perfect game was one in which nothing happened. Baseball aficionados would disagree, saying that plenty happened during a no-hitter, but he couldn’t appreciate it.
Of course, it was a hell of a lot more fun to watch when you’d wagered on the outcome.
His gambling had started out as innocently as that. He did it for fun. Even while he was at UT, he would make calls, place bets on NCAA games, although he’d never bet on a Longhorns game. But he’d wanted to. He didn’t yield to the temptation of betting on his own games until he was drafted by the Cowboys.
The shrink who’d counseled him at Big Spring had a theory. He said Griff had felt guilty over his good fortune. The Longhorns had won the national championship his senior year. He’d missed being awarded the Heisman by two votes. He was the number one pro draft pick that year and an enviable prize for the Cowboys, whose veteran quarterback had retired. When he signed with the team, his picture was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Fame and fortune at twenty-three. Heady stuff.
The shrink’s take on it was that he’d gambled in the subconscious hope of getting caught, being punished, and losing everything, including Coach and Ellie’s affection. The shrink had emphasized that. “Coach Miller is perhaps the one individual in the world you respected and for whom you felt affection. Yet you deliberately did what you knew he couldn’t forgive, the one act that would cause an irreparable breach in your relationship.”
His summarizing analysis was that, subconsciously, Griff felt he should be penalized for all the good things that had happened to him—beginning with Coach giving him a home and ending with him becoming starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys—because in his deepest, darkest self, he’d felt these boons were undeserved. His ruin had become a self-fulfilled prophecy.
Maybe that was right.
Or maybe that was horseshit.