by Marina Adair
“No, but . . .” Liv could practically hear Carolyn choosing her words. And the longer she took, the higher Liv’s heart rate rose. “He’s in the scrapbook.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He’s in the scrapbook, Liv,” Carolyn said gently. “In the article about Paxton’s rescue.”
Liv set her feet on the ground. “There’s an article about the accident in there?”
Avery had asked if she could include some newspaper clippings, but Liv had assumed it would be their wedding announcement and the article on Sam when he’d been hired on as chief surgeon in Sacramento. But the accident? Liv hadn’t even read those.
“In a pocket on the back page.” Liv had never looked that far, only flipping to the pages that Paxton found interest in. “And the article talks about a search-and-rescue K-9 team who sat with Sam and Paxton until the storm had cleared.”
Liv already knew this story. The police had told her what had transpired when they’d shown up on her doorstep that Christmas morning. But hearing about it again, while naked and completely exposed on another man’s porch, brought on a strange sense of shame.
Liv grabbed her dress and tugged it over her head, covering herself.
“There are a lot of K-9 teams.” So then why did it hurt to breathe?
“Teams that fly down out of the sky to rescue Paxton?” Carolyn said with soft steel. “Why do you think he’s obsessed with a superdog who flies and saves people?”
Liv thought about how Bullseye had sought out Paxton, how easy Paxton was around Ford, and how Ford had come to Sequoia Lake for his certification. Then she told herself it was just a coincidence. Because the alternative was too painful to comprehend.
“What does the dog look like?”
Above the sound of her thrashing heart, Liv listened to Carolyn describe the dog, heard herself say that there must be a simple explanation—that didn’t include Ford misleading her. But nothing about what she was feeling was simple. It was heavy and complicated and at odds with the peace she’d fought hard for.
Carolyn finished reading the article, and Liv didn’t remember standing up or walking back to her house. But when the back door slammed shut on its hinges and the sound of the house settling around her became defeating, she remembered the suffocating feeling of isolation that rained down.
She remembered how loud the silence could be. And the longer she stood there, staring at the wall lined with memories, the more she remembered. Until the silence grew to a point that she was afraid it would never stop.
Ford didn’t even bother with shoes. He took off across the beach at a swift pace.
He’d come back out on his deck, pizza in hand, stupid-ass grin on his face, to find Liv gone. At first he thought she’d gone to the restroom, but after a good twenty minutes had passed, he went to check—only to find it empty.
Like the rest of his house.
He’d called her five times, left five messages, with no response. He’d considered the idea that Paxton had changed his mind and wanted to come home—not a far stretch since a sleepover with Carolyn sounded about as fun as a tea party with the Queen of Hearts—but then he spotted Liv’s car parked in her driveway.
He also saw a soft glow flickering from one of the bedrooms. Meaning she was the one who’d changed her mind about the sleepover. And for the life of him, Ford couldn’t figure out why.
Harris had warned him that kissing a single mom got women thinking. Ford wondered what kissing Liv naked on his porch had meant to her. He thought about all the options, and the first inkling of doubt began to creep in.
“Liv?” he called as he tapped on her back door. When she didn’t answer, he let himself in and quickly scanned the dining room and kitchen. There wasn’t a single light turned on in the entire house, but he could see a glow coming from down the hallway in Paxton’s room.
Maybe she’d already picked him up and come back.
He rapped a knuckle softly against the door frame. “Liv, you guys in there?”
The only confirmation he got was a small sob coming from inside the darkened bedroom. Ford opened the door and stepped inside, his heart dropping into crisis mode.
Liv sat on the child-size bed, her body curled tightly in the corner, a tissue in her hand and a laptop in her lap. The light glow from the screen showed enough tear tracks to know that she’d been crying for quite some time.
Alone.
No Paxton, no emergency, just Liv with those sad fucking eyes and heartbreaking sorrow.
Ford had just experienced the single most life-altering moment of his adult life, and while he’d been grinning like an idiot over it, she’d been wading through the fallout.
“Liv,” he said softly, entering the room.
She looked up at him and recoiled, making him stop dead in his tracks. So did his heart. Because she hadn’t just been crying—she’d been mourning. Ford had been around enough survivors to recognize the difference.
She stood and rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. It did nothing to erase the red rims and wet cheeks. Or the bad feeling burning in his chest.
“Is everything okay—”
Liv flipped the laptop around, and any uncertainty he had over the cause of her pain died fast and hard. Every question left his head, and he couldn’t speak past the article staring him down.
He recognized the photo of Bullseye in his rappelling gear, recognized the terrified boy huddled next to him, but the one thing he didn’t recognize was the look of utter betrayal on Liv’s face.
“I was going to tell you.”
She choked out a mirthless laugh. “Over breakfast in bed, or after you’d left town for good? Because you still had another week to string me along.”
“I was waiting for the right moment,” he said, but knew it was a lie.
“The right moment would have been when you ran into me that first day,” she said, swiping angrily at her tears, and he could tell that her hands were shaking. “Or maybe when I brought Bullseye over to your house. That way, instead of worrying myself sick over my son swearing that a dog really flew down from the sky to rescue him, I would have thought, ‘Hey, maybe he just saw Ford’s dog come down from the chopper that airlifted him out.’”
Her chin started quivering in an attempt to hold it together, and it nearly did him in. “But even if those times weren’t perfect enough for you, then how about when I sat in your office, told you that if anything was awkward between us, then you could bail. No harm done.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, but he knew there weren’t enough words in the world to make up for the ones he’d so selfishly withheld. “When I came back to Sequoia Lake, I had no intentions of making a connection more than to see how you were doing.”
“I was doing just fine.” She smacked her chest so hard he felt the thud in his own. “Paxton was doing fine. So why come back and dredge it all up?”
“I had to see it with my own eyes,” he said, and the truth had never sounded so callous. “I knew what you’d gone through, and I couldn’t let go. So when you asked me for help, I thought that this could be one last thing I did to help you move forward.”
“One last thing?” she said on a shaky breath, tossing the laptop on the bed. “What do you mean one last thing?”
She shook her head and took a step back, her hand slowly gripping her heart. “Oh my God.” She took another step back—away from him. “The gifts, the flowers, Paxton’s summer camp. That was all you? Two years of boxes on my doorstep, of wondering who was sending them, two years of lies? Is this some sick game you play—sweet-talk a lonely widow into bed and give her one last good time?”
“God, no.” He took a step forward, but she held up a shaky hand.
“Sweet-talk her into thinking she’s going to be fine?” She wrapped her arms around her stomach. “That she’s worthy of finding love again? Of being loved?”
“You are so damn worthy it hurts.” But he could tell by the look in her eyes that she didn’
t believe him. Didn’t believe that she was lovable.
“Do you know why I came here that first time?” he said, because even though he knew it would sever any hope he had for winning back Liv, he knew that she needed to hear it. “I sat next to a dying man and listened to him talk about his wife for twelve hours. About how beautiful and amazing she was, and how she’d filled his life with warmth and love. About how his biggest regret was that he wouldn’t be able to spend the rest of eternity caring for her the way she deserved to be cared for.”
Ford took a step closer and took her hand in his. “His love for you was so raw and deep I couldn’t help but promise to deliver his Christmas gift to you.” Liv reached down and touched the platinum-and-diamond necklace Ford had rescued from the trunk of Sam’s car and delivered to the hospital.
He’d watched as the sheriff handed her the box, explaining that it had been recovered, then left her alone in an empty hospital room with the last thing she’d ever receive from her husband. Only, she hadn’t opened it—she’d clutched it to her chest as if it would fill the empty gap if she pressed hard enough.
Ford had stood in the shadows waiting for her to cry, because he knew that it would be the first sign of letting go, but she never cried. She finally opened the box and gave herself a minute with the necklace—he’d timed it—before she slid it around her neck and went to check on Paxton.
Ford couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when he’d decided to continue sending her gifts from Sam, only that her unwavering determination was the cause.
“He loved you, Liv,” Ford said.
“You think I don’t know that?” she said. “I’ve always known that. What I didn’t understand was how love could be solitary. I’ve spent my entire life trying to be a part of a team, but never finding someone who’s willing to put the relationship first. They’re too busy making all ‘the right’ decisions that they never take into consideration what’s right for me. For my son who’s going to mourn the loss of yet another person in his life when you disappear.”
“I don’t have to disappear,” he pleaded, taking her hand. “Reno is only an hour away.”
“And what, you come into our lives a few days at a time? And then when you’re finally able to let go of this tragic case, you move on to the next case? Once again, you’re not thinking about what I need and want.”
“What do you need?” he asked, his head pounding with desperation.
“I need honesty, openness, a choice in the things that affect my happiness.” She took her hands back. “You can’t give me those things.”
“Yes. I can. All I ever wanted was to see you happy,” he said, his voice shaking now too.
“And just like Sam, you decided what I needed to be happy. Instead of letting me find my own path to happiness, you swept me off my feet, let me believe that I was starting a new chapter. Only you want to know how the new one is reading?”
No. He didn’t. Not right then. Not when her eyes were filled with a defeat and anguish that made his chest hollow out. Because for the first time since that day in the hospital, Ford saw a flash of the woman who knew that gaping hole was never going to go away.
“A lot like the last one. And the one before that,” she cried, a fresh pool of betrayal lining her lashes. “Only this time, it’s even worse. I can’t say that the last man I made love to actually loved me back. Or that loving someone would never be something I could ever regret. Because this”—she pointed between them—“I can’t ever trust whatever this was.”
“It doesn’t matter how we met or how we got here. What matters is how we feel. In here.” He pounded his chest. “I love you, and you have to trust me, Liv. We can make this work.”
He reached out to cup her cheek, but she turned her face. “That’s the problem. I can’t trust you. It took me two years to get to this place, to open myself up for a future that wasn’t bound by my past. And with one secret you ruined it all. Including my ability to trust myself.”
Ford’s chest tightened to the point of pain. He would have given anything to go back to that day in the hospital and deliver Sam’s gift himself. Because watching her shut down and curl back into herself was killing him.
“Sam wasn’t your responsibility, and neither am I,” Liv said, and the words cut through him, leaving a hole he was certain was visible. “You don’t have that kind of power, Ford. You never did.”
CHAPTER 18
“Sit still,” Emma said a few days later, waving a metallic-pink hair-chalk pen in Ford’s direction. “One more color and then I’ll put it back to normal.”
And because normal sounded like something Ford could get behind, and his heels were killing his feet, he shifted his leopard-print tutu and took a seat. His butt squeezed into the tot-size barber chair, Ford looked in the mirror at his metallic-purple-and-pink-streaked tips and cringed. “Are you sure this will wash out?”
“Uh-huh. And it turns the bathwater sparkly pink,” Emma said, as if that was an added bonus to letting a six-year-old color your hair.
“All right, just don’t get it in my eyes this time.”
“I won’t!” Emma said, giving not one but three more strokes of the hair chalk. “Daddy, Ford’s almost ready for his family picture with Bullseye. He just needs his lips glossed.”
Bullseye had gotten off light, as far as Ford was concerned. Dressed in a pink tutu with a matching bow behind his ear, he was sound asleep by the couch.
“I’ve got my camera ready to go,” Harris said, grinning at Ford from the safety of the couch. He lifted a beer, then gave a two-fingered salute, just in case Ford wasn’t aware of just who was the village idiot.
Ford had a salute of his own, but since it only required one finger and there were kids present, he said, “One photo makes it around the office and I will tell everyone about the time you thought Bullseye was the barfly from the night before.”
“What’s a barfly, Daddy?”
“Kind of like a horsefly, only harder to get rid of,” Harris said, shooting Ford a look. Ford just smiled. “Hey, pumpkin, why don’t you go and get that red lipstick upstairs.”
Emma’s eyes went owl-like. “The one that comed with my Barbie and you said I can’t use in the house?”
“That’s the one.” This time Harris grinned. “I think it would go great with Ford’s hair color.”
With a squeal of delight, Emma took off, her feet sounding like a stampede as she raced up the stairs.
“You’re an asshole,” Ford said when she was out of range.
“Says the guy who’s trying to dump his responsibilities on me.” Harris leaned back into the couch, taking way too much pleasure in Ford’s current situation.
It had been four days since Liv had escorted him out of her house, and still no word. She hadn’t returned his calls, his texts, and was even a no-show for a meeting about Wagon Days.
“I’m not dumping. I’m just trying to make this easier for everyone involved,” Ford said. “I’m still doing all the work—I just won’t be here for the event.”
It had taken Ford a whole ten minutes to realize that staying in town would only make it harder on Liv. Even less time to figure out he’d blown any shot he’d had at a relationship with her. He’d known that the second he saw the anguish on her face. So he’d called his boss and asked if he could move the certification up a few weeks and return to Reno early.
“Because you’ll be licking your wounds in the mountains while Liv is down here facing everything head-on,” Harris said.
Yeah, that too. He’d hurt her. Badly. She’d finally opened herself up to the idea of more, and Ford had given her more of the same.
“Or you could stay, help her,” Harris offered.
Ford had shown up at Harris’s house to talk to him about the early transfer back to Reno. He was surprised Harris hadn’t grilled him about his reasons for leaving. Or his situation with Liv. He’d just said that if Ford played dress-up with Emma, then he’d sign off on the transfer. Ford figured eit
her Liv hadn’t told anyone what had gone down, or Harris finally wanted him gone. Only Harris loved to ride Ford’s ass—especially when he’d screwed the pooch. So when Harris sat forward, his expression dialed to Dirty Harry, Ford knew he’d just been waiting.
“Last time I helped her she ended up slamming the door in my face and crying herself to sleep.” He shrugged, but even that hurt. “Plus, I live in Reno. She lives here.”
“Thanks for that nice geography lesson. With logic like that, you couldn’t think yourself out of a fucking paper bag,” Harris said.
“She asked me to leave. I’m leaving. End of story.” Ford rubbed his hand over his chest, trying to ease the raw ache that had been gnawing at him. It didn’t help.
“And when exactly did she ask you to leave? Before you told her you loved her or after?” Harris snapped his fingers. “Oh, wait, I remember. It was when you decided to ignore the single-mom code and sweet-talk your way into her panties instead of straight-talk your way into her circle of trust.”
“Again, these pep talks are always a highlight,” Ford said in a tone that would have a smart man shutting up.
Harris was not a smart man. In fact, he was as stupid as they came, because he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and said, “Well then, let me be the one to point out the big fucking fact that you seem to be missing. You don’t want it to be the end.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want!” Ford stood. Arguing while sitting in a tiny chair with pink tips felt as ridiculous as the idea of Liv settling for weekends and rotating holidays. She’d done that before, and he didn’t want to put her through that again. “She deserves more.”
“Okay, then be more,” Harris said, as if the solution were that easy.
“How?”
“Stay,” Harris said, and he let the one word settle.
Ford shook his head. “Not an option. By coming here, I made everything worse for her.”
“And you think leaving will make it all better?” Harris said it as if Ford were dim-witted. “Because I can tell you it won’t. You’re never going to find whatever it is you’re looking for by chasing disasters. The only thing that will make this better is to stay here and face it.”