Commitments

by Barbara Delinsky

  Right now, though, his eyes and ears and all his other senses were calling for Sabrina. Bringing her close to his side, he guided her from the barn. The air was indeed cooler than it had been when he’d come, and though it was only mid-afternoon, the sun was leaning toward the horizon.

  She squeezed his waist and tipped her head up to him. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Twenty minutes later, she repeated the words. Derek was leaning over the Jacuzzi, adjusting the water temperature. She’d slipped her hands under his shirt and was stroking his back.

  Satisfied with the heat, he turned, sat on the broad ledge of the tub and tugged off the shirt. Then he brought Sabrina to stand between his legs. His hands stole under the tails of her shirt but went no farther than her waist because he was suddenly distracted. The look in her eyes was something to behold.

  She was focusing on his chest, looking as though she’d never seen anything so beautiful. She ran her hands lightly around the broad curve of his shoulders, brought them skimming over the muscles that defined his upper chest, slid them over warm, hard flesh to where his pants rode low on his hips, then dragged them back up the narrow line of soft, dark hair that bisected his front. Where the line flared, her fingers followed until each palm covered a small, hard nipple.

  Then Sabrina was the one to be distracted, because the slightest pressure of Derek’s hands had arched her toward him and his mouth was opening over her breast. The barrier of her shirt enhanced the feeling as his tongue dabbed her nipple to hardness. Propping her forearms on his shoulders, she closed her eyes in pleasure.

  He continued for several minutes. But when both nipples were taut and her breath was coming less steadily, he set her back and said hoarsely, “Water’s ready.”

  It took her a minute of lingering delight to realize what he was saying. She opened her eyes to send him a look of pleading, which he answered with a gentle kiss. To make up for what he’d done, he helped her undress.

  Moments later, she was settled in the crook of his shoulder in the warm, swirling water. She gave a soft sigh of contentment, but other than that neither of them spoke. They simply surrendered to the warmth and let the water massage their entwined limbs.

  “Sabrina?” Derek asked after a while.

  “Mmm?”

  “How’s Nicky?”

  At first she didn’t respond. Then, with a sad sigh this time, she gave a one-shouldered shrug.

  “Any change?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Not now. It hurts. I don’t want to hurt right now.”

  “You made the right decision.”

  “But it hurts anyway.”

  He drew her in a little closer, offering whatever silent comfort he could. Several minutes later, he said, “I think you’ve done a great job with this place.”

  She twitched her nose against his chest. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

  “Would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Would you?”

  “No. I really like it.”

  “Really?” she asked cautiously.

  “Uh-huh.” And he meant it. The inside of the farmhouse was simply done, clean with newly stuccoed walls and polished wood floors, warm with area rugs and native artwork.

  “I don’t have much furniture.”

  “You have what you need—sofa and chairs in the living room, bed in the bedroom, a few dressers and desks.” He paused, then tried to sound casual when he said, “And a completed guest room. Why is the guest room the most finished in the house?”

  She heard something behind his attempt at casualness that made her bite back a smile. “Are you worried?”

  He considered denying it, but only for an instant. “Yeah,” he said gruffly. “I haven’t waited all this time for you, only to sleep in a guest bedroom.”

  She cupped the water and sent it rippling higher on his chest. “Not to worry. It’s for my guests.”

  “Aren’t I a guest?”

  “No.”

  “What am I?”

  Her smile was soft, shy, innocent. “Loved one. Lover.”

  He liked her answer as much as he liked her softness, her shyness, her innocence. Sliding an arm beneath her knees, he shifted her until she lay across his lap. With his upper arm bracing her head, he kissed her, then asked, “So why is the guest room all done up?”

  “Because my brother has taken to visiting.”

  “How come?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “It’s like he’s looking for family after all these years.”

  “But he has your parents. He lives a lot closer to them than to you.”

  “It’s not the same. There’s something here. I’m not sure I can explain, but he likes this place. He doesn’t do a lot, just kind of sits and thinks and asks me questions about what I was thinking and feeling when we were growing up.”

  “What do you tell him?”

  “That I was wishing our family was like other families. That I wanted everyone to be attentive and warm and close.”

  “You still want that.”

  She hesitated for an instant before acknowledging it with a nod.

  “Do you tell him that?”

  “I have.”

  “What does he say?”

  “That I’m no different from him, or my mother or my father. But they’re so lonely, Derek. Each one in his way.”

  “So are you,” Derek said very softly.

  She held his gaze for a minute, then closed her eyes and turned into his body. She didn’t feel lonely. When Derek was with her she felt that she could dream again. She knew that it was an illusion, that he had designs on his life and that some of them frightened her, but she felt she’d earned an illusion or two.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “I want that,” she whispered back.

  Tipping her chin up, he kissed her in a way that left little doubt as to his sincerity, and by the time he was done, his hands were on her body, working with the gentle pulse of the water to give her pleasure. But the pleasure wasn’t only hers. It was Derek’s, too. The way she sighed when he caressed her breasts, the tiny moan she let out when he traced the outline of her bottom, the small feline sounds she made when he found the special heat between her legs—all heightened his own arousal to such an extent that while she was still throbbing in climax he lifted her over him and arched deeply into his own release.

  Some time later, when their bodies had calmed, they climbed from the tub, wrapped themselves in large terry bath sheets and stumbled to Sabrina’s bed, where they shed the towels, climbed under the covers and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  By the time they awoke, it was dark and too late to go to the market. Not that either of them was sorry. They didn’t feel like getting dressed, and it turned out that Sabrina had food in the house after all.

  “That is awful,” she decided as she opened an envelope of dried soup.

  Derek had already put the prescribed amounts of milk and water in a pan. “Not so awful,” he argued, taking the envelope from her and adding its contents to the liquids. “I like cream of broccoli soup. And besides, if you bought it, you must have been planning on eating it yourself, so why is it so terrible if I have some?”

  “Because you deserve better. And because I should have been prepared.”

  He set the pan on the stove, lit the gas under it, then turned and took her by the shoulders. “If anyone’s at fault here, it’s me. I didn’t say when I was coming. I didn’t say if I was coming, so there was no reason for you to stock up.”

  “It occurred to me to buy food, it really did. But first the kitchen wasn’t ready, and then I was afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Like if I gave a party and no one came.”

  He rotated his thumbs. Not even the thick terry of her robe could hide the delicacy of her bones. That delicacy was only part of what inspired his gentleness when he asked, “Is tha
t why you don’t have a room set up for Nicky?”

  She swallowed hard, but she didn’t avoid his eyes. “No. I wanted you to come, so I was superstitious about making preparations. With Nicky, it’s different. I’m not sure I want…” She couldn’t finish. The thought was too cruel.

  But Derek saw it differently. “You’re not sure you want all that work again. It’s understandable, Sabrina. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “But he’s my son. I love him. There are times when I’m torn to bits, when the anguish of not having him is as bad as the anguish of having him. I thought about decorating a room for him. I even pictured how I’d do it. Then I thought about seeing that room day in, day out, and I didn’t think I could take it. I try—” She swallowed again, and her eyes were growing moist. “I try not to think about Nicky too much. When I do, I go nowhere. I have to move on in my life.”

  Derek took her under his arm and held her close while he stirred the soup. “Would you want to have another child?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Physically?”

  “Emotionally. I couldn’t go through another pregnancy knowing what happened.”

  He hesitated for just a minute before saying, “I didn’t use anything, Sabrina.”

  “It’s okay. I have an IUD.”

  He gave the soup another stir, then another. Then he said, “If you were to have a second child, it could be totally different.”

  “Or it could be the same.”

  “Did the doctors say that?” When she didn’t answer, he prodded. “Did they give you odds against it happening again?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they?”

  “Very slim,” she said in a small voice, then rushed on. “But that’s irrelevant. Even if the odds were a million to one, I couldn’t risk it.”

  Derek felt saddened. Not only did he believe that Sabrina was made to be a mother, but he had images from time to time of her mothering a child of his. They were fleeting images. He hadn’t given much thought in the past to having children, and his future was too murky for him to dwell on it now. But those fleeting images brought him a strange, unexpected sense of peace.

  Riding on the tails of that peace, he gave the soup a last stir, gave her shoulders a squeeze and turned toward the refrigerator.

  * * *

  The master suite was on the ground floor at the back of the house. It actually consisted of three smaller rooms that had been added on after the original farmhouse had been built, but Sabrina had had the walls broken down and the cathedral ceiling exposed. The room looked out over the woods and was lit by two large skylights through which, on a clear night, moonlight poured.

  Moonlight was pouring in this night, but that wasn’t what kept Sabrina and Derek awake. It was each other and the fact that they were together. The slightest movement of one caused the other to stir. There was surprise, occasional alarm then reassurance. A kiss led to a touch, which led to a caress, which often led to something far hotter.

  Then again, there were times when they simply lay in each other’s arms and talked. “Do you enjoy living up here?” he asked in a tone compatible with the quiet of the night.

  “Uh-huh. I try to get back to New York once a month, but I feel better here.”

  “Better in what way?”

  “Less pressured. New York is such a doing city. When I’m there, I feel inadequate.”

  “That’s bullshit, y’know. You have no reason to feel inadequate.”

  “But I do. I’m leading an unproductive life.”

  “I wouldn’t call what you’ve spent the last two months doing to this farmhouse unproductive.”

  “You know what I mean. And anyway, life is calmer here than in New York. I like it this way.”

  “You don’t mind the isolation?”

  “I don’t feel isolated. At least, no more so than I did in New York. I keep in touch with a few friends by phone, and Maura pops in sometimes.”

  He took a playful bite of her chin. “Another guest for the guest room?”

  “Mmm. She wants me to write your story. I keep telling her that I’m working on you, but I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of that, either.” She took a quick breath. “Derek, why do you want to know about Lloyd Ballantine?”

  “Shhhh,” he whispered against her earlobe. “Not now.”

  “Then when?”

  “Later.”

  * * *

  The next morning—late, late morning—Derek opened up a bit. “I always wanted to be able to do this. When I was a kid, breakfast in bed seemed the ultimate luxury.”

  Tucking the sheet across her breasts, Sabrina reached for a cracker. “I’ll bet you dreamed of something better than Saltines and jam.”

  “Hey, we have a cheese omelet here.”

  “Mmm. One egg and two slices of cheese, and most of that is stuck to the plate.”

  “Still, this is a luxury. Where I came from, you didn’t risk getting crumbs on the sheets. Crumbs brought ants, so my mom said, and since we already had plenty of cockroaches—”

  “We had cockroaches on Fifth Avenue,” Sabrina said as she handed him a cracker neatly spread with jam. “Where did you have them?”

  “Not on Fifth Avenue, not even in New York.” He downed the cracker in a single bite. “We lived in a little town about forty minutes out of Philadelphia. I can’t say we lived on the wrong side of the tracks, because there weren’t any tracks. The whole town was pretty depressed. We had a tiny little two-bedroom place that wasn’t worth the money it would have taken to make it livable, but it was the nicest house in the neighborhood. My mother did what she could, but my father usually bet away what money he earned before he got home.”

  “What did he do for a living?”

  Leaning against the bed’s brass headboard with the sheet draped loosely over his hips, Derek had a sudden panicky urge to change the subject. Getting into his father’s job was getting into the really dirty stuff, and he didn’t want to do that. He felt at home in Sabrina’s farmhouse. He felt at home with Sabrina. She made him feel that he was worthy of what she offered.

  But he owed her the truth.

  “My father was the brains behind one of the biggest loan sharks in Phillie. He set up deals, saw them enforced. He would have been a wealthy man, himself, if he hadn’t had a compulsion to gamble.” He frowned at the folds of the sheet. “My mother suffered. She was a principled woman to the point of being obsessed, while my father was loose as a goose and twice as dirty. God only knows what they saw in each other.”

  “Opposites attract?”

  “The thing was, they didn’t attract.”

  “They must have at some point. They made you.”

  He snorted. “I’ve often wondered if it was rape. The only sounds I heard coming from my parents’ room at night were unpleasant ones. They argued a lot.”

  “Did he beat her?”

  “No. I’m not sure he could have. She was nearly as tall as he was, and she was physically strong. I know,” he said in such a way that Sabrina understood that he’d felt the brunt of his mother’s physical strength more than once. “But my father wasn’t like that, anyway. He wasn’t one to get his hands dirty. When it came to delivering messages that loan payments weren’t being made on time, he had other people do the ugly stuff.”

  “Then why—” She closed her mouth on the question, but Derek could easily follow the direction of her thoughts.

  “Why was he killed? He was killed because he got too smart for his britches. Or maybe too greedy. Or too desperate. He’d done time for being an accessory to murder. He was feeling pretty low, and he didn’t like that. He decided his life would be improved if he took a bigger cut in the loan payments, and he thought he could do it without his boss knowing.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was strained. “Joey Padilla used to run the money with him. He was a punk kid, a bodyguard. At some point he figured that he stood to gain more by snitching on my dad than by sticking by him, a
nd he was probably right. Money is power, and my dad couldn’t hold money any longer than it took to reach the nearest racetrack.”

  “But why did they have to kill him?”

  “To set an example.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Did you know all this then?”

  “Oh, yeah. In a neighborhood like ours, you didn’t miss much, and what you missed, someone else made sure to fill you in on.” His eyes reflected that remembered pain. “I was no model child. People took pleasure in telling me why.”

  * * *

  “Derek, you think about Joey Padilla a lot, don’t you?”

  Derek scuffed up a bunch of wet leaves. He and Sabrina were walking through the afternoon woods. Tall evergreens sheltered them from the fine rain that fell. “Yeah. I think about him.”

  “How much older than you was he?”

  “About eight years.”

  “Did he have a family?”

  “They told me he had a wife and two kids.”

  “Did he have a job?”

  “Officially, he was a mechanic. Unofficially, he was moving drugs. And he drank a lot.”

  “What was he doing in the parking lot that night? Why was he the one to call you? Was it an honest coincidence?”

  Derek nudged her hips with his own, an easy thing to do since they were sharing a poncho. “You’re full of questions.”

  “Once before, at Parkersville, you were going to tell me what happened that night. You didn’t get beyond the bare facts.”

  “Those bare facts are the only ‘facts’ there are. The rest is conjecture.”

  “I’m game for conjecture.”

  For several minutes, the only sound was the patter of rain as it dripped from the tips of the pine needles and the squish of the wet leaves underfoot. She looked up at Derek’s face. His hair lay in damp spikes on his forehead. His features were tense, his eyes distant.

  “Things didn’t make sense,” he said out of the blue. “For months after the trial, I sat in my cell and went over and over what happened that night. I looked at things one way, then another. I looked from every angle, and only one thing was clear. The phone call was obviously a setup, because Padilla had planned to kill me. He came from his car holding a loaded gun. If he’d been on the level, there’d have been no need for a gun. I wasn’t any threat to him. I didn’t know who he was.”