by Cindy Gerard
“You’re running because you’re afraid. But it’s time to face it, Em. It’s time to listen to the truth.
“You made a mistake. You made a mistake,” he repeated more gently, willing her to admit it. “What you saw was a client coming on to me. Nothing more. I didn’t encourage it. I didn’t return it. I didn’t sleep with her. And I think you know that—I can’t believe you don’t know that—but you’re afraid. After what you did to me, you’re afraid to own up to the truth.”
She stilled. Her breath was labored, her breasts strained against the thin white gown she wore. Physically he may have overpowered her, but from beneath the curtain of chestnut hair falling over her face, she still fought him with her eyes.
For long moments he searched her face for some sign of concession. When she stubbornly held her silence, he eased his hold again. When she didn’t fight him this time, he pressed his point. “Is that it, Em? You’re wondering now if you were wrong?”
All the fight seemed to have left her. He caressed her arms gently, then let her go and simply watched as she sank back down on the bed. Through the silence he sensed a slight lowering of her guard. Her posture gave her away. She was feeling exposed and cornered and more vulnerable than she wanted him to know. To combat it, she tucked her knees to her chest, linked her arms around them and lowered her head.
After a long hesitation he took a chance and sat down next to her. Enclosing her ankle with his hand, he squeezed it through the satin of her gown. The small intimacy was automatic on his part. A familiar gesture. A comforting touch. A gentle reassurance that had once been as natural between them as making love.
Once she’d have snuggled into the comfort zone he tried to create for her. Not today. Today she drew her foot away. The distance she created was as emotional as it was physical.
He immediately felt the loss.
When she raised her head, the look in her eyes told him she felt it, too.
“How do you think you’re going to get away with this?”
Her voice was soft, but her tone was as cutting as scissors set to paper. Clearly she intended to avoid dealing with his conclusions and his questions.
Refusing to give up, he held the line. “How am I going to get away with this? I’m not sure I can. But with so much at stake how could I not give it a try?”
He forced himself to soften his tone. “How could I listen to Sara tell me that her mommy’s never happy anymore and not want to take you away and change that? How could I see you—too thin, too pale, too weary—and not want to make what’s wrong in your life right?
“How could I love you, Em?” He curled a finger under her chin and lifted her head so she had to look at him. “How could I love you and watch you hurting and not want to fix it?”
With everything in her, Emma fought to hang on to her anger. But his words and his touch struck like battering rams against her defenses. The aching warmth in his eyes melted through her resolve like torch set to steel.
It was too much. Too much wanting to believe him. Too much guilt over what she’d done to him. But overriding it all was the telling memory of another woman on the receiving end of a smile so intimate it should only have been hers. Only hers.
It was that memory that grounded her again. It was that memory that rallied the anger she needed to mask the hurt.
Oblivious to the tears leaking down her cheeks, she knotted her fingers around a fistful of quilt. “Damn you. Damn you for sounding so willing to fix things when you’re the one who broke them.”
Ignoring the ache in her chest, she threw his words back in his face. “You want to play how could I? Fine. I can play that game. Only let’s change it to how could you? How could you say you love me and take another woman to your bed?”
Saying the words, watching his face darken at the accusation only added to her anguish. She swallowed back a far-too-familiar thickness clogging her throat.
“How could you do that to me and then lie about it? Did you expect me to just sit like a sorry little sparrow and pretend you were working all those nights when you came home late? And how could you possibly think that there could be any future for us with her between us?”
The cords in his neck tautened. His eyes grew hard. But his voice stayed calm—dangerously so. “How many ways can I say it? There is no her. There was no affair. There was nothing.”
She clenched the quilt tighter, damning herself for wanting to believe him, damning him for being so convincing.
“Do you know how badly I want to hit you right now? I’m not stupid. Don’t treat me like I am. I know what I saw.” A bitter laugh welled up. “She was all over you. You weren’t backing away.”
The breath he drew was heavy, the muscle in his jaw clenched tight. “She was a client.”
“Oh, right. You mentioned that. Well.” She waved a hand through the air. “That makes it all right, then, doesn’t it?”
“No, dammit. I’m just trying to explain.”
“Fine. Explain then, if you weren’t lovers, why she felt she could touch you that way. She was in your space, Garrett.” Her words echoed in the pulsing silence that followed. “She was in my space,” she added—pain, anger and humiliation lacing every word. “Only a woman who knows she’s invited would make herself at home there.”
A flicker of guilt clouded his eyes then was gone. She hadn’t realized how much blood that small, telling sign would draw. Hadn’t acknowledged to herself until she saw it that a part of her was holding out hope that her accusations were unfounded.
“Okay.” His reluctant affirmation relayed as much defiance as admission. A knife couldn’t have sliced deeper. “So maybe I was sending out some signals,” he went on, his eyes hard, his face grim, his tone clipped and defensive.
“Maybe after months of feeling you slowly pull away from me, watching you turn away from me in bed more often than you turned toward me, it was a turn-on that an attractive woman found me desirable.”
Though guilt laced his words, the tension that had been building in her breast twisted so tight she could barely breathe. Yes, she had turned away from him, but no more than he’d turned away from her.
“And maybe I was hurting. Maybe I was tempted.” His words jarred a defense already weakened by a sense of inadequacy. “I don’t know. Maybe I was even flirting a little to boost my ego. But that’s as far as it went. That’s as far as it would ever go.”
Even more than his words, she heard another message in his tone. When she could finally speak, the words came out on a raspy whisper. “So you’re saying this is all my fault.”
“No. Dammit no.” He swore viciously. Then swore again. Dragging both hands roughly through his hair, he rose from the bed and stalked across the room. “I’m trying to be truthful with you,” he ground out as he turned wearily back to face her. “You think I’m proud of myself? You think that it made me feel like a man to encourage her instead of discourage her when I knew it would never go anywhere? I was hurting, Em. And I was lonely.” The anger bled back into his words just as the anguish darkened his face. “I was lonely,” he repeated. “So lonely that for one second there, I told myself that if I did sleep with her, maybe I was justified .”
His admission fell on her battered defenses like a lead weight. She covered her ears with her hands. She couldn’t listen to this anymore. She could think past his words, couldn’t hear past the voice of guilt she’d lived and breathed for longer than she wanted to remember. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
But she couldn’t stop the thoughts from swelling. And for the first time she felt real fear as the words that welled up inside her knotted in her chest and clogged her throat. She tried desperately to swallow them back. But they were too strong, too painful to keep inside any longer. They spilled like blood, trailed like tears, escaping with an ache so strong it stole her breath.
“Emma—”
“No. Don’t say another word.” Panic was a piece of jagged glass cutting huge slashing wounds inside her. She
struck out against it and because it frightened her so, she struck out against him.
“I don’t want to listen to you twist things around until this is all my fault. I won’t let that happen. Not to me. I won’t let you do to me what my father did to my mother. And I sure as hell won’t let you turn me into her!”
The electric edge of pain in her words split the air like lightning.
Stunned silence settled like a storm cloud in their wake.
Until this moment, until this wrenching moment of truth, she’d hadn’t known. Had never suspected that the core of the fear she harbored was rooted in the shambles of her mother’s life.
The tension in the loft vibrated with the concussion of a revelation so explosive it slammed the breath from her lungs.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, the aftershock of her admission rocking her. “My God,” she murmured again and, defeated by the knowledge, lowered her face to her hands.
Garrett watched the color bleed from her face. Felt it rise in his own. He should have known. He should have seen or suspected the cause of the fear she’d been fighting.
He knew her mother’s story. The dutiful wife, the soft-spoken, Southern socialite, Viola DuPree had left Mississippi and everything she’d known to follow her husband to Jackson all those years ago. In her determination to maintain their marriage, she’d accepted his lies even when faced with evidence of his repeated affairs. She’d done everything for him, lived her life for him, given up her dignity and pride for him—only to have him divorce her six months after they’d resettled in Wyoming and move in with the woman he’d uprooted his family to be near.
Viola’s devastation had been complete. The waste, shameful. Once a vibrant, loving woman, she’d turned to prescription-induced oblivion, where the pain of depression neither touched nor tempered her life.
Clearly, though, it had touched Emma’s. This beautiful, proud woman who was Viola’s daughter was afraid the same thing was happening to her. Her father had destroyed her mother. He’d turned her into a victim. And now, imagined sin or real, Emma was pinning her father’s crimes on him.
“Emma? Sweetheart.” He touched a hand to her hair, stroked it gently. “Is that what this is all about?”
Her eyes were filled with the shock of discovery and a wild, consuming fear as she searched his face. He was certain she wasn’t aware that she’d begun to cry. Soft, choked little sobs broke from her throat until she began weeping freely. His heart breaking for her, he pulled her into his arms and held her.
The fight deserted her completely. She clung to him, turned to him as she had when they’d been young lovers and she’d poured out her hurt and her fears.
She cried for her mother. She cried for herself. And even though she didn’t say it, he knew she also cried for the demise of everything they’d lost.
When she had no tears left to shed, Garrett brushed the hair away from her face.
“I love your mother, Em. I know you love her, too. But you are not her,” he whispered, cupping her face in his hands. “You could never be anything like her. And I’m not him. I could never do to you what your father did to her.”
He pressed his lips to her brow. “Think about that. Think about it, and you’ll know.”
For a long moment, he just sat with her, neither expecting nor receiving a response, only wondering how they had let a breach this wide wedge its way between them. And agonizing over how, with so much misunderstanding clouding the view, they were possibly going to see the way back to each other.
Weary with the questions and the causes, he pried her carefully away from him. With the gentleness of a father soothing a child, he lowered her back down to the bed.
“I know we’ve got problems, Em,” he whispered as he eased the covers up to her chin. “I’ve known it for a long time, but please, please believe me when I tell you that another woman isn’t one of them.”
She closed her tear-swollen eyes and turned her head on the pillow.
“There’s only been one woman for me. Ever. And I need her. I need her to help me find the way through this mess. Please say you’ll stay with me. Just...just give it a week to see if we can figure this out.”
He didn’t know what else to do. Didn’t knew- what else to say. And even now that he finally understood the root of her doubts, he didn’t know if he would ever completely comprehend what he’d done to make her lose her trust in him.
Feeling as defeated and as weary as she looked, he trailed the back of his fingers across her brow. With a diminishing hope that the healing would ever begin, he gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“Rest for a while. Just rest,” he repeated on a husky whisper and rose from the bed. “You’ll find some clothes in the chest under the window when you feel like getting dressed. When you come downstairs, we’ll talk.”
For a long moment he stood at the top of the stairs waiting for something that never came. She didn’t call out to him. She didn’t ask him to stay. She just turned her face to the wall and let him walk away.
He hadn’t been aware that he’d been holding his breath until his chest began to ache from the weight of it. He let it out slowly—then did the only thing he felt she wanted him to do.
He left her. Alone with her doubts. Alone with her fears. Just as he was alone with her tears still damp on his shirt.
Five
After he left her in the loft, Garrett walked out to the wraparound deck. Settling deep in a willow chair with his bare feet crossed at the ankles and propped on the deck rail, he wrestled with a weariness that had seeped into his blood like sludge.
He’d been so sure that if he could get her alone, he could fix things between them. But even with the revelations the last hour had unearthed—maybe even because of them—he wasn’t sure any longer.
He was afraid for her. And that made him afraid for them.
Fatigue eventually caught up with him. It had been a long, tense night Discounting that, he’d been working extralong hours at the office and on the sites of several projects the past few weeks while he’d set his plan in motion. What little free time he’d had, he’d spent hauling up supplies and getting the cabin ready for Emma. It had been a long time since anyone had spent any time here—longer still since a woman had been in-residence.
He fell asleep wondering if she would insist that he take her back to Jackson after she’d rested. Wondering what he’d do if she did. He woke troubled by the same thought—and by a sense that he was no longer alone.
Sitting up slowly, he scrubbed a hand over his face, rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders and turned to see her standing there.
She was dressed in the new jeans and yellow cotton knit sweater he’d bought her. Her feet were covered in the buttery soft doeskin moccasins he’d known she would like. She’d brushed her long hair until it shone, then pulled it back from her face with one of the gold clips he’d left for her on the dresser.
Though her eyes were still a little puffy, she looked rested and sleep soft. Despite her loss of weight and the lack of color in her cheeks, he was still, and would always be, electrified by her beauty. What he saw in her eyes, however, had the most profound effect on him. She was still struggling with her decision—and that meant she was still afraid.
Ignoring the sinking feeling in his gut, he rose and studied her profile. She leaned against a porch post. Clutching it with both hands, she pressed her cheek against the sturdy rough timber and looked over the valley. Her silence could mean anything from resistance to reluctance to reminiscence.
“Did you rest?” he asked inanely.
She nodded. “It’s been a long time since I’ve slept that soundly.”
“You must have needed it.” Another lame, innocuous comment.
They both recognized the wordplay for what it was. Evasion. Neither of them was willing to be the first to tread the path that would lead them to the heart of the matter.
She glanced at him over her shoulder, then averted her gaze back to the riv
er where its mad scramble over rock and stone fifty yards away created ribbons of undulating silver and frothy lace. On the far bank, lodge-pole pine and quaking aspen climbed gently sloping foothills that abruptly gave way to soaring, snowcapped peaks.
“It’s beautiful here.” It was a simple truth, yet another not-so-simple diversion.
His heart rose to his throat in anticipation. “Aside from the isolation, the beauty is part of what made me decide to bring you here. An added enticement I’d hoped would help you decide to stay with me. I guess the question now is, did it work?”
Finally it was out. They both knew the beauty of the Wind River Valley had little to do with her decision—just as they both knew everything was riding on her answer.
She was silent for too long. Too long to keep his hands from sweating. Too long to stall a broken breath.
“Ten years, Em,” he reminded her, then made what he told himself would be his last pitch. “It should count for something. It should be worth a week. One week. Can’t we give ourselves seven days to see if there’s anything to salvage?”
When she turned to him, her eyes were troubled, the hands she cupped around her elbows slightly trembling.
“And what if there isn’t? What if there’s nothing left to piece together?”
It was his turn to look out over the valley. His turn to clench unsteady hands over the split-log porch rail and hang on. “Then at least we’ll both leave here knowing we tried.”
Moments slogged by. Somewhere in the distance a raven called. The wind whispered through the pines. The river snaked through an ageless path carved from earth and stone. The endless, boundless sounds of the valley all registered on a peripheral level. So did the sound of his own breathing, the heavy beat of his heart. Until he heard his name.
“Gatrett.”
He turned his head. Straightening in slow motion, he looked from her face to the hand she offered.
She was hesitant, but she was reaching out. Of more significance, she was reaching out to him. For the first time since this all started, he saw something in her eyes that translated to hope.