by Cindy Gerard
“What happened, love?” Michael asked gently.
She brushed a damning tear from her eye. “My father . . . died.” Her coward’s heart convinced her that what Michael didn’t know couldn’t hurt him and what she let him know wouldn’t hurt her . . . at least not as much as the whole truth.
“I went a little wild after that,” she rushed on, knowing that if she didn’t elaborate, Michael would assume her father had drunk himself to death. “Mother had a lot of difficulty dealing with . . . many things. She couldn’t cope with her own problems and wouldn’t deal with mine. Short and to the point, I got into some trouble. A little recreational trouble, a little shoplifting trouble.” She shivered, and he held her tight as she told him the minor and not-so-minor laws she’d broken. “I dropped out of school and ended up in and out of a number of juvenile detention centers.”
“You must have been a terror,” he whispered against her hair.
His attempt at humor didn’t fool her for a second. She’d stunned him. Shocked him, even. And his mood was anything but light.
“I thought I was real tough, all right. What I was, however, was stupid. I was eighteen before I woke up and realized I was just another unfortunate statistic—a high school dropout with a record, no money, and no future. It made me even angrier. I didn’t want to be just another anything.”
“And then,” he prodded gently.
“And then, with the help of a wonderful woman who saw past the anger, I decided that if my life was going to change, I was the one who was going to have to do something about it.”
“Just like that.”
She shrugged. “I got my GED while I was still in detention, applied for some educational grants and loans, and earned an associate’s degree at a small community college. I managed to get my GPA high enough to be accepted here at Colorado State on several financial-need-based scholarships. The rest, as they say, is history.”
“Wrong.” He tipped her face up to his. “The rest, like the best, is yet to be.” He kissed her, pouring into that kiss a world of hunger, a world of hurt. Hurt he felt for her. Hurt, she knew, he thought he could heal. She clung tightly to that notion, wishing it were so. When she was in his arms, when he was loving her, anything seemed possible.
“Marry me,” he said fiercely, then frowned as panic flashed in her eyes. “It wasn’t supposed to sound like a threat. Baby, you had to know this was coming.”
“It can’t happen.”
“You love me,” he insisted.
“I love you,” she said without hesitation. “Can’t we be satisfied with that?”
“Satisfied? Satisfied implies pleased, gratified. You’re saying let’s settle. I will not ‘settle’ for anything when it comes to you. I don’t want an affair, January. I want the whole package, wrapped in pretty paper and a big satin bow. Love, marriage, Toby . . . our own babies.”
“Michael—”
“No.” Sensing her arguments, he cut her off. “Don’t do this. And don’t sit there and try to convince yourself you know what’s best for me, because you don’t know. But I do know what’s best for you. Me.”
“You are the best thing that’s ever happened in my life,” she admitted sadly.
“Then what is it?” He searched her eyes. “Is there more? More you’re afraid to tell me?”
She looked away. Hating herself for lying, she shook her head.
“Then you’re missing something here.” Gripping her shoulders gently, he made her face him. “You just told me honestly about all those deep, dreaded secrets you thought were going to send me packing. Haven’t you noticed? I’m still here. I’m not even looking toward the door.”
But you will, she thought, fighting a pain that could only be heartache. If you ever find out what a coward I am, you will. She met his eyes and felt the cold bath of guilt wash over her.
“January, listen to me. I’ve never experienced anything like what happens when we come together. Obsession has taken on new meaning since you’ve entered my life. Possession is a word I fight daily because I know you wouldn’t stand for it. Believe me when I tell you, I’d never try to run your life. I want to marry you. Have babies with you. And if you want, I’ll even try to save the world with you.”
A tear fell, uninvited. “No marriage, Michael. No babies.”
He closed his eyes and swallowed a vicious curse. “Tell me why.”
She couldn’t answer him.
“Tell me, January, or you’ll force me to tell you.”
She bolted out of his arms and off the sofa.
He was silent for a long moment. It wasn’t until he spoke that she realized he’d walked up close behind her. “You are not a defenseless child any longer. Your father can’t hurt you anymore.”
Forcibly repressing a shudder, she wrapped her arms around her waist and stared vacantly out the window into the night. “He will always hurt me.”
“Only if you let him. You didn’t deserve all the things he did to you. And you are entitled to all the things he didn’t do for you.” He ran a gentle hand down her arm. “Don’t you think I realize why you’re fighting this? Why you won’t let yourself take what someone should have given you long ago?
“I’ve seen you with Toby. I’ve seen the way you look at him, the way you want to reach out and wrap yourself around him. And then I see you draw back. You’re afraid to let yourself commit to him, just like you’re afraid to commit to me. You’re afraid that at some point we’ll both reject you.”
She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t let him see how close he was getting to her most secret fears.
“Those are a child’s fears, January,” he said, as if reading her mind. “A child who had reason to fear. But you’re a woman now. And you are loved. No one treasured you as a child. Let me treasure you now.”
She whirled around to face him. “Don’t you see?” she cried, overcome with guilt and love and a fierce need to protect him. “It’s because I love you that I can’t marry you. Michael . . . the odds of a child growing up in a home as dysfunctional as mine was and evolving into an adult who can perform successfully in the role of spouse and parent are somewhere between slim and none.”
“Perform?” He practically spat the word. “Dysfunctional? I’m not asking for a statistical report here. I’m asking for a woman, with a woman’s needs, a woman’s strengths . . . and a woman’s weaknesses. You are that woman. You are the woman. The only one I’ve ever asked to be my wife. The only one who has ever made me feel complete.”
“Sometimes,” she whispered, throwing herself into his arms and burying her face against his throat, “sometimes you almost convince me it could work.”
“Oh, it’ll work.” He held her tightly against his chest. “Haven’t you heard? I never make a mistake, not professionally, not personally. It’s against the law.”
“In my experience, it’s Murphy’s Law that takes precedence over all others,” she said dismally. “Anything that can go wrong will.”
“Then maybe,” he countered, cradling her head in his big hands and tipping her face up to his, “it’s time we set some new precedents. Tell me you love me,” he demanded, his eyes growing dark.
“I love you.”
“Tell me you’ll at least think about this.”
Because at that moment she couldn’t deny him, because she couldn’t help herself, she nodded. “I’ll think about it.”
For the next several days January did nothing but think about it. Helen made sure of it.
“Why do you think you have to be everybody’s heroine but your own?” Helen asked one morning after several days of uncharacteristically silent speculation.
January glanced across her desk at Helen, who had interrupted her work on the Reynolds brief to pose the question.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“The only thing ridiculous about it is
that it’s true. I may be old, sweetie, but I’m not blind. Things between you and Michael should be as sweet as powdered sugar on a strawberry margarita. Yet you’re as sour as a kosher dill. You think I don’t see the strain? He had you loosened up for a while there. I believe you were actually having the, you know, the F word? Fun?
“I can’t figure it,” Helen continued, scowling thoughtfully. “Ever since Thanksgiving, you’re back to your old tricks. Working nights, working weekends. Working, working, working.” She threw her hands in the air in exasperation. “Now I want to know what put the skids on the greatest romance since Julia Roberts fell for Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. Lord, I still tear up when I see that movie on cable,” she added on a wistful sigh.
January smiled sadly. “Romance and movies mix, Helen, because you can edit out the rough parts. Real life doesn’t come with guarantees of a carefully orchestrated plot.”
“Bull pucky. Michael Hayward has happily-ever-after written all over him. Now what exactly is your problem?”
“I’m just being cautious, all right?”
“Cautious. Humph. You hang on to that word like a lifeline, and your ship isn’t even sinking. The man loves you. He wants to marry you.”
January couldn’t meet Helen’s eyes. “He thinks he wants to marry me. If he knew the whole truth he’d change his mind.”
Too late, she realized what she’d just admitted. A quick glance at Helen confirmed it.
“Oh, Lord.” Helen’s hazel eyes, heavily shadowed with a dizzying shade of neon yellow, took on an iridescent quality as they narrowed at her. “You don’t mean . . . Oh, January, sweetie, surely you’ve told him who you are. Oh, Lord,” she repeated emphatically when she read the truth in January’s eyes. “Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord.”
Several moments of condemning silence followed before January rose from her desk and turned to stare out the window.
“I’m going to tell you something, girl,” Helen said, “and I want you to listen and listen good.”
Startled by the heated anger in Helen’s voice, January turned to face her.
“For five years I have sat by and watched you sequester yourself from the rest of the world because you were too afraid, or too proud, to let anyone close enough to you to find out you are a vulnerable, hurtable person. But if you think that I’m going to stand back and watch you push away the only man who can wield a hammer big enough to break that protective barrier you have mortared around yourself, you’ve got another think coming.”
“Helen,” January began, “this is really none of your business.”
“The hell it isn’t, sweetie!” She rose from her chair and advanced, one finger stabbing at the air between them. “You made it my business the day you hired me. I’ve watched you and learned from you and loved you like the child I never had the good fortune to have. I am entitled, dear heart. I am entitled to give you a piece of my mind if I feel like it. And I’m entitled to tell you that if you don’t set things right with that man before sunset, you’ve not only lost the best thing to ever walk into your life, but you’ve lost yourself a secretary.”
Stunned, January stared at her.
“I mean it, January. I can polish my nails at any desk in town. I don’t have to sit behind that one and watch you walk through the rest of your life haunted by what you should have done and didn’t do. I won’t do it.
“Now you figure out some way to deal with this. And for God’s sake, deal with it honestly. Start with asking yourself who you really think you’re protecting by withholding your little secret. Yourself or Michael? And don’t you dare hide behind that old argument that you’re protecting your mother from a scandal. You know as well as I do that Michael would never do anything to hurt you or anyone you care about. Besides, Monica’s a big girl and she can damn well take care of herself.”
Knowing her eyes were shining with panic, January turned away.
Helen’s hand on her arm stopped her. “The love of a good man is a precious, priceless gift, January,” she said softly. “Just because you’re afraid to accept it doesn’t give you the right to throw it away.”
Ten
Michael peeled away from the stoplight at full throttle, welcoming the bite of the early December wind as it whipped through his hair and stung his face. He welcomed, too, the explosion of adrenaline as the growling motorcycle beneath him skidded on a patch of ice and fishtailed dangerously before he set it right again. Since receiving Mac’s phone call two hours ago, he’d have embraced hell itself if it would have taken his mind off the hollow, gnawing ache eating at his gut.
But even the reverberating roar of the bike’s powerful motor couldn’t obliterate the memory of that call.
“Hayward! Hey, man, I can’t believe I finally caught up with you. Lucky for you I’m persistent.”
Recognizing the voice as that of his friend and contact in Denver, Michael had laughed into the receiver. “Last I knew, Mac, my voice mail worked just fine.”
“Screw voice mail. Hate leaving messages. Besides, I knew you’d want to hear this firsthand.”
“I’m intrigued. What have you got?”
“Remember that Stewart woman you wanted me to check on for you a few weeks ago?”
Michael had gotten so caught up in January he’d actually forgotten he’d bumped Mac about her.
“Well,” Mac had continued, “I finally hit pay dirt, buddy. Hold on to your hat. You’re not going to believe what I found out. . . .”
He’d absorbed Mac’s news in numb silence. Then he’d spent the next two hours trying to outrun the truth. Or, at the very least, trying to outrun its implications. Only no matter how hard and fast he pushed his machine, Mac’s news just kept catching up with him. It had chased him over miles of both I-25 and the Boulder Turnpike until finally, inevitably, it had driven him to the source.
His black rage had been diluted to weary acceptance by the time he pulled into January’s drive. There was a light on inside. He stared at it for a long, brooding moment before he killed the motor, shoved down the kickstand, and walked up the path to her front door.
Even before Helen had delivered her speech that morning, January had known she was going to have to tell Michael. Even if it meant losing him, he deserved—no, he’d earned the right—to know the truth from her. And she had lived the lie too long.
Praying she was prepared for the consequences, she’d waited until she got home from work, then, with a tightness in her breast, picked up the phone to call him.
The roar of his cycle stopped her. She parted the curtain with a trembling hand, then watched through the window as he parked the bike and with a slow, almost reluctant determination walked to her front door.
Feeling a churning mixture of relief and the niggling sense of impending devastation, she opened the door.
As it always did, her heart leaped at the sight of him. There were so many faces of Michael. She would have welcomed any but the one standing in dangerous silence outside her door.
Neither the lover, the friend, nor the nurturing protector to a troubled little boy had come to her tonight. In black leather and faded denim, he was the dark knight of a dream-spun fairy tale, the ultimate road warrior who looked like he had just led the way out of hell.
He filled her doorway, his strong face reddened from the cold air, his dark hair wild and windblown. And his eyes—the beautiful blue eyes that turned to a warm, yearning cobalt when he loved her—were as hard and unyielding as steel.
Confusion was the only thing that buffered her creeping fear, the dark sense of foreboding that inched across her skin and made her shiver.
“Michael,” she said hesitantly when, tearing his gaze from hers, he pushed past her into the foyer. “I—I was just going to call you.”
“Were you?” His voice was as stiff as the set of his shoulders.
He walked into the living room. U
ncertain, she followed him to the doorway. When his restless gaze settled briefly on her, she nodded. “Yes, I was.”
“Then I guess I saved you a call.” He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, glancing stonily around the room before his gaze returned to her face. “It’s just as well. I think I’ve had about all the calls I can handle for one day anyway.”
“Michael, what is it?” She’d never seen him this way, so cold and distant. And changed. “Has something happened?”
He searched her face with the hard, haunted eyes of a stranger.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I guess you could say something’s happened.”
The sharp foreshadowing of pain joined her sensation of dread. “Can you tell me?”
“It wasn’t up to me to tell you anything, January. Or should I say Elaine?”
The room became so quiet that the creak of his supple leather jacket and his harsh, controlled breath sounded like explosions. She wanted, suddenly, to be anywhere but in this room. Folding her arms tightly around her waist, she sank into the nearest chair. “How,” she asked, hearing the despair in her voice, “did you find out?”
“I’m a journalist. I have contacts,” he answered sarcastically. “Since my kind can’t be trusted with the truth, we pay people to dig up dirt for us. My God, January . . .” No longer capable of veiling his anger with indifference, he faced her with accusing eyes. “Was that the sum total of what you thought of me?”
Even knowing it was pointless, she couldn’t stop herself. “I . . . was going to tell you.” Pointless and pathetic.
He tipped his head back and snorted at the ceiling. “Right.”
“Michael, listen to me. In the beginning, yes, I was frightened you might bring the whole thing to light again. I didn’t know you then. I know you now.”
“A hell of a difference that made, didn’t it?”
“You matter to me now.”
He stared right through her. “The only thing that matters is that I didn’t find out from you. The only thing that matters,” he restated with emphasis, “is that you didn’t tell me.”