A Bridge to Dreams

by Sherryl Woods

  Something snapped inside her at his presumption. Not only had he marched off to fight her family war for her, now he’d backed her into a corner. “What kind of proposal is that?” she raged.

  “I was trying to propose when Timmy called,” he reminded her calmly.

  “That’s not the point. Dammit all, Brad Willis, can’t you see that you’re just as bad as my brothers? You haven’t once given me credit for being able to make up my own mind about things. I’ve spent my whole life letting other people fight my battles for me, make the decisions about what’s best. Not this time. I’ll be damned if I’ll jump from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.”

  She picked up her purse and with one final, furious scowl in Brad’s direction, she yanked open the door.

  “Karyn,” he said quietly. She turned back and saw that he had stretched out on the bed, his back propped against the stack of pillows, his hands behind his head. “I wouldn’t go down there quite yet, if I were you,” he warned with lazy nonchalance.

  Karyn regarded him warily, trying to decide if he was honestly warning her or attempting to trick her into staying. He sure as hell didn’t seem to be taking her seriously. “Why not?”

  “Because unless I miss my guess Frank and Jared are still planted in the parlor like a couple of giant redwoods.”

  With a heartfelt sigh, she closed the door slowly. “They’re still down there?”

  Brad nodded. “I don’t think they trust me entirely.” He didn’t exactly sound broken up about it. He sounded more like a man who was confident of the eventual outcome of this mess.

  Karyn wanted very badly to walk out on him, but if he was right about Frank and Jared—and he probably was—she needed to buy herself some time. She looked around for a place to sit. There was only the bed and Brad was occupying a rather intimidating portion of that. She perched on the side as far from him as she could.

  “Are you staying?”

  “Only until the coast is clear.”

  He shifted his body until he was sitting next to her, thighs touching. “How about we put the time to good use?”

  Every nerve in her body leaped to life at the contact and at the seductive tone of his voice, but she wasn’t giving in. Not about this. “No, Brad,” she said. Her voice was firm, but she didn’t dare meet his gaze. Those green eyes of his could be her undoing. “I am waiting here just long enough to avoid some sort of public scene with my brothers. Then I am going and you and I will never see each other again.”

  “You don’t mean that,” he said, but there was the tiniest hint of uncertainty in his voice.

  “I do mean it. I do not need somebody to fight my battles for me, Brad. I do not need somebody to support me or take care of me. All I ever wanted was someone who’d love me.”

  “But I do love you.”

  “That’s not love, Brad. That’s smothering. I ought to know. I’ve lived with it all my life.”

  Because she couldn’t bear the confused, hurt expression in his eyes one single second more, she got up and walked away. Whatever the consequences might be of encountering her brothers downstairs, they couldn’t be any worse than sitting here with a man she loved after discovering that he didn’t know the meaning of the word.

  Karyn had thought her pain couldn’t possibly get any worse, but it did. Her brothers had left the lobby of the hotel, but as she emerged, she ran smack into the man who’d gotten her into this mess in the first place. A rumpled but extraordinarily persistent photographer was waiting at curbside. Lazing against the fender of a car, he was instantly alert at the sight of her. He snapped several shots before Karyn realized what was happening.

  It was the final straw. She slung her purse as hard as she could, hitting the man upside the head, then took off down the hill toward Fillmore at a run. She was almost at the bottom when she heard a familiar shout.

  “Karyn,” Frank yelled from his car. “Get in here!”

  She whirled on him. “I think I’ve been rescued quite enough for one day. Just go home!”

  She began walking again, the car creeping alongside. “Come on, sis,” Jared pleaded. “I know you’re upset, but we were just trying to protect you.”

  “You have no right to interfere in my life. None. I am twenty-six years old. If you all would get on with the business of living your own lives, maybe I could live mine. Now go away. I want to be by myself.”

  “What about Willis?”

  “You don’t have to worry about him anymore. He’s as bad as the rest of you. I just finished telling him off, too. I trust that makes you happy. You’ve done your duty. The relationship is over.”

  She glanced sideways just long enough to see an exchange of guilty looks flash between her brothers. It gave her a fleeting instant of satisfaction before she dashed across the street behind them and caught a bus going in the opposite direction. She didn’t really care where it was going. Just about anyplace today was going to feel like hell.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  How in the name of everything holy were you supposed to prove your love to a maddening woman like Karyn Chambers? The question had reverberated through Brad’s head so often since his return to Los Angeles, he thought he was going nuts. What had he done that was so terrible? He’d tried to protect her from her brothers’ wrath, tried to shield her from embarrassment. She’d reacted as if he’d committed a crime.

  For days he paced through the L.A. car dealership, in and out of his office and around his house muttering under his breath about women who didn’t know the first thing about accepting love. Then he finally tried putting himself in her shoes. While Karyn struck him as being an innocent in need of protection, she saw herself as a woman in desperate need of asserting her independence. She was still trying to prove to herself—and her brothers—that she could stand on her own two feet. His actions, well-intentioned as they’d been, had knocked her feet right back out from under her.

  Brad was used to fighting fiercely for what he wanted, charging after it with everything that was in him. He hadn’t won races by being cautious. He’d won them by taking chances, by wanting them so badly that no risk seemed too great. He wanted Karyn Chambers. He needed every stubborn, feisty inch of her. She’d snagged a part of his heart that had been lonely and untouched for a very long time. Every fiber of his being wanted to roar back up the California coast and claim her.

  But some gut instinct told him that would be exactly the wrong thing to do with Karyn. She didn’t need to be pressured right now. She needed to work through what had happened between them and reach her own conclusions about the depth of their love. He vowed to wait, to maintain his distance, while she did exactly that.

  He had no doubts, none at all, about the eventual outcome. He only hoped he wouldn’t go mad in the interim.

  * * *

  The clear, color picture on the front page of the tabloid showed a startled, wide-eyed woman emerging from a familiar San Francisco hotel. A second photo was a close-up of Brad’s face. As she stood in the checkout line, Karyn felt a moment of sick uncertainty before she realized that she was the woman who appeared above the headline: Hot Driver Brad Willis Races Toward New Love.

  The story below added the lurid details, including Brad’s complete and seemingly endless list of romantic conquests, her name and occupation and the recent discovery of their love nest at the Pacific Heights hotel. “Is this the lady who finally lured Brad Willis away from fast cars?” the newspaper asked. “Karyn Chambers might be beautiful, but can she compete with his Porsche? Others have tried, but none have succeeded.”

  They made it sound like some tawdry competition. Love nest! The very phrase left her trembling and feeling sick to her stomach. It was bad enough that she’d made a fool of herself over the domineering jerk, but now the whole world knew about it.

  After putting the paper back on the rack, Karyn turned and walked out of the store, leaving behind a shopping cart filled with frozen low-cal meals and three pints of chocolate-crunch ice cream. The
dinners had been for her conscience. The ice cream had been a futile attempt to fill the void that Brad’s departure had left in her life.

  He’d only been gone for a few days and already she was lonelier than she’d ever been in her entire life. He hadn’t called, not even once. Though she’d been the one to break things off, she regretted it hourly as the minutes dragged by and she missed hearing the sound of his voice. Maybe if she’d been wiser in the ways of love, she’d have recognized what they had sooner. Maybe she’d have fought harder to work things out, rather than running at the first hint of trouble. Brad’s actions might have been wrong, but she was a coward.

  For one fleeting second she was almost tempted to go back for that awful newspaper just so she could stare at Brad’s picture. Though her memory was good, it didn’t capture him as vividly as that sleazy photographer had. Even she was able to recognize the irony in that. As for her own pictures, they had remained in the camera that Brad had nabbed from her while they were on their balloon ride.

  Still dazed by the discovery that love didn’t vanish immediately upon the arrival of disillusionment, Karyn was even more confused at finding herself a media celebrity. She walked slowly home, her thoughts in turmoil. At her apartment she was greeted by the sound of the phone ringing and the sight of the light on her answering machine blinking insistently. Incapable of dealing with either until she’d sorted out her thoughts, she ignored both and sank down on the sofa.

  “Now what?” she murmured. How was she going to live down this latest fallout from her brief affair with Brad? The law firm had been supportive and lenient during her long struggle to complete the training to become a paralegal, but it was a staid, old organization. Seeing her picture by every grocery-store checkout stand was not something her bosses would condone. The partners didn’t even like to take divorce cases in which they expected a lot of dirty laundry would be aired publicly.

  As for her brothers, she had no doubt at all that once one of them had spotted the report, they’d begin pestering her all over again about moving back home. She wouldn’t be surprised if they personally packed her bags for her or at the very least permanently locked the hinges on her foldout bed.

  One thing was certain, she wasn’t going home again. If she had to find another job, so be it. Nothing was going to make her regret her week with Brad. He had opened new worlds and no matter who tried to turn that into something dirty and capricious, she knew better. She believed in her heart that what they had shared was a kind of love, fleeting perhaps, but love nonetheless. If only he hadn’t been so overly protective. If only she’d listened to his explanations. If only he’d fought harder to overcome her doubts.

  There were those two sad words again—if only.

  The rattling of the doorknob warned her that the family onslaught was about to begin. There was no place to run, so she sat right where she was and waited. She refused to help by getting up and opening the door.

  Fortunately, it was Tim who came in holding a copy of the paper.

  “Hi,” she said in a flat tone.

  “I take it you’ve seen this,” he said.

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Frank is going to blow a fuse.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “And Mom. What is she going to think?”

  At that moment the doorknob twisted again and Karyn’s mother came in. If she’d worked to learn her cue, she couldn’t have timed the entrance any more effectively. Only the worried furrow between her brows indicated that she was troubled. Her smile was as bright as ever as she sat next to Karyn and wrapped her arms around her.

  “Are you okay, Karyn Marie?” she said, studying her intently.

  “Fine, Mom. I assume you didn’t just drop in. You’ve seen the paper.”

  “Mrs. Murtaugh brought it by.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you be sorry, baby. That old woman’s nothing but a busybody. I’m not one bit concerned about what she thinks. I’m just worried about you. Timmy, go make a pot of coffee while your sister and I talk.”

  “But—”

  “Go. And make it a big one. I expect the others will be here before long.”

  When Tim had gone into the kitchen area, Karyn’s mother laid a work-roughened hand against her cheek. “You in love with this man?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, relieved to have it out in the open at last. “It doesn’t make much sense, though, does it?”

  “Whoever said anything about love making sense? The one thing I do know is that those special feelings aren’t something you turn your back on.”

  “But he’s exactly like Frank and the others. He thinks I need looking after.”

  “And that’s so bad?”

  “I want to be on my own, be my own woman, make my own decisions.”

  “Don’t you think he’d let you do that? There’s a big difference between caring what happens to you and taking over your life. A man who cares too much, why, he might make a mistake every now and then and push too hard, but it’s usually in the name of love. That’s not control, Karyn Marie. Not by a long shot. Maybe the very first decision you ought to make to prove you’re all grown-up is whether you really want this man enough to fight for him. Now why don’t you tell me about him.”

  Despite herself, Karyn found that she was eager to talk about Brad, anxious to say his name aloud, to pour out everything to a sympathetic ear. “Actually, we just met,” she began.

  “When?”

  “A couple of weeks ago,” she admitted sheepishly.

  “Oh, my.”

  “Exactly.”

  She patted Karyn’s hand. “Well, never you mind about that. Where is this Brad Willis now?”

  “Back in Los Angeles, I guess.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “No, it’s not what you think. I told him I didn’t want to talk to him. I told him I couldn’t love a man who wanted to run my life the way my brothers always have.”

  As if on cue again, the entire Chambers part of the world descended en masse, led by a scowling Frank. Before he could say a word, though, Tim asked, “Coffee, everyone?”

  “Beer,” Frank corrected tersely, sitting down and eyeing Karyn as if she’d grown two heads.

  “Don’t you dare sit in judgment on me, Frank Chambers,” Karyn snapped. “Did I interfere in your life when you got involved with that two-timing little tramp from Oakland? Have I said one word about the fact that it’s taken you five years to get around to proposing to Megan, even though she’s head over heels in love with you and actually thinks you’re the smartest, handsomest man on the face of the earth? Have I? And what about you, Jared? Do I tell you how to live your life?”

  “It’s not the same,” Frank grumbled.

  “No, it’s not,” Jared agreed. “You’re our—”

  “Don’t you dare finish that,” she ordered. “I am no longer your baby sister. I am no longer a baby. I am a woman and I may make a few mistakes now and then, but they’re mine to make.”

  “You have to admit, sis, this one’s a doozy,” Tim said gently as he handed her a cup.

  “Et tu, Brute?” she said, flashing him a hurt look.

  “Sorry, but it’s the truth. Maybe if I hadn’t warned Brad—”

  Shocked eyes turned on him. “You warned him?” Frank said, aghast.

  “Warned him about what?” her mother asked.

  “Yes,” Timmy said defiantly to Frank. “I told him you were playing outraged father of the year. I didn’t see any need for Karyn to be embarrassed.”

  “Well, maybe if she’d been a little more embarrassed last weekend, her picture wouldn’t have been right up there beside Cher’s today.” Frank looked ready to explode. “Good God, Timmy, what were you thinking of?”

  “Will one of you explain?” their mother ordered.

  Karyn shrugged. “They found out I was with Brad last weekend
and they came charging over to rescue me. Only, Timmy called and warned us and Brad went down to meet them without telling me they were coming, which is why I got mad and left him.”

  “He lied to us,” Jared interjected indignantly. “Let’s not forget that the man told us a bald-faced lie. You were obviously upstairs when we were there. It wasn’t an hour later when we found you running down the street.”

  “I think whatever Brad told you was justified under the circumstances,” Karyn countered, just as the door opened and the man in question walked through. Her heart did an untimely somersault in her chest. Despite everything, she was very glad to see him. She figured if she showed it, though, Brad would be lynched before he could cross the room to kiss her. That was really too bad, too. She could have used one of his kisses about now. They still had a lot of talking to do, a lot to work out, but this time she wasn’t going to run away from it. This time she was going to behave like a woman who knew exactly what she wanted from life.

  Frank and Jared were already on their feet. Her mother looked slightly dazed by the tall, handsome man who was regarding her daughter with a passionate gleam in his eyes. Timmy took a protective step closer to her.

  “What do you want, Willis?” Frank demanded.

  Brad met his gaze evenly. “To see your sister. We need to talk.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you,” Jared said.

  “I can speak for myself,” Karyn interrupted firmly.

  “Well, you don’t want to see him, do you?” Daniel said, speaking out for the first time and taking a defiant step toward Brad. He balled his hands into fists at his sides.

  “Yes, I do want to see him,” Karyn said. As she looked at the shocked faces turned toward her, her stomach rolled over, but she insisted, “Privately, please.”

  Her mother regarded her intently, then nodded in satisfaction. Apparently she saw something that no one else in the room saw, including her daughter. Karyn just wanted to be alone with the man behind the chaos in her life.