by Kim Law
This was why they’d bought it.
Two males, one female. Ages eighteen, eighteen, and sixteen.
Her heart beat harder. Harry had been only sixteen.
“You should go,” Nick said.
She slowly shook her head. “I don’t do that anymore.” The words barely whispered out. Was she discrediting Thomas’s memory by not helping? Had she hurt him by protecting herself?
“But you could do that,” Nick said just as quietly.
She swallowed, the pizza from earlier suddenly seeming stuck in her throat. Then she looked at the darkened back door of the house. The radio had gone silent. She eyed the helicopter sitting alone in the dark. There were children missing tonight, and she had a means to save them. Her fingers began to tremble, and she felt her pulse race. She should do something.
Yet she couldn’t bring herself to get out of her chair.
“Come here,” Nick said, but he didn’t wait for her to do as he’d suggested. He rose and lifted her up, then lowered back to his chair with her in his lap. His arms surrounded her, and she almost felt better. But there were still three kids missing in the mountains tonight.
The radio squawked again, this time with several SAR people reporting in that they were readying to join the search. The valley had purchased a light-equipped Huey within the last couple of years, so that meant someone would be going up tonight. The kids wouldn’t have to wait. The knowledge released the pressure that had built behind her rib cage, and she sank back against Nick. His arms tightened, and neither said anything as another report came from one of the surrounding counties. A new team gave an ETA for arrival, and Harper relaxed a bit more. Lots of people would be helping. Those kids wouldn’t be alone.
“I miss it sometimes,” she finally said, admitting a truth she’d refused to even acknowledge to herself.
“Then don’t give it up.”
“But I don’t know if I can go back.”
“How about looking at it as if it’s only on pause, then?”
She turned her face up to his, intrigued.
“Pause doesn’t mean it’s over for good,” he said. “You can go back whenever you’re ready.”
His words hit home, only in a different way than he’d meant. “Like me? I’m on pause?”
“Like you were.” He cupped her cheek. “But I think you’re coming out of it. Maybe it’s time to bring the search and rescue back out, too?”
It was all of a sudden too much. Too many questions, and not enough answers. “Can we not talk about it anymore? A search is being formed. What I do or don’t do in the future doesn’t matter.” She climbed off his lap and held a hand down to him. “Let’s go in and watch a movie.”
The digital clock on the dresser clicked off another minute closer to midnight as Nick and Harper remained lying on her bed, both of them tucked under a lightweight blanket. The blanket and the TV were the only things of color in the room. Even the clock was white. But earlier, Nick had caught a glimpse of a pale-orange strap of lace peeking out of one of the dresser drawers.
He hugged Harper tighter to him and lowered the volume as the credits began to roll. He thought she might be asleep, but he wasn’t ready to move yet.
Before they’d settled in the bedroom, she’d given him a tour of the remainder of the house. As promised, there had been an impressive media room on the second floor. All red and black, with theater seating. With the top-of-the-line surround system, it was definitely a place to crank up a horror movie and scare the bejesus out of a person. But Nick much preferred the way they’d done it.
The remainder of the upstairs had been bedrooms, with one gathering area and a powder room. All had been professionally decorated—and all just as impersonal as the rest of the house.
The only room he hadn’t actually seen the inside of was a single bedroom at the front of the house. Unlike when he’d started to go into the nursery, when Harper had hesitated but let him go in, the room upstairs had been a firm no.
In fact, she hadn’t even looked at the door when he’d stopped beside it.
Nick suspected there was evidence of her late husband inside that room. Maybe indicators of the two of them together. That would account for the complete lack of the other man’s personal possessions found throughout the house.
But all in all, even with the tense moment upstairs, the night had been terrific—though she had been different here. That wall of hers had inched a bit higher. It made him wonder what else might still be hiding behind it. Was there more to her story that she hadn’t shared?
“Tell me how you got into bull riding,” Harper said behind a yawn. “Did you ride much as a kid?”
He looked down at her in the faint glow cast from the bedside lamp. “There was that sheep I told you about when I was seven.”
“Right.” She wiggled on the bed, scooting up higher against him. “You didn’t last the eight seconds. But what was it like? And did it make you want to try again?”
Honestly, it had made me never want to ride again.
He thought about Nate pointing out that Nick had no desire for riding as a kid, then muted the TV and rolled to his side to face her. Grabbing her hand, he brought it to his chest. “It was actually my mom’s idea for me to ride that day. We had a family friend whose kid was great at the sport. The kid was my age. Shorter but stockier.” He smiled wanly. “He could stay on the sheep the full eight seconds.
“Anyway, this lady was talking her kid up so my mom told her that I was better than him. That I would be a champion someday.” He stared at their clasped hands as he processed what he’d just said. He’d forgotten that part of the story. His mother had planted the seed.
Sonofabitch.
He ignored the implications and ploughed on. “So the next time the youth rodeo came to town, she packed us up, and off we went. I was thrilled. My mom wanted to see me ride.”
“You had her attention.”
Nate had been right. “I had her attention.”
He returned to his back, pulling Harper down with him.
“I got on,” he said, “and then I was off. That fast. It was a short ride, for sure. But the more important thing was that I dislocated my shoulder.”
“Ouch.” She moved as if to raise herself up, but he kept her tight against him.
“She refused to acknowledge how bad I was hurt,” he told her. His words grew tight, and he noted that the tension in Harper’s body now matched his. “Told me to suck it up. She brushed it off with her friend, made up some bullshit story, then took me home and sent me to my room. That night, when I didn’t go down for dinner, I used the excuse that I’d eaten too much at the rodeo. But Nate knew. He’d been there. Plus, it was hard to miss the way the one shoulder hung lower than the other. He skipped dinner along with me. Sat on the bed, not taking his eyes off me all night long, as if the mere act of concentration could fix me. I wouldn’t admit how bad it was, though. Not even to him. I sat there stoically, not moving my arm, and biting the inside of my cheek to keep from crying.”
“What happened next?”
Nick closed his eyes, not wanting to see the memories, but with his eyes closed, they only became more visible. “Dani eventually came in to check on me, but I sent her away before she could get more than a foot in the door. Then Cord showed up. It was right before he went to bed. He ignored me when I told him to go away, and he figured out with one look that something bad had happened. But he was only thirteen. What could he do?”
“He could have told your dad that you’d been hurt.”
“I would have denied it.” He looked at Harper and pictured his brother all those years ago, angry determination covering his thirteen-year-old face. “He snapped it back into place. I was amazed. Still am. It hurt like a bitch, too. But how he knew how to do that at that age, I’ll never know. The next day he told Dad that he’d hurt me while wrestling, and Dad had Dani take me to our general physician. Without that move, I probably never would’ve been able to ride. As it is,
I wear a customized brace to keep things from popping out of place.”
“Cord’s a doctor now, right?”
“Yeah—not that it’s a surprise. He not only fixed me up that night, but every time she hurt herself . . . the finger, the car wreck, whatever . . . Cord was the one who found her. I’m pretty sure that was intentional on her part. She was a master at fucking with us.” His hand stroked down Harper’s back. “Nate said something to me the other day, and at the time, I didn’t give it much thought.”
“What did he say?”
“He pointed out that I didn’t get into riding until after high school. I’d always assumed that was due to the sheep incident. But what if it wasn’t? What if”—he gulped—“what if I never really wanted to be a bull rider? Maybe I did it just to prove how tough I was. That I could be a winner.”
“Prove it to your mom, you mean?”
He nodded. “To my dead mom. Pathetic, huh? She always told me I wasn’t tough enough, so I had to show her.”
“Not pathetic.” Harper pressed a kiss to his cheek. “You were only ten when she died.”
“Eighteen when I left home. When I started riding.”
“But stuck at ten.” She turned his face toward hers, and her gaze raked over him. “Do you think that’s why you haven’t gone national?”
A lock seemed to click into place. “Possibly.”
She gave him a tender smile. “Well, you might not have gotten into it for the right reasons, but you can’t be disappointed with the outcome, right? You’re really good.”
“But what if I could have been better at something else?”
He felt ripped wide open as he looked into her eyes. He didn’t bring up the subject of going back to school, but he wanted to. He wanted to know what she’d think. Only, the conversation had drained him. He had nothing left tonight.
“You can be whatever you want to be, Nicholas Wilde. You know that, don’t you? It’s never too late to start.”
He tried to return her confidence with an assured nod, but the attempt fell flat. Because he had no idea what he wanted to be. He pulled her in closer and she slid a leg over his and they lay there like that for several minutes, her hand covering his heart and her hair tickling the underside of his chin. Then he turned off the television and reached over and clicked off the lamp. Total darkness fell around them.
“Is it okay if I stay here tonight?” They remained fully dressed, but even if sex wasn’t on the table, Nick didn’t want to leave.
“Absolutely.”
Nothing was said about them removing any articles of clothing or crawling under the covers. They simply remained where they were, tucked beneath a mint-green blanket in the middle of Harper’s bed. Several minutes later, Harper began to fidget before finally rolling onto her back.
“I never did tell you about me riding the bull,” her words floated over to him.
He smiled slightly in the darkness at the picture that formed in his mind. “Will you tell me about it now?”
“If you want to hear it.”
“I would like nothing better.” He captured her hand at his side and waited to hear her story.
“First of all, I didn’t actually stay on for eight seconds the first time I rode. I might have misled you there. But I did eventually stay on one.”
A rustle of movement happened at his side, and he suspected she was now facing him.
“It took me a few weeks. Thomas and I attended a bull-riding school when we lived in Texas.”
Nick’s brows shot up. “You considered getting into the sport?”
“Good grief, no. We just wanted to conquer it. To say we’d done it.”
He was beginning to understand her. “No” wasn’t in her vocabulary. Nor was “risk free.”
“It was my idea to attend the school.” She spoke more softly now. “I talked him into it. It was the last class, and I was determined to prove I could do it. I made it to eight seconds on my third try that day, and I was flying high. Thomas was so proud of me. And then it was his turn.”
Nick immediately understood that this part of the story hadn’t turned out well. “What happened?”
“He ended up in the hospital. Broken rib, punctured lung. And it was all my fault.”
“Why your fault?”
“Because I made him ride.”
Nick went silent to allow his words to slowly form. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing, but he’d picked up on a pattern with her. The burden for whatever happened to Thomas fell upon her. But why?
“From everything you’ve told me about him,” he finally started, “I wouldn’t think him to be the type you could make do anything if he didn’t want to. Didn’t you say you two were pretty much alike?”
“I did. But at the same time, I’d asked myself on occasion if maybe we weren’t so much alike. Did he do as much, risk as much, only because I egged him on?”
Nick turned the light back on and faced Harper. “I thought he followed in his brother’s footsteps. Would Harry have wanted to ride a bull?”
“And more from what I learned about him.”
“Then how do you figure any of it was your doing?”
She went totally silent and completely still. When Nick couldn’t stand it anymore, he lifted a hand and brushed his thumb over her cheek. Her skin was soft and creamy, and she seemed more fragile than he’d ever seen her. But she hadn’t answered his question, so he remained silent, giving her the time to get out whatever it was she needed to say.
“His parents blamed me.” Her words splintered as she spoke. Her eyes were sad, the corners seeming to droop on the outer edges. “And not just for the accident, but for him living here. For him dying,” she whispered. “Which was my fault, but they don’t even know about that part of it. They just knew that he wouldn’t have been jumping out of planes if not for me.”
“Yet the army has you jump out of planes.”
Her brow creased. “They do.”
“And didn’t you meet Thomas after you’d both enlisted?”
“I see where you’re going with this, but you’re off track. That was a short period of his life. Being with me was the ‘after.’” Her chest rose and fell with her breaths. “While Thomas was in the hospital, his parents offered to buy me out of our marriage. If I’d only let him come home to California where he belonged, they’d give me all the money I could ever desire.” The words were bitter, and Nick wanted to hold her. But not yet. She wasn’t finished yet.
“But money wasn’t what you wanted?” he asked.
“I had what I wanted. I had Thomas, and a good marriage. I loved my life. The only thing that could have possibly made any of it better was if they’d loved their son the way he’d loved them. He wanted their approval. Up until the day he died. He wanted them to see that him being here was an act of love. His parents hadn’t handled Harry’s death well, so Thomas did it for them. He showed respect for his brother by never letting him be forgotten.”
Nick wrapped his arms around her. “He sounds like a good man.”
“He was the best. He went to see them one final time before we tried for kids. To ask them to be in our lives.” Her head moved in a negative motion. “They were so bitter. I don’t get that. They had a son who died, yes, but they had another one who was alive. Thomas was the one who’d lost the most. Both brother and parents. It wasn’t fair.
“I never told Thomas they tried to buy me off,” she added softly, “but I did wonder if I should have taken them up on it. If I had, Thomas could have had his parents back. He shouldn’t have had to choose.”
“No, he shouldn’t have.” Nick tilted her face up to his. “But I’d take a guess that Thomas made his own choices in life. You didn’t make them for him, right?”
She puffed out a short breath. “I’d like to believe I didn’t.”
“I’d place bets that you’re right.” He touched his lips to hers. “I’d also venture to guess that if Thomas had it to do over again, he would choose you e
very time.”
The corners of Harper’s lips lifted marginally, then she closed her eyes and tucked in next to him. Nick wrapped both arms around her, and when her breathing finally grew regular, he let his go there, too.
Chapter Twenty
You must be the flavor of the month.”
Harper went still against the gate at the words spoken close behind her. Words that very much sounded as if they’d come from Nick. Yet, she had her eyes on Nick. He waited in the second set of chutes, one rider before him.
Therefore, these words must have come from his twin brother. Nick had mentioned Nate would be there tonight.
Slowly turning, she found herself taken aback at the similarities between the two men. She’d known they were identical—and she’d been around both of them together a few times as kids. But witnessing the grown-up specimen times two—this one also in a dusty, worn cowboy hat—was a bit shocking. The heavy beard only added to his looks.
Not letting anything show on her face, she took her time and scanned Nate up and down.
When finished, she arched her brows. “And you clearly turned out to be the less attractive twin.”
Nate’s entire face broke into a grin as laughter boomed out of him. And that fast, Harper remembered what a good guy Nick’s brother had always been. He’d dated Chastity for a very short time.
He thrust out a hand. “Nice to see you again, Harp. Okay if I call you Harp?”
“As long as you don’t call me honey.”
She’d never really had a problem with that particular pet name until Nick had used it at the wrong time.
“Noted,” Nate said. “How about hot ass, then?”
“Only if you want to find yourself flat in the dirt.”
And once again he laughed. He moved to the gate to stand beside her and then hung his arms over the railing. The rider before Nate had finished. He’d lasted only five seconds.
“I’d heard he still had the hots for you,” Nate mused. “Not that I can blame him. But I’m guessing I can blame you for me getting kicked out of his hotel room tonight.”