by Cara Colter
* * *
Days later, she did not feel quite so brave. She felt worn down from emotion, and her devastating sense of loss. Her mantra was not strong enough to carry her, and didn’t even seem true anymore.
How did “all men are rotten” fit into being worthy of the gift that was love? It didn’t. Her father had not been rotten. And Brand was not rotten, either.
He was human.
She thought of the look in Brand’s eyes the last night she had seen him. She had mistaken it for coldness and cruelty and rejection.
But now, having seen Paul Weston again, she was very aware of what those things looked like. And Brand had none of them in him. None.
What she had seen in his eyes was the lonely bleakness of a man who thought he had to protect her, even if that meant from himself.
Bree realized she had to use all this newfound bravery to go into his dark world and bring him to safety. She had to be brave enough to go after him. To go after Brand, a man who had only ever used his position and his power for good. A man who was as worthy of her as she was of him.
He just didn’t know it yet.
But when she called his cell, there was no answer. When she called his office, she was told he was not available.
The new Bree put on her bravery cloak, and went downtown. She had a cookie contract after all. There was no reason not to drop by his office!
For once, there was a receptionist at the front desk in that luxurious front foyer. No joyous dog came bounding out the door.
“I need to see Mr. Wallace,” Bree said.
The receptionist looked at her, and obviously recognized her. Bree had been a bit of a fixture for the past month. Was there the faint pity of one not unfamiliar with the heartsick trying to get through to her boss in her tone?
“I’m afraid he’s out of the country at the moment. I’ll tell him you called by?”
“Out of the country? But when will he be back?”
“I’m not at liberty to say that.”
Bree wanted to leap across the desk, place her hands around that skinny throat and squeeze an answer from her. What country? How long would he be gone?
“I think he’s going to be away for some time,” the receptionist said, and now she looked genuinely sad.
“Where’s Beau?”
“He’s out of the country, too.”
Bree felt a wave of relief. “Thank goodness,” she murmured. Beau, the only one he trusted completely with his heart, was with him.
She turned to leave. The door that separated the office space from the front entrance swung open.
A young man walked out. She recognized him from his beard, and from her first day here, when he had been swinging on that hammock, throwing a beanbag in the air.
It niggled her memory. He is one guy I make sure to talk to every single day.
“Kevin?” she said.
He turned and looked at her absently.
She racked her memory for the afternoon that she and Brand had practiced phrases out of the Klingon language, laughing until they could laugh no more.
Klingons, Brand had told her gravely, did not have greetings per se, but still she drew a phrase from her memory.
She tentatively tried out the crazy sounding mix of consonants and vowels. She must have done something right.
Kevin brightened instantly. He responded with the same mix.
Literally, it meant “what do you want?”
“I want to take you for coffee,” she said. The receptionist had been watching the whole interchange. When Bree glanced back at her, she had ducked her head, but she was smiling.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IT WAS A life out of a dream, Brand told himself, as he shook seawater from his hair and tucked his surfboard under his arm.
He had his dog, he had the ocean. He had spectacular sunsets, and day after day of sunshine. The palm trees were swaying gently in a tropical breeze. Up the beach was a cottage, completely open-air, with state-of-the-art electronics, so he could check in with the office and talk to his mother.
Unfortunately, the sand was everywhere, golden and unending.
And it was the very same color as Bree’s hair.
Unfortunately, even though he was having the life out of a dream, it was not a dream he would wish on anyone.
He had never been plagued with loneliness before, and now he awoke with it as his companion and slept with it at night.
Even Beau was aware something was amiss. Instead of following him exuberantly into the water, snapping at waves he could never catch, he laid on shore, watching, lethargic, sadness coming out of every pore and stinky wrinkle.
Except right now, Beau’s ears were perked up. His great head was lifted off his paws, and he was staring at the line of palm trees along the edge of the beach.
Suddenly he gave a woof, heaved himself up and began to gallop along the beach toward the trees.
Someone was coming. A woman.
As she got closer, he saw her hair. It couldn’t be. But he had thought no one else in the world had hair like that.
He wasn’t tormented enough? Out in the middle of nowhere a woman with the same hair was coming toward him? A woman with a colorful wraparound skirt knotted at a slender waist, wearing a black bikini top.
His heart rose as she got closer.
It couldn’t be. It was a mirage, a man dying of thirst in the desert imagining the only thing that could save him.
The dog reached her, and she went down on one knee.
There was only one person his dog greeted like that. Brand wanted to run to her, just like the dog, to throw himself in a delirious pile of joy at her feet.
But he could not.
He needed to be strong. Stronger than he had ever been in his life.
For the love of her, for the love of Bree Evans, he needed to be strong.
He forced himself not to go to her. Instead, he wrapped a towel around his waist, dropped down into his hammock, put on his sunglasses and picked up a book.
“Brand?”
He lowered his sunglasses and peered at her over the rim. He pretended surprise, and then irritation.
“What are you doing here? Nobody knows I’m here.”
“Kevin does.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Well, he’s a geek. He traced a telephone ping or something.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He’d do anything for a woman who speaks Klingon.”
“Which you don’t,” Brand said with a snort.
“You’d be surprised what love is willing to do to find its way.”
Love. He snapped his sunglasses back over his eyes, nestled deeper in his hammock, looked intently at his book. He hoped it wasn’t upside down.
“You’ve wasted your time,” he said. “I don’t want to see you. Go away.”
“I’m not going away.”
He hazarded a look at her, frowned and looked away hastily. There was something new in her. A strength, a self-certainty that she had not had before.
He contemplated that. He was falling to pieces here on his desert-island dream world with his dog. And she was...what? Blossoming? Coming into herself?
She was more gorgeous than she had ever been and she’d been plenty gorgeous.
A bikini! That said it all, really. Over a month ago, she’d been a one-piece kind of girl. He glanced at her again. He wanted to touch her hair. It was the exact color of the sand. He glared at the book.
“Do you want to know what I’ve learned over the past few weeks, Brand?”
“Not particularly,” he said. He deliberately licked his finger and turned a page of the book.
She shoved the hammock. It rocked wildly and he thought he was going to get dumped in the sand. He managed to extricate h
imself and find his feet.
He stood looking down at her. She gazed up at him with those soulful, earnest eyes. Those soulful earnest eyes that had a new layer to them.
Bravery.
The kind of bravery a man who did not feel brave could cling to, like a life raft was going by just as he had resigned himself to drowning.
“Humph,” he said, annoyed with himself.
She lifted an eyebrow, as if she could see right through him.
“This is what I learned about myself,” she said with that quiet new confidence. “I thought love had broken me once. After Paul, after the baby.”
Did she have to mention that? It made it hard to be mean to her, to do what needed to be done to drive her away. No, not hard—impossible.
“But now I see that’s not true at all. What broke me was an imitation of love. Real love is different.”
He stared at her. He could feel himself swimming toward the paddle she was holding out, even as he ordered himself to swim away from her, to choose the loneliness of an endless sea.
“Real love doesn’t break people,” she said. “Real love is like the love I received from my family. It filled me with hope and it made me a promise that good would always outweigh bad.”
“Naive,” he growled. But she put her fingers on his lips. Her touch was a balm to his tormented soul. He could not do anything now but listen, even though he knew he was touching the paddle she was holding out.
“Love, genuine love, makes you stronger. It gives you a belief in yourself and the world. It makes you more authentic, not less.”
He was silent, but inwardly he could feel the slow tremble of complete surrender.
“You think,” she said softly, “that you will be like your father, but you have already shown in every way that you are in the world that you are not. He ran away from your mother, and responsibility.
“You have embraced those things.”
“Speaking of my mother, there’s a chance it’s genetic—”
“Shh,” she said. “You think I don’t know that’s the fear you’ve wrestled with your whole life? Brand, you already know so much more about love than you have ever given yourself credit for.
“Love—the kind that sticks with it through the hard stuff—you already know that. That’s what has made you who you are. That’s what has made me love you so helplessly. So hopelessly.”
“Look, I tried this. The love stuff. It’s not for me. I warned you. Wendy. Lasted three days, I—”
“Shh.” There it was again. Gentle. But a command.
“I’m not saying you aren’t scared of love,” Bree said. “I’m not saying that at all. Why else would such a smart man pick such a perfectly ill-matched person as Wendy?
“You’re scared of it. You’ve seen the power it has to wound.
“But what I’ve seen? I’ve seen the power it has to make a man like you, who is so good, so decent, so courageous, despite the wound.”
In his mind, he could see himself heaving himself into her lifeboat.
She felt his absolute surrender the moment it happened. Her arms went around him. She held him with astonishing strength. He could feel the strong beat of her heart, and the tenderness of her skin.
“I love you,” she said. “And I’m going to love you until my very last breath. I am never, as long as I live, going to stop.”
He let those words ease into him, ease past all his defenses, ease over his walls, something warm and fluid, that could not be stopped by something so small as one man’s desire to shield others from the possible pain of this force.
“What about my children?” he asked, and he could hear the anguish in his own voice.
And she could hear it, too.
“What blessings they will be to the world,” she said quietly. “What blessings our children—loved and accepted for all their strengths and all their flaws—will be to the world.”
He took her face between both his hands and searched it for any trace of fear, for any trace of a lie.
But he saw what he had always seen in her face, even when she was a young girl going to her senior prom.
He saw that her gift to the world was hope.
Belief.
A tremendous unshakable conviction.
And that conviction was that love would always win. It was even stronger in her now than it had been then, when she was a young girl who had never had one bad thing happen to her.
Now, she had had bad things happen to her. She had suffered tremendous losses.
And still, she stood before him, unshakable in her faith, stronger than ever.
The word came from somewhere deep within him. It was his soul recognizing what she had held out to him. It was his soul yearning for a place to rest, for a place he had never had.
It was his soul, his heart, his mind, his whole being accepting the invitation she had held out to him.
To be brave.
To step into the unknown.
To have hope.
To believe.
To embrace the greatest force in the entire universe—love.
“Yes,” he whispered to each of those things, and then, his voice stronger, to her he said, “Yes.”
And then stronger still, even though this time it was just within himself, it felt as if he was shouting it to the earth and the waves and the trees, and the stars, shouting it with all the joy and strength it deserved—yes.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE GARDEN LOOKED the way it had always meant to look. Pails of white flowers—begonias, Brand vaguely thought—flanked the back steps, and peeked out from every shaded corner of his backyard.
The house looked different. Every window was open and so were the French doors. Analytically, he knew the house had not changed. It was the same color, there had been no renovations.
And yet, everything felt different, as if the house was happy, and as if its happiness was spilling out those open doors and windows.
The clatter of people busy in the kitchen and a shout of laughter reached him.
His back garden was filled with chairs with white satin bows on them, and people milled around, filling the space with color and energy and laughter and a shared belief in happy endings.
Given Vancouver’s weather, it was a miracle it was not raining today, but there you had it.
Brand was a man who had come to believe in miracles.
Bree could have had the wedding anywhere. In a different country, on a beach, in the best hotel in Vancouver, but she had looked surprised when he had asked her where she would like to become his wife.
“At home, of course,” she said. “That’s where your mom will be most comfortable, and then Beau can be part of our celebration, too. Even Oliver can be part of our day.”
Sure enough, Oliver was peeping sourly out from under one of those pails of begonias. They had been adjusting the cat to his new home for several weeks now. He had taken to it—and to bossing around Beau—with a kind of regal disdain that Brand had learned meant he was almost deliriously happy.
He considered that word. Home. In the last few months, his house had been transformed into a home. Bree had not moved in. She had wanted to. He had refused her. And he had refused her desire to seal their relationship physically as well.
He had almost given in to that temptation the night of his company’s charity ball. Now, he sometimes wondered about that. If the intervention hadn’t been divine.
Because that was not what he wanted with Bree.
He wanted to be the man she deserved, the man her father had always expected he would be. A man who would cherish her and treat her with complete honor, always.
So, here he was, minutes before his wedding, contemplating the nature of miracles and divine intervention. He was a changed man from what he had been just a few months ago.
Then, he had mistakenly thought he had everything. Then, he had thought he was wealthy.
“Time to go, buddy.”
Chelsea’s man, Reed, tapped him on the shoulder. He and Bree had become so close to the other couple, who had begun dating almost as soon as Reed submitted his findings on the fire to the investigating team.
An electrical fire.
No one to blame.
A faulty circuit.
Or a miracle. One that had brought this young couple, obviously made for each other, together.
Just as a last-minute decision to go to that gala had reunited Brand with Bree.
Brand walked up the aisle of chairs to the back of his yard, where a flower-bedecked trellis had been erected. Reed flanked him on his right and Beau padded along beside him, looking as pleased as his wrinkly face would allow. Beau’s white ribbon was already somewhat bedraggled.
People began to drift to the chairs.
Brand’s mother took her seat in the front row, looking beautiful in a pink two-piece suit that Bree had helped her choose. She radiated the soft glow of wellness. Elvis was banished, for now. Brand dared not hope forever, but there was something about watching Bree with his mother that made his throat close and his eyes sting.
Bree treated his mother with an unfathomable tenderness that his mother reacted to like a parched plant that had needed rain. Brand knew love couldn’t heal her, or else his already would have, and yet there was something about the steadiness of Bree’s love that brought out the best in his mother, that brought out a side of her he had never seen.
He’d asked Bree once how she loved his mother so completely, and she had seemed so genuinely surprised by the question.
“She’s part of you,” she had said. “She’s part of everything that is best about you—your strength and your decency and your drive. I love her for what she gave you, and I love her for her innate bravery. And I love her for the way she sees the world.”
Bree’s own mother, came and sat by his, and their hands found each other, two women who knew there was a certain kind of bitter sweetness to saying goodbye to one kind of relationship with their children, and hello to another one.