by Kara Isaac
Emelia tried to keep her face impassive, not let Sabine see how much her words were shaking her. “And you are?”
Sabine summoned up a regret-filled smile. “I was.”
They watched as the next two rowers slid their feet into the footplates on the ergs and adjusted the straps.
“Look, I made a mistake when he was injured. I let him push me away. I thought that maybe space was what he needed. It was the wrong move. And I’m sorry that I’m the inconvenient ex-girlfriend showing up and throwing a spanner in your little fledgling romance, or whatever it is. But I’ve never quit on something I’ve wanted in my entire life, and until the day he can look me in the eyes and tell me there’s no hope for us, I’m not going to quit on him.”
“Sounds like you already did.”
Sabine flinched like Emelia had struck her.
“I’m sorry. I . . .” Emelia floundered for words. “Look, we’re not even dating. So it’s not like I’m in your way. He’s free for the taking.”
Sabine studied her for a second, her gaze softening. “I know competition when I see it. I’m not sneaky. I fight fair. I just want you to know that I’m in this.”
In what? Emelia ran her hands through her hair. This was an insane conversation. “Fine. Thanks for the heads-up. Notice received.”
Someone called Sabine’s name from across the room and she gave them a wave as she turned toward them. Allie appeared on Emelia’s other side, watching Sabine as she stalked away. “She doesn’t look happy. What was that about?”
“I think it was the English version of throwing down the gauntlet.”
Allie raised her eyebrows. “For Peter?”
“For Peter.”
Allie gave her a look that Emelia couldn’t quite decipher. “I didn’t know there was a gauntlet for Peter.”
“You and me both.” Emelia had only spoken to the guy in passing all day. She had no idea what it was Sabine had seen that had made her think they were in some kind of competition for him. Time to change the subject. “Speaking of gauntlets, have you guys set a date yet?” Emelia regretted the question as soon as she asked it. Something crossed Allie’s face that wasn’t the smile most brides-to-be seemed unable to restrain. Which made no sense given Emelia’s observation that their relationship was one of the most functional she’d ever seen.
“No.”
Hadn’t they been engaged for like seven months? Not that she could talk. She avoided relationships like someone with a peanut allergy avoided a Snickers. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”
Her roommate let out a sigh. “It’s complicated.” Allie dropped to the bench behind them, pulled her legs up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them.
“Visa stuff?” Emelia settled in beside her, keeping her gaze on the guys in front of them taking a few warm-up rows. Through the windows tree leaves were a lush green. Summer was definitely in the air.
“Sort of. I’m from New Zealand. He’s from America. We live in England. But only temporarily. I might get an offer to stay at Oxford. I might not. It’s all just uncertain.”
Emelia shifted her focus to her roommate. “Is that the real reason?” It was only a guess, but Emelia had a strong suspicion that there had to be more than that to it. The couple she knew wouldn’t let something like a little uncertainty stop them from getting hitched. People from different countries faced the same thing all the time.
“Yes . . . no.” Allie ran her hands through her hair and blinked rapidly. Allie sucked in a breath, looking like she was trying to get her emotions under control. “I guess I thought the fear would go away. I’m thirty-two years old and I foolishly believed when we got engaged that everything would magically be okay. How stupid is that?”
This was definitely a side of her bubbly, confident friend she hadn’t met. “What are you afraid of?”
“Getting married.”
“As in . . .” Emelia was clearly missing a connection here, but she wasn’t sure what it was.
“The wedding.” Allie’s fingers were twisting over themselves. Again and again. Emelia wanted to reach out and make them stop. “Every time I think about it, I freak out. I walk into a dress shop and start hyperventilating just looking at them. We start talking about where and when and I just feel this vise in my chest. The last time I got married was the worst day of my life. I just didn’t know it. And now when I think about getting married that’s all I remember. I don’t get excited. I want to throw up.”
Wow. Emelia never would have guessed that underneath Allie’s bubbly exterior sat all this angst. Or that she’d been married before. “So elope. Go stand in front of a judge, or whatever it is here, and just get married.” Emelia shoved aside the selfish thought that Allie’s marriage would leave her homeless. No way was she living with newlyweds.
Allie looked at her, eyes wet. “I can’t do that to Jackson. He wants the real wedding. He deserves a proper one. His family, they’re amazing, and he’s the only son. I can’t take that away from them. Not because of my stupid mistakes. I know that once I’m walking down the aisle and he’s waiting for me, I’ll be fine. I just don’t know how to get there.”
“Does Jackson know this?” She raised her voice as the announcer started counting down to the beginning of the next race.
“Some of it. I don’t want to hurt him. And every time I mention Derek, he gets this set in his jaw like he wants to go and hunt him down and beat him.” A wry smile played on Allie’s lips as she traced something on the wooden bench with her pointer finger.
“Have you tried . . .” Emelia couldn’t believe the words that were about to come out of her mouth. “Praying about it?” That was what church people did, right? Prayed about stuff? If there was a God, surely He would listen to Allie. She studied the big screen for a few seconds. The guys had started rowing; the crowd’s roar was low but it would grow exponentially over the next few minutes.
“All the time.” Allie shrugged. “But God’s not like a magical fairy up there waving a magical wand that will—poof!—make everything all better. I need to take responsibility for dealing with my own stuff. And it’s hard. And it wrecks me that Jackson has to deal with it too. That he has a fiancée who turns into a mess every time we try to talk about what should be one of the best days of our lives. That I’m dreading it, instead of excited about it.” She heaved a sigh and ran her hands through her hair. “Maybe we should actually have an engagement party first. See if that helps.”
Emelia turned to her. “You haven’t had an engagement party?”
Allie shrugged. “When we got engaged, I’d only been in England a couple of months and Jackson even less. We hadn’t made a lot of friends, and with him in Cambridge and me here and our families on two different continents, it just hasn’t happened.”
“Okay. So have an engagement party. Start with that.”
Allie sighed. “The only problem is even that will probably be over my mother’s dead body.”
Two hours later, Emelia closed the gym door behind her and breathed in a lungful of fresh air. It had come down to the two coxes, Cambridge winning with five rowers winning to Oxford’s three and a margin of three seconds. The way they’d whooped and danced you would’ve thought it was the real thing. The part of her that cheered for the underdog had smiled on the inside, careful not to let any of the Oxford team see.
Allie unlocked her car and they both opened their doors. Emelia’s backside had almost hit the seat when she remembered. “I left my water bottle in there.”
They’d been almost the last to leave too. Knowing her luck, the facilities manager had locked the door behind her.
Allie stuck the key in the ignition. “Run back. I’m sure someone will still be there. I’ll wait.”
Emelia climbed out of the car and jogged toward the gym. She could picture exactly where she’d left it. Against the wall behind the ergometer she’d tried out rowing before the crowds had showed up. And after a thousand meters of feeling like she was about
to pass out, she’d decided it was definitely not the sport for her.
The door swung open easily, and she took the stairs two at a time. Allie had some kind of guest-lecture thing tonight. She didn’t want to make her late.
Turning the corner at the top, she could hear the whirring of an erg. The rowing club was going to collect them the following morning. She rounded the corner, then stopped. Peter sat on one of the rowing machines, his back to her. Even from meters away, she could see the sweat beads rolling down his neck, his shoulders and arms rippling as he pulled the handle with such power, it wouldn’t have surprised her if the tether broke.
His left shoulder had some strapping tape across it. One large strip came out from under his sleeveless top. Not that from the way his arms and quads rippled as he rowed you’d have had any idea he’d been injured.
She inched forward, trying to get a glimpse of the numbers on the display screen. Her jaw almost unhinged as she caught sight of them flashing up over his shoulder. Her average split of two minutes ten over five hundred meters had made her feel like she was about to lose everything she’d eaten in the last week. Peter was pulling a minute thirty-five and, judging by the determined set of his profile, had no intention of slowing down anytime soon. And this was him injured.
This guy wasn’t good—he was superhuman. Her confrontation with his ex still rang in her ears. Sabine was right, Emelia was never going to be able to understand what this sport meant to him.
Her gaze shifted from Peter to her water bottle, sitting right where she’d left it. Tiptoeing over, she picked it up silently and moved back toward the exit, allowing herself one last glimpse at the pure athleticism in motion. What had happened to him? Maybe it was time to break her self-imposed Google exile to find out. It wouldn’t be prying, exactly. It wasn’t like it wouldn’t be public knowledge.
So why don’t you just ask him yourself then? The question followed her as she walked away. Emelia was almost at the top of the stairs when a roar followed by a smacking sound made her spin and sprint back into the room.
Peter was on the mat beside his erg, knees curled up to his chest, one hand gripping the opposite shoulder. By his head, the seat still slid up and down on the rail, the fan still spinning.
Emelia sprang over the three ergs that were between them and dropped to her knees beside him. His eyes were clenched shut, face tinged with gray under the sheen of sweat.
“Peter. Peter!”
His eyes opened enough to become slits. “Emelia?”
“What do you need?”
“My bag. Pills.” He huffed the words out as though it took extreme effort to speak. Closed his eyes again. Turning, she saw a black backpack by the far wall. Jumping over his erg, she ran to it, ripped the zipper open, and emptied the contents onto the floor. Thermal top, water bottle, muesli bars, and then the hollow sound of a circular medicine container, then another. She grabbed them both, along with the water bottle, and scrambled back.
“Which one?” She tried to read the labels, but they blurred in front of her eyes.
“OxyContin. The green one.” Oh boy. She was no doctor, but she knew from her days as a fill-in sports reporter that was only prescribed for serious pain.
She opened the first container; the round green pills were inside. Pulling one out, she held it between her fingertips. “Open your mouth.”
His mouth cracked open enough for her to poke it through his lips. “Water coming.” She angled the water bottle carefully to control the flow. Last thing the guy needed right now was her drowning him. He lifted his head up a little to gulp the water, then dropped it back to the mat.
The whole time his eyes didn’t crack open. “Thanks.”
She stepped back over the erg and put all his stuff back in his backpack, carrying it over to him in case he needed anything else.
“I’m fine. Just give me a few minutes.”
Typical English stiff upper lip. “Don’t be stupid.” She assessed the way he was holding his upper arm against the side of his chest. “Dislocated shoulder or rotator cuff?”
He opened his eyes and stared at her. “Rotator.”
Oh boy. That was bad. Not that it took a genius to figure that out when he was in the fetal position and the color of ash.
“Do you have a car here?” He couldn’t drive, that was for sure. But he needed to be home. Resting.
“Yup. I’ll be fine. Honestly.” All of a sudden, Emelia remembered Allie. Sitting in the car. No doubt wondering what the heck had happened to her.
Right on cue, she heard someone approaching. “Emelia?” her roommate called out. “Everything okay?”
Emelia stood just as Allie rounded the corner. “I’m fine.” She gestured to the man at her feet. “He is not.”
At that, Peter somehow managed to roll himself into a sitting position, face contorted in pain. “I’ll be fine. I just need a few minutes for the Oxy to kick in.”
Allie skirted around the machines as Peter stumbled to his feet, his right hand now supporting his left elbow.
Allie stopped in front of him, her neck craning so she could look up at his face. “What have you done? You said you were going easy on it.” She sounded like a bossy older sister.
“I was.”
Emelia bit the inside of her cheek as she observed the way Peter avoided Allie’s gaze. Whatever it was that she had seen, “going easy” wasn’t it.
From the expression on her face, Allie didn’t believe him either. She let out a sigh and ran a hand through her copper hair as she shook her head.
Emelia stepped forward. “You have a lecture. You should go. I’ll make sure he gets home okay.”
Allie glanced between the two of them, obviously torn.
“She’s right, Allie. You need to go. I’ll call you later.” Peter’s sweaty T-shirt stuck to him like cling wrap outlining his muscular physique. Emelia forced her gaze away and onto her roommate, who still looked a little uncertain. There wasn’t even any decision to be made. This wasn’t community college. You didn’t just not show up for a lecture at Oxford.
“Can you walk okay?” Emelia directed the question to Peter. “I’ll take your backpack, but I’m just going to need to grab my stuff out of Allie’s car.”
Peter nodded, managing something that was more shuffle than walk, but at least it was forward movement.
“I’ll go get your stuff. You come with him.” Allie finally accepted that she was going to have to leave this to Emelia.
A few minutes later, Emelia was holding her gear and watching Allie drive away. It was only as the ashen-faced guy leaned against the passenger door of his car that she realized her rescue plan had one significant flaw.
She had never driven on the wrong side of the road before.
Nineteen
PETER TRIED TO BITE BACK a groan, but one escaped anyway as he settled himself into the passenger seat and gritted his teeth against the feeling of someone taking an ice pick to his shoulder.
His arm lay useless against his side like a broken wing. Any attempt to move it sent shards of pain through his shoulder.
The last time it had felt this bad, he’d been on a bar floor in Verona, not knowing what had happened but knowing it was bad. His next clear memory was of the white ceiling of the local hospital, the buzz of serious pain meds, and the grim face of the head coach. No words were necessary to tell him the dream was over before it had really begun.
“Can you pass me your seat belt or do you need me to get it?” Emelia’s voice broke through his ramble down bad-memory lane. Peter slowly moved his right hand from where it was supporting his left elbow and reached up until his fingers hooked around the belt and pulled it forward.
He squashed down a yelp as even the small movement sent fire down his side.
“I’ve got it.” Emelia took it, and he heard a whir as she pulled it around his body. Then a click as it tightened across his torso.
He anchored his hand back under his elbow and forced himself to breathe
against the fireworks display taking place on the back of his eyelids. He’d lost track of how much time had passed since the shredding pain had sent him off the erg and onto the floor, but it couldn’t be long before the Oxy kicked in.
Kevin was going to kill him. Peter had promised his physio he was taking it slow and steady. That was the condition that had gotten him the okay to get back on the water. A pace that would have had a disabled pensioner passing him. And he had been. But after weeks of good easy rows out on the water and only the occasional twinge from his shoulder, he’d thought it was time to push it a little.
How could he have been so stupid? He had years until Tokyo. Enough time to rebuild his strength and fitness to be a contender in all the lead-up races that mattered. But no, he’d had to go and be the big man. And now he’d put himself back what, months?
It was the email that had caused Peter to be reckless. The weekly newsfeed from America that helped him keep tabs on the journalist who’d been responsible for Anita’s death. He should quit it. Just the sight of her byline was enough to have him seeing red. This week she’d been stalking some poor celebrity who had checked into rehab. Degrading them. Smearing their character with allegations and insinuations that could never be undone. That was what he’d been thinking of as he’d pulled on the handle of the erg so hard the numbers on the display could hardly keep up.
He registered that the engine had started, but the car wasn’t moving. Cracking open his eyelids, he turned his head slightly to see what was going on. Emelia sat in the driver’s seat, staring out the windshield, fingers grasping the steering wheel.
“You okay?” Then he realized she was missing a key piece of information. “Sorry. You don’t even know where I live.”
Emelia shook her head. “Allie told me where you live. It’s . . .” He watched something flicker across her profile. For a second, he didn’t think she was going to tell him whatever it was. “So, I’ve never driven in England before.”