Only Forever

by Linda Lael Miller

  “I may sue,” he replied.

  10

  Vanessa tapped one foot nervously while she waited for Gina to answer the telephone. Finally she heard a breathless “hello” at the other end of the line.

  Huddled in her kitchen, speaking in a whisper, Vanessa explained that Nick was lying in the middle of her living room floor, apparently immobilized. “What should I do?” she asked. “Call the paramedics?”

  Gina laughed. “It would serve him right if you did. Nick’s faking, Vanessa—he probably wants to spend the night.”

  Vanessa sighed. Of course Nick was pretending, indulging his hypochondria. After all this was the man who carried on like a victim of Lizzie Borden’s when he cut himself. “Thank you,” she said.

  “See you tomorrow,” Gina responded lightly. “Have fun getting Nick off the floor.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “At Uncle Guido’s dinner, of course,” came the answer.

  Vanessa’s hackles rose. Evidently Nick had committed her to a family gathering without so much as consulting her. She said a polite goodbye to Gina and, after gathering her dignity, walked back into the living room.

  There, standing beside Nick’s prone body, she folded her arms across her chest and nudged him with one foot. “What’s happening at your Uncle Guido’s place tomorrow, Nick?”

  With great and obvious anguish, Nick raised himself to a sitting position. “I could have been killed,” he fretted, avoiding her question.

  “That could still happen,” Vanessa allowed.

  Laboriously the man who had once struck fear into the heart of every linebacker in the National Football League hauled himself to his feet. He gave the vacuum cleaner he’d tripped over a look that should have melted the plastic handle, and then sighed. “I suppose you’re mad because I told my family you’d come to dinner tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

  Vanessa was tapping one foot again. “That kind of high-handed presumption is exactly what keeps me from marrying you, Nick DeAngelo!”

  He leaned close to her, and she was filled with the singular scent of him. His dark eyes were snapping with annoyance. “Who asked you to get married, Lawrence?” he countered.

  Crimson heat filled Vanessa’s face. No one, not even Parker, could make her as furious, so fast, as Nick could. “You wanted to shack up?” she seethed.

  Nick sighed again heavily. “Time out,” he said, making the signal with his hands. “Let’s start over. You’re the one who brought up the subject of marriage.”

  Vanessa looked away, her eyes filling with sudden embarrassing tears. She had no idea what to say.

  Nick took her arms into his hands and made her look at him. “It’s time we stopped playing games,” he said hoarsely. “I love you, Vanessa, and I’d like nothing better than to marry you. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever you say.”

  Vanessa bit into her lower lip. She wanted to say yes so badly that she could barely hold the word back, but fear stopped her. Mortal fear that gripped her mind and spirit like an iron fist, cold and inescapable. She tried to get past it, like a mountain climber working her way around an obstacle by inching along a narrow ledge.

  “Maybe I wasn’t so far off a minute ago,” she ventured to say, “when I asked if you wanted to live together.”

  Nick stared at her in wounded amazement. “You said ‘shack up,’ if I remember correctly,” he replied.

  Vanessa winced at the dry fury in his tone and rushed headlong into her subject. “It seems to me that it would be a good idea for us to live together for a while, just until we could make sure we really love each other.”

  Nick’s eyes glowed with dark heat. “Sure,” he mocked, shrugging. “That way you wouldn’t have to make a commitment. If you got a job offer in another city, or decided you wanted a different roommate, you could just bail out!”

  “That isn’t what I meant at all!” Vanessa cried, horrified at the picture he was painting.

  “Isn’t it?” he demanded. “Tell me, Vanessa—where were we going to set up this romantic little love nest?”

  She swallowed. “I thought San Francisco would be nice,” she admitted in a very small voice.

  “I’ll bet you did,” Nick retorted, and, unbelievably, he turned and strode toward the door.

  Vanessa hurried after him, not wanting to let him go again so soon. “Nick, wait…”

  He stopped and turned to face her, but there was a cold distance in his eyes that made her heart ache. “I want a wife and a family, Vanessa—I’ve told you that. If you can’t make a commitment, then for God’s sake let me go.”

  “You’re being a prude,” Vanessa accused, as he opened the door to an icy November wind.

  “Imagine,” Nick marveled, spreading his hands. “Me—the party animal. Go figure it.”

  “Don’t be so stubborn and unreasonable!” Vanessa cried, knowing how lonely her world was without him. “Lots of people are living together these days, and they’re making their relationships work!”

  “Good for them,” Nick replied. “As for me, I’m ready for a wife, not a perennial girlfriend. Sleep tight, Vanessa.” With that, he went out, closing the door crisply behind him.

  Feeling bereft, Vanessa shot the bolt into place and wandered witlessly back to the kitchen, meaning to console herself with a cup of tea. She’d turned her answering machine off to call Gina earlier, and now, after putting a mug of water into the microwave, she checked for messages.

  There was only one, but it might have made all the difference in the world if she’d only heard it a few minutes earlier. The producers of Seattle This Morning wanted her to host the show, not with a partner, but on her own.

  Vanessa would have jumped for joy at any other time, but she couldn’t forget that Nick had just walked out the front door. She dreaded facing the rest of her life without him.

  Thursday was long and it was lonely. Vanessa did her stint on the shopping channel—dressed as a pilgrim—and turned down numerous invitations to friends’ houses opting instead to go home alone and cook a frozen turkey dinner in her microwave.

  There were messages on her machine from everyone in the world except Nick DeAngelo. She returned a happy-holiday call to her grandparents and left the others unanswered. All night she lay staring up at the ceiling, trying to imagine herself living with Nick as his wife, bearing his children, sharing his joys and his problems.

  The pleasant pictures were all too fleeting. It was easier to imagine him packing to leave her on some rainy afternoon.

  All night Vanessa tossed and turned. Long before morning she knew what she had to do. If she stayed in Seattle, she would keep having destructive encounters with Nick, which would break her heart over and over again.

  She had to start over somewhere else.

  She called the television station in San Francisco first and told them she was accepting their offer, and then she got in touch with a friend in real estate and arranged to put her house on the market. She hoped the new owners would let Rodney go on living in the garage apartment since he liked it so much.

  Nick didn’t try to contact her again, and Vanessa’s feelings about that were mixed. She marveled at her own capacity for conflicting emotions where that man was concerned.

  When the fifteenth of December finally arrived, Vanessa’s brief career with the Midas Network was over. That evening Mel and the Harmons shanghaied her, dragging her off to a farewell party at, of all places, DeAngelo’s.

  “How could you?” Vanessa demanded of Janet Harmon in a whisper when the crowd of people from the network had finished congratulating her and gone back to enjoying wine and hors d’oeuvres. It would have been easier if Nick had been away looking after the other restaurant or something, but he was very much in evidence.

  “How could I?” Janet echoed. “Vanessa, how could you? Leaving the Midas Network is one thing, but leaving Nick is another. Are you out of your mind? The man adores you!”

  Vanessa’s gaze went involuntarily to Nick. He was talkin
g to a couple on the far side of the restaurant, laughing at something the woman said as he drew back her chair. Knowing all the while that her reaction was silly, Vanessa ached with jealousy. “Bringing me here was a rotten trick,” she said miserably, forcing her eyes back to her own circle. “Thanks a lot.”

  “We were trying to bring you to your senses, that’s all,” argued Mel, leaning forward in his chair. He was accompanied by a woman half his age with bleached hair and whisk-broom eyelashes.

  Vanessa sighed. “Even if I wanted to stay, it’s too late. I’ve already given up my job and sold my house.”

  Paul, now her former boss, sat back in his chair. “The spot on Seattle This Morning is still open,” he said.

  Vanessa felt a little leap of hope in a corner of her heart, but it died quickly. She was as afraid of commitment as she’d ever been, and Nick probably didn’t want her anymore anyway.

  She wasn’t about to find out. Going to him with heart in her hands and being rejected would be more than she could bear. She looked down at the glass of chablis a waiter had poured for her moments before and left Paul’s remark hanging unanswered in the air.

  Vanessa was in a sort of daze from then on, eating her dinner, sipping her wine, making the proper responses—she hoped—to the things the other people around the large table said to her. She told herself that she had only to get through dessert and a round of goodbyes and then she could escape.

  She was coming back from the rest room when she encountered Nick in the hallway. He blocked her way like Italy’s answer to Goliath.

  “Hello, Nick,” she managed to choke out, her cheeks coloring. “How are you?”

  He gave her a look that said her question was too stupid to rate an answer and sighed. “It would be easier to forget you if you weren’t so damned beautiful,” he said raggedly.

  Vanessa didn’t know what to say in response to that. Inwardly she cursed Janet for having her going-away party here where she couldn’t have escaped seeing Nick. She tried to step around him but he wouldn’t let her pass.

  “It’s damn easy for you to walk away, isn’t it?” he asked in a low, wondering voice. “Didn’t any of what happened between us get past that wall of ice you hide behind and touch you?”

  Anguish filled Vanessa, but she refused to let her feelings show. She met Nick’s gaze, a feat that nearly brought her to her knees. “It was all a game,” she lied coldly.

  Nick grasped her shoulders in his powerful hands. “If it was,” he bit off the words, “we both lost.”

  Vanessa was on the verge of tears, but she kept her composure and stepped out of his hold. “Goodbye, Nick,” she said in a soft voice. This time, when she went to walk away, he allowed her to pass.

  She didn’t stop at the table and speak to her friends; that was beyond her. She simply kept walking, crossing the dining room, concentrating on holding herself together.

  She paused to collect her coat, but she was practically running when she reached the sidewalk.

  Snow was drifting down from the sky in great lacy puffs—an unusual event in Seattle—and the magic eased Vanessa’s tormented spirit just a little. She slowed her pace, allowing the weather to remind her of Spokane, of childhood and innocence.

  Pike Place Market, with its noise and bustle, reminded her that she was in Seattle. She went inside, making her way through hordes of happy Christmas shoppers, pausing in front of a fish market, watching and listening as salmon and cod and red snapper were weighed and tossed on the counter to be wrapped. Vanessa stepped closer.

  “Help you, lady?” asked a young boy with dark hair and eyes. He was wearing a white apron over jeans and a sweatshirt, and Vanessa wondered if he was a part of Nick’s vast family.

  Vanessa stepped closer, feeling self-conscious in her glittering blue dress, strappy shoes and evening coat. She opened her evening bag to make sure that she had money. “I-I’ll take a pound of—of red snapper, please.”

  “Red snapper, a pound!” the boy yelled toward the back of the market, and the weighing and tossing process started all over again.

  “What’s your name?” Vanessa asked.

  The young man gave her an odd look. “Mark,” he said. “Mark DeAngelo.”

  She smiled. Nick had told her about working in his uncle’s fish market when he was about Mark’s age. For Vanessa, it was like looking into the past, seeing Nick as he must have been. “You’re Gina’s cousin?”

  Mark nodded, taking Vanessa’s money and making change, still looking puzzled.

  Vanessa felt foolish. She put her change back into her purse and reached out for the red snapper, now snug in its white package.

  “You a friend of Gina’s?” Mark asked just as Vanessa would have turned and walked away.

  “Nick’s,” she confessed.

  His wonderful dark eyes narrowed. “So you’re the one,” he said, and any friendliness he might have shown earlier had faded away.

  Vanessa swallowed, wondering what had brought her to this market in the dark of night, what had made her mention Nick in the first place.

  “Uncle Guido,” the boy said to a heavyset man who had materialized beside him. “This is her—Nick’s lady.”

  Guido DeAngelo gave his nephew a quelling look, then smiled at Vanessa and extended one hand over the counter where crab legs and salmon steaks lay on a bed of ice. “You forgive Mark,” he pleaded, beaming. “He got no manners. No good manners at all.”

  Vanessa shifted her bag and her package of fish so that she could shake Guido’s hand. “How do you do?” she murmured, completely at a loss for anything more imaginative to say.

  Guido’s bright dark eyes took in her evening clothes and her special hairstyle. “You have new fight with Nicky?” he demanded. Despite his stern manner, Vanessa doubted that he had a trace of malice in him.

  The tears came back. “I’m afraid it’s an old fight,” she answered.

  Guido rounded the counter and hugged her. “That Nicky. He’s a stubborn one. You tell him his Uncle Guido said to quit it out right now!”

  “Quit it out?” Vanessa echoed.

  “Cut it out,” Mark translated from his position at the cash register.

  Vanessa smiled and nodded. “I’ll tell him,” she promised. If I ever see him again.

  Outside the market, Vanessa hailed a cab. She half hoped to find Nick’s Corvette waiting in her driveway, but the only car in evidence was her own. She paid the driver and hurried around to the back door.

  The telephone was ringing when she stepped inside the house, and she heard the answering machine pick up and play its recorded spiel.

  “Damn it,” Janet Harmon said, “I know you’re there, Vanessa Lawrence. Pick up the phone right now or I swear I’ll come over and bring the whole party with me!”

  Vanessa literally dove for the receiver. “Don’t,” she cried, “please! I’m here!”

  “Well,” Janet retorted, “if it isn’t the disappearing guest of honor. You might have told us you were leaving, you know.”

  Vanessa lowered her head, feeling guilty. Her friends had gone to a great deal of work and expense to say farewell, and she had left them high and dry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Janet interrupted, “I can guess. You ran into Nick, went a few rounds with him for old times’ sake and then crawled off to lick your wounds.”

  Vanessa was incensed. “It wasn’t like that at all,” she said, even as one part of her insisted that Janet was exactly right. Mostly in self-defense, she began to get angry. “In some ways, Janet, it serves you right. If you’d picked any other restaurant besides DeAngelo’s, this wouldn’t have happened!”

  Janet was quiet for a moment while Vanessa regretted having spoken so sharply.

  “I’m sorry,” they both said in unison. After that they laughed in chorus, and then cried.

  “What are your plans for the holidays?” Janet wanted to know when they’d each gotten a hold on themselves.
>
  “I’m going home to visit my grandparents,” Vanessa said.

  “After that?”

  “I’m due in San Francisco on January second.”

  “Do you have an apartment?”

  Vanessa glanced at the clock, stretching the telephone cord so that she could walk to the refrigerator and toss the package of red snapper inside. “No,” she answered. “The station is putting me up in a hotel until I can find something. Where are you calling from?”

  “Nick’s office,” Janet replied. “The party’s still in full swing—why don’t you come back?”

  Vanessa relived the encounter she’d had with Nick in the hallway and nearly doubled over from the pain the memory caused her. “I couldn’t,” she said.

  “What did you say to each other?” Janet wanted to know. “You sound like someone in Intensive Care, and I think Nick is out on a ledge even as we speak.”

  “What do we always say to each other?” Vanessa countered. She knew the question would confuse Janet, and that was exactly what she wanted. “Listen, my friend—Nick DeAngelo is old news, all right? I don’t want to talk about him anymore. Not tonight, at least.”

  Janet sighed heavily. “Okay,” she conceded. “But let me go on record as one who thinks some of your wires are stripped.”

  Vanessa smiled sadly, though there was no one there to see her. “Thank you for giving the party—I really appreciate it, even though I didn’t behave as if I did.”

  “I understand,” Janet said. And that was why she was such a good friend—Vanessa knew without a doubt that she really did. “Will we see you again before Christmas?”

  Vanessa promised not to leave Seattle without saying goodbye and hung up. She didn’t sleep well that night, but that was nothing new.

  In the morning she was up early. Dressed in jeans, sneakers and a flannel shirt, she was busy packing in the living room when Rodney startled her out of her skin by bursting into the room from the kitchen.

  He was dragging an enormous Christmas tree behind him.

  “You didn’t,” Vanessa said painfully, looking at the evidence. The lush scent filled the near-empty room.

  Rodney beamed. “Yes, Lady Scrooge, I did. You’re going to have a tree whether you like it or not!”