A Bride For Saint Nick

by Carole Buck

  Tilting her head back, she stared up into the dark, deep-set eyes of a man she no longer recognized, but whom she nonetheless knew she knew.

  Intimately. Absolutely.

  In the same way that he knew her.

  Nicholas “Saint Nick” Marchand.

  John Gulliver.

  They were one, she realized, but they were not the same.

  Dots of light danced bizarrely across Leigh’s field of vision. She felt her body go cold. Then hot. Then cold again. He’d been hurt, she thought suddenly, her blurring gaze fixing on the puckered skin that marred John’s left temple. He’d been terribly hurt and in hideous pain, and she hadn’t been there to comfort him.

  She should have been. She would have been, had she been told the truth.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  “Because I fell in love with you six years ago.” The huskyrough response seemed to reach her across a great and perilous distance. “And I never fell out.”

  Her heart cartwheeled. She swayed.

  Love.

  He said he’d fallen in love with her.

  But who was he?

  And who was the “her” with whom he claimed he was still enamored?

  She wasn’t Suzanne Whitney anymore, she told herself painfully. She was Leigh McKay. Survivor. Businesswoman. Single moth—

  A name crashed into her consciousness like a comet, freighted with fear and a ferocious degree of maternal protectiveness.

  Andy.

  Oh, dear Lord.

  Andy.

  The dancing dots of light metastasized into great splotches of darkness.

  Leigh’s fingers went slack. The bread knife fell, clattering against the floor.

  A moment later, she fainted.

  John caught the only woman he’d ever loved as she sagged against him, then swung her up into his arms. Cursing the slip of the tongue that had unleashed such emotional havoc, he carried her out of the kitchen and into the living room. He laid her down on the sofa.

  She was frighteningly pale. Worried about the possibility of shock, he sought for her pulse in the same way he’d sought for their son’s on a wintry Monday afternoon less than two weeks ago. The beat-beat-beat he finally found and counted off was rapid but not irregular.

  Breathing a prayer of thanks, he brushed Leigh’s fair, tangled hair off her brow. Then he set about adjusting her fuzzy blue robe—drawing it closed, retying the belt. His responses throughout were rooted in compassion and concern, not carnality.

  The instant she began to stir, he backed away. His deliberate crowding of her in the kitchen notwithstanding, he knew-that Leigh needed space. The encounter to come would be difficult enough without beginning it under the pressure of enforced proximity.

  Tensely, he watched Leigh open her eyes. Her delicately veined lids fluttered up reluctantly, revealing eyes that were clouded with confusion. Her gaze wandered aimlessly around the room before finally meeting his.

  He saw…nothing.

  No hurt.

  No hostility.

  Certainly no happiness at the resurrection of her lover and the father of her only child.

  For a few awful moments, she didn’t seem to register his presence at all.

  And then, in the space of a single pulsating second, everything changed. Leigh’s expression went from unaware to overwhelmed. He could almost see the memories flooding back into her consciousness.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, forcing the words out of a tight, dry throat.

  She blinked several times, levering herself up into a sitting position. Her movements were awkward. “For what?”

  Where should he begin? he wondered wretchedly. The list of the mistakes he’d committed and the misjudgments he’d made was lengthy, indeed.

  “For all the lies,” he finally responded.

  Leigh shuddered. She crossed her arms in front of her as though trying to stay warm. “They told me you were dead,” she said in a small, shattered voice. “The police. The…men from the FBI. They t-told me.”

  “I know.” He hadn’t known when they’d told her, of course. But he’d found out later and assented to the conspiracy of silence, so that made him equally culpable.

  “They never said anything about John G-Gulliver.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “You wanted me to believe—”

  “No!” The word exploded out of him. John thrust his injured right hand through his hair, searching for an explanation. “I mean…God! I didn’t want it, Leigh. But in the endafter the accident—I decided it would be better to let you go on thinking that I was Nicholas Marchand and that he’d been killed.”

  Her sky-colored eyes filled with tears. Her lips trembled. “Better for whom?”

  The tone of the question stunned him. It wasn’t accusatory. Rather, it was replete with self-directed guilt. It sounded as though Leigh somehow felt that she was to blame for what had happened.

  John’s control broke. He crossed to the sofa and sat down, encircling Leigh in his arms. She resisted the contact for a moment, then yielded to it with a gut-wrenching sob.

  “Shh.” He stroked her, trying to absorb her anguish. Seeing her hurting under any circumstances would have been difficult to bear. Knowing that he was the cause of her pain was unadulterated hell. “Shh, sweetheart.”

  “You didn’t—t-trust me?” Leigh eventually asked, her voice partially muffled by his chest.

  His hands stilled. His heart missed a beat. Again, he got the incredible impression that she was blaming herself, not him, for what had gone so terribly wrong five and a half years ago.

  “In the beginning, when we—when Nick and Suzanne—met, I didn’t trust anybody,” he answered, his voice thick with emotion. “Including myself. It’s like that, under cover.” He paused, remembering the unrelenting pressure of the deception he had practiced for eighteen months. And then he saw a parallel that had never occurred to him before. It was not a pleasant notion to contemplate. He broached it carefully. “It’s…probably like that, being in the Witness Security Program, too.”

  A choky sound and a violent shiver seemed to confirm his assumption. After a few moments Leigh eased back and lifted her face toward his. Her cheeks were wet, her lashes spangled with tears. “Y-yes,” she replied with aching vulnerability. “Sometimes.”

  “Suzanne Whitney was so innocent,” he murmured, blotting the fragile skin beneath her eyes with the pads of his thumbs. He knew the observation probably sounded like a non sequitur, but it really wasn’t. “So…honest.”

  “You didn’t think she’d—” Leigh inhaled on a hiccupy breath, then cut to the heart of the matter “—lie for Nick Marchand if you told her the truth?”

  John hesitated, wondering if she was thinking about the fact that Suzanne Whitney had perjured herself on Saint Nick’s behalf in the wake of his putative death. A fragment of the pitch Drake Nordling had made in his hospital room came rushing back to him.

  She’s obviously got feelings for you, the older man had told him. Or maybe I should say, for Marchand. That comment I made about her being very cooperative doesn’t apply to the subject of Saint Nick. About him, she’s given us nothing. Nada. According to her, he was a perfect gentleman. A Boy Scout. If she found out…

  “I thought Suzanne might try,” he admitted with difficulty, tracking the exquisitely symmetrical shape of her face with his fingertips before lowering his hands. “But I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to pull it off. I didn’t want to put her at more risk than she already was.”

  “And after the accident? After the risk was over?”

  Again, John hesitated. Then, slowly, he began to relate the events that had prompted him to acquiesce in the fraud that had propelled her out of her old life and into a new one. He did not spare himself as he explained why he’d decided that the love he felt for Suzanne Whitney demanded he free her from the web of deception in which he’d entangled her. Nor did he shy from underscoring the ugly irony that the price of her liberation
had been yet another lie.

  It was only at the end that he sought to mitigate his actions. Taking a deep breath he concluded, “I had no idea you were pregnant, Leigh. I swear to heaven, I had no idea. Nordling never said a word.”

  A queer spasm of emotion contorted Leigh’s delicate features. John tightened his hold, fearing she was going to faint again.

  But she didn’t. Instead, she angled her chin up a notch and asserted with surprising steadiness, “He didn’t know.”

  He gaped, feeling like a man who had assumed he was operating on solid ground only to look down and discover there was nothing beneath his feet but air. “What?”

  “Drake Nordling didn’t know I was carrying a baby.” Leigh’s eyes held his for a second or two, then slid away. Her lashes flicked down, veiling an expression he couldn’t put a name to. “I didn’t know then, either. I was nearly three months along before I realized.”

  John needed a few moments to begin adjusting to the implications of what he’d just heard. When he thought he could trust his voice he asked, “You told him once you found out?”

  “I told the marshal who was handling my relocation. I…had to.”

  “Because there was no one else for you to turn to.”

  Leigh’s gaze came back to his. Once again, her eyes were bright with tears. His heart contracted as he forced himself to confront what it must have been like for her to confess to some hard-faced lawman that she was pregnant by a man she believed had been a criminal. He opened his mouth to beg for her forgiveness. She forestalled him with a question that stole his breath away.

  “What about you, John?” she demanded tremulously, the tears welling up over her lower lids and trickling down her cheeks. “Who did you have to turn to? You nearly died! All those months in the hospital. All those operations. You were…you were alone. You were suffering. And I n-never knew. I would have—Oh, God. If only you’d told me…”

  On the edge of weeping himself, John gathered Leigh against him once again. He caressed and cuddled her, nuzzling her silken hair with his lips and crooning sounds of comfort and caring.

  “I love you,” he said fervently, repeating the words over and over like a mantra. “I love you so much.”

  “J-John,” came the sobbing response. “Oh…J-John.”

  Eventually, Leigh cried herself out. She lay quiescent in his embrace for nearly a minute afterward, her head tucked beneath his chin, her warm breath fanning his skin in unsteady little puffs. He continued to stroke her, trying to communicate the message that she was safe with him and always would be. He would have been happy to hold her next to his heart forever. But when he felt her stir and start to pull away, he made no attempt to restrain her.

  “Why now?” she asked throatily, raising her gaze to his. “Why, after five and a half years of letting me think you were d-dead—if you honestly believed letting me go was the b-best thing to do—” She paused, biting her lower lip. Her eyes darted back and forth. “Was it—I mean, d-did you—did you find out about…Andy?”

  John thought he understood the anxiety he heard threading through her disjointed inquiry. Leigh plainly feared that his. profession of love for her was rooted in a desire to claim his son. Well, he couldn’t deny that he yearned to acknowledge his flesh and blood. But he’d come to Vermont for her and only her, and he would do whatever it took to convince her of that.

  “I ‘found out’ about Andy when you flung open the door of the examining room and snatched him away from me,” he declared.

  “Marcy-Anne Gregg hadn’t said anything about him?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Mr. Nordling—”

  “We don’t talk. We haven’t talked for a long, long time. I’m out of that life, Leigh. Completely. What you see now is exactly what you get. John Gulliver, independent entrepreneur. Scarred, but not keeping any secrets.”

  She stiffened at the last word. Again, he thought he understood.

  “How did you find me?” she questioned after a second or two, her voice tight.

  “Those photographs I told you Marcy-Anne Gregg sent to Lucy Falco and Lucy sent on to me? You were in one of them. I called Marcy-Anne not because she’s a valued customer but to find out where it had been taken.”

  “You hadn’t been looking for me…before?”

  John lifted his left hand and massaged his temple. His head was beginning to ache. “No,” he said honestly. “But I spent part of every single day of the last five and a half years wondering about you. About where you were. What you were doing. Who you were with. Whether you were happy. When I saw you in that picture—”

  “It was like seeing a ghost?”

  The suggestion shocked him. “No, sweetheart. Oh, no. Never. You were alive for me.”

  A delicate tinge of color washed through Leigh’s milk-pale cheeks. “You’ve been alive for me, too. My head kept saying you were dead. But sometimes my heart insisted you were still…That you couldn’t be…”

  “I understand.” He took her hands in his, thinking about the internal battle he’d been waging. Which side had emerged victorious from the fray, he wasn’t certain. He wasn’t even sure whether what had occurred could be called a victory. “Believe me. I understand.”

  There was a pause. Finally Leigh withdrew her hands from his and pressed the critical issue by asking, “Why didn’t you tell me who you were? If not that first day in the clinic, why not the next one when you came to visit?”

  John expelled a weary breath, the ache in his skull escalating to a painful throb. “I came to Vermont to satisfy myself that you were all right, Leigh. That you’d gotten over me. Over…Nick. I needed to be sure that the new life Nordling and the Justice Department had given you was working out. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t make any direct contact. I’d just look. One smile, I thought, and I’d know how you were.”

  “You think I’m that easy to read?” The anxiety he’d heard before was back in her voice.

  “No.” His response was quick and unconditional. “But Suzanne Whitney was.”

  “Oh.”

  He waited for a moment to see if she would say anything else. When it became clear that she had no intention of doing so, he went on.

  “Whether I would’ve been able to make myself steer clear of you if what happened at the preschool hadn’t happened, I don’t know. I doubt it. But once the connection was made—once I found out about Andy—everything changed. Still, there was no way I could say what needed to be said that first day. You were too upset to listen. And I was, too…God! I don’t know what I was. Then the next day when I came to visit, you seemed so damned skittish that I decided I had to back off and give you some time to get to know me.”

  “To learn to…trust…you.” Leigh’s inflection was odd. So, too, the expression in her lovely blue eyes.

  “Yes,” he concurred, feeling his mouth twist. “I wanted you to learn to trust me enough to believe me when I confessed to having been a consummate liar.”

  She studied him, seeming to ponder the perversity of the desire he’d just expressed. “And then what?”

  “And then, I don’t know. I can imagine Suzanne Whitney trusting. Believing. Forgiving. But Leigh McKay…”

  “I’ve changed that much in five and a half years?”

  Outwardly, no, John reflected. But inwardly, she’d been transformed. He scarcely knew how to define the differences he’d detected; much less how to explain how greatly they’d intensified the attraction he felt for her.

  “You don’t make me think of pale pink rosebuds anymore,” he said finally. “You might have been well beyond the age of consent six years ago, but you were still a girl. Now…you’re a woman.”

  “I’m also a mother.” There was a hint of challenge in the statement.

  “That, too.” John wondered if he would ever overcome the remorse he felt about the fact that she’d been forced to face maternity alone. He should have been there for her! For their son!

  Leigh lifted her chin,
her throat working. “About Andy—”

  “It’s all right,” he interrupted, pressing a fingertip to her mouth, silencing the fear he was sure she was about to voice. “I’m not going to say anything to him about who I am. I won’t…ever… say anything to him if that’s what you think would be best.”

  Her eyes widened with something that looked a lot like shock. John felt as though he’d been kicked in the stomach. Had she actually thought he would blurt out his claim of paternity in front of their little boy without consulting her? Didn’t she know him better than that?

  Perhaps she did, he told himself with pang a second later. Perhaps Leigh McKay knew him better than he knew himself. Considering the debacle he’d precipitated in the kitchen, why should she trust him to guard his tongue around Andy?

  Indeed, when all was said and done, why should she trust him at all?

  “John.”

  The soft invocation of his name was accompanied by a tender touch to his chest. His breath snagged at the contact, reaction sizzling through his nervous system. Bleak brown eyes collided with drowningly blue ones.

  “What?” he managed.

  “I believe you.”

  “You…believe…me?”

  “I know you’d never hurt Andy.”

  She meant it. He could see it. Feel it. He waited a moment, then asked very carefully, “Do you think I’d hurt you, Leigh?”

  “No.” She shook her head as though wanting to underscore the reply, her fair hair rippling about her face. “Not…intentionally.”

  Given all that had happened, John recognized that this was a greater expression of faith than he had any right to expect. But it was much, much less than he wanted. Still, the secret of their shared past was finally out. And while Leigh had retreated from him because of it, she hadn’t turned away. There was hope for the future. There had to be!

  Had she accepted what he’d told her about his stint as Nicholas Marchand? he asked himself. Did she have confidence in his account of his conversation with Drake Nordling? Or did she require more than his word about who had said what and why?