by Laura Moore
“Really, all I need is a dish towel or—”
“Nope.” Shaking her head, Anna backed up a step. “What we have here is a clear case of karma. Have fun, Quinn. He’s a keeper.”
—
The clock was ticking down and Quinn’s feet were dragging as if made of lead. When she went to collect her clutch and slip the scarf inside, she spotted Tess and Ward leaving the dance floor, hand in hand.
She wound her way past the tables to intercept them. After giving them each a hug, she asked, “Are you off?” Their flight to the Turks and Caicos left early in the morning.
“Soon, after we make the rounds.”
“Well, I get to say it first, then. Have a wonderful time, Mr. and Mrs. Knowles.” She hugged Tess again. “I’m going to miss you. This tall dude, not so much.”
A hand slipped about Quinn’s waist, and her breath caught in her throat as her heart flip-flopped. Unable to resist, she leaned against Ethan.
Ward nodded to him and stuck out a hand for Ethan to shake. “Take care of my little sister while I’m away. Take even better care of my horse.”
Quinn stuck her nose in the air. “Definitely will not miss you,” she said, but then spoiled the effect by launching herself at her brother and squeezing tight. “So happy for you, Ward,” she whispered.
“Love you, sis.”
Exchanging yet another hug and kiss with Tess, she let the newlyweds move off to speak to Tess’s uncle Frederico, who was talking to Mr. and Mrs. Vecchio. “They’ve got it, I know they do,” she murmured to Ethan.
“Got it?”
“The kind of love and commitment to see it through—both the bitter and the sweet that life will yield.”
His mouth brushed her temple. “I agree. Ready to blow this joint?”
She drew a breath. “Yes.”
“I THINK WE can now say with authority that Italians not only know how to eat, they also know how to party,” Ethan said.
“Big-time,” Quinn managed to say with hardly a tremor.
They were seated in the back of the town car that Quinn had reserved. He was holding her hand as they talked, his thumb doing a slow sweep like an erotic metronome across the inside of her palm. She was only grateful that he’d chosen to caress that spot and not the inside of her wrist, where he wouldn’t have been able to miss the hammering of her pulse.
She felt nauseous with nerves.
They’d reached the Brooklyn Bridge, and both fell silent, he presumably admiring the lights illuminating the bridge’s suspension cables and the view of lower Manhattan, the newly completed Freedom Tower soaring above the other buildings. She beheld the same stunning view but could only think, with a growing despair, I have to do it now, so he won’t see where we’re headed.
She withdrew her hand from his and opened her clutch. Her cold fingers touched silk. Pulling the folded square out, she spread it open on her lap and refolded it along the diagonal so the strip would fit around his head.
“What’s that you’ve got?” he asked.
“A blindfold for you.” How could her voice be so even when her heart was jumping inside her chest like a jackrabbit?
“Are you kidding?” Laughter mingled with confusion in his question.
“I don’t want you to see where I’m taking you until we’re there. Please, Ethan?”
His gaze searched her face in the shadowed interior. She kept her teasing smile in place. Finally he shrugged. “Sure. Okay.” He turned his head so she could wrap the silk strip over his eyes. “Damn it, Quinn, I hope you’re not taking me to a sex club. I don’t intend to share you with anyone.”
—
The door to the Brendel Gallery was locked, but when the livery car pulled up to the address, Quinn saw a figure of a woman framed in the pale light of the first-floor window, watching, waiting.
Ethan was by her side. From his alert stance she knew he was listening to the street sounds to determine where they were.
She wanted the scarf off his head as much as he.
She wanted this over with.
The door swung open while her finger was still pressed to the buzzer. With a nod for the tall woman with raven-black hair and dramatic eyes, she guided Ethan inside.
“Are we here? Can I take this damned thing off now?” he asked, clearly striving to retain his good humor—for her.
How quickly would her patience have evaporated had someone pulled this stunt on her? Even with him, the bitch in her would have emerged.
“Just a second,” she told him. “We’re almost there.”
The reception area was empty, the lights dimmed. Dara Brendel pointed toward the room beyond and motioned to follow her.
Quinn’s hand was on Ethan’s elbow. “This way,” she said, guiding him into the white-walled space lined with photographs. Bringing him into the center of the room, she lowered her hand, and saw him stiffen with anticipation. Silently she moved behind him, unknotted the scarf, and stepped back, her eyes on him.
His reaction came quickly, even as he was turning, taking in and recognizing his work—Quinn knew there were at least fifty of his photographs displayed on the walls. “What the hell?” His head jerked in surprise when he saw Dara. “Dara? What’s going on here?”
In answer, she rushed over to him and kissed his cheeks. “Oh, Ethan, it’s so good to see you. I’ve been a mess, so freaked out about your injuries. So horrible—”
“The pictures, Dara.”
“Your friend Quinn’s idea. Of course I agreed.” She stepped back and cast Quinn a quick smile before hurrying from the room. For a moment, the tap of her heels against the poured-cement floor sounded. Then the gallery was silent.
“Are you going to explain what this is about, Quinn? Why are you showing me my photographs?”
She heard the tension in his voice. He was holding on to his temper but barely, and only because he hadn’t yet fully grasped her motive for bringing him here.
“I’m not merely showing you your photographs. I’m showing you you, Ethan. You can’t deprive the world of your vision, of the things, beautiful and terrible, that you’ve seen. You have important, necessary work to do. You owe it to all the soldiers you knew in Afghanistan, and to the families and loved ones of those who died there. Your photographs and the book you make out of them will give every one of those people something no one else can, Ethan.”
While she spoke, his expression had shuttered, a default defense tactic. “I thought you understood why I can’t finish the project, why I can’t look at those photographs. I fucking helped get men killed.”
“No, you didn’t. You were doing your job, just as they were doing theirs. Now you need to finish your job.”
“Sorry.” His tone was flat. “I have another one in California. Your parents gave me a contract. I signed it.”
She’d dreaded that it might come to this. “Consider yourself fired.”
“What?” The word came out with the force of someone on the receiving end of a blow.
“I’m one of your bosses. I’m firing you,” she said through numb lips. “Once you’ve finished your project, I’d of course be willing to rehire you.”
“So generous of you.” His sarcasm lashed her. “You may have overlooked one minor fact. Even if I intended to do as you ask, my equipment is—”
“Upstairs, in Dara’s apartment. I brought the boxes over myself when you were out getting your suits. Your luggage is up there, too. The concierge packed the rest of your things. You can stay with Dara or Erin. She should be here in a few minutes.”
His expression had grown stone cold. She’d watched it turn hard and remote as he listened to her and began to understand the scope of what she’d done—all the calculations, planning, and deceptions that had brought them to this moment.
The words came out, escaping her in a doomed rush. “I love you.”
He looked at her. “God damn you, Quinn.”
ONE MONTH PASSED and then a second. By the third, Quinn had discovere
d the many stages of grief. They were labyrinthine, sometimes doubling back on each other, sometimes leading her to a dark and dismal place so far from where she wanted to be.
The first stage: shock, an icy cold blast that withered the small, foolish, and too fragile hope residing in a corner of her heart. The wish that Ethan, upon seeing the images he’d captured, the beauty and honesty that shone in them, would have spoken before she had to utter a word.
The reaction she’d dreamed of? A simple one. Perhaps a slow but heavy exhale signaling his epiphany. Surrounded by his extraordinary pictures, he’d realize how important it was to overcome his guilt and self-doubts. The power of the work he’d already created would give him the strength required to finish the military documentary. She’d even believed that he would recognize that the endeavor, painful as it surely would be, would ultimately provide the catharsis and healing he needed.
In that Disneyesque script, love never dimmed from his eyes. He even accepted the necessity of her going through his phone and contacting his former girlfriend and his editor behind his back, arranging for all his gear and his equipment to be express-shipped to New York, and having his clothes packed and delivered to Dara’s apartment. It was a stretch, but somehow she sort of, kind of, hoped that he’d accept her motive for not simply banishing him from the ranch but also kicking him out of their hotel suite.
As that incredible fantasy went, he’d then summon that half smile she adored and shake his head in rueful admiration at how carefully she’d orchestrated the details of her strategy while bluebirds sang and Thumper thumped.
How pathetic that when he’d acted as her rational self had predicted, it had crushed her. Like a sledgehammer smashing ice into fragments.
The worst moment came the second before he cursed her, when neither his face nor his expressive eyes reacted to her anguished declaration. He remained chillingly distant. Untouchable.
Her love hadn’t mattered to him.
On the heels of shock came agony, the next stage of grief to torment her. As she returned to her life at the ranch, mechanically going about her daily chores and activities, how many times did she torture herself, replaying those minutes in the gallery space? How many sleepless nights did she pass, tossing and then turning, as she composed alternative speeches, ones in which she’d coax and sweet-talk him into agreeing to open up his equipment cases, take out the rolls of film and memory cards, and begin the job of selecting the images that best represented the soldiers’ lives in Afghanistan?
The answer? Dozens upon dozens, until her brain was feverish, her stomach knotted.
But would any of those approaches have worked?
Of course not. It wasn’t in her nature to cajole; it wasn’t in Ethan’s to tolerate flattery. But if she’d even remotely believed that wheedling would sway him, she’d have dropped to her knees and pleaded until her voice was gone.
Could she have played the diplomat and reasoned with him? He had a father in the State Department who’d failed. He had an editor who was persistent and likely excellent at her job—Ethan wouldn’t have signed on to work with anyone less than top-notch on a project like this—and she, too, had failed to convince him to return to the project.
The only option remaining was to throw down the gauntlet and challenge him. And while she’d dreaded it, she also knew she might have to withdraw the offer her parents had made him: a job, but even more, a refuge.
Would that drastic step have been necessary if she’d been cleverer in her approach? Well, crap, she hadn’t been. And up until that evening she’d never felt less than an equal in matching wits with Ethan. Remembering some of their conversations, how they’d laughed together, how they’d gotten each other, made her heart bleed a little more.
Those memories most likely triggered the next stage: anger. Damn it, why couldn’t he text her if he couldn’t bring himself to speak to her? She only wanted to know that he was all right. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing.
Had nothing they shared and given each other—passion, tenderness, laughter—mattered? Had her betrayal erased all the positive?
Did he truly have no idea of how deeply she’d fallen in love? He must have. She’d gone from a man-awkward virgin to an enthusiastic sex partner in zero to sixty, Ferrari fast. No other man could have made her lose her inhibitions and give herself over to him so completely.
Did he really not know how much it hurt to be separated from him, not to turn and see his face and feel her heart leap?
He was too smart and sensitive a man to be unaware of the pain she was suffering, so her only recourse was either to bawl her eyes out or stretch her vocabulary, amassing new curses and insults to whisper as she mucked out the goat pen, hiss as she turned the earth in the vegetable garden, and mutter as she patted freshly tilled and composted earth around tiny seedlings.
She managed to resist venting too much around the animals, aware they would sense her emotions and grow agitated. Bowie was on edge as it was, often running to the window and looking out, scanning the world for a glimpse of that human who’d thrown the ball so well. But every once in a while Quinn succumbed to her fury. Shutting the study door, she would recite the curses du jour to Alfie. His head cocked, his eye beady, he picked them up with the ease of a polyglot.
She hardly noticed when her anger faded, replaced by a weird numbness, as if her body had received a massive dose of anesthesia. Smiling still felt foreign, but at least it didn’t resemble a rictus of pain. It meant, too, that she could hang out with her brothers and her friends without exhausting herself trying to pretend that she didn’t have a gaping hole in the center of her chest.
Numbness was a blessed relief. It provided her a kind of floaty, above-the-scene distance as well. The vantage point allowed her to remember a previously glimpsed truth. At Christmas, her mother had said that Quinn had a deep-seated need to rescue and heal broken creatures. But Quinn had understood what she was really saying. That with respect to Ethan, Quinn couldn’t let him become the human equivalent of Tucker or Una, two creatures forever handicapped by the suffering they had endured. Ethan had a chance to become close to whole again and live his live fully.
So she’d forced him to confront his obligation to the soldiers and their families—and perhaps even the world—to show these pictures of men at war. She’d done so knowing that if he finished the project, if he healed as she hoped he would, he’d in all likelihood return to his former existence, traveling the world, capturing its beauty, mystery, and ugliness. It was a life she couldn’t share. Her ties were here at Silver Creek and the animals in her care.
Forcing him to go was the hardest thing she’d ever done. It was also the most selfless and loving.
Sacrifice wasn’t something with which she was overly familiar. It might not have hurt quite so much if there had been one conversation between them where they wished each other well. But no closure was in the offing. Ethan didn’t want to talk. It was as simple as that. After what she’d done, Quinn couldn’t bring herself to initiate a conversation. Also simple. Heartbreakingly so.
Early April came and the world was filled with signs of renewal. Flowers bloomed, lambs bleated and gamboled, calves suckled and dozed in the sunshine, and two new foals, Flora and Zeus, raced each other in the pasture in short bursts before returning to their dams’ sides. In the goat pen, five gray and white kids tottered around and nosed everything in sight. Only Gertrude, who always did things according to her own schedule, had yet to kid. But her hindquarters had softened and she’d been pawing the dirt; she’d birth anytime now.
Growth and change were all around her. Impossible to remain in this benumbed state, no matter how much protection it afforded her. The moment had come to accept that what she and Ethan had was over.
It was time to focus on the positive. She knew that she would survive the heartache. She had work she loved. She had friends and a family who had been treating her as if she were made of spun glass these past few months, and it was time to put t
heir worry to rest. They deserved it. So did she.
This was the moment to start filling her heart with new things. While she would never experience a love like the one she’d known with Ethan, she refused to feel bitter or resentful any longer, not when there was so much life to be lived.
A sense of peace settled over her.
She knelt on the goat pen’s stomped-on dirt and let the kids’ tiny noses butt her sides and their cloven hooves press into her thighs as they scrambled over her, already determined to scale heights. And while she couldn’t prevent the pang of loss when she thought of how much Ethan would have enjoyed the sight of the baby goats, she believed a day would come when her memories of him would summon a smile of affection and gratitude.
A larger head butted hers, and she reached up to scratch Gertrude’s ears just the way she liked.
“Oh, Gertrude, I really need to get to that place, I do,” she whispered. “I’m better, honestly I am. But there are these moments when I’m so scared I’ll never feel as happy again as when I was with Ethan.”
“Gertrude doing okay, Quinn?” Reid asked from the other side of the enclosure.
Better than I am, she thought. Surreptitiously she wiped her eyes and then straightened, making sure she smiled. “I’m pretty sure she’s close to kidding. Her bag’s tight and her ligaments and rump have softened. She’s been pawing as well.”
“You need help getting her into the kidding pen?”
“I’d appreciate it. I didn’t want to do it alone in case Maybelle’s buckling tries to escape. Ten days old and he’s already a little devil. The lead’s hanging by the gate.”
After they’d led a swollen-bellied Gertrude into the straw-lined pen on the other side of the small barn, Quinn filled the water bucket and put some fresh hay in a feeder for her to nibble on. The nanny didn’t like being separated from her tribe. Fortunately, she was growing increasingly distracted by what was going on inside her body.
“It won’t be long now, sweetie,” Quinn told her.