Handful of Dreams

by Heather Graham

  They hadn’t talked about Peter; they had never veered too far into the past. Susan had seen to it that they made love in the darkness because she hadn’t mentioned the most pertinent fact in their lives—that they were quite shortly to become parents.

  She winced; she just couldn’t do it. Not yet … not until she knew for certain that this was what she wanted it to be, the type of relationship that demanded marriage, and even more, the total commitment of the heart.

  With a soft sigh she closed her eyes and envisioned the past few days with wonder, then winced again. She was holding out. There were so many important things that she might have said to him. And yet she didn’t. This thing between them, this new relationship … this love … was so fragile. Susan trusted him; she wanted to trust in his feelings for her, and yet she was afraid. Always afraid that the truth would not be believed, that it might appear so convenient that it couldn’t possibly be believed. David had said he hadn’t wanted to talk about the past—and it had been easy to agree.

  And then there was that dread inside her that she might hurt him. She couldn’t talk about her hospice work; she didn’t dare. She wouldn’t tell David that Peter had known about the cancer claiming his life and had chosen not to involve the son who loved him so deeply….

  Magic. She closed her eyes tightly, aware deep inside of her that they just had to make the magic last. They had to grow together, gain strength together, if the truths were ever to be known. Especially that most pertinent truth: the child she carried. His child.

  Her fingers kept floundering across empty sheets, and she realized with a smile that David was already up. His watch was on the hotel nightstand, though, and she smiled again, thinking that it meant he hadn’t dressed yet. He had a habit of putting his watch on before his clothing.

  She picked it up, just like any lover who touched her beloved’s belongings as an extension of touching him. It was such a beautiful piece….

  Her heart pounded slowly, and she stopped winding the band around her fingers. Inadvertently she caught her lower lip between her teeth and drew a trickle of blood as she read the inscription: “To David, on Christmas. My love forever, Vickie.”

  A tempest of emotions raced through her, pain foremost. He might not have loved a woman in over a decade until he had met her, but he’d sure as hell had something hot and heavy going with Vickie Jameson! Christmas? When she’d been so lonely—and pregnant with his child.

  Rage pushed aside pain, and then the pain came back, and then an awareness that bordered on both panic and serenity.

  She’d never pretended that he hadn’t been having an affair with Vickie Jameson. She’d known it the moment she first saw the model. It had been an affair that had long preceded her own.

  And if he loved her, he would come to her. He would stay with her, eventually ask her to marry him. Love had to endure the test of time, and she only prayed that they had the time.

  She put his watch back where it had been, rose quickly, and ran into the bathroom with her clothing. She didn’t want to be scrutinized too closely by the morning’s light.

  David still wasn’t in the bedroom when she had finished showering and dressing. Frowning, she hurried out to the suite’s small parlor. He was wrapped in a towel, stalking around while he talked on the phone. He saw her, smiled a greeting, and kept talking. Susan assumed it had to be his office, but then she heard him say Jerry’s name and she frowned, wondering if it was Jerry from Maine with whom he was talking.

  He hung up quickly, threw his arms around her, and gave her a kiss, but when he released her, he appeared brooding and upset

  “Was that Jerry from Maine?” she asked.

  “Yeah. There was a message from him at the office. I called him. He just wanted to warn us both that Harry Bloggs’s trial is coming up in early February. They want us both to testify.”

  “Oh,” Susan murmured. David handed her a cup of coffee. She shook her head with confusion. “So why are you upset?”

  He sighed. “I have to get back to New York right away. There’s been an attempt by another house to hustle some stock, and I’ll be damned if I’ll wind up under someone else’s control.”

  “Of course you’ve got to go!” Susan said with forced cheer. No! she cried out inwardly. No … not yet. She wasn’t ready for the time to be over.

  “Susan, Jarod is on his way out—”

  “Oh, David! I’m an adult, I know how to get on an airplane! Why did you make him come when he has a brand-new baby?”

  “It’s only another couple of days.” David grinned ruefully. “It’s okay. He was with Tracy in the hospital and during those first few days. His mother-in-law is down now, so he’s eager to get out a bit.”

  “Truth?”

  “Truth.”

  He pulled her against him. Susan wished that he was dressed in something more than a towel. He started to kiss her, very deeply, his fingers moving against her throat and cheeks in a way she found horribly evocative.

  “David!” She broke away from him breathlessly. “If you’ve got to get out of here, don’t do that!”

  “I guess not,” he murmured regretfully. Still he hesitated. “Yeah.” He glanced at his wrist and realized that he wasn’t wearing his watch. “You’ve got a radio appointment in an hour and a half and I have to rush.”

  But he pulled her back to him one more time. “See you soon?”

  She tilted her head back and tried to give him a sultry smile without breaking into tears. “You know where I live.”

  David sat at his desk exactly two weeks later, flourishing his signature across the last of the documents that secured Lane Publishing from outside intervention. With the last of it, he shoved the document from him, leaned back with a smile, and planted his feet on his desk, definitely pleased. It had been a hectic time; he’d moved more money around than he knew he had. But it was over. He could fly out this afternoon and be with Susan that night.

  Maine. The beach house.

  “You know where I live.”

  Her whisper had stayed with him night and day, even haunting his dreams. Jarod had told him that the tour had finished as smoothly as it had begun. Sales figures were trickling in, and they’d hit a number of the best-seller lists already.

  He hadn’t called her. He’d been so busy, he’d barely gone home at night. And besides … a phone call wouldn’t have been right. Not now. He had to reach her….

  His buzzer was sounding. He punched the intercom button and picked up the receiver. “Erica, I am done!”

  “Oh, great,” she replied. “I’ll get a messenger up right away. You’ve got a call on fifty-four.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Erica!”

  “David! I think you should answer it. I think it’s a woman. It’s kind of a muffled voice. But she says it’s urgent and personal.”

  “Erica—never mind. I’ll take it.”

  He punched the extension button. “Yes?”

  “David Lane?”

  “Yes?” He was growing impatient; he wanted to get out of the office.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Lane, but you are a blind idiot! Solve your silly problems and go marry that woman before the baby is born without a father!”

  The phone went dead in his hands. He dropped the receiver as if it were on fire and clutched his temples between his hands. Idiot! Yes … How could he have failed to see it? She had changed, her breasts were fuller, and—oh, hell, he’d been so damned blind!

  Pregnant … a baby. Life. His child. He groaned softly, with pleasure, with pain, with incredulity. Remembering the night, the very first night, so long ago now that it seemed like another world, a fantasy played out of wind and storm and mist. He could remember so clearly how she had looked, so exquisitely beautiful, so beguiling that neither promises of heaven nor threats of hell could have veered him from his need to touch her. To love her.

  And from that night, that first night of both tempest and passion, the
re would be … life. Dear God in heaven! Why hadn’t she told him?

  The answer struck him slowly, slowly and painfully. Pregnant. For quite some time. Obviously for quite some time. Which meant … that it might be his—and might not. And he loved her so much that it didn’t even matter except—

  He didn’t even think about his father. She might have lived with Peter, she might have really loved him. David knew inside that she had never hurt Peter; he knew what Peter had known, the beauty that Peter had seen. Whatever her real feelings had been, she had never used Peter.

  It didn’t matter. None of it mattered except that he had to know—and that she hadn’t even come to him with the news! And, oh, God, it was just like another knife digging into him, only this one carved around his heart and into his soul, and he knew damned well that he just wasn’t going to be able to handle it well at all….

  Winter was having a heyday in northern Maine. Susan didn’t care. She needed to be outside. Outside where the wind rushed by her, where she could walk along the sand, see the pines, the water.

  She went outside every day and walked. It was good for her. And she prayed every day that he would come.

  He had to come to her. He had to….

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SUSAN SAW A RED Porsche parked in the driveway and her heart began to fly. David had come back to her.

  Her fingers were trembling; she clasped them together. She felt like laughing and crying, felt lighter than air. He was back! Their days together had not been a simple game, and his whispers of caring had been real. They had been apart a full two weeks, but he was back.

  Susan walked to the door and entered the beach house, trying to control her elation and hope. He was sitting in the parlor, staring into the blaze in the hearth. The fire danced warmly, snapped and crackled and hypnotized.

  David knew she was inside. He had heard the door but hadn’t turned.

  The urge to run to him died within Susan’s heart, and suddenly the fire didn’t seem warm at all; its crackle had become tension. She felt as if she had been struck, yet she had no idea why or from where the blow had come. She stood still, watching his dark head.

  He stood up, hands in his pockets, and sauntered slowly to the mantel. He kept staring into the flames, resting an elbow against the ledge, then turned at last to her.

  His eyes … she had always known they could look like that. Dark blue and hard and glittering in the fire’s glow … icy fire. His features were so tense. He appeared as firm as a rock and weary to death at the same time.

  Her heart seemed to soar, then to cease beating; she wanted to reach out to him, to cry out and demand to know what was wrong. How could they have parted so closely and come to this in a matter of days? She wanted to speak; she couldn’t. She just stared at him, stunned, lost, waiting.

  A slow, rueful smile curved his lips, a jeer against himself. And at last he spoke, so softly that the crackling fire almost eclipsed his words.

  “So that was it, Susan. I wondered why you became so gentle. Why you were suddenly so eager for my touch, for me. Eager to talk, eager to listen. But I fell in love, you see, so I didn’t want to question your motives.”

  He hesitated, his eyes falling to the flames again, then rising once more to hers as a pained, dry laughter came from him.

  “Well, Susan, am I expecting a son—or a brother?”

  It felt as if a hammer had slammed against her, robbing her of breath and power. She wanted to slap him, to tear into him with her nails like a savage, wounded hawk. But still she couldn’t move; she stared at him, feeling ill, unable to comprehend that he could believe what he was saying. After all this time, after all they had shared, he still didn’t understand.

  “It doesn’t really matter, of course,” he said flatly, drained of emotion. “You didn’t even have to undergo your charitable charade. I’ll marry you—I would have married you without it. I wouldn’t want my son or brother labeled a bastard for life with a blank space under ‘father’s name’ on a birth certificate. After all, one way or another, the child is a Lane.”

  She could move; at long last she could move. Her rage was a very cold thing, astoundingly under control, like the pain that ripped her apart but left her standing.

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “Your proposal was unique, but no. You don’t have to worry about a Lane being a bastard. I don’t know where you got your information, but it isn’t anything that should concern you. The last man I’d have raising an Anderson is an arrogant, judgmental bastard like you.”

  She turned around and slammed out of the beach house. Susan heard him shout her name furiously, but that was all she heard. The roar of the surf clogged her ears; the wind picked up, and her heart thundered as she ran. Her breath tore from her, and that, too, was loud. It was interspersed with laughter and sobs, and she had never felt closer to hysteria in her life, never felt more torn, more desperate to get away, to lick the wounds of a hurt beyond death.

  “Susan!”

  She heard him again but distantly, because she had already reached the high ground, the pines and boulders, and had never welcomed that sandy forest more. Twilight was coming, and it was a place that she knew, a place where she could hide in the darkness.

  Bits of snow clung to the trees and the ground. Susan paused, gasping for breath. He would follow her; him and his self-righteous determination to do the right thing. She leaned back against the trunk of a tree and sank slowly to the ground. She started to cry softly, but the air was so cold that it felt as if her teardrops turned to ice the moment they fell from her eyes. She looked up through the sheltering pines; darkness was coming, but so was a storm. He wouldn’t find her, not when the shadows protected her. Eventually she would have to go back. Or forward. She could probably reach Jud Richmond’s cottage before the storm broke if she hurried. She stood up and started walking.

  He called her name by instinct. David didn’t move right away; he felt numb and more confused and tormented than ever.

  What had he expected from her? It wasn’t what he had expected, it was what he wanted, longed for: Susan, hearing him, disputing him, running to him to tell him that she knew the child was his, that she loved him with all her heart, that…

  At last he moved, shaking himself severely. He knew her so well. She didn’t beg, she didn’t plead, and she had a pride that never quit. And with his own wounded pride and terrible fear he had attacked her with guns blazing. Why the hell hadn’t he managed things decently for once? Talked to her, held her, admitted that none of it mattered at all, that he loved her.

  Because, he answered himself, he loved her but hadn’t been able to trust her yet. Because it was still there, after all the years, the horrible feeling that love made a man vulnerable, that it bared his back to a thousand knives in a thousand different ways.

  He reached the door and called her name again, frantically. The phone began ringing, but David ignored it.

  “Susan!” He looked up at the sky and bit into his lip, unaware that he gouged it. Storm clouds were gathering, roiling and dark like the coming of the night.

  He had to find her. He loved her; if he wanted a chance for them at all, he had to find her. And he couldn’t fail her—or himself—this time. He had to find her, hold her with all the love and the strength that he could, and admit that he was afraid but that nothing else in the world mattered if she could only love him in return….

  The phone was still ringing. David stepped back into the foyer to grab his coat out of the closet. The phone was such a damned annoyance, he barely gave it a thought. She’d headed for the pines, and he had to find her before the storm broke.

  But right before he walked out the door, some sense of foreboding stopped him in his tracks. No sane person let a phone ring for that long unless they were desperate.

  David hurried into the library and answered the summons.

  It was Jerry, and he sounded surprised to hear David’s voice, but then he went
on—with relief. “David! Thank God you’re there! He’s out.”

  David shook his head in confusion. It sounded as if he were supposed to know what Jerry was talking about.

  “Who’s out? What are you talking about?”

  “Bloggs! Harry Bloggs! That psycho you caught at the beach house! Hell, how can you forget such a thing?”

  “I didn’t forget. I thought he was in jail—”

  “He was! But there were only two guards on duty; Bloggs slipped the key from one of them and locked him in the cell. He knocked out the sheriff. David—he was issuing all kinds of threats against you and Susan. Is she with you?”

  David looked down at his palm. It was soaking wet with sweat, but a chill of fear was making him shiver at the same time.

  “I’d better find her—fast!”

  “David! Wait!” Jerry yelled.

  “What?”

  “I think he’s already up there! Jud Richmond called in a short time ago. He was out in the woods and came back in to find his old dog, Sam, dead on the porch. His place was a mess, but only one thing had been stolen, his old sawed-off shotgun. David, listen to me, listen good, please!” Jerry begged. “The deputy’s trying to get some men through, but the storm has already started here. The road’s impassable. You’ve got to watch it like a hawk until they can get through! Be careful!”

  Jerry was screeching, almost as if he were in tears. David was shaking, shaking so badly that he wasn’t sure he could walk, much less use extreme caution. He had never been so frightened in his life.

  Got to find her, got to find her, got to find her…

  The words took hold. He raced up to his bedroom, found his revolver, and then he was racing into the pines.

  Jud’s house was dark. But he never locked his doors, so he’d just come home and find an unexpected guest. Susan frowned, berating herself furiously. The storm was about to break any second; she just hadn’t really given a damn because she’d been so upset. She paused in the clearing before the old log cabin, looked up at the sky, and suddenly realized that she cared very much. Rash, reckless emotion had made her leave the beach house knowing a storm was brewing, and she hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the baby.