Promises to Keep

by Susan Crandall

The fact was they barely knew one another. Still, he saw her brilliance, her insight, her humanity, and her love more clearly than he’d ever seen inside another human being. It was more than a little frightening. Could he trust it? With Nicholas involved, there was so much more at stake.

  “Why don’t you go to bed,” he suggested. “The baby will be up early.”

  Seemingly startled by his voice, she looked up at him with those smoky eyes and the urge to touch her was stronger than before.

  She gestured toward the large pile of unopened mail. “Are you working without sleep until this is done?”

  He got up and stood behind her chair. Massaging her shoulders, he said, “I don’t think we have a lot of time. That phone call . . . it probably wasn’t . . . still . . .”

  She stretched her neck and moaned softly. “I’ll work until it’s done. I’m used to going without sleep. I can nap when Nicholas does tomorrow.” She leaned her head back and looked up at him.

  He bent down and kissed her chin. “How about some coffee, then?”

  “Sure.” She started to get up, but he held her in place.

  “I know where the coffee is; keep reading.”

  A few minutes later, when he set a mug down beside her, she looked at him with serious eyes. “Do you get many of these?” She held up a single folded sheet of paper that looked like it came out of a TV crime drama. All of the wording had been cut out of publications and glued onto plain white copier paper. It threatened his life, cursing him for bringing his Western ways onto sacred Muslim soil, committing sins against Allah.

  He gave her a self-assured cocky grin in an effort to erase that look of disquiet in her eyes. “Sometimes there’s actually a rock attached and it’s hurled at my head. When they come through the mail they’re not nearly as dangerous.”

  He saw her shiver.

  “Why do you keep going back?” she asked.

  “Because it’s completely foreign to the Western world and everything that happens there affects us. If there’s ever to be any common ground, someone has to forge it. We need to understand them. And I’ve been there long enough that I can ask some of the right questions. So I stay.” As he said it, dread crept through his veins. Seeing Clifford die and leave children behind . . . Nicholas needed him. Everything had changed.

  He made a circuit of the house, checking out all of the windows before he sat down and went back to work. He pushed away the most important thing that had changed—his feelings for Molly. He couldn’t climb that mountain until he finished scaling this one. First and foremost, he had to keep her safe.

  Three hours later, he threw the last scrap of paper onto the “read” pile. “That’s it. Nothing.” He put his elbows on the table and ran his hands through his hair.

  Molly said, “You really thought she would have sent you evidence, something that pointed to the man who killed her and why?”

  He couldn’t believe she’d just asked that. “Of course. Why else would we have spent most of the night doing this?”

  “Because it’s better than doing nothing?”

  “This is too serious to be wasting time.”

  “I know it’s serious. Julie knew it was serious. That’s why I didn’t think you would find anything in there.”

  “But if she knew this guy was bad—evil, as she said—I have to think she would have done something. It’s not like her to not cover all the bases.”

  “Dean,” Molly looked in his eyes. “She didn’t tell you she was pregnant. She didn’t send you evidence, just like she didn’t send evidence to the police or the federal government. She told me what she was going to do would allow her and Nicholas to start over safe. She knew that if she left a trail for someone else to follow if she was killed, the father would find out about the baby.” She paused and took his hand. “Julie was going to deliver her evidence to the authorities in person or not at all. And remember, she was careful to do it without Nicholas. None of what she did was accidental, or unplanned— including befriending me. She had one goal and only one: to protect her child.

  “If she failed, she wanted this to die with her. She wanted it to end. She did everything she could to insure that. She would not risk Nicholas, not even to punish the man who killed her.”

  Dean wanted to tell Molly she was wrong. Julie’s sense of justice, of right and wrong, had always been strong.

  Then a little voice deep inside, one that had been fed by watching Molly with Nicholas, by seeing the sacrifices she herself had made for a child she hadn’t given birth to, grew in intensity until it shouted: Nothing mattered more to Julie than her child—not justice or conscience or ethics. He realized that a mother’s fierce protectiveness had, up until now, been as foreign to him as Islamic culture had once been.

  He squeezed Molly’s hand. Looking into her gray eyes, he saw the same ferocious drive to protect Nicholas. Molly could be angry, bitter that his sister had used her in this way, that Julie had set upon her a life she did not have a hand in choosing. But there was none of that in Molly’s eyes. All he saw there was love.

  Why hadn’t he seen this before he set these wheels in motion? Now there was a killer as determined to protect himself as Julie had been to protect Nicholas. If he’d listened to Molly, maybe the baby would have remained undetected and things could have moved along as his sister had planned.

  Too late now. Now he had to see this through to the end. He had to eliminate this threat, and keep Molly and Nicholas safe in the process.

  As if she read his mind, she said, “Can you call off your investigator? Maybe if we stop looking for the father, he’ll realize we’ve given up.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “It’s too late. He thinks Julie hid evidence. He won’t stop. It’s just a matter of time before he connects the dots and realizes you have Julie’s baby—he’ll assume, as I did, that the evidence could be with you, too.”

  Molly sighed, sounding as tired as he felt. “Let’s get some sleep,” she said.

  Sleep seemed as impossible as turning back time. But he could see she was exhausted, so he said, “Good idea. I’ll just crash in the living room.”

  Still holding his hand, she rose. “Don’t be ridiculous. Come to bed with me.”

  He stood and wrapped her in his arms. He held her tightly for a long while. He shouldn’t do it. He was going to hurt her; sleeping with her knowing that seemed unconscionable. But when she stepped away and said, “Come on,” his will deserted him. All he wanted to do was hold her next to him, feel the silk of her skin against his, breathe in her exhaled breath.

  Exhaustion precluded a long, languorous undressing. Instead they both stripped off their clothes and slid under the sheets from opposite sides of the bed. When they came together, it was with passion fueled by high emotion, fear and loss mingled with desire and devotion. The fact that danger could be lurking outside their door heightened every sensation, made each touch brilliant with meaning.

  At the moment their bodies joined, Dean looked into her eyes and saw that he was home. For the first time in years, complete peace flowed over him. And the most amazing thing was that he saw the same emotions reflected from her own gaze.

  He held her close long after she’d fallen asleep. It seemed impossible that fate, as cruel as it had been to his sister, could deliver this woman to him by the same tragedy. And now he had to prevent that tragedy from compounding itself. Tomorrow, he’d contact the authorities and try to come up with a plan to take Stephen VanGraff out of the picture. He didn’t know where else to turn. He ignored the reporter’s logic that told him if they had enough evidence to get VanGraff, they’d have him by now. And, at this point, Dean had nothing new to add to their arsenal.

  At some point Dean must have dozed, because the scraping on the outside wall of the house brought him straight up in bed. He listened intently.

  Molly roused next to him. “What?” she whispered.

  “Shh.”

  It sounded again.

  “There’s a tree
that scrapes on the house when it’s windy,” she said sleepily.

  Dean got up and moved the curtain aside to look out the window. The wind had picked up, bending tree branches that looked like an audience of gray skeletal fingers applauding against the pre-dawn sky. Still he wasn’t satisfied until he went through the house, checking the locks and peering out each window.

  When he returned to the bedroom, Molly was sound asleep, but Nicholas was beginning to make those tiny noises Dean had grown to recognize as precursors to waking.

  He slipped on his clothes, then picked up a fresh diaper and the baby before Molly awakened. With Nicholas in the crook of one arm, he set a bottle to warm. Then he changed the diaper quickly, before Nicholas could get himself worked into a real cry.

  As he sat feeding the baby, barefooted in the gray of early morning, he listened to the increasing wind. To Nicholas he said, “Well, little guy. You and I have a real problem. What are we going to do about your mommy?”

  Looking into those tiny blue eyes, watching the little fists clutch in front of Nicholas’s chest as he took the bottle, Dean realized there was only one answer to that question.

  As soon as Dean finished feeding the baby, he set him in his pumpkin seat and made a call to Harry. They had to contact the feds. If nothing else, perhaps they could put an alert out for VanGraff’s known contacts and look for anyone flying to Indianapolis or Louisville. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

  Harry’s voice sounded groggy when he answered.

  “You think I’m paying you to lie in bed all morning?” Dean said.

  Harry groaned. “What time is it?”

  “It’s eight where you are.”

  With a deep breath, Harry said, “Well, that means thanks to your stinkin’ case, I’ve been asleep a grand total of fifty-six minutes.”

  “What’s going on?” Even as he asked, his skin prickled with anticipation.

  Dean listened with disbelief as Harry told the tale of his night. When he finished the call, he picked up the baby and carried him back into the bedroom. He put the child between himself and Molly in the bed. He wasn’t in the least worried about falling asleep and suffocating the baby—not after what Harry had told him.

  Even though he tried to be quiet and careful not to jostle the bed too much, Molly’s eyes came open. She smiled sleepily at him, then inched closer to the baby. When she held Nicholas’s impossibly tiny hand between her thumb and forefinger and kissed it, Dean’s heart nearly stopped beating. There was going to be no more excuse for delay. Everything was about to change—again.

  When Molly’s eyes fully focused, she saw something on Dean’s face that made her skin crawl with apprehension. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just spoke to Harry. Seems the CIA rousted him in the night, asking what he had on VanGraff, accusing him of upsetting the delicate balance of their investigation.”

  “That should be good, right? They’re keeping an eye on VanGraff.”

  “It seems that the CIA weren’t the only players on the move last night. VanGraff left a nightclub around three A.M. and someone shot him as he was getting into his limo.”

  “Dead?” It was almost too much to hope for.

  “Dead. CIA’s pissed. VanGraff is just a link in a chain to them; they wanted the whole chain. They think he was killed because they were getting so near to springing their trap. Harry’s digging around made his ‘associates’ additionally nervous. They didn’t trust VanGraff not to turn on them once in custody.”

  “No honor among thieves,” she said quietly.

  “Very much like that.”

  “Why are you so unhappy?” This had been the answer to her prayer. Nicholas was safe forever and Dean didn’t risk his own life getting it done. What more could he want?

  “I’m not.” He leaned across the baby and kissed her. “Try to go back to sleep.”

  She rolled onto her back and stretched. “I can’t. I promised Lily I’d come to brunch at her house this morning. She says she’s worried Dad and I won’t get completely made up on our own. But I think it’s really because she wants someone more scandalous than herself there when she tells Dad that Clay is Riley’s father.”

  As she started to get out of bed, he grabbed her hand. “Wait.”

  She lay back against her pillow with her heart hammering. She knew there was more that he’d been holding back. With great effort, she looked him in the eye.

  He appeared uncomfortable, yet held her gaze. “You’ve been a wonderful mother to Nicholas. I don’t want to hurt you—”

  “Stop!” She raised her hand in the air between them. “I don’t want to hear it—not yet. Please, give me that.” Without waiting for any kind of response, she got up and went into the shower where she cried for a solid thirty minutes.

  Molly was surprised when Dean asked if he could go to Lily’s with her. She allowed herself this one weakness. At least when she told her family of her great big lie she’d have Dean there with her. Maybe he could shed a noble light on it in her father’s eyes. Surely Dean would do that for her.

  When they arrived at Lily’s farm, Dean made a point of carrying Nicholas inside. It rankled, as if he was staking his territory, but she decided she’d better get used to it. She’d come to the conclusion that she would not beg to keep the baby; it would be pointless and might just cause Dean to alienate her altogether. He felt strongly about family—and Nicholas was all he had. But she wasn’t going down without a fight to remain in the child’s life. So she put a smile on her face and followed him up the front porch steps.

  Lily let them in and snatched Nicholas for some baby kisses, while Dean apologized for barging in on their family meal.

  Lily dismissed his apology and graciously welcomed him.

  When they entered the big kitchen at the rear of the house, Dean made all of the appropriate noises of appreciation and said, “Something smells good.”

  “Help yourself to coffee. Everything will be ready in a minute.” Lily handed Nicholas back to Dean and started pulling things out of the refrigerator.

  Benny was in the overstuffed chair beside the fireplace and Faye was perched on the hearth. With her red hair, she reminded Molly of a parrot hovering near her burly pirate.

  Molly introduced Dean, unnecessarily as it turned out, to Faye and then kissed her dad on the cheek. “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hi, baby.” He still looked a little edgy, so she moved away from him and helped Lily shuttle food to the dining room table.

  As they sat down to brunch, a quality that reminded Molly of static electricity buildup hung in the air. While they ate, everyone was careful to avoid the topic of Riley’s disappearance. But when Lily served dessert, their dad said, “So young man, you gave everyone quite an upset the other night.”

  Riley cast a quick glance first at Lily, then Clay. “Yes, sir.”

  Benny said, “That’s all you have to say? That little girl broke her leg. Your mother was frantic. And poor Faye didn’t sleep a wink until she knew you were safe.”

  For a moment, Molly thought Lily was going to let Riley go it alone. She was just about to speak up herself, when Lily said, “Dad, Riley had a very good reason to need to spend time alone. But when Mickey hurt her leg, he did the right thing and stayed with her until daylight.” She swallowed dryly.

  Clay reached over and held her hand. He then looked his father-in-law in the eye and said, “Benny, the reason Riley was so upset is that Lily and I had just told him that I’m his father.”

  Molly watched her dad’s brown eyes cut quickly from one of them to the other. She held her breath. Poor Dad, this was going to be a day filled with shockers.

  Benny said, “Well.” He cleared his throat. “This is certainly a surprise.” Then he looked at Riley. “I understand you were upset. But running away is no way to handle something like this. It did nothing but put your mother in a state and cause that little girl to get hurt.”

  Molly nearly blurted out that at least his reactio
n got things aired out better than just shutting the door on someone. But this wasn’t about her and her dad, it was about Riley and Lily.

  “I know, Gramps. I’m sorry I worried everyone.”

  Wow, no excuses? No blaming Lily and Clay? Now it was Molly’s turn to absorb her surprise. Riley had become a man before her eyes and she hadn’t noticed until now.

  Lily tearfully explained how she ended up married to Peter and Benny listened in tight-lipped silence.

  When she was finished, Benny remained still, his expression unreadable.

  Molly knew this was particularly difficult for him to swallow. Their dad had raised them on two basic principles: truth and responsibility. Any transgression in these areas was serious trouble. Most all other sins could be eventually pardoned. Molly always suspected he felt so strongly about this because of their mother—who in the end was neither truthful nor responsible.

  Now, in one afternoon, the poor guy was going to discover both of his daughters had lied to him.

  She tried to relax while Lily’s revelation soaked in before she admitted her own duplicity. Somehow, she thought, all of the good intentions in the world were not going to make a difference here today.

  “Well, now, see how things had a way of working out.” Faye spoke up, apparently trying to soften Dad’s lack of response. “The three of you are together, just like you should be.”

  Molly knew this must have been for Riley’s benefit, because Faye never went out of her way to make things easier for Lily. Theirs had been a battle of wills from the start; three years ago they had squared off at odds over what was best for Benny. Molly knew her dad would never be swayed by anyone to do something he didn’t want to do, so she didn’t understand the purpose of the whole conflict. Their truce was always tenuous at best.

  Clay said, “Riley, if you’d like to be excused, you may.”

  Riley looked grateful and left the table.

  For that, Molly was grateful. She hated to deliver her bombshell in front of him, especially since she wasn’t sure she’d hold up under her father’s reproach as admirably as Riley had. Her weakness wouldn’t be triggered because she was afraid of her father, but because once the fact that Nicholas wasn’t really hers was out there, it would become reality. Just looking across the table at Riley made her long for the boy that Nicholas would someday grow to be. Already a lump was gathering in her throat. Would she be able to get the words out at all?