A Risk Worth Taking

by Zana Bell

  “Yeah, for my MCAT.”

  “Your what?”

  “It’s an exam that gets you into medical school. I’m taking it in a month.”

  Funny, how the dim light accentuated her features—large eyes, strong nose, wide mouth. She looked every bit as fierce and resolute as the Valkyrie she played. “A doctor? Of all professions, you want to be a doctor! I can’t believe it.” Her voice was rising, and she stared at him as though trying to read a different answer in his face. “It just doesn’t fit with the—” her hand made circles in the air “—the whole biker dude thing.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that, so he didn’t.

  “I feel so…misled, played. That’s it!” She drew herself up the SUV door, skewering him with a glare. “I feel played and deceived. You’ve been deceiving us all.”

  He shifted in his seat. If this was how someone he’d known only a few weeks was taking it, no way in hell would he tell his mother. “Now, don’t get all riled. It didn’t start like that. I never lied as such. I just left stuff out.”

  “Stuff?” she shrieked. Damn, he should have chosen a different word. “Stuff! All that mystery. I thought you were engaged in something secret, something big. Espionage, nefarious business deals—the white slave trade, maybe. And all the time you were studying to be a doctor.” She spit the word.

  He tried a joke. “You sound disappointed I’m not a master criminal.”

  Big mistake.

  “Don’t be bloody ridiculous,” she exclaimed. “It’s just that you seemed so supercool. I never thought your secret would be something as ordinary as becoming a doctor.”

  She made it sound like a swearword, and something snapped for him. “Grow up, Cressa,” he said. “Right from the start you’ve had me wrong. You made assumptions. You had all these fantasies. Well, tough if I don’t live up to them. This is me. This is who I am. A guy who has this dumb dream to be a doctor. Which is why I don’t have time for you and your games right at this minute. Why don’t you go live out your own fantasies, instead of foisting them on others.”

  “Oh, I so can’t just sit here and take this crap.” She flung open her door and jumped out. “You made a fool out of me.” And she slammed the door so hard the Jeep shook.

  He leaped out his side and intercepted her in front of the vehicle, catching her by the shoulders. “I never made a fool of you. You did that all on your own.”

  Realizing his fingers were digging in, he let go and stood back, but still his eyes nailed hers.

  “Is that so?” she hissed, advancing. “Excuse me, but are you going to deny your own little fantasies that first dance we had?”

  Her accusation stopped him short. She pressed home her advantage. “What about the night after the roof incident? Was that all in my imagination?”

  He stayed silent on the grounds that anything he said could incriminate. Her hands clamped her hips like a vise. “And today. What would have happened if you hadn’t vomited? Have I really been making everything up in my fevered imagination?”

  “Ah, shit. No, you haven’t.” He slumped against the SUV, its hood still hot under his hands. “There is something between us.”

  “Maybe if you’d been straight with me from the start, I wouldn’t have been so confused by your mixed messages. I’d have been spared the humiliation of pushing things, believing there might be something special to explore.”

  He lifted his hands. “Okay, yeah, you’re right. That’s why I told you tonight. I couldn’t stand it any longer that not saying anything had slipped into lying to you. Now you know.”

  “Yes,” she said gruffly, “I do.”

  “Can we get back in the Jeep now?”

  In silence they climbed in, but she hadn’t finished. She was a woman; of course she hadn’t. “I don’t get why wanting to go into medicine is such a big secret.”

  He tried to hold her unwavering gaze but looked away first. “It’s not a secret as such. I don’t broadcast it, but my friends know. Some of the people I work with know. The only ones I specifically haven’t told are my family.”

  Cressa slumped against her door. Her eyes hadn’t left his face. “Because…?” She drew out the word.

  “Look, I hardly ever see them. We mostly come together in crisis moments—my accident, Cole’s arrest and court case, Mom’s illness. There’s never been a good time to raise the subject. We aren’t exactly the Christmas and Thanksgiving sort of family.”

  “Given your mum’s cooking, I’m not surprised.”

  They both laughed and the tension between them lightened a little. Cressa was marginally less stern when she returned to her interrogation.

  “I still don’t get why you wouldn’t just tell us.”

  “‘Us’! That’s just it,” he said, aggrieved. “I’m in a foreign country. No one here gives a damn what I do, so before you happened along, ‘us’ was going to be just Mom and me. We may have a dysfunctional relationship in your opinion, but hey, it works. She’s getting better by the day and I don’t say anything that will upset her. But you appeared—” he stabbed a finger at her “—and disrupted those dynamics. You are so damn meddling.”

  She shoved his finger aside. “Nice try, Walker, but you can’t pin any of this on me. I came to stay with a perfectly nice, ordinary family, only to discover innocent questions cause skeletons to dance in their cupboards.”

  “A recovering alcoholic and her biker son are not your ordinary family,” he said dryly.

  “No, but you present like one. Although,” she went on more thoughtfully, “I doubt there are any ordinary families. Usually once you start getting into people’s lives, they are never as straightforward as they seem on the surface.”

  He wondered about her family. Five sisters, an ambitious mother, an actor father. What were the dynamics there? The big difference was that something held them together. They sure did talk a lot, what with all those phone calls. Maybe that was part of it. It certainly wasn’t just a question of love. Hell, he loved Mom, Sass and Cole. He’d loved Crystal and Stella. The Walkers just didn’t have the knack of togetherness. They’d all been trying more, though, these past six months. Maybe that’s what Sass and Mom had been working on here, learning to be family. Was that what Sass had been trying to tell him at the wedding?

  He became aware of Cressa watching him. “What?”

  “I was just thinking about you being the ‘biker son.’” She made quote marks in the air. “You’re buying into your own publicity. The more I get to know you, Adam, the more I realize you are not the person you show to the world. The skeletons don’t need to come out of the cupboard—you do.”

  “And thank you, Dr. Freud.”

  “Furthermore, I think you should tell Alicia.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to raise her hopes. She’ll be all excited and happy for me and then when—if—I fail, she’ll start blaming herself, and who knows what that would trigger.”

  Cressa pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Back up. Who says you’ll fail?”

  His eyes had grown accustomed to the blackness now and he could see her features more clearly—the glint of green in the dark depths of her eyes, the curve of her bottom lip, the line of her throat, all framed by the billowing cloud of hair she’d taken down once on dry land. Perhaps because he knew the opportunity would never come again, he almost couldn’t resist leaning forward and kissing her. But now that he’d started, he felt he had to make a full and frank confession. She had to know the truth about him.

  “Because, Cressa, that’s what I do. I fail.” He looked at her so she’d grasp that his words were for real. “I’m really good at failing. I fail at the most important things in life and it puts Mom through hell. She was upset when I dropped out of school. She got drunk at my wedding and cried with my divorce. She couldn’t visit me in the hospital without saying it was all her fault for not having been a better parent. And when Cole—” Adam shook his head. “I’m not risking putting her i
n a tailspin if I fail again.”

  “That’s crazy! That was all in the past.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “Would you like to put your mother through your wedding drama again? Could you look her in the eye a second time and say, ‘Oh, made a mistake again. Another wedding’s off.’”

  “That’s not the same because—” Cressa broke off. She gazed into the darkness, then turned back to him with a rueful grin. “You’re right. I’d walk over live coals rather than face Ma with something like that.”

  He wasn’t done. There was one final admission. “To be honest, it’s not just Mom. When my stunt went wrong, I crashed in front of a thousand people. I had to face our friends when Crystal took off. All that sympathy, that pity. That false cheeriness.” He shook his head at the memories. “Just this once, I’d prefer to fail in private.”

  Cressa’s eyes were steady on his face. “Oh, yeah, I remember that only too well. After the ba—the wedding fiasco,” she continued smoothly, “people not knowing whether to talk about it or not was a nightmare. I’d never have gotten through it if it hadn’t been for my family. Even Mum was supportive, though I knew how awful it was for her, especially being so sure I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life.”

  She straightened in her seat and switched on the ignition, the lights exploding the darkness. With a clash of gears and the roar of acceleration, she had the Jeep back on the road.

  “So, Adam,” she said, her tone conversational now, “to make things clear. You’d like me to back off and us both to ignore this attraction between us.”

  “Yeah, I can’t afford any distractions just—”

  “Say no more.” She threw him a bright, friendly smile. “Now that I understand what the hell is going on, I promise to leave you in peace for the rest of your stay.”

  It was what he’d wanted all along. He ought to have felt relieved. Instead he felt deflated. “Great. Thanks for understanding.”

  “But you have to admit—” she changed gears “—it might have been fantastic. We could have been fantastic.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CRESSA HAD MADE her promise in good faith. Now that she understood him, there was really nothing left to explore. A relationship might have been fun, but hey, there were always new and interesting guys, fresh adventures.

  She soon discovered, however, that the day’s sailing had shaken her philosophy of life, exacerbating her restlessness and causing her to rethink her values. Snatches of conversations reverberated in her head: “…being free and being lost can sometimes look the same.” “…under your wild-child act is a strong woman wanting to get out.” “…go live out your own fantasies.”

  Adam was pursuing his dream with a single-mindedness she couldn’t help admiring. It was one thing to let fate fill her sails, but perhaps it was time to take the tiller.

  Trawling the internet took some time, but the search came up gold. She sat back in her chair and stared at the screen in disbelief. There it was, the dream job. Crew wanted for a tall ship used for chartering. Fate seemed to be handing it to her on a platter. There remained, of course, the small problem of applications from around the world; they would be flying in. The job was a long shot. The longest shot. But what if she got it? Just imagining Adam’s expression when she told him brought a smile to her lips as she opened her résumé file.

  Adam. She was thinking of him again. Despite all her efforts not to, she’d given him quite a lot of thought. Now that her initial shock had worn off, she could see that his desire to be a doctor made sense. He had the focus and precision necessary for operations, and kept a cool head under pressure. He already worked life-and-death situations and he was certainly bossy enough to be a surgeon. And what better goal than to fix people?

  At least he’d finally been honest. She knew where she stood and that was great. Everything was out in the open, rules clearly defined. Life could go on as it had before Adam roared into her life. So this agitation that she woke up with was inexplicable, as was the disturbed night she’d spent. She was usually such a good sleeper.

  Monday she was due on the set, so she dropped from the top bunk as she did every morning and ambled down the dark hallway to the kitchen, where she put on the kettle. Usually she did her stretches while waiting for it to boil, but this morning she paced restlessly to the living room, where she leaned a shoulder on the French door, looking out.

  The harbor waters were motionless, a dark pewter under a sky freckled with stars, although dawn was not far off. Matariki—the Seven Sisters—stood out bright and bold. It had been there every morning, but normally she was too keen to get on with the day to stop and look. The stillness had an almost breathless quality to it, the beauty an aching loneliness that tugged at her. A memory of the dolphin flashed. How distant that euphoria now seemed. She gazed toward the sand spit at the far end of the bay. The fairy terns would be returning in spring, but she wouldn’t be here to greet them. The thought saddened her, which was silly, because she could come back anytime to visit over the summer.

  The strange, wafting emptiness followed her to work. On the way she spotted her first lamb of the season. In the long, low, early-morning sunshine it ran to its mother on wobbly legs, and the sight made her tearful, then cross. She needed to pull herself together. Once at work, everything would be fine. The other two Valkyries were always good at making her laugh.

  Sam and Bridget were oblivious to her odd mood, however, caught up in their own relationships.

  “Jeremy is such a romantic,” Bid sighed as they sat in makeup. “Over the weekend he took me away to an exclusive hideaway up at Russell. Chilled champagne was waiting for us in the room and the food was out of this world. I felt like a princess.”

  “Hank and I went skydiving,” said Sam. “It was incredible. Afterward—” she leered lasciviously “—the sex was triple X.”

  Bid looked pained. “Sam, don’t you ever feel anything but lust for a man?”

  “No, sweetie. I leave all the romantic sighing and crying to people like you.” Sam blinked as the false eyelashes were applied, and batted them several times at her reflection. “Life’s too short for all that he-said, she-said analysis of what in the end is just a case of what all animals do best. What did you do on the weekend, Cressa?”

  “We went sailing,” she mumbled as best she could while lipstick was applied.

  “Oh, yeah? Anything happen?”

  They both waited, but Cressa wasn’t in the mood for confidences. Her feelings fell somewhere between those of Bid and Sam, but for the life of her, she wasn’t quite sure where.

  “Adam threw up.”

  That got a laugh, but she knew she was being mean. The story of him at the top of the mast could easily be talked up. The revelation that he was a steelworker would impress. Then there was the small fact of his wanting to be a doctor. She could just imagine the storm of discussion that would spark. In many ways she could see where he was coming from. It would make people view him differently. Her mother, for instance. And failure would alter viewpoints yet again.

  People judged; that’s just what they did. Mind you, the Walkers didn’t pull their punches, either, when it came to analyzing her rather than sorting out their own problems. They were wrong, of course, about her life. She’d stared the alternative in the face and hadn’t wanted it. She’d chosen her path. Adam had chosen his. They just happened to be going in opposite directions. Which was fine. Hers was the fun route, she thought defiantly as she strode out of Makeup to do battle.

  Strenuous activity was just what she needed to snap herself out of her silliness, and that day she threw herself into the action, slicing and dicing her opponents with bloodcurdling yells. She kicked Dave, menacing with chains and a machete, hard in the gut. He folded with immaculate timing, his wire jerking him up in the air as though flung by the force of her blow. Packing a punch like that could go to a girl’s head. On cue, Mike ran up behind her and she skewered him with an underarm blow, then whirled a
round, felling him with a chop to the head before racing to rescue Sam from three assailants.

  She was breathing hard at the end when Dave walked over. “Crikey, Cressa. You nearly winded me with that kick.”

  “Yeah,” said Hank, rubbing his skull. “Watch it with those swords, okay?”

  “Okay.” She ought to be repentant, but somehow she wasn’t. She couldn’t wait for the next battle scene to begin.

  BE CAREFUL what you wish for.

  Adam tapped his pen on the blank sheet of paper in front of him. He was supposed to be writing an essay under timed conditions, but instead he found himself checking his watch. It was late afternoon; Cressa should be home soon. For the past half an hour he’d been listening for the sound of her engine. Not that he’d go out and talk to her or anything.

  The past three days, they hadn’t exchanged a word or look that could be interpreted in any other way but friendly consideration. But, he had discovered, for him this pact or standoff or whatever it was had come too late. Cressa was already lodged in his consciousness like a burr. When she was out the house, he waited for her to return. When she was home, he knew exactly where she was every minute, could picture what she was doing. Even when he was studying, he caught himself daydreaming like a schoolboy in the throes of his first crush.

  How wonderfully straightforward his carnal yearnings of their first meeting now seemed. He should have taken her to the trees then and there, Deirdre be damned, before everything became so complicated.

  We could have been fantastic.

  Now he’d never know, and that prospect ate him up. On the surface, Cressa seemed unaffected by their new understanding, though at night as he lay in his single bed, feet dangling over the end, he listened to her toss and turn on the creaking bunk. She came home physically exhausted, but went out again each evening, caught up in a new frenetic whirl of socializing. Looking for the next man already? The few times their paths crossed, she was bright and breezy. The only clues that all might not be perfect in Cressaland were some lines of tiredness in her face. Once or twice he thought he saw shadows in her eyes, but that was probably the effect of sun and cloud outside.