SEALed With A Kiss: Heroes With Heart

by Low, Gennita

  An aching silence fell between them. Vinny kept his back to her. She watched his shoulders rise and fall as he fought to bring his emotions under control.

  “I swear, Vinny,” Ophelia said, in a last-ditch effort to elicit his understanding, “if I’d known what Rawlings would do to me, I would never have taken chances with our baby.”

  He turned his head at her assertion. But the look in his eyes wasn’t even one that she recognized. He looked at her as if he’d never seen before—or like he was seeing for the first time who she really was. The look encased her heart in ice.

  He had finally realized what she’d known all along—that she did not deserve him. That she wasn’t the woman he thought she was.

  “What else do you swear to?” he demanded, turning to face her, his hands curled into fists by his side. “That you never once considered aborting our baby? Is that why you didn’t tell me you were pregnant?”

  She longed to deny the accusation immediately, but the memory of considering abortion even for a fraction of a second kept her mute.

  “I gotta get out of here,” he declared, snatching his jacket off the back of the chair, “before I say something I’ll regret.” With fingers that shook, he jammed his arms through the sleeves as he walked to the door. Feeling lower than a worm crawling deep down in the earth, Ophelia could only watch him walk away.

  As he reached for the latch, someone knocked.

  With a scowl Vinny snatched the door open.

  “Is she sleeping?” asked a familiar voice.

  He held the door wordlessly ajar.

  Stunned by the remote look on Vinny’s face, Ophelia scarcely noticed her sister, Penny, peering around the door. With a dismissive look that made Ophelia’s veins shrink, he slipped past Penny without another word.

  “Hey.” Penny divided a curious look between them as her son Ryan tugged her into the room. “Sorry it took so long for us to get here,” she apologized. “Our flight was delayed.” She sidled up to the bed, dismay registering on her pleasant face as she looked her sister over. “Oh, honey, you look awful.” Blue-green eyes took stock of the cuts on Ophelia’s face.

  “I feel awful,” Ophelia managed to whisper past the huge lump in her throat. Her gaze trekked to the little blond head standing at the height of her bed, near her elbow. Ryan peered up at her through rounded, worried eyes. “Hi, buddy,” she crooned, sitting up straighter so as not to alarm him further, and willed herself not to cry in front of him. “Why don’t you come sit up here?” She patted the space beside her hip, prompting Penny to lift him onto the mattress. “Fifi needs a hug,” she added, using the name he’d bestowed on her.

  As naturally compassionate as his mother, Ryan leaned into Ophelia, wrapped his sturdy little arms around her, and squeezed her hard. With her nose buried in his bright hair, it occurred to Ophelia that she would never get to cuddle her own baby like this. She’d failed to protect the little life the way she should have. Her face crumpled with misery.

  “You hurt, Fifi?” Ryan asked, running a gentle hand over the bandage that encased her wrist as he peered up at her.

  She tried once more to hide her tears from him and failed. “I’m hurt,” she admitted in a voice thick with grief.

  But it wasn’t Rawlings whom she blamed; it was herself. She’d asked for every ounce of the misery filling her heart. She didn’t deserve her loving husband. She didn’t deserve a happy marriage. Not even the loss of her baby was punishment enough. It was about time she owned up to what a selfish, shallow creature she was. Time she showed some accountability for her actions. Just how she would accomplish such a feat, she didn’t know, but it needed to be done. It was time to make some serious atonement.

  *

  Vinny slanted his wife a worried look. Seated next to him in the passenger seat of her reclaimed Kia Soul, she’d spoken scarcely more than a word since checking out of the hospital that morning. He’d brought her by his mama’s house so she could say good-bye to his mother and sister, both of whom had been nearly as subdued as Lia. And now they were an hour outside of Philadelphia with hours to go before they reached Virginia Beach. He’d hoped putting distance between her and the man who’d nearly had her killed would bring some color back into her waxen cheeks, a little of that devil-may-care sparkle back to her lackluster eyes. But she remained silent and subdued, almost…penitent, if such a word could be used to describe her.

  “You warm enough, cara mia?” The slate colored clouds were starting to dust I-95 with shimmering snowflakes. He had set the heat on high, but Lia still looked like she was freezing. She sat there hugging her injured arm like a bird with a broken wing, suppressing visible shudders. Was it the shock of having nearly been murdered or his harsh words that were eating at her?

  “I’m fine.” She stared unseeing at the road before them.

  If Rawlings was the problem, maybe she only needed reassurance that he would be brought to justice—and soon. “I told you the latest update from Sergeant Presti, didn’t I?” he asked, recalling that he had, but maybe she hadn’t heard him.

  “About the chauffeur?” she replied, proving as astute as ever. “Yeah, you told me.”

  Rawlings’ driver, questioned by the police in relation to Lia’s abduction and reappearance, had bolstered their case by rendering statements that implicated his employer. More than that, Lia’s abductor, arrested for car theft, had stowed a Glock in his own car that was linked to the bullet that had killed John Staskiewicz. Finding himself facing murder charges, the kidnapper had fingered Collum as the man who’d hired him to abduct Lia. Phone calls between Collum and Rawlings, retrieved by the FBI, had sealed the lieutenant governor’s fate. The man was being held without bond.

  “Rawlings isn’t going to get away with what he’s done, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “It’s not. Actually,” she said, in a distant voice that did little to reassure him, “I could care less about Rawlings.”

  In that case, it had to be his behavior yesterday that had made her erect an invisible wall between them. “Look, I know we’ve got some stuff to talk about. Finding out that I was a father and I didn’t even know it until the baby was gone—that was a mind fuck. I just don’t understand why my wife—my most trusted friend—would keep something like that from me. I’m sorry if I snapped, okay? I’m just a little on the defensive here.”

  To his astonishment, Lia socked him in the shoulder. “Don’t do that!” she railed.

  “Do what? What’d I do now?”

  “You’re apologizing! Why the hell are you apologizing when I’m the one who screwed up? I deserved every ounce of your anger and every harsh word you had to say to me.”

  “Baby, don’t do this—”

  “No, I have to. Right now I hate myself, and I’ve decided to move out for a while,” she added.

  What? The words were so unexpected that the steering wheel wobbled in his grip. “What do you mean ‘move out’?” he asked, panic spiking his pulse.

  “I just…I need some time alone, away from…us.”

  Us? He had to tear his horrified gaze off her profile to keep from crashing into the guardrail. Stabbing on the hazard lights, he swung her Kia off the highway and into the breakdown lane, where he turned in his seat to reason with her. “I don’t understand. You gotta know I love you, no matter what.”

  “I know that.” She turned her head to look at him. “But right now I don’t love myself. I kept you in the dark when I shouldn’t have. Because of my selfishness, I got our baby killed—”

  “Lia.”

  “Let me talk. I don’t deserve you, Vinny. I never have.”

  “Don’t say that,” he begged, his heart thudding with dread that she really meant what she was saying. “Of course you deserve me. That’s bullshit.” He tried groping for her hand, but she pulled it away and hugged herself harder.

  “It’s not bullshit. It’s the truth.” She turned her face away from him to stare into the trees beside the highway. “I’m
going to move in with my sister for a while,” she said dully.

  “How can you say that?” Vinny demanded. “When Rawlings took you away from me, I couldn’t even breathe, Lia. Don’t you understand? I can’t imagine my life without you. I don’t even want to.”

  “You’ll be better off,” she insisted.

  Taking in her stoic demeanor, he realized she was serious.

  “Sweetheart, we can work this out,” he told her. “We’ve always worked things out.”

  Her solemn expression offered him no hope. “Not this time,” she said simply.

  Shocked into silence, Vinny turned his attention to the cars tearing past them. They had four more hours on the road before they got home. Something told him that four hours wouldn’t be enough time in which to change Lia’s mind—probably not even four days or even a week. They’d come upon a huge, unforeseeable knot in their bond as husband and wife, one that made him quail for how convoluted and complicated it appeared.

  Being a SEAL, his first impulse was to tackle the problem head-on, to unravel the knot, and smooth things out between them. But his gut whispered that this problem wasn’t something he could fix. Only Lia, given time to heal and the space to remember how much they meant to each other, could untangle the knot from her end. All he could do was relinquish her in the hopes that she would realize they were better together than apart.

  With his heart sinking like a stone, he merged back into traffic resigned to the fact that, for an unknown length of time, he was going to have to go through life without Lia right beside him.

  Chapter Eight

  ‡

  “Dat’s a licorice card,” Ryan stated, pointing a pudgy finger at the spot where Ophelia’s gingerbread man was about to land. “You have to skip a turn.”

  “Are you sure?” Ophelia reached for the licorice card and turned it over. “Huh, you have the cards memorized,” she marveled.

  He had trounced her at a memory game earlier that day, and she didn’t even know how he played those games on his Nintendo DS. At only three years of age, Ryan’s situational awareness reminded her of Vinny. “I bet you have a photographic memory, too,” she wagered, realizing now why she constantly lost to a three year old. “You’re cheating,” she added under her breath.

  Ryan looked up sharply from the board that lay on the living room floor between them. “I not cheatin’!” he said, his little eyes ablaze with indignation.

  “No, of course not,” she soothed, cursing her quick tongue. “That’s not what I meant, honey. It’s just that your eyes take pictures and your head stores them, so you never forget anything you see.”

  Duh. The look on Ryan’s face conveyed plainly that this was obvious. He probably thought it was the same for everyone. Ophelia snorted at his expression. Nothing amused her more than the looks on Ryan’s face. They made her wonder if her own baby would have been so amusing, so precocious, so damn smart. Of course he—or she—would have. Any child of Vinny’s was bound to be a prodigy.

  For the fifth time that day, she caught herself reaching for her cell phone. Don’t call him. She was the one who’d insisted that they live apart. She’d refused to be the thorn in his side, the weak link in their marriage, any longer. She had walked out of their life together because he was better off without her. Calling and talking to him like they were friends would be counter-productive.

  Except that she missed him so much that she physically ached for him. She dreamed about him every night. She ate like a bird, with little appetite to speak of and had timed how frequently she thought about him—every three minutes, or less. All that had been going on for four weeks now.

  She wanted so badly to tell him about the steps she was taking to improve herself. Even with her wrist still healing, she went to fitness classes three times a week and to church with Penny and Joe every Sunday. She had volunteered with Penny at the homeless shelter for veterans. She’d cut back on her hours at work in order to look after Ryan so Penny could save on daycare. It was the least she could do since Penny and Joe had taken her in on a moment’s notice. Best of all, she’d discovered that she wasn’t such an awful role model, after all. Even Joe had said she had a special way with little kids—though come to think of it, that might have been Joe’s idea of a joke about Vinny’s age and relative height.

  No, she was good with Ryan. If she weren’t, he wouldn’t want to hang out with her all the time. She would make a good mother, after all. And she was dying to tell Vinny about her epiphany.

  Except that Vinny hadn’t called. And Ophelia had her pride. She rolled over onto her back, stared up at the family room ceiling, and sighed. What if he’s waiting for me to call him?

  “I winned,” Ryan stated, matter-of-factly.

  “Of course you did.”

  His piquant face loomed over hers. “Is I good today?” he demanded.

  Being good was high on his list of objectives since Santa Claus would know if he wasn’t, and Santa was due to bring toys in just two days. “You were an angel,” Ophelia declared.

  He frowned his disgust. “I wanna be a dinosaur.”

  “Well, then you’d have to be a dinosaur that doesn’t eat other dinosaurs.”

  “Like a stegosaurus.” He leapt to his feet, grabbed the book on dinosaurs off the coffee table, and plopped down with it.

  Seeing Ryan engrossed in the book, Ophelia teased the phone out of her pocket and stared at the empty display. She could call Vinny and leave a friendly message. That way he wouldn’t just forget about her. What if he never thought about her the way she thought of him? What if he found somebody else!

  She’d dialed his number before she realized what she’d done. Just to hear his voice, she told herself. He was probably at work anyway, so she’d just end up getting his voice mail.

  “Lia.” The sound of her name being said with so much warmth and welcome brought a lump to her throat. “How you doin’, cara mia?”

  The endearment made her eyes sting. “Good. Great, in fact. Really good. You?”

  “Oh…I’ve been better.”

  The sorrow in his voice strummed her heartstrings. “Why, what’s wrong?”

  A bitter chuckle sounded in her ear. “Nothin’ now, cara mia.”

  Relief buoyed her heart. Did her call mean that much to him? God, she hoped so. “I’ve missed you,” she admitted, aware that Ryan had pulled his head out of the book and was now looking at her.

  “I’ve missed you more,” Vinny said, causing her heart to leap with joy. So he hadn’t forgotten about her. “How’s the wrist?”

  “All better. Are you at work?” she asked.

  “At the commissary. I’m lookin’ for something to take to the XO’s Christmas party—you know, the one he has every year?”

  “Of course.” Her heart clutched at the memory of past parties and the fun they’d had together.

  “I thought I’d get some crackers and cheese. Maybe veggies and hummus.”

  “I thought you didn’t like hummus.”

  “I like anything you like.”

  She seized his olive branch with a rush of gratitude. “Well, I like dressing up and going out,” she hinted heavily. “I haven’t gone out in forever.”

  “Then why don’t I pick you up at eighteen hundred hours tomorrow, and we’ll go to the party together?”

  She would prefer to go anywhere else in the world than to a party where his teammates were bound to regard her with contempt. Still, beggars could not be choosers. “Okay,” she agreed.

  “See you tomorrow then. Bye.”

  The phone clicked in her ear making her wonder if Vinny was as eager to get together as she’d initially perceived. Perhaps she’d projected her desire onto him? Either way, the dark cloud that had been hanging over her head just minutes earlier had disappeared. Suddenly, the future looked worth living.

  *

  Vinny frowned at his reflection in the bathroom mirror as he wrestled with his necktie. The gaunt, narrow face of the man looking back at
him testified to how miserable he’d been without Lia in his life. Not feeling like he had the right to call her, not hearing the sound of her voice for weeks on end had nearly killed him. Sure, he’d been away from her plenty of times before for work, but he’d always managed to do sporadic video conferencing and the occasional phone call. The knowledge that she was waiting for him had made separation bearable.

  Remembering her phone call yesterday, he marveled at his restraint. He’d wanted to sob with relief that she’d finally called him. Instead, he’d held it together long enough to secure a date with her the next night and then he’d quickly hung up before his emotions betrayed him. His patience had finally paid off! Christ, giving her the space to grieve their baby and to realize how much their marriage meant to her had been the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. And Vinny had faced some enormous challenges.

  I’ve got her now, though, he assured his harried reflection. “Fucking tie.” He tugged it apart and started over.

  Tonight was the turning point in their present situation. Nervousness fizzed in his belly. He hoped to God he’d gotten the details right, or she might yet slip from his grasp again. To bolster his confidence, he considered the news he had to share with her, confident that it would help to bring her home. She’d soon be back in his life, back in his bed, right where she belonged.

  *

  “Won’t we be late for the party?” Ophelia asked as Vinny pointed his Civic away from the beachfront toward Norfolk.

  “Nah, they’re starting later this year. I wanted to take you somewhere else first.” His dark gaze trekked in her direction, lingering with appreciation on her figure-hugging, fire-engine red velvet dress.

  She was glad now that she’d dressed to kill. Looking like a million bucks, as her sister said, gave her the confidence she needed to portray herself as the changed woman that she was, a woman worthy of her husband.