"So you say." She pulled against his hand. "Turn me loose."
"Not until you listen to me."
"What if I don't?" she said.
"Then you'll never know the truth." He sighed but didn't free her. "Listen, Sarah. Please. I can't go on like this. It's killing me."
It was the sorrow in his voice that swayed her, a sorrow that rang true. "All right. Tell me." Knowing he wouldn't let her go to Nicholas, she sagged to the ground.
"I've messed this up from the beginning." From far away his words sank into her. "But there's been enough deception."
"I'm not arguing." Drained, she looked at Jake's face, the face of a man she'd been on the verge of loving—maybe already did—the face of a stranger now in the tawdry midway lights. "Go ahead. What is the truth!"
Jake hunkered over her. "I knew Ted before he married you. We met while I was consulting on a job. He'd been hired to teach the American workers about the language and politics of the country. He was a well-known expert, and the oil company hoped it could short-circuit potential problems if he briefed us on hot issues."
"Oh, yes," Sarah said as grief seeped into her, "Ted was the expert, all right. He cared for that country more than he did anything else, certainly more than he loved me or my baby."
"He was there to convince the workers that they had to look at things from the eastern viewpoint, not to insist on their American ways of doing things. He made sure they knew what would be considered insulting." Jake bent closer and his heat and anger enveloped her. "We became friends of a sort. He was easy to like."
Sarah covered her eyes for a moment, remembering the man who'd charmed her into marriage and talked her into going back with him to the country he'd adopted, remembered him, too, as the father of her child. "Ted spent most days and nights at the university. He became a fanatic about the Middle East and its problems. A convert. He didn't want to come back home."
Her voice trickled away as her memories crowded in. She'd tried to obliterate the past in order to survive in the present, and now Jake was bringing it all back.
Jake pulled her hands away from her eyes. "Look at me when I talk to you, Sarah. I want to see your face. I want you to look into my eyes and then dare accuse me of lying." Ruthless and determined, he stripped her of her defenses.
"You're heartless."
"I told you the gloves were off, but you're going to hear me out and you're going to face me when you do. No more walls. No more hiding. For either of us."
Sarah knew he was right even though she hated him. He'd kept her son from her. "I'm listening." She'd endure what she had to and then go on. She could do that now.
Jake gripped her arm tighter. "When Ted ran into me, I could tell he was desperate. He looked as though he'd been living hand-to-mouth. He knew he was dying and begged me to take the boy to America."
"I don't understand. The State Department told me they'd been killed in a bombing." All this time her son had been alive and she'd given up because some blue suit had told her he was dead. She should have known better. Sarah
rubbed her knees, the repetitive motion calming in the midst of the turmoil. "What happened?"
Jake shrugged. "I don't know. I figured out that he'd been in hiding, but I couldn't get him to tell me what was going on. You know how unsettled politics are over there."
'To my everlasting grief, I do." Sarah clenched her fists.
"Anyway, I didn't pry."
"How admirable. You were stupid not to." She shook her head.
Jake frowned. "Yes." He straightened her fingers, one by one. "But I was back in that country with my own job to do. I was supposed to slip an oil executive threatened with kidnapping out of the country before anyone missed him. His company hired me to go in undercover, so when I ran into Ted I couldn't ask too many questions. I couldn't afford to answer any of my own."
"But how could you not ask some questions?" Jake's attitude was beyond her.
"Look," Jake's irritation reached her, "I didn't ask questions because I didn't want to explain myself and, frankly, I didn't give a damn what was going on with Ted. I looked at his kid and made up my mind. No kid should have been carted around like that. I'd have done anything then to get the boy out of that country. It wasn't safe for him." Jake slammed his hands under his armpits. "But I don't suppose you'd understand that."
"Of course not. I was only his mother." Coming from her tight throat, her sarcastic words were rusty. "Why did you agree to Ted's conditions?"
"It was the only way I could get the kid from him," Jake snarled. "What was I supposed to do? At that point, I'd have told Ted anything. Besides," Jake's voice grew menacing, "Ted told me all about the kid's mother. About how she'd deserted both of them, running back to America because she couldn't stand life in the Middle East, told me how he begged her to stay with the baby—"
"What?" Sarah leaped to her feet.
Jake rose, towering above her, anger and threat rolling over her. "How he begged her not to abandon their son, how she laughed in his face while she packed her bags. Any of this sound familiar, Sarah Jane Simpson? Or should I say Sarah Jane Harrison? That was your married name, wasn't it?"
The savage edge to Jake's voice should have intimidated her, and once it would have, but not anymore—not with the miracle of her son in range of her breath and voice. "None of what you're saying is true. It never happened." Cold and in control now, she continued, "I don't know how Ted managed to sell you such a story, but you were played for a sucker."
"Really?" He said in a voice soft with warning. "Now just how could that be? Remember? I was there in the dust and rubble. And you were here in your home, safe and warm." Jake curled his hands over her shoulders. "Did you ever think about the son you left behind, Sarah? About his being cold or hungry?" His fingers tightened. "Because when I found him, he was both."
His words battered her and she swayed. "Don't! I can't bear to hear it. I never stopped thinking about him." She wiped away the streaming tears. "Never."
"How touching." Jake pushed her away. "I could almost believe you, but I was there. I saw Ted. He loved his son. His wife's desertion broke him."
Sarah wiped the tears from her face. She'd been in pain before, but ignorance had blunted it. Knowing what her son had gone through was worse than imagining, and she'd imagined everything, everything, but knowing was worse and she attacked. "You took the money. You agreed to Ted's condition. That doesn't say much for your nobility."
"I turned the money down." Jake wiped his hands down his jeans. "But I agreed not to let the boy's mother know about him. Ted had reason to ask that."
"How could you agree to such a monstrous proposal?" She couldn't afford to lose control.
"After what she'd done, she didn't deserve Nicholas." Flat and judgmental, Jake's statement left no room for the grays of human behavior.
"I see." Brushing her eyes again, Sarah found the courage to continue. "What if you were wrong?"
"When I met you, I thought I was, but you never explained things, not even when I gave you the chance."
"I didn't think my past was any of your business." Sarah faced him down. "But you decided to force yourself into my life and play God."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Jake paced away from her. "I didn't know what to do about Nicholas. I'm a loner. I couldn't give him what he needed, a home, stability, settledness—all those small-town virtues," Jake snarled. "I couldn't give him those things, and I wasn't going to dump him on some child-welfare department. I know what that's like, so I thought, what the hell, I'd see his mother for myself. Maybe he'd be better off with me. I had to know."
"And you stayed." Memories, hot and treacherous, swirled between them with her words.
"Yes."
"Trying to decide whether or not I was./// to have my own son?" Sarah grabbed his shirt and made him look at her. "Didn't the weight of playing God ever get to you, Jake? Even God rested, so I've been told, but you just stayed on and on pretending to cou
rt me, judging me."
"It wasn't like that."
"Of course it was. Lies and deception and you playing God. That's just what it was. All lies, all pretending."
"No, not everything. I—" He touched her hair gently.
"You what, Jake? Decided that maybe I'd been in the grip of some postpartum depression? Made excuses for
me?" Sarah lost it. Anger and hurt and fury boiled out of her. "Or just decided that I was worthless?"
"I wanted you."
His somber words stopped her. "Want? How could you want a woman you thought had abandoned her son? Especially since your mother had deserted you?"
"I don't know." His face looked as though it had been scoured clean of all emotion. "But I did."
"Am I supposed to fall in your arms now that you've explained everything? Is that what you expect?"
His face was grim. "I don't expect anything."
"Does that excuse what you did to me?" Sarah wanted to howl with anguish. He'd destroyed whatever they could have had together. She'd been building dreams on shifting sands and the tide was crashing in, washing them out to sea. She'd been stupid. Now she had to salvage what she could for herself.
Jake heard her words and knew he'd blown it. "I don't have an excuse. I found myself in a situation I didn't choose. I did the best I could."
"What about honesty? Why didn't you try that?"
Her pale face and suffering eyes wrenched him, but stubbornly he pushed ahead. He had to make her see how it was. "I couldn't. Nicholas's life was at stake. Can't you understand how I felt? How could I leave him with someone who'd already dumped him?"
"But after? When you knew I wasn't like that? Or didn't you ever reach that conclusion?" Rain drops and tears wet her eyelashes.
Jake exhaled. "I couldn't leave him. I couldn't leave you."
When he looked into her eyes, he drowned in her pain and knew the rack was being tightened one more notch.
"Do you know what you did to me?" Her hands were moving in agitation. "Do you want to know what really happened five years ago?"
"If you want to tell me." Jake didn't know what else to say. Her pale face worried him. The anger that had bubbled up when he was recalling Ted's story and confronting her with it had vanished in the misty rain. Looking at her, he knew without a doubt that Ted had lied. Had known it since he'd first seen her, but he'd refused to admit it.
Like the ripple of water betraying the passage of deep-swimming fish, memory shivered over her face.
"I was young, twenty-one, just finishing college when I met Ted. He was handsome, brilliant, and I worshipped him. He was from an old Charleston family and swept me off my feet. He was the golden man of every girl's dreams."
Jake hated Ted.
She continued pensively. "I thought it was romantic that he wanted me to follow him back to the Middle East where he was on a professorship, and it was. Until my son was born."
She never referred to the boy as their son, just hers.
"Then Ted changed. He resented any time I spent with the baby. Of course it was all right that he was never home, always in meetings with people he never introduced me to. When I learned some of them were involved in a coup against the government, I was terrified." Sarah's voice shook.
"What did you do?" Jake could see it all now. What a fool he'd been.
"What any mother would do. I tried to talk Ted into leaving. I tried—oh, God in heaven, how I tried—to make him see how his political maneuverings were putting us in danger."
Jake watched the raindrop—a tear?—slide down her face. "Why didn't you take your son and leave?"
Sarah's laugh grated against him. "That does seem simple, doesn't it? I tried, but when I told Ted the baby and I were going home, he went berserk."
His Sarah, Sarah, who would never be his, scraped her hands against her jeans over and over. Jake wanted to capture them and calm their fluttering distress.
Her husky voice, tear-washed and thin, slashed into him. "Do you know what that meant? From that moment on, I was never alone. The nurse Tardeh, Ted, one of his friends' wives, someone was always around. Don't you see, Jake?" she said quietly. "Ted had no intention of letting us go without him, and he wouldn't leave. Not even when our embassy was bombed. That was when I knew I had to get us out."
Jake leaned against a booth and folded his arms as he thought through the possibilities, knowing from experience how difficult it would have been. "What did you do?"
Low and muffled by the storm of carnival noise, her voice still flowed into every pore of his body. In the damp air, her flower scent taunted him with memories.
"I begged him to go with us, I promised him I'd return with him if we could at least take the baby home to America."
Jake closed his hands over her chilled palms. She never noticed, and her cold fingers continued their agitated fluttering. He dropped his hands. He couldn't even give her comfort.
"Finally he agreed."
"So what happened?" Jake remembered Ted, his facile charm. With heaviness in his heart, Jake now knew what Ted had done.
"Ted bought the tickets, made the plans, helped me pack." Sarah's voice was cracking and Jake stepped closer. "We boarded the plane." She laughed wildly. "It would be the last plane out of there, but none of us on it knew that at the time."
Jake was afraid to touch her. The undertow of memory sucked her away from him, far away to a distant shore and time.
''We were buckled in our seats. Already buckled in! Can you imagine? So close. And then Ted looked out the window. 'There's Tardeh,' he said."
The clutch of her small, cold fingers chilled Jake bone-deep. So much wrong had been done.
" 'Let me take the baby down to see her for a moment. It's the last time she'll ever see him, Sarah. Don't turn against Tardeh, too. She's been his second mother.'" Sarah shook her head and the damp braid slithered against Jake's arm. "I protested a little. I told Ted the baby needed his bottle, that he was tired."
Sarah looked right through Jake. 'Ted stood up. I remember he bumped his head." Her face twisted in reminiscence. "I told him to hurry, I wanted to give the baby his bottle as he took off so his ears—" She paused and her mouth quivered. "So his ears wouldn't hurt." Frantically she pulled her hands free and rubbed her arms. "Is it getting colder?" she said plaintively.
"Not really. Stand over here. I'll block the wind." Jake faced the spitting wind. They were going to have to leave before the skies opened. Buck and Nicholas would be coming back any minute. He glanced up. A few heavy clouds with a front moving in.
Still she rubbed her arms. "I kept watching for Ted to come down the aisle." She looked down at the ground. "I'll never forgive myself for that. How could I have risked my child by trusting Ted?" Blindly she looked up at Jake.
"Ted's child, too, Sarah," Jake emphasized.
Over and over she rubbed her hands. "He was so hungry and kept sucking my thumb—" Her sob was dry and old. "I was so careless. Ted kept at me and at me and I let him take my baby."
"It wasn't your fault."
Her look was uncomprehending. She was in another world and time.
"I touched his sleepy little eyelids—so droopy and silky. I still feel them at night in my dreams, that baby-silk against my fingers. Oh God, I still wake up thinking I'm on the plane holding him and Ted is reaching for him and I hold my baby tighter and tighter and don't let go and the plane takes off with him still in my arms, still wrapped in his blue blanket with white puffs, and I reach down to smooth his silky skin—"
"Sweetheart, don't," Jake reached out for her. Her pain was destroying him.
"Robbie," she murmured, rubbing her empty hands together and looking around at a world gone insane with Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds.
"Nicholas," corrected Jake. "Ted changed his name after you left. God only knows why. If he wanted to make finding them more difficult, he should have changed both of their names. He didn't, though, and the kid only knows himself as Nicholas. You can't confuse hi
m now by calling him Robbie."
He was just understanding the enormity of what he'd done to this woman with her fragile face and courageous heart. He'd kept her son from her. She'd never forgive or forget that.
Like a winter wind, the loneliness of life without Sarah blew through Jake, freezing the tender shoots sprouting in his soul. He tasted salty rain in the air and realized it was his own tears. He couldn't remember ever shedding tears before. Once again he covered her empty, seeking hands with his.
He wanted to kill Ted for causing Sarah such pain. Bitterly Jake realized how he'd been taken in. Ted had known Jake's past and used it against him, against Sarah. "Ted planned it?"
"It would never have worked if I hadn't been so gullible. I should have known better, but I believed him. I have no one to blame but myself, my own stupidity."
Jake knew Sarah would have fought like a woman possessed for her son. Why had he resisted that knowledge for so long and used his anger to twist his feelings about Sarah into hostility? The answer seeped into his heart. Nicholas. He'd grown to think of Nicholas as his own and couldn't give him up.
"What did you do after you got home?" Jake sought refuge in speech from his disturbing thoughts. She shrugged. "I don't remember very clearly. There was a doctor on the plane who gave me a sedative, and from that point on I blanked everything out for months. I made hundreds of phone calls and used every contact I could to reach anyone who could help me. I even put an ad in a mercenaries' magazine. Buck says he told me not to, but that I screamed and yelled at him and did it anyway."
Jake wanted to wrap her in his arms and never let anyone, including himself, hurt his Sarah again. But he'd messed up the chance to do that. Soft as drifting spume, her voice interrupted his thoughts. 'Then I was told they'd been killed in a terrorist bombing, and the world turned gray. Until now." Her glance accused him.
Even after promising not to, he'd hurt her. Defensively, Jake jammed his hands in his back pockets. He'd hurt her, but he'd also brought Nicholas to her. Ted had taken her son, not him. He wasn't Ted.
Desperation urged him into action. He'd always been more comfortable going on the offensive. "I did what I thought was right." She had to accept that.
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