by Cara Colter
In moments the soup was bubbling briskly.
He ate some, then against his better judgment got a bowl and spoon-fed some to the dog.
He could go now, and get help.
But just then Casey cried out in her sleep, woke with a start, screaming, and scrabbled out from under the blankets.
He went to her instantly, pulled back the covers, crawled back in beside her, and held her tight. Her tears soaked his chest. He kissed the top of her head, and that seemed to finally settle her down.
“I dreamed I was back in the water,” she said.
“It was just a dream. You’re safe. Do you want something to eat? I made soup.”
“I could have got us all killed,” she said. “Instead of a celebration of love, poor Emily and Cole. More tragedy—
“Hey, don’t even go there. That’s not what happened.”
“I could have killed you. One mistake, and you would have been dead. All of us out floating in the water.”
“Stop it,” he said sternly.
“I-I c-c-can’t. So stupid. I’m st-stupid.”
“It was an accident. Shit happens. Shhh, you’re not stupid. You’re about the furthest thing there is from stupid.”
“Why couldn’t I see? The dog went through the ice! Why did I just charge out there like that? Like an idiot.”
“Because, for once,” he said softly, “you were thinking with your heart instead of your head.”
“That figures,” she said. “That just bloody well figures. That’s always when I get in trouble.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “You tell me all about that, Casey.”
Under normal circumstances she would have never told Turner Kennedy about the faulty radar of her heart.
But this wasn’t normal.
Nothing about tonight felt normal.
Least of all what she was feeling for Turner. A trust as deep as anything she had ever felt.
“It’s a long story if I start at the beginning,” she said.
“We’ve got nothing but time.”
“My dad could not be faithful to my mom,” she said tentatively, because she knew that really was the beginning. “Some people say it’s the nature of Italian men, but I don’t think that was it.”
She stopped. Heavens, was she really going to get into this? They were naked together, and she was going to discuss her childhood?
No, she was going to discuss the problem of thinking with her heart.
And that was better than the alternative, which she suspected was why he was encouraging her. He wanted her to think about anything except that water closing over her head, how close she had come to killing them.
And she wanted to think of anything except how strangely right it felt to be cuddled up in a blanket with a very nearly naked man.
“What do you think it was?” he asked, encouraging her.
“It was my brother getting cancer. I think my dad was unmanned by that. As if he should have been able to save him and protect him, and he couldn’t.”
“I think every man feels that way,” Turner said softly. “As if it is his highest calling to protect what is his.”
His voice embraced her, accepted her, encouraged her to go on. But more, she had a feeling Turner Kennedy had just told her who he was.
“Go on,” he said, his voice soft in the night, the crackling fire and his nearness lulling her into a place where she wanted to share confidences.
“And then when my brother died, my dad saw that as his greatest failure as a man. He couldn’t face it. He kept the pain at bay by having affair after affair after affair. Each one an attempt to get his manhood back. That’s my memory of my dad. Even here at the Gingerbread Inn. He was always flirting with my girlfriends’ moms.”
“You were embarrassed by him,” Turner guessed gruffly.
“Oh, yes, but oddly, I was more embarrassed by my mom. She always knew what he was up to. She’d shriek and cry and throw things, but any real action? No. Why did she tolerate that? Why didn’t she leave him?”
“It sounds almost as if you’ve forgiven your dad, but not your mom.”
“It’s easier to forgive deceased people.”
“What’s going on with your mom, Casey? How come you aren’t spending Christmas with her?”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“Emily told me. She said when she and Cole planned this, they wanted everybody to be able to get home after their ceremony and have Christmas with their families. So, how come you aren’t?”
Casey contemplated the fact that Emily had said anything to him about her, but then gave in to the temptation to share it. She said quietly, “Can you keep a secret, Turner?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s my life. Keeping secrets.”
“When he died, my mom joined a convent. When I asked her to spend Christmas with me, it was no, she was serving Christmas dinner to the poor. But I was welcome to join her. As long as I remember she’s Sister Maria Celeste now, and not Mom. She seems much happier being that than she ever was being my mother.”
“Oh, boy,” he said, his voice a low growl of sympathy. “So there it is, finally. Why you’re sensitive to the topic of nuns right now. I’m sorry, Casey.”
“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me!”
“How can I not? Your life has just been one abandonment after another, hasn’t it? Even me, leaving you the way I did.”
“Why did you leave me like that? Without even a goodbye?”
“Men are jerks. Topped off with the jerk you got engaged to.”
“You’re not like him, but that’s what I mean about following my heart,” she said sadly. “How did it lead me right to my father? How could I be so stupid as to pick Sebastian out across a crowded room—or a crowded lab, as it was? How could I be so stupid as to fall in love with a man who was going to be unfaithful? Just like my dad.”
“You wanted somebody to love you, Casey. There is nothing wrong with that.”
“Yes,” she said sadly. “It’s that clear to you, isn’t it? I was just desperate for someone to love me. Or maybe it’s more that I’m desperate for someone to love.”
“Don’t say that as if it’s a bad thing.”
“It is a bad thing to want something so desperately it blinds you to reality.”
“No, it isn’t. Because you were made to love somebody, Casey. Somebody worthy of you. Somebody you can have children with.”
“You don’t need a man to have children anymore,” she said. “I think it’s safer to use a sperm donor. It’s more scientific, don’t you think?”
He swore under his breath.
“What?”
“Remember I told you when I kissed you that I knew you were never going to be a nun?”
“I remember,” she said dreamily.
“Well, you aren’t going to make babies like that, either.”
“I am so,” she said stubbornly. “I’ve already decided. That’s going to be my Christmas present to myself. My gift to myself for the rest of my life. A baby. A child. A family. I’m not waiting for some man to come and give me what I want. I am creating my own life!”
“Is this the major decision Emily told me you were making?”
“Emily told you?”
“Don’t do it,” he implored her softly. “Casey, raising kids is a tough enough job for two people. Wait it out. Wait for the right guy. The life you always dreamed of is waiting for you. I promise.”
“You can’t know that. You certainly can’t promise me that.”
“Yes, I can. Some man is going to see you and know what you are. He’s going to see that you’re funny and brilliant and have a heart of pure gold. And he’s going to love and cherish you and protect you, and wake up every morning an
d look into your eyes and see your amazing hair cascading over his pillow, and he’s going to thank God for you. He’s going to love having wild-haired children with you.”
Suddenly, in all this sharing of secrets, Casey needed to tell him the biggest one of all.
Her defenses were so completely gone it felt as if they had been silly in the first place.
“I want it to be you,” she whispered. “I’ve always wanted it to be you. From the night I met you at Emily and Cole’s wedding. I want you to be that man.”
He touched her hair with infinite sadness, and with no surprise, as if she had never kept her secrets hidden from him at all. “It can’t be me, Casey.”
“Why?”
“Aside from the fact you’re seeing me in a very heroic light right now, I can’t give you what you need.”
“Why?”
“Casey, I’m so much like your father, you would run.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“YOU ARE NOT!” Casey said. Why had she done that? It felt as if she had peeled open her chest and shown him her very heart. But even so, she felt the need to get at his truth. “You are absolutely nothing like my father.”
“I don’t mean I’m a womanizer,” Turner said. “But I have made choices that pulled my family apart as surely as your dad’s way of dealing with life did yours.”
It penetrated her exhaustion that Turner was doing what he did so well. Trying to distract her. Maybe even to sting her with his rejection, so that she wouldn’t focus on him.
“Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me, Turner, about those choices.”
“I already did,” he said, with a dismissive shrug. “Those days with you in New York were my last days in your world.”
“Then tell me about that other world. The one you went to. Tell me where you went and what it did to you.”
Suddenly, despite all that had happened to her tonight, Casey did not feel weak, but strong. She felt as if she was seeing Turner as clearly as she had ever seen him, despite his efforts to throw up a smoke screen.
And Casey could see he was struggling, at a deep level, that his very soul was in jeopardy. She knew he was the strong, silent type, and she suspected it was the worst prison of all.
She had just told him her deepest longing. Her deepest secret. That she could love him. Now, she needed to know his. And perhaps, if he told her, some wall would come down from around him, and she could crawl over the rubble, and find him inside....
“Turner, let this cabin be our sanctuary. Let it be the place where we can tell each other anything. Unburden it. And then leave it here.”
“Go back to sleep, Casey.”
“I’m not going to. Not until you tell me.”
“Not even if I beg you?” he said wryly.
“Not even then.”
“We could reopen the discussion about underwear.”
“You know what? You are trying to use distraction, and it is not going to work. You saved me tonight, Turner. And now it’s my turn. To save you. There’s something inside you that is eating you alive.”
Turner was silent for a long time. And then he sighed, and something in Casey’s heart melted, because it was the sigh of a warrior who had found the place, finally, where he could put down his shield.
He was going to trust her, and it felt as if the wall around him had that first all-important crack in it.
“In a way, it’s a story like your dad’s. Because a tragedy started it. My father died in the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center. He was a financial consultant, an ordinary guy, probably a better human being than most, who went to work one morning and got murdered.
“I was in university when it happened. My only goal in life, up until that point, had been to have as much fun as was humanly possible. Someday, though, I assumed I would settle down, have a family and give the same life to my children that he had always given to me.
“But after it happened, I felt like everything he had always stood for was being threatened. I was taken with a rush of patriotic fever, a desire to make a difference, maybe a desire to vindicate my dad.
“Of course, my family did not see it—my becoming part of that rush of young American men who joined the military to make the world right again—as in any way honorable. They saw me leaving when they needed me most, giving my mother one more loss to deal with when she was already at her most fragile. My brothers accused me of leaving because I couldn’t stand the pain.
“And it was only a long time later that I could acknowledge how true that was. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand all the tears. To this day, I can’t stand tears. I couldn’t stand wallowing in it. I had to feel like I was doing something about it.
“I pushed to get into an elite antiterrorism unit. I can’t talk about what I did, but suffice to say nothing in my rather sheltered and privileged childhood had prepared me for it.
“Even so, I started my career with a great sense of purpose, a sense of taking control in a troubled world. I expected a life of high adventure when I stepped away from everything I knew, and got a life of unfathomable danger and darkness.
“I got a life where mistakes cost lives. Where the people closest to me paid the ultimate price.
“I watched myself change. I became what that kind of work demanded I be. I became a survivor, jaded and cynical. Being emotionally shut down was an asset that was necessary for survival.
“But I’m nothing if not highly adaptable, so I became what I needed to be. And that has meant leaving everything else behind me.
“I was on an extremely delicate, covert assignment when word reached me that my mother had died. It would have jeopardized months of training, and maybe lives, to leave at that moment, so I made a choice.
“My brothers have not forgiven me, and I don’t blame them. I’m not the kind of guy who fits into their world anymore. I’m the kind who puts a mission before my own mother. I already told you I’m the kind who ends up in a bag. Better not to let anyone become too attached to me.”
“You’re protecting them,” she whispered. “You think you’re protecting them. From you.”
He made a harsh sound at the back of his throat. “You can attach an honorable motive to it if you must, but I don’t think so.”
“How can they not see who you really are?” she asked. “Even Harper can see it.”
“That dog nearly killed you. She is missing a few brain cells.”
“I can see it,” Casey stated, deciding not to hide behind the dog.
“You can, eh?”
“Turner?”
“Hmm?”
“I think I’m falling in love with you.” And then she pulled herself in as close to him as she could, and raised her lips to his.
“I just told you all the reasons you can’t.”
“My heart isn’t listening.”
He moaned, a low animal sound of pain, deep in his throat. He took her chin in his hand and gazed into her eyes.
And then he brushed her cheek with his lips.
“No,” he said firmly. She got the sense it was as much to himself as to her.
He jumped off the mattress so fast he took the blankets with him. And then bent to awkwardly cover her.
“I came here knowing I had to make a decision,” he said. “Do I try to go back to a fork in the road and choose a different path? Could I? Or do I stay on the path that I have chosen already?”
“I don’t care which path you take,” she said, her voice trembling. “I will support you in either of them.”
He snorted. “You don’t know the reality of the path I’m on.”
“Maybe not,” she said firmly, “but I know the reality of you. Turner, couldn’t we just give it a chance? Couldn’t we just see each other? Couldn’t we just see if there�
�s something there? A future for us together?”
It felt as if she had risked everything as she waited for his answer; every ounce of her pride, every bit of who she was was on the line.
For a moment, she saw a struggle behind his eyes, but then it was over.
“Remember when I said you weren’t stupid?” he said harshly. “I take it back. You are missing a few brain cells, just like the dog. And I’m not getting any top marks, either. What did I think? That I was at a pajama party, lying here trading secrets? I can tell you are out of danger. I’m going to go.”
“Go where?”
“Back to the inn. I’ll return with a vehicle and some warm clothes. You should probably go to the hospital.”
“I do not need the hospital!”
“Just for observation.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“No,” he said, with quiet finality. “Please don’t you do this. You think you love me because I rescued you. Because you’re experiencing that near-miss euphoria.
“I get it all the time. I get it just before I deploy. That heightened sense of awareness. That feeling of being intensely and incredibly alive. The sense that I can see things everyone else has always missed. It’s almost like being on drugs.
“You know the first time I felt that way, Casey?”
She shook her head. She had a feeling she really did not want to hear this.
“The first time I ever felt that was with you. Those days in New York. That was the first time I was going to deploy.”
She stared at him.
What they had shared that night hadn’t been a magical connection between him and her? It had been some kind of intense reaction to heading into danger that had had nothing to do with her?
“You know what else? You know why I rented that presidential suite at the Waldorf? You think it was just to make you feel special? You happened to be in the right place at the right time.
“I’d come into all this money. I had to get rid of it. I had to get rid of that money from my dad’s death. Insurance money. Money for the victims of 9-11. I hated that money. I hated it as much as I hated the tears. I wasn’t going to be anybody’s victim.”