Читать книгу Winning His Heart - Алисон Робертс - Страница 15

CHAPTER EIGHT

AT FIRST KAYLA THOUGHT it was a trick. Kevin had not been above using what she wanted most to get his own way.

Once we get established, in our new town, then we can talk about a baby.

She whirled, already angry that something about David being here was bringing all this stuff up. She was prepared to be very angry if David had used her dog to make her do what he wanted.

He was not looking at her, but had gone to the railing of his deck and was watching something intently. She followed David’ gaze, and though it was dark, she saw Bastigal’s little rump, tail tucked hard between his legs, disappearing through the Blazes’ hedges and heading out onto the street.

Kayla’s heart leaped with hope.

David stepped back inside the door, shoved his feet in a pair of sneakers and went down the back porch steps two at a time. He blasted through the boxwood, careless of the branches scraping him.

Kayla looked down at her own bare feet, and contemplated the skimpy fabric of her nightgown. By the time she went and got shoes on, or grabbed a sweater to cover herself—her sweater had gone inside with Mrs. Blaze—the dog would be gone. She doubted Bastigal would come to David even if he did manage to catch up to him.

It was the middle of the night. It was not as if anyone was going to see her.

Except him. David. And he thought I should be painted.

Without nearly enough thought, with a spontaneity that felt wonderfully freeing, Kayla took off through the hedge after David.

She saw he was crossing the deserted street at a dead run. If Kayla had had any doubt that he had maintained the athleticism of a decade before, it was vanquished. He ran like the wind, effortless, his strides long and ground covering. In the blink of an eye, David had crossed the silvered front lawn of a house across the street. Without breaking stride he charged around the side of a house and disappeared into the backyard.

She followed him. She thought her feet would give her grief, but in actual fact she had spent all the summers of her life barefoot, and she loved the feeling of the grass on them, velvety, dewy, perfect lawns springing beneath her feet.

She arrived in the backyard just in time to watch David hurdle effortlessly over a low picket fence into the next yard. She scrambled over it, catching her nightie. She yanked it free and kept running. She didn’t see Bastigal, but David must have seen the dog, because he was chasing after something like a hound on the scent.

She caught up with David after finding her way through a set of particularly prickly hedges. They were in the middle of someone’s back lawn. She cast a glance at the darkened windows.

“Do you see him?” she whispered.

He held a finger to his lips, and they both listened, and heard a rustle in the thick shrubs that bordered the lawn.

“Bastigal!” Kayla called in a stage whisper, both not wanting to frighten the dog or wake the neighbors.

Twigs cracked and leaves rustled, but she didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of her dog, and the sound was moving determinedly away from them.

David moved cautiously toward it. She tiptoed after him. And then David was off like a sprinter out of the blocks, and Kayla kept on his heels.

Three blocks later, she had done the fast tour of every backyard in the neighborhood, and they now found themselves on Peachtree Lane, in the front yard of a house that was on Blossom Valley’s register of most notable heritage homes.

“I think we lost him,” David said, and put his hands on his knees, bent forward at the waist and tried to catch his breath.

“Dammit.” She followed his lead and rested her hands on her knees, bent over and gasping for air. She was so close to him she could see the shine of perspiration on his brow, the tangy, sweet scent of a clean man’s sweat tickled her nostrils.

“Don’t move a muscle,” David whispered. He nodded toward the deep shadow of a shrub drooping under the weight of heavy purple blossoms.

One of the blossoms stirred in the windless night. The leaves parted.

Kayla stopped gasping and held her breath.

A little beige-colored bunny came out, blinked its pinky eyes at them and wiggled its nose.

“Is that what we’ve been chasing?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Dammit,” she said for the second time.

But despite her disappointment, Kayla was aware that her blood felt as if it were humming through her veins, and that she felt wonderfully, delightfully alive.

She began to laugh. She tried to muffle her laughter so as not to disturb the sleeping neighborhood.

David straightened, watched her, arms folded over his chest. He shook his head, and then smiled. Then he chuckled.

She collapsed on the grass, on her back, knees up. She tugged her nightie, now torn at the hem where it had snagged, down over her bare knees, and then spread her arms wide, giggling and still panting, trying to catch her breath.

After a moment, David flopped down on his back beside her, his arm thrown up over his forehead.

Their breathing became less ragged, and the night seemed deeply silent. Some delicious fragrance tickled her nostrils. The stars were magnificent in an inky black sky.

“This is one of the things I missed after we moved to Windsor,” Kayla whispered. “You don’t see the stars like this in the city.”

“No,” he agreed softly, “you don’t.”

The silence was deep and companionable between them. “Why did you move to Windsor?” he asked. “You always liked it here.”

I hoped for a fresh start. I hoped a baby could repair some of the things we had lost.

Out loud, she said, “Kevin got a job there.”

She didn’t say that Kevin’s job had not lasted, but by then they could not afford to move back, let alone have a baby. She did not say the kind of jobs she had done to keep them afloat. She had waitressed and cleaned and babysat children and even done yard work.

She did not say how she had longed for the sweetness of the life she had left behind in her hometown. Didn’t David long for it like that? She asked him.

“Do you miss it here? Ever?”

His silence was long. “No, Kayla. I don’t have time to miss it.”

“If you did have time, would you?”

Again the silence was long. And then, almost reluctantly, he said, “Yeah, I guess I would. Blossom Valley was the place of perfect summers, wasn’t it?”

The longing was poignant between them.

“I can’t remember the last time I looked at the stars like this,” she murmured. But she thought it was probably in those carefree days, those days before everything had changed.

“Me, either.”

It was one of those absolutely spontaneous perfect moments. His bare shoulder was nearly touching hers. Peripherally, she was aware of the rise and fall of his naked chest, and that it was his scent, mingled with the pure scent of the dew on the grass and the night air and those flowers drooping under their own weight, that had made the night so deliciously fragrant.

“Is that Orion above us?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “the hunter.”

“I remembered how you impressed me once by naming all the stars in that constellation.”

She laughed softly. “Zeta, Epsilon, Delta. That’s his belt.”

“Go on.”

So she did, naming the stars of the constellation, one by one, and then they lay in silence, contemplating the night sky above them.

“I always thought you’d become a teacher,” he said slowly. “You had such an amazing mind, took such delight in learning things.”

She said nothing, another road not taken rising up before her.

“I at least thought you’d have kids. You always loved kids. You were always a counselor at that awful day camp. What was it called?”

“Sparkling Waters. And it wasn’t awful. It was for kids who couldn’t afford camp.”

“Naturally,” he said drily. “One of the most affluent communities in Canada, and you find the needy kids. I didn’t even know there were any until you started working there.”

“That whole neighborhood south of the tracks is full of orchard workers and people who clean rooms at the motels and hotels.” She didn’t tell him that now that she had been one of those people she had even more of an affinity for them. “It was Blossom Valley’s dirty little secret then, and it still is today.”

“And how are you going to fix that?” he asked.

Instead of feeling annoyed, she felt oddly safe with him. She replied, “I bet I could think of some kind of coupon system so the kids can come for ice cream.”

“Ah, Kayla,” he said, but not with recrimination.

“That’s me. Changing the world, one ice cream cone at a time.”

“No wonder those kids adored you,” he remembered wryly. “What I remember is if we saw the kids you worked with during the day at night, they wanted to hang out with you. I hated that. Us ultracool teenagers with all these little tagalongs.”

“Maybe you were ultracool. I wasn’t.”

“I probably wasn’t, either,” he said, that wryness still in his voice. “But I sure thought I was. Maybe all guys that age think they are.”

Certainly Kevin had thought he was, too, Kayla remembered. But he never really had been. Funny, yes. Charming, absolutely. Good-looking, but not spectacularly so. Athletic, but never a star. Energetic and mischievous and fun-loving.

Kevin had always been faintly and subtly competitive with his better-looking and stronger best friend.

When David signed up for lifeguard training, so did Kevin, but he didn’t just want to be equal to David, he wanted to be better. So if David swam across the lake, Kevin swam there and back. When David bought his first car—that rusting little foreign import—Kevin, make that Kevin’s father, bought a brand-new one.

The faint edge to Kevin’s relationship with David seemed like something everyone but David had been aware of.

Hadn’t Kayla spent much of her marriage trying to convince Kevin he was good enough? Trying to convince him that she was not in the least bowled over by David’s many successes that were making all the newspapers? Trying to forgive Kevin’s jealousy and bitterness toward his friend, excuse it as caused by David’s indifference to the man who had once been his friend?

But Kayla remembered David really had been ultracool. Even back then he’d had something—a presence, an intensity, a way of taking charge—that had set him apart.

And made him irresistible to almost every girl in town. And on one magic night, I’d been the girl. That he had shared his remarkable charisma with.

I tasted his lips, and then he hardly looked at me again.

“I adored them back,” she said, wanting to remember the affection of those moments and not the sense of loss his sudden indifference had caused in her.

“They were pesky little rascals,” David said. “You never told them to go away and leave you—us—alone. I can remember you passing out hot dogs—that I had provided—to them at a campfire.”

Maybe that was why he had stopped speaking to me.

“Did I?”

“Yeah. And marshmallows. Our soda pop. Nothing was safe.”

“I love kids,” she said softly. “I probably couldn’t bear to think of them hungry.”

“Our little do-gooder.” He paused and looked at her. “You did love kids, though. That’s why I thought you’d lose no time having a pile of them of your own. Especially since you seemed in such a hurry to get married.”

Kayla bit her lip. For the first time since they had lain down beneath the stars, she was certain she heard judgment there.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

“So why didn’t you have kids?” he persisted.

Kayla begged herself not to even think it. But the soft night air, and this unexpected moment, lying in the coolness of the grass beside David, made the thought explode inside of her.

She had wanted a child, desperately. Now she could see it was a blessing she had not had one.

“The time was just never right,” she said, her tone cool, not inviting any more questions.

“Aw, Kayla,” he said, and as unforthcoming as she thought her statement had been, she felt as if David heard every unhappy moment of her marriage in it.

She felt an abrupt, defensive need to take the focus off herself. “So why aren’t you married, David? Why don’t you have a wife and kids and a big, happy family?”

“At first it was because I never met anyone I wanted to do those things with,” he said quietly.

“Come on. You’ve become news with some of the women you dated! Kelly O’Ranahan? Beautiful, successful, talented.”

“Insecure, superficial, wouldn’t know Orion if he shot her with an arrow.”

The moment suddenly seemed shot through with more than an arrow. Heat sizzled between them as his gaze locked on hers.

“What do you mean, ‘at first’?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer—he just reached out and slid a hand through her hair, and looked at her with such longing it stole her breath from her lungs.

The air felt ripe with possibilities. Kayla again felt seen, somehow, in a way no one had seen her for years.

Somehow, feeling that way made her feel more intensely guilty than her disloyal thoughts about her husband.

And then, thankfully, the uncomfortable intensity of the moment was shattered when the darkness exploded around them, and they were both frozen in an orb of white light.

“End to a perfect day,” she said, happy for the distraction from the intensity. “Beesting, hospital emergency room, lost dog—” disloyal thoughts about my deceased husband “—now alien kidnapping.”

He didn’t smile at her attempt to use humor to deflect the intensity between them.

“Don’t forget the stargazing part,” he said softly.

She looked at him. Not many people would look better under the harsh glare of the light that illuminated them, but he did. It brought the strength of his features into sharp relief.

It occurred to her that the stargazing was the part she was least likely to forget.

David broke the gaze first, sat up and shielded his eyes against the bright light that held them.

“Police! Get up off that grass.”