Читать книгу The Bridesmaid's Gifts - GINA WILKINS - Страница 11

A gentle breeze ruffled Cassandra’s snow-white hair, one straight lock tickling her right cheek. She reached up to tuck it back, savoring the scent of the flowers that bloomed in the gardens around her.

As she often did, she thought of how fortunate she was to be at this pleasant, exclusive, private facility. It was expensive, but her late husband had made sure she would be well cared for after his passing. Just as she had known he would when she’d married him.

She sat alone in her little corner of the garden. She didn’t mingle much with the other residents here, most of them being quite a bit older. Besides, she wasn’t interested in socializing. She actually enjoyed her solitude, for the most part.

She didn’t come outside very often, but she had allowed herself to be persuaded this afternoon, thinking that the fresh, warm air might clear her mind. She didn’t like the new medications. They left her feeling groggy. Lethargic. And she still had the nightmares. Not as often, maybe, but just as vivid and disturbing when they came.

She would have to ask Dr. Thomas to make another adjustment.

Her knitting needles clicked with a slower-than-usual rhythm as she tried to immerse herself in the soothing sounds of the birds singing in the trees above her head, the water splashing gently in the nearby fountain. Lovely, peaceful sounds that almost—but not quite—drowned out the echoes of her dreams.

“Here you are.”

She couldn’t have said how much time had passed between her thoughts of him and his appearance. A few minutes. An hour, perhaps. Time had a trick of slipping away from her. “Hello, Dr. Thomas.”

He sat on a concrete garden bench, crossing one leg over the other. The casual pose stretched the fabric of the khaki slacks he almost always wore with a solid-color shirt and brightly patterned tie beneath the required white coat that made him look so handsome and professional. She liked the way he dressed. Not too stuffy but neatly enough to show regard for his patients here.

There had been a trend away from ties and white coats a couple of years ago, but the residents hadn’t liked seeing their physicians in blue jeans and polo shirts and other members of the staff in T-shirts and flip-flops. Now that the doctors were back in their white coats and the rest of the staff wore tidy uniforms, everything seemed to run much more smoothly. More civilly. She firmly believed that the general decline in polite society could be measured by the pervasive loss of respect for proper attire.

And weren’t there people in her past who would find that attitude hilarious, coming from her?

“What are you thinking about so seriously?”

She made herself smile as she replied candidly, “Neckties and panty hose.”

To give him credit, he didn’t seem at all taken aback by the non sequitur, asking merely, “Are you for ’em or agin ’em?”

She chuckled, thinking of how much she liked this nice young man. “I’m for ’em.”

He tugged lightly at the blue-and-green-patterned tie he wore with a blue shirt that contrasted nicely with his light tan. “I was afraid you might say that.”

Laughing again, she shook her head. “Don’t try to con me. You like looking nice or you wouldn’t give so much thought to matching your shirts and ties. Unlike some of the doctors who show up in mismatched patterns and colors that make one’s head hurt to look at them.”

“Now, Cassandra, don’t make fun of Dr. Marvin. Everyone knows he’s color-blind.”

“Then he should always let his wife dress him in the mornings, bless his heart.”

Grinning, the doctor nodded. “You’re probably right. So how are you?”

She told him about the effects of the new sleep aid, finishing with a request for a change.

Dr. Thomas nodded gravely. “We’ll make another adjustment. I still think it would be good for you to talk about your dreams with someone, though. If not with me, at least with your counselor. We don’t discuss specifics about our clients, as you’re aware, but I get the feeling you aren’t being much more forthcoming with her than you are with me.”

“I tell you both everything you need to know,” she assured him, catching a dropped stitch.

“I would like to think you trust me, Cassandra.”

The sincerity in his voice was genuine, not like some of the doctors who only pretended to be truly concerned about the residents here. Dr. Thomas cared so much that she was tempted at times to advise him to put a bit more distance between himself and his patients. As appealing as his empathetic nature made him, it also made him more susceptible to burnout and disillusion. As fond as she was of him, she would hate to see him fall prey to either of those conditions.

“I trust you as much as I trust anyone.”

He sighed lightly. “I suppose I have to be satisfied with that.”

Nodding, she let her hands rest. “How was your date last week?”

“We were talking about you, not me.”

She lifted her needles again.

After a moment, he conceded. “We attended a symphony performance. We had a flat tire on the way to the concert hall, but I was able to change it without messing up my clothes or making us late to the concert. On the whole, it was a pleasant evening.”

“But a little dull,” she interpreted, reading easily between the lines. “You probably won’t ask her out again. I told you she wasn’t right for you.”

He shook his head in obvious exasperation. “Maybe you can introduce me to Ms. Right,” he muttered.

“I can’t introduce you, but I can tell you that you’ll know when you find her. And you will find her.”

“A seer, are you?” he teased.

She didn’t smile in return.

“You’re crazy.”

Aislinn flinched in response to Ethan’s blunt words. “I’m not crazy.”

“Then you must think I am. Because there is no way I’m buying whatever it is you’re trying to sell.”

“I’m not trying to sell anything, Ethan. I just…know.”

“You don’t know anything.” He took the photograph out of her hands and set it a bit too forcefully back into place on Joel’s bookcase. “I think you’d better leave now.”

She sighed wearily. “I knew you would react this way.”

“Did you? Well, hell, maybe you are psychic.”

He stalked to the doorway, pausing there with one hand motioning for her to precede him. It wasn’t a request.

Though she moved past him out of the bedroom, she wasn’t ready to completely give up. “If you would just let me tell you what I—”

“I’m really not interested.” He kept walking, straight toward the front door, making her have to hurry to keep up with him. “I know Nic thinks the world of you, and Joel seems to like you, too, so I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you really believe the things you say. Maybe you’ve guessed correctly so many times that you’ve convinced yourself you really do have some sort of gift. But this time you’ve taken it too far.”

“Don’t you think I know how bizarre this sounds?” she retorted. “Can’t you understand how hard it was for me to come here, knowing how you would respond?”

“Then why did you come?”

She sighed and pushed her hands into her pockets. “I had to,” she muttered. “I couldn’t sleep last night and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest until I talked to you about the…about the feeling I had about your brother.”

“And just when did you get this…feeling?”

The slight note of mockery behind the word wasn’t lost to her, but she answered evenly, “Last night. At the reception. When you touched me, I—I knew there was something I had to tell you. I wasn’t sure what it was until later, during the night, when I got…I don’t know…some sort of a mental image of this photograph. When I looked at it, when I held it, I knew what I had to tell you.”

Ethan’s expression didn’t change during her halting, stumbling explanation. She swung out her hands in frustration. “I know it sounds crazy! I spent most of the night wondering if I really have lost my mind. I don’t have visions, Ethan. I don’t get flashes when people touch me. Like you said, I make guesses—and they usually come true. But this is different. This isn’t something that has ever happened to me before.”

“Really?” He made no effort to hide his disbelief. “How about last year, when you kept calling Nic in Alabama to warn her that something bad was going to happen to her?”

“I told you—that was a feeling. Just a vague sense of uneasiness that made me worry something might go wrong. The sort of premonition ordinary people get all the time.”

Ordinary being the operative word. It was all she had ever aspired to be.

Ordinary.

Normal.

He shook his head. “Coming into my brother’s house, going into his bedroom, telling me Kyle didn’t drown thirty years ago—that’s not the sort of thing ordinary people do, Aislinn.”

She swallowed. “I know.”

Letting his breath escape in a long, slow exhale, Ethan pushed a hand through his hair, leaving it even more mussed than it had been before. “I’m not sure what I should say here. I’m not very good at this sort of thing. Maybe you should get some help. You know, see someone. If you need me to call anyone—a friend, maybe, a family member—just tell me the number.”

Oh, great. Now he was trying to be nice even as he suggested that she should be taken away in a straitjacket.

“You know what, Ethan? You’re right. I shouldn’t have come here,” she snapped, moving toward the door. “I should have known how you would react. I did know, but I thought I could persuade you to listen. I was wrong about that, but I wasn’t wrong about Kyle. He didn’t die in that flood. He’s very much alive.”

He didn’t respond, but she hadn’t really expected him to. She grabbed the doorknob and jerked open the door. She’d stepped only halfway through when she turned to throw one last reckless comment over her shoulder.

“You want a real, live prediction from a real, live freak? Fine. Your parents are on their way home. They’ll arrive just fine, but they’ll be delayed by several hours because they’re going to have a blowout in a little town just inside the Alabama border. The left rear tire, and it’s going to take them a while to have it repaired. So figure out how I ‘guessed’ that, why don’t you? I certainly don’t know.”

She slammed the door behind her with enough force to rattle the diamond-shaped glass pane in the center. And still it didn’t seem hard enough to express the full extent of her anguished frustration.

Ethan was trying his best to concentrate on his work when the telephone rang later that afternoon. Glancing at his watch, he decided it was exactly the time his parents should be arriving safely at their home, probably without any untimely delays at all. “Hello?”

“Hey, bro, it’s Joel.”

So he’d guessed wrong. “What are you doing calling on your honeymoon? You don’t have enough to keep you entertained there?”