Читать книгу This Time For Keeps - Jenna Mills, Jenna Mills - Страница 10

Two and a half years before

“MEG, YOU READY?”

She looked up from the well-worn parenting magazine and grinned. Instinctively her hand slid to her tummy. “Absolutely.”

Dr. Brennan’s smile was warm. A tall, slender woman nearing sixty, she’d taken care of Meg since her first ob-gyn appointment over a decade before. “I thought Russell would be here.”

Meg refused to let the frown form. Not today. “So did I,” she admitted with a quick glance at her watch. She’d been leaving messages for half an hour. He’d yet to call her back. “He must have gotten hung up at a meeting.”

It wasn’t the first time, and, she figured, it wouldn’t be the last. Russell was like that, always losing himself in one project or another. His mother called it escape, but Meg thought that was overly harsh. Russell was an intensely intense man. He did nothing halfway. He was all in, or all out.

“Should we wait a little bit?” Dr. Brennan asked. “I can probably spot you another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

It was the right thing to do. Over the years he’d been by her side at so many appointments and procedures. Rarely did he miss. But today…

“Nah,” Meg said, standing. There was no telling how much longer Russell would be, and as it was, she’d been waiting just about her whole life for this. She could tell him the news herself. She could surprise him. She already had the pink and blue booties purchased.

After the sonogram, she’d know which pair to wrap.

“Let’s do this,” she said, reaching for her satchel.

Dr. Brennan nodded. “If you’re sure,” she said, escorting Meg toward the exam room. “Do you have any feelings, one way or the other?”

“Russell thinks girl.”

“And you?”

“Healthy,” Meg replied as a little flutter quaked through her. “I’m just thinking healthy.”

Present Day

TWO YEARS WAS A LONG TIME.

Russell Montgomery stood on the edge of the field of blue, as much an outsider as the night he’d walked out the front door of the house that had quit being a home. He’d told himself not to look back. It wasn’t healthy. Life was ahead of you, not behind.

His eyes had shifted to the rearview mirror anyway, for one last look. Of the cheery blue century-old house. Of the yard that sloped down to the lazy creek, the row of willows, weeping. Of her.

Instead, he’d found clay pots with wilted flowers, a swing in need of repair, an empty porch and the truth.

There was nothing to look back at.

But forward… Forward had taken him far, given him much. In the primitive villages of Mozambique, the tight, poisonous coil inside him had loosened. There, he’d been able to breathe. With the passing of each day, all those dark, festering emotions that had chased him from Pecan Creek faded a little more, until all that remained was the clinical realization that the life he and Meg had been creating had been an illusion.

He’d never planned to come back.

Hell, who was he kidding? He’d never planned anything that had happened since the day Meg first walked into his world.

Africa was a continent of extremes, breathtaking beauty and mind-numbing depravity, lush jungles and barren deserts, kindness and cruelty.

Innocence.

Savagery.

Being back in America…in Pecan Creek…

It was like stepping back into an old, faded dream, familiar but fuzzy, fleeting but somehow ever seductive. You knew you were going to wake up, but for that briefest of moments, you wanted to just…linger.

She sat there among the army of bluebonnets, the warm April wind whipping wheat-colored hair against an oval face that had once dominated his dreams. The angles were the same, the wide cheekbones and tilted eyes. The mouth that had once been so quick to—

She wasn’t smiling now. Her hair was longer than before, looser. The shield of flowers hid her clothes, but he could make out a trace of something dark—and a whole lot of skin.

And the baby…

Something hard and sharp sliced through him. He’d seen a lot during his time away. He’d seen mothers and children, birth and death. But the sight of that chubby-cheeked little girl in Meg’s lap, the frilly white dress and shot of bright red hair…

His bad leg throbbed. And for one brutal moment, everything between them fell away, the flowers and the years, the tears and the broken promises, leaving only him and Meg…and the baby they’d lost.

With eyes of blue like her mum’s, he’d predicted.

Even now, the urge to pound his fist into something hard and unmovable ripped through him.

Slowly she rose from the bed of bluebonnets, easing the child to her chest. Sleeping, he realized. His sister’s baby was sleeping.

Ainsley.

He still couldn’t believe she was gone.

And that he was here.

And Meg was walking toward him. Meg of the pretty floral dresses, now wearing camouflage cargo pants and a black top that left little to his imagination.

Or his memory.

The urge to reach for his camera was pure instinct, the desire to capture the vivid contrast between innocence and—

He didn’t know what. Typical Meg, she kept that all shuttered away, locked deep, deep inside, where no one could reach her.

No one could touch her.

Especially not him.

He didn’t have his camera, but knew he didn’t need it. Some images had a way of lasting all by themselves.

In the distance, old man Ray Blunt shuffled back into view. He paused and lifted a hand to his brow, watched.

The automatic wave surprised Russell. He’d always liked Ray, had learned a lot about the world from a man who’d never left Texas.

Ray returned the gesture, even though Russell was pretty sure the old man had no idea who he was.

But Meg did. She moved toward him, her stride strong and confident, her chin high, allowing the breeze to keep playing with the tangled strands of her hair. The longer length made her look younger than the last time he’d seen her.

Or maybe that was the baby sprawled all over her chest.

He was a man used to watching, to standing on the sidelines and documenting. Never get involved. That was how you stayed intact. But he started toward her anyway, acutely aware that he was not in Pecan Creek as a journalist.

Narrow trails of mutilated bluebonnets wound through the flowers. Once he’d chosen his steps carefully. Now he let instinct guide him—and kept his eyes trained forward.

On the woman he left behind.

IN THE BEGINNING, she’d imagined this. During those first few weeks and months, she’d closed her eyes and seen him walking toward her, that pure, undiluted focus in the bottomless green of his eyes, the…longing. Sometimes he would walk in through the back door. Sometimes he would find her sitting by the young willow they’d planted near the creek bed.

Once she’d seen him at the edge of the cemetery.

It was always the same. She would stand. He would approach. Arms were opened. She stepped in. Words weren’t spoken.

Words weren’t needed.

Only Russell.

Now…God…now. Her chest tightened. Her throat burned. Beyond him she saw her car, but knew there was no way to reach the Lexus without getting by him.

Russell Montgomery was back in Pecan Creek.

“Meggie,” he said as the distance between them narrowed, and something inside her screamed. The last fringes of the dream shattered, even as the whisper of a different dream echoed through her.

Two years. Two years since she’d heard the rolling lilt of her own husband’s voice.

“And this must be little Charlotte,” he commented with the polite formality of a complete stranger. “She looks—”

“Don’t.” The word burned on the way out. Meg stopped and looked up at him, could do nothing about the hot boil moving through her. “You don’t get to say that.”

Russell stopped moving. “Meggie, look, I understand—”

“You don’t understand a thing.” Meg barely recognized the rasp to her own voice. It had been almost ten weeks since the insanely clear February day when they’d buried this man’s sister…ten weeks during which he’d been conspicuously silent. No way could he just stroll back into town and say hello, make some kind of inane remark about who Charlotte looked like. “She was your sister, Russell. She deserved better.”

So had Meg.

The lines of his face went tight. “You know that’s not how I meant it,” he said, and she made herself swallow. “I just… Christ, Meg, I don’t know what you want me to do.”

Hadn’t that always been the problem?

“This isn’t about me,” she said automatically. It wasn’t about them. “It’s about Ainsley. She worshipped you, Russell. Thought you hung the moon. And yet you couldn’t even be bothered to come say goodbye.”

“I didn’t know.”

That stopped her. She shifted the baby, careful to keep one hand against the back of Charlotte’s head. “Didn’t know what? That Ainsley loved you? Why else would she have left Scotland to come live with us?”

Only a few clouds drifted across the blue sky, but the shadows about Russell deepened. “That she died.”

The quiet stillness to his voice went through Meg like broken glass.

“I didn’t know that she died until two weeks ago.”

“I called your parents.” Had called him first, from the hospital moments after Dr. Harrison had given her the horrible news. Instinctively she’d reached for her phone and called Russell, held her breath while the phone rang.

Froze when she got his voice mail.

She’d stood there in the starkly lit Emergency Room in the hour before dawn, listening. To his voice. His warm, casual message. But the beep had brought everything back into cruel, sharp focus, and she’d ended the call and swallowed hard, annoyed that after all this time, despite the divorce papers she’d had drawn up the month before, he’d been the first one she’d thought of.

Because Ainsley was his sister, she’d realized. Meg had loved her dearly, but in the end, it was Russell’s blood that flowed through Ainsley’s veins.

And Charlotte’s.

He stood there now, a tall man with a body that promised strength, even as an unmistakable mist clouded his eyes.

“I was on assignment,” he said in a voice so stripped down Meg had to concentrate to hear him. “My parents decided to wait until I was back before telling me.”

She couldn’t stop her mouth from dropping open. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “Because they didn’t want to inconvenience you? She was their child. She deserved…” The words trailed off as the memories edged closer. The knock at the door. The race to the hospital. Ainsley on the bed, the tubes and machines, the punishing sense of urgency as everyone seemed to move in slow motion.

“I would have come, Meggie. If I’d known, I would have been here.”

A fresh wave of grief surged up from that deep, dark place, burning her throat anew. For Ainsley, she told herself. Not because of the sound of her name in her husband’s voice. No one else had ever called her Meggie.

No one else had ever made her name sound like a caress.

And for that, she hated him.

“No one was here,” she said, still stung by how wrong it had been. “No one from your family. None of her friends.” Not even Charlotte’s father. Only Meg and Julia and Lori, a handful of locals. “She deserved better than that.”

Russell’s jaw tightened. “I’m glad she had you,” he said. “That’s why she stayed, you know.”

After he left.

“I wasn’t family.”

Russell frowned. “Meggie…you know that’s not true.”

She looked away, toward the honeybees buzzing around her ankles. Meg had always wanted a sister. She had two cousins in town, but it wasn’t the same. Julia and Faith had lived in a big two-story house in a nice subdivision and took exotic vacations…with both their parents.

Meg had never even known her father.

Then Ainsley had come to town shortly after Meg and Russell married, a troubled teenager with a rebellious streak as long as a hot summer day, and a heart as tender as a dewdrop. After Russell left—

Meg looked back up, felt something inside her shift. His smile was soft and warm, gentle. Sad. The lines of his face had relaxed, even the perpetual five o’clock shadow looked softer. But it was his eyes that got her, the crinkling at the corners, the warmth of the green, the glow of discovery and vulnerability.

Meg’s hold on Charlotte tightened. She glanced down to find the baby awake, her big eyes trained curiously on the uncle she’d never met.

“Well, hello there, poppet,” he murmured in the dialect of his childhood, and Charlotte’s little mouth lifted into a delighted smile.

Meg wanted to wake up.

But knew that this was no dream.

“There’s my girl,” she said, shifting Charlotte so that she rode Meg’s hip. “What a good little nap you had.”

Russell kept staring, as if the baby might vanish if he so much as took his eyes off her. “She’s—”

“Wonderful,” Meg finished for him. A bittersweet gift she’d never expected. “She’s got so much of Ainsley in her.” And Russell. His eyes. His smile.

His infectious laugh.

At first being around Charlotte had hurt. But there’d been no one else to step in. Ainsley had never tried to track down her daughter’s father, saying only that he couldn’t be with them.

“Then she must not be sleeping much,” Russell said, and before she could stop herself, Meg laughed.

She didn’t want to laugh.

“Fits and starts,” she said. Insomnia had been Ainsley’s middle name. Rumor had it she’d had her days and nights mixed up from the time she was born. “But we’re working on it.”

“Ainsley always said—” Russell broke off, lifting a hand to feather a finger along the underside of Charlotte’s foot.

She giggled.

“Always said what?” Meg asked.

“That she wanted to be a mum.”

Meg closed her eyes. That was true. Piercings, tattoos, wild streak and all, even at nineteen, Ainsley had been a great mother. It just takes love, she’d said. Just…love.

“And so did you.”

The quiet words did cruel, cruel things to Meg’s heart. She opened her eyes and stepped back. Away. Couldn’t imagine anything she wanted less than to be standing in a field of bluebonnets making polite small talk with the husband she had not seen in two years.

“Your mother’s been calling.” And now Russell stood before her, a stranger in a painfully familiar body. The eyes…the mouth. The thick copper hair. As always, his shirt was open at the throat, revealing a hint of the dark springy hair she’d once loved to finger. Just to the right, she knew there would be a scar. “Is that why you’re here?”

The change was immediate. His flirty little Charlotte-inspired smile congealed into something harder—and much less readable. His gaze turned serious, and on a visceral level, Meg started to scream.

No.

She’d always known this day could come. Ainsley had left a will, but wills could be challenged. Technically, she was the outsider. If the Montgomery family was to challenge her for custody, she had a horrible feeling she knew what the outcome would be.

“Actually, it is,” Russell said, and as if a switch had been flicked, the lilt left his voice. “My parents wanted me to come and—”

Meg shifted to get a better grip on a suddenly squirmy baby.

“—settle Ainsley’s affairs.”

The breeze kept whispering. The bees kept buzzing. A few cars sped along the narrow highway. But Meg held herself very still. “Settle her affairs?” Her voice was barely more than a rasp.

Russell’s eyes met hers. Once, in what seemed like another lifetime, she’d known his every look, touch. Words had been a formality they’d rarely needed.

She’d never imagined how quickly silence could turn to poison.

Or how badly it could punish.

After he’d left, at first the days had been so much better. But the nights…

The nights had been another story.

And now they were reduced to awkward formalities. There was a searching in his gaze, the photojournalist hard at work, studying, analyzing. Seeking. And in response, she tucked all those nasty, tattered remnants away, unwilling to give him a story to work with. Two years was a long time. A lot had happened. Not all of it would please a judge.

The last thing she needed was award-winning journalist Russell Montgomery on a fact-finding mission.

His eyes narrowed, as if he was squinting against a bright glare. “Her house,” he said as Charlotte started to thwack her hand against Meg’s chest. “Her belongings.”

Caution prevented relief from stirring. “Everything’s still there. I…” Had been to the house the day Ainsley died only long enough to gather a few essentials for the baby. The next day, Lori’s husband, Trey, had brought over the crib and glider, the rest of Charlotte’s toys and clothes.

Meg had been unable to go back since.

“Between the paper and the Wildflower Festival I haven’t had a chance to sort through everything yet.” In truth, there wasn’t much. Ainsley had worked as a waitress. Funds had been tight. She’d been so excited when one of her customers had offered her the use of his mother’s vacant house. “Julia and Lori offered to help me, but it just doesn’t seem to happen.”

Probably because a very strong part of her wasn’t ready for that kind of closure.

“I understand,” Russell said, and from the thickness of his voice, she knew that he did. No matter what had gone down between the two of them, he’d always had a soft spot for his sister. “I don’t want to be here, either.”

Somehow she didn’t wince. She kept her expression blank, her voice neutral. “Come by the paper tomorrow,” she said as Charlotte tugged at the collar of her shirt. She nuzzled in, her mouth open and seeking.

Russell’s eyes followed, the green quickly taking on a dark glitter she’d worked hard to forget.

The quickening was immediate—and the final straw. Meg shifted the hungry baby from her chest and lowered her to stand on top of her own feet, Char’s chubby little legs wobbling like gelatin.

“I’ve got the keys there,” Meg said as if nothing had just happened. The baby clutching her fingers for dear life, she glanced back at Russell.

He looked as though he’d seen a ghost.

“A day or two tops,” she said, “and then you can be on your way.”

A harsh sound broke from his throat…the same sound he always made when he didn’t know what to say. “Is she walking?”

“Not yet,” Meg said, easing her right foot forward. “At least, not by herself.” Then, to the baby, “Such a big, strong girl!”

Charlotte giggled as if she understood. She leaned forward, urging Meg to keep moving.

Meg obliged.

“Ray’s back.”

Meg looked up. “What?”

Russell gestured behind her, where her mother’s friend stood alongside the swarm of bluebonnets where he’d first tried to take Charlotte’s picture.

“Oh, good,” she said, turning to start back. “Maybe this time we can actually get some pictures.” She wasn’t sure what made her twist toward Russell. He hadn’t moved a muscle, stood there as still as one of the old post oaks surrounding the field, watching.

And then she got it. The baby. His sister’s child. Charlotte was the spitting image of Ainsley, who was the spitting image of Russell. Seeing her was like seeing a ghost. Sometimes Meg still couldn’t believe her sister-in-law was gone.

“Here,” she said before thinking. She lifted her arms, bringing the giggling baby up toward her uncle. “You want to hold her?”