Читать книгу Lonergan's Secrets - Maureen Child - Страница 14

His mouth came down on hers and Maggie felt herself sway into him. Her breasts pressed against his broad chest, her nipples hardened in eager anticipation.

Her lips parted under his and his tongue swept inside. She sighed and gave herself up to the intense sensations pouring through her. Deliberately she shut her brain down and ignored completely the one small, rational voice still whispering warnings in her brain.

He pulled her even tighter against him, and the combined heat from his body and the blistering warmth from the afternoon sun on her back made Maggie feel as though she were about to combust.

He growled low in his throat, and one of his hands slid down her spine to the curve of her rear. He held her tightly to him until she felt his erection through the thick fabric of his jeans. Instantly her own body went hot and needy.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him, and when he tore his mouth from hers to lavish kisses along the length of her throat, she threw her head back and stared blindly at the clear summer sky overhead. There was a delicious haze at the edges of her vision and a distinct wobbly feel to her knees.

And she was loving every minute.

“Well. Ahem.” A deep voice, then a cough, then someone said, “Excuse me, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Oops!

Abruptly the moment was shattered. Maggie swayed unsteadily as Sam lifted his head to reluctantly face the speaker. Doc Evans stood on the back porch, studiously avoiding looking at them by using his handkerchief to polish the lenses of his glasses.

“Hi, Doc.” Sam took a step back from Maggie, though it cost him. His body was tight and hard and his vision was blurred with the desire nearly throttling him. Beside him Maggie quickly tugged the hem of her tank top down and ran one hand over the sides of her head, checking to make sure her ponytail was still straight.

“Just wanted to let Sam know I was leaving,” the doc said, slipping on his glasses and stuffing the handkerchief into his pocket.

“How is Jeremiah feeling?” Maggie asked, and if her voice sounded a little breathless, Sam was probably the only one to notice.

Doc took the few steps to the yard and glanced at the watch on his left wrist before answering. “He seems… better.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed on the older man. With lust still pounding through his blood, he was on the ragged edge of control. This thing with his grandfather—the unidentified “illness”—was bothering him, and now seemed like as good a time as any to have some questions answered. “Have you determined just what the problem is yet?”

“Not yet. Um, still running a few tests.” He started rocking on his heels and his gaze shifted to a spot just to one side of Sam. “I’ll, um, keep on top of things, though. Don’t you worry.”

“Doc.” Every instinct he had was telling Sam that something was definitely up. Bert Evans and Jeremiah had been best friends and fishing buddies most of their lives. There wasn’t much one wouldn’t do for the other. Up to and including trying to pull a fast one. He crossed the yard to the other man and looked down at him. “Is there something I should know?”

Doc ran one finger along the inside of the collar of his shirt and swallowed hard. Still not meeting Sam’s gaze, he shook his head. “Nope, not a thing, boy. Everything’s as it should be.”

“Uh-huh.” Folding his arms over his chest, Sam braced his feet wide apart and simply stood there. Waiting.

Seconds ticked past, and a strong breeze jumped up out of nowhere and rushed through the yard. The older man shifted uneasily on his feet, glanced around the yard, looking everywhere but at Sam.

“He’s faking, isn’t he?”

Bert’s gaze snapped to his and he didn’t even have to say anything for Sam to know that he’d guessed right. Guilt was stamped on the other man’s features.

“Now why would you say that?” The doctor asked, deliberately avoiding answering the question outright.

“Because,” Sam said, scowling now, “it occurs to me that if Jeremiah was really as desperately ill as you two want me to think, you’d have him in the hospital. Or at the very least, have a trained nurse here taking care of him.”

“Maggie’s here,” Doc argued.

“Yes,” Sam said and heard Maggie come up to stand beside him. “And she’s been great with Pop. But she’s not a trained nurse. Not yet anyway,” he conceded, remembering that she was studying to be just that. “So I have to wonder, Doc. Is Jeremiah putting one over on me? Or you?”

The older man cleared his throat, rubbed his jaw, then blew out a breath. When he didn’t speak, Maggie did.

“Dr. Evans,” she said, aligning herself with Sam, “is Jeremiah ill or not?”

He huffed out another breath, swallowed hard, then admitted, “I never wanted to lie to you, Maggie. Or you either, Sam.”

“I don’t believe this,” Maggie muttered.

“I do,” Sam said with a shake of his head. “The old goat tricked us into coming home.”

Instantly Bert’s eyes fired up and his spine straightened as if someone had suddenly shoved a steel pole down the back of his shirt. Shaking an index finger at Sam as if he were still a kid and needed a good dressing-down, the older man said, “It’s a damn shame that old goat had to trick the three of you into coming back to the ranch.” He took a breath and rushed right on before Sam could try to defend himself. “You boys haven’t been back since that summer, and do you think that’s right? Do you think it’s a fair thing to do? Cutting your grandfather out of your life?”

“No, but—” Sam shoved both hands into his pockets and backed up a step. He also noticed that Maggie’s gaze was on him.

“There’s no buts about it, boy,” Doc Evans said. “You three mean the world to that ‘old goat’ in there. Not surprising he’d do whatever he had to do to get you back here, now is it?”

No, it wasn’t. And if the doc’s aim had been to make Sam ashamed of himself, it had worked. But no one could understand just how hard it was to come back to Coleville. To this place that had once meant everything to him. No one could know that coming here, being here, felt as if he was somehow dismissing what had happened that summer. As if he was trying to forget.

“It was an accident,” Doc said, his voice softer now. “But you three have been making Jeremiah pay in loneliness. That isn’t right.”

Sam didn’t trust himself to speak. Guilt roared through him with a sound so thunderous it surprised the hell out of him that the others couldn’t hear it. The doc was right. Jeremiah had been punished for something that wasn’t his fault. Sam and his cousins had each cut this ranch and the old man out of their lives to make living with that summer easier on themselves. But they’d never stopped to consider how their actions affected their grandfather. And what kind of bastards did that make them?

He scrubbed one hand over his face and turned away, suddenly unable to face the accusatory glare in Doc Evans’s eyes. He walked across the yard in long, hurried strides until he reached the edge of the field. Then he stopped and stared. Stretched out for miles in front of him, open land raced toward the horizon. The breeze whistled past him, lifting his hair, tossing dirt into his eyes. Midday sun beat down on him like a fist and made him feel as though he were standing at the gates of hell, feeling the heat reaching out for him.

Appropriate.

Behind him, he absently listened to Maggie thanking Bert for coming and then to the soft sounds of the doctor’s footsteps as he left. Shame still rippled inside Sam and he had no defense against it. The bottom line was he and his cousins had forced their grandfather into faking a serious illness just to get them home.

“Are you okay?”

Maggie came up beside him and laid one hand on his arm. The simple heat of her touch, the gentleness of her voice, eased back the knot of pain lodged in the center of his chest.

“No,” he admitted, never taking his gaze from the horizon. “I don’t think I am.”

She sighed. “What Jeremiah did wasn’t right. He shouldn’t have worried you and your cousins—or me.”

Finally then Sam looked at her, caught the worry in her dark eyes and warmed himself with it. “He shouldn’t have worried you. We had it coming.”

“You’re being really hard on yourself.”

He laughed at that. “Aren’t you the one who’s been telling me that I should never have stayed away?”

“Yes,” she said. “But if anyone should have understood what you were feeling, it should have been Jeremiah.”

“No.” Sam turned to face her and laid both hands on her shoulders. “He couldn’t. Because he doesn’t know all of it.”

“Tell me,” she said, reaching up to cover his hands with her own. “Tell me what happened.”

His fingers tightened on her shoulders, his grip clenching as if holding on to her to steady himself. Maggie sensed the pain radiating from him and wished she could do something to ease it. But there was nothing—not unless he could talk to her. Tell her what it was that kept him in pain. Kept him from the home and the grandfather that he loved.

“Sam…”

He inhaled sharply, deeply, and blew the air out again in a rush. “Every summer we came here. There were four of us. All of us born within a year or two of each other. Our fathers were brothers and we were more like brothers than cousins ourselves.”

His eyes misted, and she knew he was staring into the past, not seeing her at all, though his grip on her shoulders remained strong.

“Me, Cooper, Jake and Mac.” A wistful smile curved one corner of his mouth. “I was the oldest, Mac the youngest. Not that it mattered,” he admitted.

The wind kicked up again, twisting dirt into tiny tornadoes that raced across the yard in front of them.

“Mac was brilliant. Seriously smart. He was only sixteen, but he had some great ideas.” Sam smiled now and Maggie felt the tension in him climb. As if talking about that last summer brought it all even closer. “That year Mac had come up with some gizmo he said would make us all rich.”

“Really?” Maggie smiled up at him, trying to make this easier. “What was it?”

He smiled back at her and shook his head. “Hell if I know. Mac and Jake were big into motorcycles, though—always tinkering with some damn thing or another. And that summer the two of them said they’d come up with something that was going to improve engine performance and make us all millionaires.” His smile faded slowly. “They were right. The royalties on that invention have been incredible. But Mac never lived to see them.”

“Tell me what happened.”

He let her go and shoved both hands through his hair as he took a step back. Distancing himself from her? Or from the memories gathering around him?

“It was a contest,” he said bitterly, his mouth twisting as if even the words had a foul taste. “We took turns jumping off the ridge into the lake. We got ‘points’ both for how far out we were able to jump and for how long we stayed underwater before surfacing.”

Maggie’s stomach fisted and sympathy washed through her. She reached for him, but he shook his head.

“Just… let me get it out.” He swallowed hard and stared off into the distance again, seeing the past unroll in front of him. “It was Mac’s turn. Jake had already outjumped all of us.” A choked-off laugh grumbled from his throat. “Mac hated to lose. He took a running start, jumped off the ridge and landed farther out than any of us had gone before. Jake was pissed, but to win, Mac had to stay down longer than he had, too.”

“Oh, God.” She knew what was coming. Knew that Mac had died that long-ago summer day and, in dying, had set his cousins on a path that had kept them from everything they’d ever cared about.

Sam kept talking as if Maggie hadn’t spoken. “I was timing him. Had Jeremiah’s stopwatch. Mac had been under two minutes when I started worrying.”

“Two minutes? Isn’t that an awfully long time?”

“Not for him. He’d done it before. But this time…” Sam shook his head. “It felt… different. Don’t know why. I told Cooper we should go in after him, but Cooper wanted Mac to beat Jake, so he said to give him another few seconds. We waited. We should have gone in after him, but we waited.” His eyes filled with tears that he viciously rubbed away a moment later. “Not we. Me. I should have gone in after him. I knew something was wrong. Knew he was in trouble. Felt it. But I waited.”

“Sam.” Her heart ached for him. For the pain he’d carried for so long.

“I waited, stood there on the ridge timing him, for God’s sake, while Mac was dying.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself. You always have been.”

He snapped her a furious glare. “Weren’t you listening? I knew he was in trouble.”

“You had a bad feeling. You were a kid, too.”

He brushed off her attempt at understanding and said, “I was the oldest. I should have known better. It was stupid to jump off that damn ridge. At two minutes and fifteen seconds, I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran and jumped in. The others were right behind me. The lake water was cloudy.” He squinted, as if still trying to see his cousin through the murky water. “Took us too long to find him. Took forever. He was lying on the bottom. We grabbed him and dragged him out. Laid him on the bank and pushed the water out of him, but it was too late. He was dead. Mac was dead.”

She reached for him, taking hold of his forearm, and his tensed muscles felt like steel beneath her palms. “I’m so sorry, Sam. But it wasn’t your fault.”

“That’s what everybody said,” he told her on a sigh. “Doc Evans examined the… body. He said Mac broke his neck when he jumped in—and unconscious, he drowned. And after that nothing was ever the same again.”

“You stayed away, Sam,” she said, sensing somehow that he didn’t want her sympathy now any more than he had before. “You made that choice. You and the others. You didn’t have to. No one blamed you.”

“I blamed me. Mac drowned. While we all stood there, timing him, he died.”

“You’re not psychic, Sam. You couldn’t have known that he broke his neck.”

He shook his head, refusing to hear her. Refusing to drop the burden of guilt he’d been carrying so long it had become a part of him. “I should have known he was in trouble. If I’d gone in when I first wanted to, I could have saved him.”

“He broke his neck,” she reminded him softly.

“He was only sixteen.”

“I know.” She lifted one hand and laid her palm against his chest, feeling the thundering beat of his heart. “But does staying away from Coleville make it easier?”

“Nothing makes it easier.”

“Then why stay away? Couldn’t you—I don’t know—honor Mac’s memory by coming home? Being the doctor this town needs? By living your life and being happy?”

Hope flickered briefly in his eyes before fading away again. God, Sam would like nothing better than to agree with her. To tell her yes, he’d stay. He’d stay here in Coleville, move back to the ranch. Surround himself with everything he’d missed for so long.

But he couldn’t.

He’d failed Mac.

And now he wasn’t allowed to be happy.

She frowned up at him and he saw the disappointment in her eyes when she asked, “Do you really think Mac would want you all to be miserable for the rest of your lives? To avoid coming home to the place you all loved so much?”

“No, he wouldn’t,” he said softly, reaching out to run the tip of his fingers along her cheek. “But that doesn’t seem to matter. Not for me. Or the others.”

“So when the summer’s over, you’ll leave again.”

He swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“And not come back.”

“Yes.”

“No matter how far you run, Sam,” she said quietly, “you’ll never be able to outrun your past. I know. I’ve tried.”