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She held him tighter, stroked him with soothing hands, murmured tender lies—that it was okay, that everything would be all right.
He said, “I called the ambulance. And then I hid, in the trees, until they came. They took him out. He was so still, but maybe…he could have been alive. There were cops, too. They looked around the property, but they didn’t find me. Tory, I have to get away. I have to get out of town….”
She begged him to stay. But he said he couldn’t. He’d end up in jail if he stayed. So she said she would go with him.
“You can’t. You’re sixteen. How would we live? It would never work. But I’ll come back, Tory. I swear. Someday…”
Someday.
She hadn’t liked the sound of that at all. Someday could be forever. Someday could mean years.
But what could she do? She sneaked back into the house to get what money she had there, and then came out again and gave it to him. And after he left, in the house once more, she tiptoed to the hall bathroom, locked the door and turned on the light, expecting to find dark stains all over herself.
There was nothing. Her eyes looked wide and haunted in the big bathroom mirror, but her blue pajamas bore not a single dark smear. The blood had all dried on him before he came to her.
Before he left he had asked her to find out what she could about Blake. He promised to call. In a few days…
And he had called. Once. Three days after that terrible night. He called in the late afternoon, when her father was still at his clinic and her mother was at the beauty shop.
By then Tory had thought that everything would be all right. Because Marsh’s father had not died. Blake was out of the hospital and back on his feet. She told Marsh the news, bursting with joy that it would all work out, after all.
“You can come home now, Marsh. Your father didn’t die, and it’s safe to come back.”
“No, Tory. I can never go back there. He’ll kill me if I do. And if he doesn’t kill me, I’ll kill him….”
He’d sounded so very far away. And so desperate. A fugitive from justice. He’d actually called himself that. He wouldn’t tell her where he was calling from. He said he had to keep moving, he couldn’t let Blake find him.
“You don’t know him, Tory. You don’t know how he is. Nobody gets the better of him….”
She was crying when she hung up the phone, thinking she’d go crazy waiting for Marsh to call again.
But she hadn’t gone crazy, though sometimes in the weeks to come it had felt like she was. And as it turned out, he never did call again. That was the last time she ever spoke to him—until a few hours ago, when she’d picked up the phone and heard his voice saying her name.
A dark-haired woman wearing too much perfume brushed past her murmuring, “Excuse me,” as she went.
“Oh.” Tory blinked. “It’s okay…”
A black leather wing chair waited a few feet from where Tory stood. She ordered her numb legs to move, to take her there. Once she reached it, she sank stiffly into it.
Marsh came toward her. So strange. Her heart was breaking all over again. It shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t feel like this, not after all these years.
He stopped just a foot from her chair. Concern had turned those dark eyes to velvet. “God. Tory…”
Almost, she lifted up her arms to him.
Almost, she surged from that chair and into his embrace.
Almost.
But not quite.
She hesitated, thought, Do I really want that—his arms around me? And how can I be certain that he will welcome me there?
Then she realized it didn’t matter whether she wanted him to hold her, whether he wanted her body pressed close to his. Somehow, while she hovered on the brink of throwing herself at him, the dangerous moment had passed.
Tory stayed in the chair and stared up at him. “Why now?” The hushed words seemed to come out all on their own. “Why now, after all this time?”
“Tory, I—” He cut off his answer before he even said it. “Please. I think we’d better go somewhere more private. To my room, all right?”
She probably should have said no to that. But she didn’t. People kept strolling by them, and there were three clerks behind the check-in desk. She didn’t need any of those people witnessing her distress, let alone hearing whatever she and this man ended up saying to each other.
She stood on shaky legs and smoothed her rumpled skirt. “All right.”
For a moment she thought he would take her arm. She didn’t know if she could bear that—his touch, right then.
But then he only gestured. “This way.”
She fell in step beside him. They strolled across the lobby and down into a central court area paved in stone. Then up three carpeted steps to the elevators. He pushed a button. They waited. She didn’t look at him. It seemed better not to.
A set of doors opened. They got on with two men in business suits. The elevator had glass walls. They rode up with a view of the open court area retreating below them.
The two businessmen were arguing, speaking in tight, hushed tones. Tory ignored them. It wasn’t hard. Most of her energy was taken up in painful awareness of the man beside her—the man she still would not look at. She stared blindly down at the courtyard as it moved away beneath them.
The businessmen got off on the fourth floor, leaving Tory and Marsh alone the rest of the way. Marsh didn’t speak. And Tory felt that she couldn’t speak, that if she’d opened her mouth only a strangled, crazy moan would come out.
At last, they reached his floor—the top floor. The car stopped, the doors slid open.
He said, “This way,” for the second time. She walked beside him, down a hall that was also a long balcony overlooking the courtyard below. When they reached his door, she stepped back as he used his key card. The green light blinked. He turned the handle and signaled for her to go in ahead of him.
It was a suite, she noted with some relief. She wouldn’t have to try to talk to him in a room that was more than 50 percent bed.
They entered a small entrance hall that opened onto a living area done in forest-green and maroon. Soothing colors, she thought, though the last thing she felt at that moment was soothed.
He gestured at the forest-green sofa. Obediently she lowered herself onto one end of it.
“Can I get you a drink?”
Her stomach rebelled at the thought. Yet she heard herself answer, “Plain tonic water?”
“I can do that.”
He turned for the bar, which had a mirrored wall behind it, and got busy fixing the drink she’d asked for that she really didn’t want. Once he’d poured the tonic water, she watched him mix himself a whisky and soda.
She couldn’t help staring at his hands. Very fine hands, long-fingered and strong. They appeared much better cared for than in the past, the nails filed short and buffed smooth.
She found herself thinking how they used to hold hands all the time, thinking that she could still recall exactly the way his hand had felt in hers—warm and firm and rough.
And then she thought what she should not have allowed herself to think.
But holding hands wasn’t what got us into trouble…
What got them into trouble had happened out by the river at Ten Mile Flat, in the back seat of that old Plymouth Duster he used to drive. They would lie all wrapped up together, clothes unbuttoned, but never fully undressed—after all, someone might come along. Surprising, the trouble a couple of kids can get into, and all without ever taking off all their clothes.
As if he were touching her now, she could feel them—those long hands on her skin…
Tory blinked. Gulped. Cut her eyes away.
When she looked back, he was watching her in the mirror over the bar. She became certain, in that instant, that he could see inside her mind, that he knew what she had been thinking, about those nights out at Ten Mile Flat.
She felt defiant, then. And angry. That she should still remember so vividly. That this man who had left her to have his baby alone could still call forth such a powerful response in her.
He turned, a glass in each hand, and came to sit in the armchair nearest her end of the sofa. He passed her the tonic water. The glass was cold, beads of moisture already sliding down the sides. She took one sip. Her stomach lurched.
No. Better not try to finish it. She set it on the coffee table in front of her. He drank, the ice cubes clinking together in his glass.
She found herself staring at his watch. A Rolex. Unbelievable.
She said what she was thinking. “It looks like you are doing well.”
He lifted one of those broad shoulders in a half shrug. “I own a business. Boulevard Limousine of Chicago. I started it eight years ago, with one twelve-year-old Cadillac limousine and one chauffeur—me. Originally, it was just a way to support myself while I was earning my degree.”
His degree? Marsh Bravo, who had barely managed to graduate from Norman High, now had a college degree?
He chuckled. “Hard to believe, huh? Me, a college graduate. But I have to confess. It’s not from any college you would have heard of. You went to OU, I suppose.”
“Yes. I did.”
“Figured you would. Dean’s honor list, right?”
She nodded. “And…how is your business doing now?”
He brought his glass to that sensual mouth again, sipped, shrugged once more. “Revenues this year should top five million. I have 250 employees and a fleet of 85 limousines.”
Tory could hardly believe what she was hearing.
I’m no good, he had written. You can do better….
Eight years ago, he’d said. Eight years ago, in Chicago, he had started his business. And since then, he must have been making a living at least, must have been doing all right.
Yet he had never called. Never written. Never made the slightest effort to see her, until now.
That hurt. That hurt way too much.
She couldn’t afford that—to start hurting for this man all over again. Couldn’t. And wouldn’t.
She had to remember. This meeting was not about her. It was about Kim. For Kim. Kim was the one who mattered now. And if Kim’s long-lost daddy owned a fleet of limousines, well, that was all to the good.
Marsh looked into his glass, and then back up at Tory. “What about you?”
She stared at him blankly, still trying to accept the fact that the poor boy she had so passionately, utterly loved, the poor boy who had turned his back on her because he had nothing to offer her, had spent the past decade becoming a rich man.
At last, his question registered. He wanted to know what she did for a living. “I’m a florist. I have my own shop. The Posy Peddler. On Gray.”
“A florist.” He smiled.
Did he find florists amusing? She pulled her shoulders back. “That’s right.”
He gave her a long, nerve-racking look. Then he spoke gently. “You said on the phone that you weren’t married. Is there…someone special, then?”
Someone special? Why did he ask that? What difference could it make to him, now, after all this time?
It was too much. She stood, then didn’t know what to do next. She started to sit again, but changed her mind about that. She stayed upright, and wrapped her arms around her stomach, which felt as if someone had tied it into a ball of hard knots. “I don’t— Marsh. Why are you here? Why now?”
Marsh looked up at her, wondering what he’d said that had made her so angry all of a sudden, recalling how crushed she had looked at the sight of him down in the lobby, how he’d wanted to grab her and hold her close and plead with her to forgive him for not coming back—to swear to protect her, to never hurt her again.
But he hadn’t grabbed her. And she hadn’t thrown herself into his arms.
And since then, things seemed to have gone seriously south. This pretty stranger glaring at him now was not the same innocent girl he had once loved so much. Once, when he looked at her, he could feel his whole heart opening up, reaching out to her.
He didn’t feel that way now. He felt—interest. She was a good-looking woman. And he liked the way she carried herself, liked the sound of her voice, the cute smattering of freckles across her slim nose.
It was…attraction. Yes. That was the word for it. But he didn’t think it was love. Not anymore.
Could it grow into love again?
As if he would ever find out the answer. The woman glaring down at him now didn’t look especially eager to try again.
But then, what had he expected? He was, after all, the one who broke it off, even if he had done it for her own good, even if he had known, deep down, that it could never have worked out for them.
And probably even more damning in her eyes than his breaking it off, were those letters she had sent him. The ones that had taken months to reach him, he’d moved around so much there in that first year. The letters he’d returned unopened, though it nearly killed him to do it. He’d spent a lot of nights wondering what she might have written in those letters.
“Why are you here?” she demanded again, openly angry now.
“I told you. My father—”
“Oh, you stop that. I’m not talking about your father right now and you know it. I want to know why you called me.”
“I just…” Damn. He wasn’t even sure he knew the answer to that himself. Curiosity, maybe. About what had happened to the girl he left behind. Curiosity—and a kind of longing. A longing not so much for the girl he had loved as for the heat and tenderness he’d known with her. A longing that had faded over the years, but that had never completely left him.
And then there had been the old man. Prodding. Taunting him to look Tory up.
“You just what?” she demanded.
“I wanted to see if—”
“Look,” she said, cutting him off, apparently deciding she didn’t want to hear what he had to say, after all. “This is a…well, it’s a shock for me.” Those beautiful blue eyes had taken on a panicked gleam. “I don’t seem to be handling it real well. I didn’t know…I didn’t expect—”
She looked pale again, as she had in the lobby. Worse than she had in the lobby—as if she might be sick.
