Loving You Always (9 page)

“Well, if you need me, you know where I am.”

He stood up and walked inside, leaving Kerris with just the breeze for company. She knew he would not hear from her and she would not hear from him. She almost forgot to hurt when the door closed behind him. It was now such a familiar sound.

W
alsh stuffed the last few items into his bag, giving his bedroom a cursory inspection before heading toward the stairs. His flight didn’t leave for another three hours, but he had to get out of this house. It didn’t feel like home anymore. He’d remained in Rivermont longer than he had planned. Jo and the board of directors had drawn him into foundation issues he hadn’t had time for over the last year or so. Uncle James had gotten in last night from his business trip. They’d knocked back a few brews and watched whatever was on ESPN. Their relationship was as vital and essential as ever, but things weren’t quite the same between Walsh and Jo.

The kiss he’d shared with Kerris had been an earthquake, splintering his most important friendship. Unfortunately, he’d felt the aftershocks in his relationship with Jo. They hadn’t spoken much since her visit to New York, and he knew she didn’t approve of his being here now for Kerris. The strained, frozen silence between them belied the years of warmth and laughter they’d shared in this very house.

Each summer he, Jo, and Cam had raced through the backyard, flown down to the river, and raised hell in the halls of this place his mother had made feel like home. Only one thing hurt almost as much as losing Kerris, and that was losing Cam and Jo.

As if the force of his thoughts had conjured them up, he heard their voices at the bottom of the stairs.

“You’re leaving?” Jo’s voice carried up the staircase. “But where? When?”

“I’m going to Paris.” Walsh heard the barely suppressed excitement in Cam’s voice. “My flight leaves at eight.”

“The Sorbonne? You told her?”

“Yeah, and I…Jo, I told her I want a divorce.”

Walsh leaned against the wall, afraid his weak knees wouldn’t support him. His heart battered his chest, straining against the wall of bone and muscle. Hot air panted over his dry lips, his breath shallowing at the thought of Kerris being free. Of having her. Then he recalled how she’d looked the last time he’d seen her, how he’d had to force himself to leave her there in that hospital bed, cheeks still wet from tears she’d shed over Amalie. He pushed away from the wall, rounding the stairs and storming down them until he stood in front of Cam. Walsh dropped his bags to the floor and gave Cam an unwavering glare.

“Going somewhere?”

“None of your business,” Cam shot back.

“You son of a bitch.” Walsh grabbed a fistful of Cam’s shirt and dragged him close enough to hit. “You’re leaving her?
Now?
”

Cam shoved, putting as much distance between him and Walsh as the death grip on his shirt would allow.

“I’m the son of a bitch?” The calm in Cam’s voice would have fooled some, but not Walsh. “I’m getting out ’cause I didn’t sign up for a ménage à trois. If you wanna blame anyone for this, blame yourself. I do.”

Walsh slowly released the fabric clutched in his hands, watching the smooth mask of Cam’s face.

“You’re going to Paris? You’re divorcing her?”

“Yeah. At least wait until I’m on the plane before you rush over there.”

“You left her alone? With all she has to go through?”

“I would never do that, but there’s no need for me to stay. Mama Jess moved in to take care of her.” Cam looked down at his shoes. “Thought you’d be happy.”

“It’s not the way I wanted…I’m sorry, Cam.”

Cam looked up, narrowing his eyes and lacing his words with sarcasm.

“Sorry? Jo, he’s sorry. You screw up my marriage, my only shot at a family of my own, and you’re
sorry
? Wow. Your mom would be so proud.”

“Shut the hell up.” Menace and anger tightened Walsh’s face. His fists balled at his side. “Don’t even say her name.”

“That’s how Ms. Kris raised you?” Cam dug around in Walsh’s wound, heedless of the growing violence Walsh felt in his chest and knew must be all over his face. “Just like your daddy. No respect for marriage vows.”

“Cam, I’m warning you.”

Walsh willed back the flame rising up his neck. He licked his top lip, finding it wet with the sweat of his anger and agitation.

“It’s okay.” A bitter smile marred Cam’s face. “You got the girl, like you get everything else. Just remember. That’s my leftovers. I broke her in for you.”

Bone slammed into bone when Walsh’s fist connected with Cam’s jaw. And then they were on the floor, writhing on the cold tiles of the foyer. Walsh sat on Cam’s chest, pounding his fist into his face, mindless in his rage. Cam managed to reach up, even from that awkward angle, landing several punches to Walsh’s eye and chin. They didn’t talk. There was nothing left to say. The only sounds in the foyer were the grunts, the punches—the sounds of a violent confrontation long overdue.

Surreal. It couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t Walsh’s best friend, his brother, whose nose gushed blood under the relentless anvil of his fist. Even the blood pouring from a gash above Walsh’s eye wasn’t real; it wasn’t enough to wrest him from the nightmare of friendship slaughtered in the very house where they had played.

“Daddy!” Jo screamed, running toward Uncle James’s study.

Unc rounded the corner, his glasses resting low on his nose, the document he’d been studying still in his hand.

“What the hell! Break it up!”

Uncle James plunged into the merciless battle between the two men. He pulled at Walsh’s shoulders, trying to dislodge him. He grabbed Walsh’s arm before his fist could connect again with Cam’s face.

Cam dragged himself to sit against the wall, elbows resting on the knees he pulled up. He offered a maniacal grin, blood lacing his teeth and running down his chin.

“You’re such a spoiled bastard,” he spat at Walsh, the look he leveled at him malevolent.

Cam gestured to the stately foyer.

“You’ve had everything since the day you were born. All this. The best schools, great family. A mother…”

Cam’s voice broke. He closed his eyes and shook his head, wiping at the blood on his face.

“And you just had to have my girl.”

“It wasn’t like that.” Walsh heaved precious air through his lungs, spent from their violent exertion. He stretched out on the floor, looking up at the crystal chandelier overhead. “We didn’t…we never—”

“Just because you never fucked her—”

“Cam, good grief,” Uncle James said. “That’s your wife.”

“Oh, you didn’t hear?” Cam dragged himself to his feet. “She’s not my wife anymore. At least not for long.”

“What’s he talking about, Walsh?” Unc asked.

Walsh couldn’t meet the disapproval and disappointment in his uncle’s eyes.

He remained silent, banging his head once against the floor. He felt like an insect Cam had stretched out beneath a magnifying glass, three sets of eyes singeing him with unrelenting sun rays. They all watched him with varying degrees of censure and judgment.

“Oh, nothing to say now?” Cam swiped at his still-bleeding nose with the hem of his shirt. “Let’s just say that Walsh and Kerris had a…special relationship that didn’t leave much room for her husband.”

Walsh gulped back the shame boiling up in his throat, never taking his eyes from the glittering light fixture above. His faulty character was on display here in the house where his mother had raised him, where Uncle James had taught him to be a man.

Walsh forced himself to sit up and face Cam.

“I don’t know what to say other than I’m sorry.”

“Is it true?” Uncle James, face a blank sheet of paper with just a few lines, waited for Walsh’s response.

Walsh looked at his uncle, unable to apologize.

“I love her. I loved her before Cam even married her.”

Walsh turned his eyes to Cam, who looked back at him like an enemy.

“What I regret is not telling you, Cam. Thinking I could handle it. Thinking it would go away. The kiss you walked in on should never have happened.”

“Jesus, Walsh.” Uncle James’s disillusionment whooshed from his mouth in one quick breath. He ran his hand over his face. “How could you?”

“What? Kiss her?” Walsh stood to his feet. “One kiss. If it had been up to me, she would have left your ass a long time ago, Cam. That would never have happened, though. And you know why? Because that’s the kind of woman you married.”

Cam looked back at Walsh, unblinking and silent.

“She would never have left you for me. Never have cheated on you. One kiss, and you’re throwing that away?”

“A lifetime with a woman who loves someone else?” Cam twisted his eyebrows into a frown. “Would you take that?”

“I’d take Kerris any way I could get her.” Walsh cleared his face of repentance or apology. He grabbed his bags from where he’d dropped them. “As a matter of fact, I’ll take her as your…how did you put it? Broken-in leftovers? Yeah, I’d take her if she’d had
seven
husbands, not just one idiot ahead of me.”

“So you’re really going after her?” Cam asked.

Walsh walked to the door and knew this would be it. This would be final.

“Unc, would you run me to the airport?” Walsh looked past Cam and Jo to where his uncle stood. “I’ll wait in the car.”

M
ama Jess, I need you to do me a favor.”

Kerris glanced from the bulk of her two casts, lumps beneath the comforter, up to Mama Jess’s worried face. She had cried for only a few minutes after Cam left, and then she’d retreated to her office on the screened-in porch. From her wheelchair by the window, she’d looked out and down to the riverbank. Mama Jess had finally convinced her to eat some soup and a sandwich. A quiet meal, with Mama Jess not asking many questions, and Kerris not offering many remarks. After eating just a few spoonfuls of soup and pulling the crusts from her sandwich, Kerris had declared herself exhausted and in need of a nap. And now she was in need of a favor as well.

“What is it, Lil’ Bit?” Mama Jess reached down to push the bangs from Kerris’s eyes.

“When Walsh comes.” She caught Mama Jess’s hand by her face, gripping her fingers. “I don’t want to see him.”

“Do you know that he’ll come?”

“He’ll come.” Kerris licked dry lips. “I just don’t…I can’t see him.”

“I saw him crying his heart out in the chapel.” Mama Jess adjusted the comforter around Kerris’s shoulder, looking down at her with eyes blessedly free of judgment. “That man loves you.”

“I know, and I care…” Kerris let the insipid word describing what she felt for Walsh sit on her tongue like tasteless porridge. “I care about him, which is why I can’t see him right now.”

“Mind explaining that?”

“There’s something broken in me. Something that’s never been right. I used Cam to try to fix it. I used the baby to try to fix it. And if Walsh comes now, as much as I…care about him, I’ll use him to try to fix it, too.”

“Hmmmm.” Mama Jess crammed everything and nothing into that monosyllable.

“And I can’t do that,” Kerris said, her eyes filling up. “Not anymore. Not to
him
. I need to be on my own and figure this out. And if he comes…I won’t be able to say no. I won’t be able to send him away. And I just…I just need some time to get it straight. To sort it out. I’ve messed up so badly, and I can’t keep—”

“Stop, baby.” Mama Jess’s voice, quiet and sharp, sliced into the hysterical note Kerris heard building in her own voice. “I’ll handle it.”

Walsh pressed the doorbell again for the fourth time in a matter of seconds. Cam said Mama Jess was here with Kerris. Walsh walked over to the window, trying to see through the sheers into the living room. He knocked on the window, a few soft taps. Maybe he should go around to the back door. Maybe he’d knocked too softly, and the steady rainfall had muffled the sound. He put a little more insistence into the fist he banged against the windowpane. It shouldn’t take this long to open a door. Surely Mama Jess hadn’t left Kerris here alone.

The front door opened before he could send his anxious mind too far down that road.

Mama Jess stepped onto the front porch, closing the door behind her and leaning against it.

“Were you going to call the fire department next?”

Mama Jess started her scrupulous inspection at his shoes, then inched up his dark-wash jeans and past his NYU T-shirt until she met his eyes. Walsh didn’t like what he saw there. It was steel. It was determination. The fact that she didn’t let him in hadn’t escaped him. Walsh walked the few feet from the window to the front door, standing his ground in front of the woman he suspected meant to keep him out.

“I’m here to see Kerris.”

“Oh, and here I was about to get flattered.” She rolled the words around in sarcasm and accompanied them with a twist of her lips.

“I…well, I heard that—”

“News sure travels fast.” She squinted up at him in the weak porch light and gestured to his face. “What’s the other guy look like?”

Walsh touched the puffiness under one eye and brushed his fingers across the cut above the other.

“Worse.” Walsh shoved all thought of Cam from his mind. He had waited too long. This was happening. Tonight. Now. “I need to see Kerris.”

“No.” Her lips barely parted over the word, like it was nothing to her either way, but Walsh wasn’t fooled.

“Is she asleep? My flight leaves in a couple of hours, but I can wait. I could even reschedule my flight. Cancel it. I can stay another day. Another week. I just need to see her.”

“Even when she wakes up, she don’t want to see you, son.” Mama Jess’s firm tone gentled just a little over the last part, but that brought Walsh little comfort.

“No, she will.” Walsh tried the usual confident smile, but it slipped and fell right off his face when he saw just how unmoved Mama Jess remained. “She’ll want to see me.”

“Then why did she tell me that if you came by, to tell you she don’t wanna see you?”

Walsh gave a vigorous shake of his head, denials fighting their way out of his mouth and tumbling past his lips.

“No, you must have misunderstood. She would never say that. Now that—”

“Now that she’s getting a divorce?” Mama Jess pushed away from the door, planting a fist on one full hip. “And now she’ll be free? Is that what you were gonna say?”

“Not exactly, but…can I just come in? Just for a few minutes.”

“I said no. Now go.”

“Go? You’re telling me to go?”

“No,
she’s
telling you to go. Look, give her some time.” Mama Jess heaved her full bosom with a sigh that seemed to say she was barely tolerating him. “Don’t be a spoiled little boy about it. Don’t you have money to make, orphans to save, and things to do?”

“Spoiled?” Walsh knew he was in trouble when he started sputtering. “Wha…I…You…Me? Spoiled?”

“Look, all I know is you out here, banging on the door, pounding on the window, whining ’cause you can’t get your way, and ’bout to pitch a fit ’cause I won’t let you disturb a woman who barely survived a car wreck, lost her baby and was just walked out on by her husband.” Mama Jess leaned forward and up until he couldn’t escape the strength of her brown eyes. “
Excuse
her for needing a minute.”

“I just need—”

“How about what she needs?”

God, he hoped Kerris needed him. As badly as he needed her. Desperation and desolation muddled Walsh’s thoughts. He, who had persuaded sheikhs out of oil holdings in their families for generations, couldn’t convince one middle-aged woman to let him into a cottage that had been in his own family for more than a hundred years? Nothing had worked, so all he had left was the truth.

“I can’t lose her again.” He said it so softly that the rain now coming down steadily almost drowned it out. “I waited once before. Tried to leave it up to her to fix things, and it got so messed up she married my best friend.”

Walsh flinted the stare he leveled back at Mama Jess.

“I will
not
let that happen again. I don’t care if you make me wait out here for a week.”

Mama Jess’s mouth softened, but she still didn’t make a move to open the door.

“Let’s make a deal.” She gestured toward the porch swing. “Sit down.”

Walsh remained rooted right where he stood. The swing was at least eight feet farther from the door than his current position.

“What kind of deal?”

Mama Jess smacked her lips together, impatience marking her smooth brown face.

“Boy, just sit down.”

He settled on the wooden seat beside Mama Jess, pushing his back into the corner and keeping his eye on her. She reminded him of his mother. They were as physically dissimilar as two women could be, but Walsh knew wily when he saw it. He’d lived with it, been raised by it. Had loved it. Mama Jess’s eyes held the same shrewdness his mother’s had. He swallowed the hot lump in his throat and braced himself for terms he probably wouldn’t like.

“I’ll let you know when she’s ready.”

“I’m supposed to trust that you…that she—” He stopped, breathing through his nose and out through his mouth once, a huff of anxious air that deflated his chest. “Okay. You’ll let me know if she’s not healing right? If she needs anything? Financially, medically—anything?”

“She won’t need anything.”

“You will let me know.” He bolstered the words with a stony glare that set terms of his own.

“I’ll let you know. She does care about you, you know.”

That was a crumb, a bone thrown, an insult to what he had with Kerris.

“She
cared
about me the day she married my best friend, so forgive me for not putting much stock in that.” Walsh’s bitterness and regret popped out like a jack-in-the-box. He tried to tuck them both neatly away before continuing in a more even voice. “Do we have a deal, or what?”

“And you won’t contact her until I contact you?”

“This won’t work.”

“Walsh, you let her do the work on herself now, or sign up for a lifetime of trouble.”

Walsh stiffened, his nervous movements slowing to nothing. There was that word—that elusive word he’d never thought would ever apply to him and Kerris.

“Did you say ‘a lifetime’?”

“If you play your cards right, maybe.” Mama Jess rationed a tiny smile for the first time since he had banged on the door.

With just a nod and without another word, Walsh stood and walked down the porch steps toward the dark Mercedes idling in the driveway, his pace not rushed despite the rain pelting his head and shoulders. He’d forgotten Uncle James was even waiting. His tunnel vision had blocked that out. Blocked out the fight with Cam. Blocked out Jo’s disapproval and disappointment. Single-mindedness had possessed him, but he came back to himself with every step he took away from the cottage and toward the car.

Kerris had months of rehab ahead of her, and probably needed some therapy for all she’d been through, Amalie and Cam notwithstanding. The road ahead of her for the foreseeable future was rough, and more than anything, Walsh wanted to walk it with her. But he got it. She needed to do this alone. He made a promise to himself, and even though she couldn’t hear it, a promise to the girl behind that door. This would be the last time he walked away from her. After this, never again.

After this, she owed him a lifetime.