Always Mine (11 page)

Alicia was looking at him, her mouth quirked in a bemused smile. “Well, congratulations on your marriage,” she said. She looked over his shoulder and he glanced back, seeing that her gaze had drifted to the enlarged photo of Jerry. “And remember that we shouldn't waste time with anything but happy.”

The happy that the dead man couldn't experience anymore.

On that, Owen's upbeat mood surge disappeared. But not the need to find Izzy. She was his means to getting home, he told himself. That's why he needed her more than ever.

Pushing up from the chair he was in, he accepted the cane that Ryan immediately handed him. “Thanks, pal,” he said, his right hand closing over the handle. He gave the kid a smile that felt as forced as he was sure it appeared.

Looking around the small crowd in the foyer, he saw Izzy's dark head. Focusing his gaze there, he threaded through the people, touching the back of her shoulder once he reached her.

She turned. There were tears in her eyes.

“Sweetheart.” He frowned, his hand trailing down her arm. Concern for her added to his own low mood. “What's the matter?”

Izzy shifted so that he could see she'd been conversing with another young woman. Oh. Oh, God.

Ellie Palmer.

Images slammed into him again. Fractured pictures from that night and from his recurrent nightmare. He smelled smoke and he heard shouts and the gnawing, crunching sound that flames made as they ate at a structure. His vision dimmed and it was only Jerry's grin he could see, flashing on and off like the strobe on top of the fire engine.

“Owen.
Owen.
Are you okay?”

He blinked, startled to find himself outside the station and limping across the parking lot toward his car. Izzy had her hand in the crook of his elbow, above his cast, and was leading him like a blind man.

Embarrassment shot through him. He stumbled, and Izzy clutched tighter, keeping him upright.

“Are you okay?” she asked again.

He felt like such an idiot, he couldn't look at her. “I'm fine,” he managed to get out. “Just fine.”

“You're not,” she answered, unlocking the passenger door for him. “And I know it. So don't even try the macho baloney with me.”

He climbed into the car instead of answering. Once she was in her seat, she shut her door then started the car and pulled out of the parking spot. “I thought I was going to lose it, too, when I first realized it was her,” Izzy said softly.

He kept staring out the window.

“Then I decided that my little breakdown wasn't going to help. So we talked about the baby. It's a boy. She's going to name him Alexander Gerald Palmer. Alexander is the name of Jerry's dad.”

Owen's hand tightened on the crook of his cane until his knuckles were white. He couldn't think of one damn thing to say.

“She and Jerry painted the nursery with pale-blue and yellow stripes. It's all ready for the baby.”

Jerry's baby. The baby he would never see.

“And—”

“Damn it, Izzy!” he burst out. Emotion broke over him again, like a cold, clammy sweat. “Do you think this is what I want to hear?”

“No,” she answered, her voice quiet. “But I want to help, and your wall of silence isn't making things better, either. I know you're hurting, and I'd like to find some way to make it better.”

Her words, her tone, took the fight out of him. It wasn't her fault. It was his, wasn't it? That night of the fire, he should have foreseen, he should have felt that things would go south. As Izzy drove, he ran everything he could remember through his head. It continued to be hazy in some places, but he forced every memory back that he could, from the first moment of the call until he'd felt the world cracking beneath his feet. How had it all gone so wrong?

He was barely aware that they'd made it home and that he and Izzy were slowly climbing the stairs to
the bedroom. Still preoccupied with the past, he dropped down onto the edge of the bed. “I should be the one who's gone,” he murmured, finally articulating the thought that had been hounding him since he woke up in the hospital.

Izzy sat on the mattress beside him. He looked into her eyes, their velvet darkness trained on his face, and for the first time spoke the words that had been sitting like acid in his belly for the last four weeks. “I would give anything to go back and have the one who is alive be Jerry.”

She brushed her fingers through his hair, pushing it off his forehead. “I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

It was the exact right response, he realized. She didn't try talking him out of the feeling, she didn't try telling him that he should be happy he was alive, which he'd either told himself a hundred times or had heard from his family and friends. Izzy accepted his words, even seemed to understand them, and he couldn't begin to tell her how grateful he was for that.

Her fingers combed through his hair again and she leaned up to press a gentle kiss on his mouth. It was sweet, as understanding as her words, as soothing as her touch, but it ignited him all the same.

His good hand came around to the back of her head to keep her mouth centered on his. He deepened the kiss, surging into the wet heat of her mouth. He needed this, too, her understanding and this powerful sexual connection of theirs.

“Izzy?” he murmured against her mouth.

“Yes.” She was already pulling the tails of his shirt out of his jeans. The fabric slid against his belly, making him shudder. Her small fingers went to work on the buttons even as he tried yanking off her sweater with his one good hand.

Their frantic fumbling might have been funny, and under other circumstances they might have laughed, but seriousness lay over them like a blanket. It slowed their movements, too, so that when they finally were naked from the waist up, it seemed like it took a week for her to respond to the press of his hand on the smooth, hot skin of her back. When the hard tips of her nipples finally met his chest wall, they both gasped.

They collapsed onto the mattress, their mouths meeting, melding, the heat between them making it imperative that he get them out of their pants. His hand popped open the snap of her jeans and yanked down her zipper. A small triangle of cherry-red fabric distracted his purpose and he slid is hand beneath it—to find her already hot and wet and so soft that his fingers curled into her as he groaned his approval against her mouth.

She bucked against his hand, her torso twisting against his so that her nipples dragged through the hair on his chest. He slid another finger into her, filling her, and her hips jerked hard. His thumb easily found the center of her pleasure at the top of her
flowered sex. He rolled over it, once, twice, while Izzy moaned into his mouth.

She grabbed his wrist. “Owen, stop. I'm…almost, I…don't…”

Yeah, she was almost there. He could feel it in the tension of her muscles and see it in the flush on her face. “But I do, Izzy,” he said, continuing to stroke the sleek heat between her legs. “I do need this.”

After the disastrous outcome of that fire, he needed to have control of something, and taking charge of her pleasure was calming the roil of emotions that had been churning in his gut all day. Drawing his mouth away from hers, he trailed it across her cheek, her ear, and then down her neck. She bowed into him, her body squeezing his invading fingers, her breath coming fast. He glanced up, their eyes met, and he watched the orgasm crash over her.

Still half-broken, in that moment Owen felt whole.

But there was more ahead. She wiggled out of her jeans, helped him with his and then they were together on the bed, their bodies moving in that dance that came to them so naturally.

He kissed her mouth, he buried his nose in the perfumed smoothness of her neck, he let her rock him into his own burst of pleasure and then into…peace.

That's what she offered, too, he realized.

He'd been able to tell her the darkest secret of his soul and she'd responded with the intimacy of her body. This is what marriage was about, he decided,
as he watched her drift into sleep on the pillow beside him.

You shared it all, and the other person took you in. Your partner was your shelter when you needed that, was your peace when that was paramount, was in your corner no matter how unwinnable the fight.

This was what love was about.

And love was exactly what Owen Marston realized he felt for his wife.

I
zzy heard the uneven limp of Owen behind her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

She smiled to herself and continued through the door that led down the steps to the garage, a box in her arms. “I'm learning a new language while teaching myself tiddly winks.”

“Okay, fine. Laugh at me.” He sounded out of sorts, but nowhere near the dark mood he'd been in after their visit to the fire station a few days before. This one was more of a boyish, it's-a-rainy-day-and-there's-nothing-to-do variety. He was walking better and his wrist was starting to itch beneath the plaster.

“He's bored,” Izzy whispered to herself as she
hitched the box higher in her hands and set it on one of the two towers she'd created. This latest carton had been delivered that morning, but she'd moved the others down here before. There were twelve altogether now, and at some point she was going to have to find a new storage spot for them. There were other tasks on her list first, however.

She climbed the steps only to find Owen waiting for her at the top. Leaning on his cane, he wrapped his casted arm around her back and pulled her close for a kiss. With a little sigh, she melted against him. For better or worse—just like their marriage vows—they'd been sleeping together since the fire station visit.

“You got up too early this morning,” he complained, nuzzling a sensitive spot below her jaw. His mouth skittered down her neck. “Let's go back to bed.”

Goose bumps broke over her skin. Yes. They could go back to bed and she could pull him over her body just like warm covers and make the world go away. But no, today she had made plans that required looking the world in the eye.

Owen couldn't hide anymore, and she was going to have to find a way to break that truth to him.

She broke out of his hold instead and tromped up the stairs toward the third level that housed the bedrooms. “Later,” she said, looking down at him with a smile.

He groaned in mock frustration. “Isabelllllla.”

She laughed. He drew her name out like that when she did things to make him crazy, like order him to stay completely still while she inspected the heated skin of his chest…with her tongue.

Up in the room where she kept her things but no longer slept, she started folding the small pile of clean laundry on her bed. She didn't hear Owen until he spoke from the threshold of the door. “What are you doing?”

His brows were lowered and there was a frown on his face. “Izzy?”

She had no idea what he was talking about. She looked around the room. It was neat and clean, and her small suitcase, sitting open on top of the long dresser, was, as always, well organized. With a short pile of T-shirts in one hand, she crossed to it and tucked the clothes into the appropriate corner. “Is there something wrong?”

“Why are you packing?” he asked.

“Packing?” She frowned, then realized that he must never have peeked into the bedroom she'd slept in when she'd first arrived. “Oh. This is just…just how I live. Out of suitcases. I never put things in drawers.”

He crossed the carpeting to sit on the end of her bed. His hand idly played with the small heap of not-yet-folded underthings a few inches away. She watched him toy with the delicate lace on a pair of just-washed thong panties that she vividly remembered him stripping off her one steamy night.

He'd parted her legs, then kneeled low so he could taste her there. “Sweet,” he'd said, looking up. “Hot.” She'd already been on fire, her nerve endings crackling and sparking like live wires after a storm.

But the storm had been yet to come. He'd bent down again, holding her knees wide so that he could keep her open as he tongued and tasted her there, coiling the desire inside her belly until it moved lower and lower and then spun out in a great frenzied whiplash of a release.

Now, she turned away from him so he wouldn't see how affected she was just by him touching the clothes that weren't even on her body. That would tighten his hold on her, if he knew. And everything she'd been planning was about loosening the ties between them.

“Izzy, sweetheart.”

“Hmm?”

“Look at me,” he commanded.

If she refused, he'd make something out of that, too, so she whirled around and gave him a brilliant smile. “What?”

He was twirling a tiny pair of leopard-print panties on his forefinger. An unholy grin lit up his face. “These make me want to growl.”

Heat shot up her face again and she stomped over to grab all the underwear, including the pair now dangling from his finger. She shoved the handful into an interior pocket of her suitcase. “There. All
done. Now can we please leave behind the topic of my clothes?”

He shook his head, his grin dying. “I still think it's odd that you haven't unpacked the entire time you've been here.”

“I told you. I always live out of my suitcase.” It made it so much easier to move out and move on, a lesson she'd learned early. “If you don't keep your belongings close, you might inadvertently leave something of value behind.”

There was a long pause. “Oh, Isabella,” he finally said. “Sometimes you sucker punch me without even meaning to.”

“I don't have a clue as to what you're talking about.” The way he was looking at her made her stomach jump up and down in a very unpleasant manner, she thought, frowning at him. “I've been traveling this way since childhood—”

“Exactly.” He caught her hand and drew her close to him. “Let's talk about your traveling childhood.”

“I don't have time for that.”

He yanked on her hand, pulling her onto his lap. “Sure you do. I was talking to Emily a while back, and—”

“I need to go make lunch.” Izzy struggled to get up, but his cast was pressed against her waist.

“We can have a late lunch. Or I can make lunch. Or we can go out to lunch. Let's forget about lunch altogether and talk.”

“I've invited someone over.” She bit her lip. She'd meant it to be a surprise, but that probably wasn't fair anyhow.

Owen groaned. “If you say it's my grandfather…”

“It's not.”

“Are you sure? Because I know Granddad has been calling you, my lovely home health worker, for daily updates.”

She smiled, because something about the older gentleman tickled her. He was loud and brash and absolutely devoted to his grandson. “And don't I cover for you every single time? I tell him you're napping or showering or—”

“Bryce said you once told Granddad I was behind a closed door with a
Playboy
magazine and couldn't be disturbed.”

Her mouth fell open and she scrambled off his lap. “I did no such thing!”

Owen laughed. “Okay, then Bryce made that one up.” He brightened. “Tell me it's my brother coming for lunch and I can think up some fitting way to pay him back. Like, you made brownies for dessert and now he doesn't get any.”

“No, it's not Bryce, either,” she said.

Something on her face must have warned him. He sobered, his gaze narrowing. “Who is it, Isabella?”

She retreated for the door, her fluttering heart joining the up-and-down movement of her stomach. “It's Jerry's wife. It's Ellie Palmer.”

He stared at her.

“You didn't speak to her at all at the fire station that day. You took one look at her and walked out. So she called yesterday to see…to see how you were.” Izzy wiped her palms on her thighs. Her other attempts at interference hadn't worked, but this time it had to. “What could I say?”

“‘Come over for lunch' doesn't seem the most natural first response.” His expression was closed off and he'd crossed his arms over his chest. “But hey, whatever. I'll get out of the house and out of your hair so you two women can chat.”

“No, no! You…you haven't been driving.”

“Then it's about time that I do.” He made to rise.

She leaped over to push him down by the shoulders. It was imperative he meet with Jerry's widow. It was the necessary final step in his healing process. Once he was emotionally whole again, Izzy could finally walk away from him.

The longer she put that off, the harder walking away would be for her. “Owen, you know you need to speak with Ellie.”

“No, I don't.”

“Even if just to tell her what you know about Jerry's last evening.”

“I'm sure other people have told her all about that. We had enchiladas. Somebody at the station just loves to make enchiladas.”

“You had another nightmare last night,” she told him. “I think that means you've got to face—”

“Stay out of my head, Izzy.” His voice was low and controlled. “Remember? We made that deal?”

“
If
I stayed out of your bed,” she reminded him. “But I didn't, did I? So when I say you've got to stop disassociating—”

“‘Disassociating'?” It was Owen who stood now, and he headed for the doorway. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“You don't want to talk about the fire, you don't want to face Jerry's widow or visit the station, let alone think about going back there to work.”

“Are you calling me a coward?”

“No, of course not, but—”

“Because the lily-livered one is you, darling. Making up stories about your perfect family life. Telling tales that aren't true so you can keep
me
out of
your
head.”

Her heart stuttered. “This is not about—”

“You married me but you couldn't even commit to twelve hours as my wife before you had to run away.” Owen's blue eyes burned. “I know why now, though, don't I? You just told me. You just told me that you have to keep all your belongings close so you don't leave anything behind by mistake.”

“Owen…”

“I was a damned fool that day for believing I'd found the woman I wanted to marry and whom I'd
love for the rest of my life. It had only been three days, a Las Vegas weekend, but I was willing to gamble my future on you Izzy. Yeah. I certainly was a chump.”

She swallowed. “Owen…”

“Because you're too afraid to take that same kind of chance. You'll never risk your heart, will you, Izzy? You'll never let anyone close enough to touch it.”

 

She left. She took that suitcase of hers—all packed up as if she'd planned this all along—and walked out on him. Owen couldn't blame her—

Hell, yes, he blamed her!

But he wasn't surprised. After all, after Vegas he'd figured her to be his once and future runaway bride. Going after her was an option, but what was the use? He might think himself in love with her, but she didn't want to be married to him. And hell, after how he'd failed Jerry, Owen wasn't sure what he wanted for himself.

But he wasn't a coward. Shoving his hand through his hair, he nursed his bad temper and thought of all the ways that Izzy had been wrong about him.

He hadn't been distancing himself from the fire. It was all too real, every day, every minute in his head. Where did she think his survivor's guilt came from?

Oh, yeah, he knew what it was. And he was aware he was experiencing it. So he tried telling himself it was the fire that was at fault for Jerry's death. Sometimes he believed it. Other times, he couldn't under
stand how all their training, their physical fitness, their equipment couldn't have made a difference and kept that young man, that young man about to be a father, alive.

It was then that he couldn't imagine going back to the job that he'd loved because he couldn't believe in the point of it any longer. He didn't have faith that his actions could make a difference.

And he was afraid there wasn't a person or a way to talk himself out of that feeling. Even Izzy, even thinking that he was in love with Izzy, hadn't budged that bleak shadow on his soul.

The doorbell rang.

Izzy? God, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it was her, because even though she'd run over his heart twice on her rush to get out of his life, the stupid thing was still beating.

He wasn't fleet on his feet, but he hurried as quick as he could, flinging open the door to see Jerry's widow. Ellie Palmer.

Hell. He hadn't thought she'd be arriving. After the argument, he'd assumed Izzy would call Ellie and renege on the invitation. But here she was, looking pale. A small smile curved her lips. “Hi, Owen.”

“Hi. I—” What could he say—“Come in”—but that?

The very, very pregnant woman's movements were slow as she crossed the threshold and gingerly sat down on the chair he indicated. She tugged the
hem of her maternity dress toward her knees as her gaze roamed the room. “Um, Izzy invited me over.”

“Right, right.” Shoving his hand through his hair, he took a seat on the sofa opposite her. “She had to step out.”