As Bad As Can Be (18 page)

“I've enough sense to look out for myself,” she returned.

He shook his head. “Doesn't matter. When someone you care about is at risk, you're always afraid of the worst.” He reached out to curl his fingers around her upper arms. “I couldn't believe my eyes tonight when I saw you up there. Gorgeous, sexy enough to drive me nuts. I've never wanted anyone like that, never.” His hands slid down her arms to hold her hands. “And then I realized that it was you, my buddy, and I didn't know how to make those two things mix.” His hands tightened on hers.

“And what do you think now?” Her voice was soft and shook just a bit.

“I think if I can get the woman on the bar and my buddy all in the same package, I'd be one damned lucky guy. What do you think?”

She leaned in toward him and his arms slipped around her. “I think I might just be the lucky one.” She pressed her mouth against his.

Quick footsteps hurried up to them and Shay stood there.

“She's gone.”

A
BODY IN MOTION STAYS
in motion, so Newton said. She'd stepped gently up the stairs as though if she let her feet come down too hard she'd shatter the fragile bubble that protected her. Pausing in her apartment had seemed untenable; only moving kept the anguish circling around her at bay. Without even pausing for thought, she'd found herself purse in hand, walking down her back stairs and opening the door to her truck.

She'd been on the highway out of town before she'd realized it. If she concentrated on moving, she wouldn't have to remember the words Shay had flung at her, she wouldn't have to remember the way she had felt the moment she realized that it was over.

But where to go, that was the question. What was she going to do, show up on Dev's doorstep and explain the whole mess? Go back to her place, where the very walls would be echoing with her gullibility? Or just leave it all behind, find her way to another town?

The idea beckoned her. Escape, forget that she'd ever believed in Shay, that she ever dropped her defenses so that he could get inside and tear her to the ground. Forget that she'd forgotten all the lessons of her life and let herself love.

It was seductive, nearly irresistible. And, she realized with a rush of panic, nearly impossible. She was
tied to a business now. She could throw away her own investment; she couldn't throw away Dev's. A greasy wave of desperation flowed through her. All she wanted to do was leave, and for the first time in her life she couldn't. Not without leaving ruin behind.

The highway stretched out in front of her headlights as she drove. She had to go back, she knew it. She had to turn around. Still, she was four hours along the New York State Thruway before she could make herself pull into a rest area.

The big, barnlike facility was still unlocked, though the inside lights were dim and the fast food joints shuttered. Her footsteps on the tile echoed as she crossed to the facilities. She stopped to wash her hands on the way out of the deserted rest room. Reaching for a paper towel from the dispenser under the mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself and froze in shock.

Under the pitiless glare of the fluorescent lights, her haunted eyes stared back at her from a face that was pale with exhaustion. Garish spots of blood spattered her white T-shirt; a smear of it ran along one cheekbone.

She wanted to shy away from the beaten-looking stranger in the mirror, she wanted to flee from anyone who knew her. More than anything, she wanted to stay moving and never go back. The thought of talking to Shay, even seeing him, made her stomach churn. She'd thought he'd cared for her, that he'd accepted her. How could she have been so wrong? And how could she now be trapped, unable to escape an untenable situation?

Mallory leaned her hands on the sink, the white porcelain cool and smooth against her fingers. Had her mother felt like this, filled with this desperate desire
to escape? Maybe she hadn't planned to leave. Maybe the pressure, the fights had just mounted up until one day she'd started moving and had simply lacked the strength to make herself stop.

Returning to do what was necessary took courage. The suffocating weight of responsibility Mallory felt made her want to run all the more, even as she knew she couldn't. Had that been the way her mother had felt about their family? Were Mallory and Dev a crushing duty that she just couldn't tolerate any more? Was she so stifled that fleeing was preferable to staying, even though she'd had to know the damage she would leave in her wake? And what did that say about her, Mallory, that she found herself at the same juncture?

You're selfish. You're no good. You're just like your mother,
the voice chanted in her head.

Her eyelids prickled. The image in front of her blurred, though she blinked to drive the tears away. For an instant, she saw her mother in the wavery, blurred face in the mirror. And for an instant Mallory understood the emotions and fears that had raged through the woman who had abandoned them. And now, on a rain-soaked turnpike three hundred miles from home, Mallory faced her mother's choice.

Slowly her knees folded and she sat on the mottled blue-green tile and wept.

 

W
HERE WAS SHE
? The question drummed through Shay's mind without respite. Her truck was gone. He'd found her doors unlocked and her cell phone on the counter; only her purse was missing. She'd told no one where she was headed.

He didn't find her out at the roadhouse, she wasn't
at O'Connor's, and she sure as hell wasn't in Bad Reputation. He fought the temptation to camp out at the base of her stairs. Dev's, he finally decided, she had to have gone to Dev's.

He checked his watch, knowing he was needed at O'Connor's. If she'd headed out immediately after their fight, she'd reach Dev's after one or two in the morning. There was no point in calling until morning.

So he told himself later at O'Connor's as he paced behind the bar and stared restlessly at the phone. If she'd been angry with him, he'd have been happy of the opportunity to let her cool down before they talked. Instead he remembered the dark, haunted look that flickered in her eyes before she walked out. Why had he talked about everything but what she meant to him? He poured drinks and tried not to stare at the clock as nine became eleven and eleven became midnight, and one day gave way to the next.

When the phone rang, he pounced on the receiver, hope sprinting through him. “Hello?” he asked, already thinking of what he would say to Mallory if it was her.

“Man, you blew it big time.” Dev's voice blasted out of the phone. “What the hell were you thinking?”

Shay squeezed his eyes shut. He'd give Dev his pound of flesh later, but now he needed to talk to Mallory. “I don't really want to get into it right now, Dev.”

“I bet you don't,” Dev returned. “How you could miss the blues festival of the year because you had to work is beyond me. What kind of a music fan are you?”

Shay blinked at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar as Dev's string of good-natured insults slowly
registered. The man should have been leaping down his throat over Mallory, not harassing him about a missed concert. Which meant that he didn't know. She would have been there by now, and Dev would have needed only a glance to know there was something wrong.

Mallory hadn't gone to him. She had to be back at her apartment.

Belatedly Shay tuned back into Dev's diatribe. “What are you doing calling so late?”

“We just got in. I wanted to rub your nose in it.”

Shay stifled his impatience and tried to sound casual. The last thing he wanted was Dev figuring out something was wrong. “We'll settle up next time I see you. We're going to be closing soon, though. I've got to go. You can call and gloat tomorrow.”

“You can bet I'll do that. Say hi to Mal for me.”

If he only could, Shay thought.

 

T
HE CLATTER OF THE NEWSPAPER
delivery truck woke Shay from the uneasy doze that had claimed him after he'd come home from O'Connor's. In just that instant, sleep was banished for good. Sighing, he rose and dressed. Maybe a walk would help wear away the tension that had him strung taut as a wire.

Outside, the streets were chill and dry, the sky flushed with the pink light of dawn. When his feet made the turn to Washington Square, he gave a wry smirk at himself. Like there was any doubt about where he was really going. He wasn't prepared to wait any more, even if it was early. She could sleep after he had said his piece. There were things she needed to know before any more time went by. They needed
each other, he thought as he turned into the alley that ran behind her building.

He was four or five steps up the back stairs before he registered the fact that her truck was still missing from the parking bay. When he reached the top landing and peeked through the window into her kitchen, he saw a scene unchanged from the night before.

One by one, the hairs on the back of his neck prickled up. By the look of things she'd been gone all night. She wasn't at Dev's, Becka and Mace had long since sailed away. Where was she?

She probably just needed time, he told himself as he walked slowly down the stairs trying to quell his apprehension. Someone would have called Dev by now if she'd wound up in the hospital, and Dev would have called him.

It wasn't the first time she'd bolted on him. It was too soon to be concerned, definitely too soon to call out the dogs. Mallory would be back that afternoon for bar prep, he was sure of it.

But deep in his gut, an icy ball of anxiety began to form.

 

A
CHILL DAWN BREEZE BLEW IN
off the water as the rising sun lit the rocks below the Cliff Walk. Mallory shivered and pulled her coat more tightly around her. She'd found the thin jacket in the cab of her truck, along with a pair of tennis shoes to replace her stilettos. It wasn't ideal, but it was the best she had. She needed to be out and she needed to be moving.

The ebb and flow of the waves was hypnotic, rushing in and around the rocks, then flowing away. A piece of cork float, broken away from who knew where, bobbed on the surface. She watched as the
waves caught it up and pounded it against the rocks. Then it disappeared beneath a boiling mass of whitewater. When the wave receded, the float bobbed back up and followed the sucking water, only to be pounded back into the rocks on the next surge.

She knew how it felt. Impossible to realize that just a day or two before, things had been right in her world. She'd been in love, bobbing on a wave of joy. Then, in a moment, all had turned. Like the cork getting pounded into the rocks, she'd been battered by Shay's condemnation, by the sudden realization that he didn't accept her, didn't care for her. Her love for him had left her with no defenses. She only felt battered, sucked under into a churning confusion of emotional whitewater in which she couldn't breathe or think.

Running hadn't helped. All across the miles of highway, it had traveled with her. Turning around had been the hardest thing she'd ever done, but ultimately, it had been her only real choice. The storm of weeping had left her drained but clear of purpose—her mother's path was not for her. She understood, now, in a way she never had. Forgiveness was too much to try for at present, but perhaps some day. For now, it was enough to have cast aside the grief she'd carried for so long.

Ultimately the water had drawn her, as it always had. Going back to her apartment was a bit more than she could face. Maybe the comforting rhythm of the waves would help her rebuild her defenses so that she could face Shay, if need be, without crumbling.

She rose and began walking, her feet scrunching on the dirt of the trail. How did you do it, she wondered, how did you forget and go on? In some small way she could understand her father drinking himself into
oblivion all their lives. If she'd never known what it was like to love and be loved back, she'd never have missed it. False though the feeling might have been, it left a gaping hole behind.

Stooping, she seized a small rock lying at the side of the trail and threw it toward the water. Then she grabbed another, and another. Suddenly she was scrabbling for rocks and heaving them in a frenzy, the bursts of violence an outlet for the turmoil in her mind.

Breathing hard, she whirled around to find more rocks. Then she noticed the figure walking toward her. Recognition took only an instant.

Adrenaline spiked through her veins, and with it came a sudden strengthening of purpose. He wouldn't run roughshod over her as he had the night before, she resolved, squaring her shoulders, pushing the misery aside. She had more fortitude than either of her parents, and what had destroyed them would not take her down. What was necessary, she would do, she told herself. What she had to survive, she would survive. And after it was over, she would go on.

If she didn't splinter into a million pieces.

As Shay neared, she saw the light of resolve in his eyes. The golden morning light made him look very young.

He came to a stop in front of her, his breath coming out in white puffs of condensation. “I've been worried about you,” he blurted, hands balled in his jacket pockets.

She congratulated herself on her dismissive shrug. “Forget it. It's over.”

“I don't want to forget it.”

Casual evaporated in an instant. “I don't think
that's up to you, Shay,” she said curtly. “You had your chance to talk last night. That's all you get.”

“No.”

It welled up, then, the misery. “What, you want to yell some more? You want to tell me I don't know what I'm doing? That I'm selfish and irresponsible? You were the one who kept saying open up, let me in. Sorry, buddy, I'm not a fool.” She turned and walked blindly away from him, down the trail.

He caught her in a few steps, touching her on the shoulder. “Turn around and look at me. Just give me a minute.”

It was the note of pleading that did it. Pleading from a man unused to it. Unwillingly she turned to face him.

He swallowed. “When I came into the bar last night and saw that ox getting ready to punch you, it scared the hell out of me. All I could think is that he was going to hurt you, really hurt you, and I couldn't stop him.”

“It wasn't your responsibility—” she began.

“Stop, okay? Just let me get through this.” He raked his hair out of his eyes and drew a breath. “All I could think when I was fighting to get to you was that I had never really told you how I felt. I never told you that I'm in love with you.”

She heard the rush of the waves, the cry of a shore bird. And over and over, his words shivered in her mind. In love with her? Shay? Her first reaction was elation, followed closely by doubt and fear. The night before was too fresh in her mind.

Shay shook his head, his face twisted in self-disgust. “I was so busy being afraid for you that even after everything was all right, I wasn't thinking clearly. I don't want you to do things that put you at risk be
cause I don't ever want anything to happen to you. But I didn't cut through all the crap about the bar to make that clear to you. I was an idiot.” He reached out and touched her cheek. “Mallory, I love you so much. I was going crazy last night when I didn't know where you were. You mean everything to me.”