As If You Never Left Me (Crimson Romance) (7 page)

“Yes, please.”

Obligingly, though reluctantly, she shoved the door closed, making sure it stayed closed this time.

In the kitchen, she started water for tea, reflecting on how nice it was to have time to linger over it. She stoked the fire in the stove, as well — something else she rarely bothered with in the mornings, because she usually headed straight to work. It felt good, though, to hold her hands in the growing warmth and think about nothing. Nothing to worry about today, no plans to make, nowhere to go. Maybe she could work on some of those sketches she’d started, though it didn’t look like she’d be able to get to the workshop —

Then it hit her. She was going to be stuck in this house all day. With Rey.

This was not necessarily a good thing.

The bathroom door squeaked and Rey came back out. There was a strange cant to his gait. It was the contorted, uncomfortable walk of a man too macho to let himself shiver. He made his way into the living room and sat on the couch, kicking open his suitcase.

“At least it’s warmer in here,” he muttered, then did a double take, squinting at Joely. “You’re not dressed. Don’t you have to go to work?”

“Look out the window.” In the kitchen, the teapot whistled. Joely went to answer its call.

Rey pulled on his jeans, then picked up a sweatshirt and went to the sliding doors leading to the small deck. He opened the blinds and stared.

“When did that happen?”

“Last night. It was in the weather forecast. Would you like some tea?”

Shaking his head, he continued to gape at the backyard, as if the snow might disappear if he looked at it long enough in disbelief. “They said two to three inches. This is closer to two feet.”

“Not quite. Do you want tea, Rey?”

Joely left a cup for Rey on the kitchen counter in case he wanted it and walked back into the living room with her own tea. “That was the Denver forecast. We’re not in Denver.”

He yanked his sweatshirt on, then grabbed a pair of socks from his suitcase. “So you’re just going to stay home and lose a day of business? Can you afford that?”

She shrugged, checking the stove. It was heating up nicely. “It’s a snow day. Like school. Nobody’s going to be out shopping for knick-knacks in this, anyway.”

“I guess that’s true.” He looked at the stove, then held his hands out to it casually, as if he were just experimenting instead of desperately searching for some kind of warmth. Joely hid her smile behind her teacup. “Is there any coffee?” Rey went on. “I could use a cup.”

“I made tea,” said Joely. “Have you not been listening to me? And there’s a cup on the counter.”

“Oh. Okay.”

He went into the kitchen to retrieve his tea.

• • •

It hadn’t quite registered with Rey until this morning how small Joely’s house really was. He’d thought maybe there was another bedroom or a study or something lurking around a corner, but there wasn’t. Kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, deck, garage. That was it. Oh, and that tiny linen closet.

That was good, though. Because it would be extremely hard for her to get away from him.

Things had already gotten comfortably domestic. He helped himself to cereal out of the cupboard while she drank her tea and ate toast with that all-fruit jelly she’d always liked. She thumbed through a magazine while she ate, not talking to him but not really ignoring him, either.

The whole scenario was far more comfortable than he’d expected.

“So what do you usually do when you’re snowed in?” he said suddenly. The silence was comfortable in its way, but it was starting to worry him. He’d never get anywhere with his planned seduction if they just sat around doing their own thing all day.

She looked up from the magazine. “I thought I might work on some sketches. It’ll be hard to get to the workshop through the snow. Once it settles down a little, Rob from up the road will come by with his snowplow and clear the road and the driveway.”

“Really. Rob, huh?” Was Rob a new wrinkle in the situation?

“Yeah, the whole neighborhood pays him a sort of retainer, salary, whatever, and he clears all our driveways for us, plus the road. The county doesn’t maintain this stretch.”

“I see.” When you lived in the middle of nowhere, he supposed, you had to come up with arrangements like that. Heaven forbid the city or county or whatever would do it for you. He thought about the big snowplows that cleared the streets at home, and about alternate side of the street parking. That kind of thing probably wouldn’t work on these narrow, winding roads.

Sipping his own tea, he looked at the black, wood-burning stove and wondered if she’d ever tried to cook anything on it. “It’s like a whole different world out here, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “In some ways. But it’s really not all that strange.” She turned back to her magazine.

Not that strange. She had to burn wood to keep her house warm, and pay somebody to plow the road. Her house was made of logs, and the TV weatherman couldn’t predict the weather for her piece of his viewing audience. No, this wasn’t strange at all. Hell, it was so much like New York City, who could tell the difference?

Joely sat at the kitchen table and sketched for a time, trying to pretend Rey wasn’t sitting across from her. Not the easiest task.

He’d gotten his computer out and connected to her wireless so he could catch up with the news. Apparently, the idea of trudging down her driveway through eighteen inches of snow to get the paper didn’t appeal to him. Of course, that was assuming the paper was even there. Given the conditions, Joely suspected it wasn’t.

So, between the scratching of her pencil and the tapping of his keys, they filled the silence companionably.

It didn’t seem right, though, to sit and say nothing. There were fourteen months of silence between them already — shouldn’t they find some way to address that?

“What are you working on?” Rey said suddenly.

Joely tweaked a line she’d been fussing over before turning the sketchpad to show Rey. He perused the picture. “Nice. This goes with the one you drew at the hotel.”

She nodded. Finally happy with the vase she’d sketched, she’d tried variations of the columbine design on a bowl and mugs. “I like to do things in sets. Sometimes somebody even buys them all together.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “And yet they work as single pieces as well, so if somebody only buys one, you can still sell the rest.”

“That’s the plan.” She turned the book back around, eyeing the drawing again. “These mugs I’ll probably price as a set of four, though.”

“You know what you need?”

There was a loaded question. “A million dollars?”
A good lawyer in tight blue jeans?

He plowed past her joke. “You need somebody to handle the financials so you can concentrate on the creative end of the business.”

“If I had a million dollars, I could hire someone.”

He opened his mouth, but closed it again, an oddly disappointed look on his face. She had the strangest feeling he’d been about to volunteer for the job. Instead he picked up his laptop and put it back into its case.

She found herself watching him, her eyes fixed on the sure movement of his long fingers. She’d always loved those hands. He pulled the zipper shut and pushed the computer case aside, bumping it up against the end of the couch.

Something in her throat started to burn. She swallowed hard before it could turn into tears. “I shouldn’t have said what I did,” she said abruptly.

He looked up, puzzled. “When?”

She swallowed. “Last August.”

The puzzlement faded from his face and he nodded slowly. “I probably would have come after you sooner if you hadn’t.”

There was no answer for that. When she spoke again she spoke to his hands, unable to meet his eyes. “I was angry.”

“You don’t say.” His mild tone caught her off-guard. When she looked up, he had a quirky smile on his mouth. “I never would have guessed.”

She returned his smile, sadly. “We have a lot of things to talk about.”

“Do we?”

“I think so, yes.”

“We can’t just … forget about it and move forward?”

“I don’t think I can, no.” No matter how hard it might prove to be, she didn’t think she could consider a future with him without working through their past.

His gaze slid sideways, and she could tell he was disappointed by her answer, but he shrugged, resigned. “Okay, then, we might as well dig in.” Folding his hands in front of him on the table, he added, “You first.”

Her eyes widened. She hadn’t expected that. Where in the world was she supposed to start? Of all the wounds they’d inflicted on each other, which should she pick open first? Rallying, she said the first thing that came to mind. “Why did it take you so long to come after me?”

He nodded approvingly. “Okay. A tough question, but fair.”

“You’re stalling, Rey.”

“Yes, I am.”

Resting her chin on her fist, she waited while he gathered the pieces of his answer. Would this be the honest Rey, who’d bared his soul to her from time to time? Or Rey the equivocator, whom she’d seen wowing the jury in court? Or attempting to wow the jury. She still couldn’t shake the image of the last trial of his she’d witnessed, when all attempts at wowing had failed miserably.

“When you left — ” he started, then broke off, shaking his head. “I don’t really want to go into this. It can’t help. We both know what happened.”

Joely blinked back sudden, surprising tears. She remembered it all too well. Inwardly, she cringed to remember the imprecations she’d thrown at him along with the divorce papers.
“Don’t bother calling me, Rey. It’s too late to fix this. If I never see you again, it’ll be too soon.”
And that had been the least of it. She hadn’t thought about that in a long time. She’d shoved it into the back of her mind so she could pretend it had never happened. A part of her still refused to believe she could have been so awful to him. So hateful. Hurtful.

His gaze caught hers as she regained control of her swimming eyes. His pain was masked there, but she could still see it lurking. Maybe he was right. It would be like picking at a nearly healed wound to revisit those moments.

“It occurs to me,” he said slowly, “that you might have some of the answers you need if you’d taken the time to read my letters.”

She swallowed. The letters. She hadn’t wanted to read them last night, and she didn’t want to read them today. But maybe he was right. Maybe she’d missed what she’d needed to hear, back then, by not looking at them. A wave of nervous tension suddenly passed through her, making her almost nauseated. Better to get it done, if he was going to insist. Like pulling off a Band-Aid. Make it quick.

He wasn’t sure why he brought up the letters. He already knew she hadn’t read them — she’d told him that in the restaurant. But when she got up and walked into the bedroom, he had a sudden sense that it had, in fact, been the right thing to say.

She came out carrying a shoebox, which she set on the table next to him. Tentatively, she sat back in her chair, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. He waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. So he opened the box.

They were all there. All the letters he’d written her after she’d stormed out of their apartment. Running his fingers over the edges of the envelopes, he counted twelve. None had been opened. Was that really all there’d been? He could have sworn he’d written at least a hundred. He looked up at Joely.

“Read them,” she said. “Or shall I?”

He cast his mind back and dredged up some of the more colorful contents of the letters. “I’ll read select highlights under one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“I burn them when I’m done.”

Her eyebrows shot up into neatly plucked, pale blonde arcs. “That bad?”

“Some of it.”

She considered. She looked almost frightened. “All right. It’s a deal. Read.”

He opened the first envelope, unfolded the letter, and confronted his own, old pain. If he let his guard down even a little, he could feel it burning a straight line down the middle of his chest, as if someone had sunk a knife there. He cleared his throat. “‘Dear Joely,’ blah blah blah, ‘I can’t believe you’re running to Colorado. Why don’t you just go all the way and head for L.A.?’”

“That was cold.”

“A little.” He went on. “‘Are you sure this friend of a friend with the storefront up for sale is legit? You have no idea what you’re doing and you could get screwed over big time.’ See? I was concerned for your welfare.”

“Nice.”

“Yes. ‘Also, where the hell is Bailey, Colorado, anyhow?’” He paused, skimming a few paragraphs. “‘I don’t want you to be in Colorado. I want you back here where you belong. And if you think I’m signing those divorce papers, you’re fricking nuts.’”

“Does it really say ‘fricking’? You’re not censoring?”

“Not that part.”

“You skipped a lot.”

He winced, thinking about some of the harsh words he’d skipped as he’d read. “Just filler.” He put the letter back in the envelope and set it out of her reach.

As he opened the second letter, he wondered again why he’d decided to do this. Each letter was like a window into the past, allowing him to relive the brutal, searing emotion he’d poured into each one. It hurt.

So he continued to read aloud, a sentence here, a paragraph there, just until he saw on her face that she understood. That was all he wanted. Just for her to understand why he hadn’t pursued her more diligently. Why he was only here now, fourteen months later.

I won’t chase you halfway across the country if you don’t still love me. There’s no point. Give me some sign I should come and I will. Because I still love you. That’s not going to change.

Five letters on the pile.

If you meant what you said, I don’t suppose there’s any point, but do you remember what we said on our wedding day? Just give me some kind of sign that we can have that again and I’ll be on the next plane to Denver.

Number ten.

You can’t possibly understand how much this hurts, Joely, when you don’t call, you don’t take my calls, you don’t answer my letters. But I’m not signing the divorce papers. If you want a split, you’ll have to talk to me face-to-face. No other options.