Carly's Gift (22 page)

She chuckled. “And missed out on basketball season? Fat chance.”

“How long am I going to have to be like this?”

“They won't give us a time frame until they see how your arm is healing.” She hesitated, unsure how much to tell him. In the end, she settled for the truth, wishing the decision had been as easy with Andrea. “Apparently some compound fractures can get pretty complicated.”

“What about my leg?”

“Six weeks and it will be like new.”

He thought a minute. “I'll bet if you told Andrea about my arm, she'd come home to see me.”

Carly smiled. “I think she would, too. But I'm not going to tell her.”

The conspiratorial gleam left his eyes. “How come?”

“Because you are.”

This time it was his turn to smile. “Can we call her now?”

Carly gave his hand a squeeze, caught up in his enthusiasm. “She wouldn't be home from school yet.”

“Mom?”

Carly looked back to Shawn. “Yes?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Oh, honey, I'm sorry, too. If I'd been home, you wouldn't have gone looking for me and none of this would have happened.”

He stared at her long and hard. “Did Dad tell you to say that?”

“What do you mean?”

“It just sounds like something he would say, that's all.”

She busied herself opening the cellophane package that held a napkin and silverware. “When did you get so smart?” she asked softly.

“I see lots of things you think I don't.”

She really didn't want to get into this discussion with him. He was a child. It was his right to be sheltered from the sins of his parents.

A soft knock on the door drew their attention before she could respond. Ethan poked his head in and smiled. “How's my kid?”

Shawn's return smile was slow to form. “I'm doin' great,” he said.

Ethan came in the room. “Well, you're going to be doing even better when you hear what I've got to tell you.”

“Andrea's coming home,” Shawn said excitedly.

Ethan's jaw dropped. It was obvious he had completely misjudged what it would take to please Shawn. “Guess again. No, don't,” he quickly added. “I want to tell you myself. I talked Arnold Livingston into selling me tickets for three of the Piston games.”

“But he only has two tickets.”

“So where's the problem?”

“What about Mom and Eric?”

Ethan shrugged in frustration. “I was thinking it would be fun for just you and me to do something.”

“I didn't want them to feel left out,” Shawn said.

“You don't have to worry about that. Eric won't mind, not if we bring him something afterward. And you know your mom—she prefers staying home to going somewhere with me.”

Anger shot through Carly. “That's not true.”

Ethan gave her a withering look. “Then why was it you broke your promise about last night?”

“Last night?” she asked.

“We were supposed to set some time aside to talk, to get things back on track between us.”

She glanced at Shawn, who was staring at his father. “Could we talk about this later?” she said to Ethan.

“Now where have I heard that one before?”

She had her mouth open to answer when it hit her what he was doing. Shawn, even more than Andrea, was compulsive in his need to defend the underdog, and Ethan was playing to that need by maneuvering her into the role of heavy. To defend herself by saying she'd felt Shawn needed her more would only put him in the middle. “I'm sure it was last night when I told you I was too tired to drive all the way home and that I wanted to stay here instead.”

Not waiting for his answer, Carly again focused her attention on Shawn. “I don't know about you, but I don't think your breakfast looks all that appetizing hot. I have a feeling if we let it get any colder, Muffin wouldn't even eat it.”

Shawn grinned, plainly relieved to have his parents' confrontation over. “There's nothing Muffin wouldn't eat.”

Carly tucked the napkin under his chin. “What would you like to try first?”

His eyes became big questioning circles. “I can't eat lying down.”

“Wanna bet? Now open wide.”

Reluctantly, Shawn let her put a forkful of egg into his mouth. He spent a second chewing, then made a face. “Yuk,” he said when he'd swallowed.

Ethan came up to the bed. “How about if I pick you up an Egg McMuffin?”

Shawn looked at Carly. “Can he?”

She returned the fork to the tray. “I don't see why not.”

“I'll be back in twenty minutes,” Ethan said. He put his hand under Carly's chin and kissed her. “What would you like?”

She was sorely tempted to tell him exactly what it would take to please her. Instead, she said, “Nothing. I'll just pick at this. There's no sense letting it go to waste.”

“You could always take it home to Muffin,” Shawn said, the mischievous twinkle back in his eye.

When Ethan had gone, Carly and Shawn slipped into a comfortable silence. For a while, she thought he'd gone back to sleep, but then he opened his eyes and spoke.

“What time do you think it would be all right to call Andrea?”

“You really miss her, don't you?”

“Yeah, but don't tell her.”

“Why not?”

“She'd never let me forget it.”

“Well, I'll let you in on a little secret—she really misses you, too.”

“Then how come she's still over there?”

“Because of me,” Carly admitted.

“How long is she going to be mad at you for not telling her about David?”

“I think she's gotten over that.”

“So, what's bothering her now?”

“She doesn't know what to say to me.”

“You've gotta be kidding. Andrea's always got her mouth going. She's—” He stopped. “Oh, I know what you mean. She doesn't know how to tell you she's sorry for being such a jerk about everything.”

Carly gently tweaked Shawn's nose. “I love you.”

He took her hand in his and gave it a squeeze. “Yeah, me too.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” she teased. “That you love you, too?”

“You know what it means.”

“Yes—I do,” she said, feeling good inside. “But do you suppose you could actually put the words together in their proper order for your sister?”

He looked horrified. “You expect me to tell Andrea that I love her?”

“Don't you?”

“Yeah, but I'm not going to tell her.”

Carly hesitated. “Would it be all right if I said it for you?”

He eyed her. “I guess so. Just don't get sloppy about it.”

“Would I do something like that?”

He groaned.

She knew he would make a show of hating it if she just bent over and gave him a kiss, but she didn't care. This one was for her.

Instead, he kissed her back.

Nineteen

David leaned back
in his chair and stared at the computer screen. He'd run into problems with books before, including a couple of bouts of writer's block, but this was different. His concentration wasn't what it should be. Ideas and possible solutions to plot problems would come to him and then disappear before he could get out a notepad to write them down.

Granted his life had taken some rather unexpected and disruptive turns of late, but nothing he hadn't handled. Besides, if he used Andrea for an excuse now, what was he going to use when she left in two days and his protagonist was still stuck with an attaché case, three kids, and two hundred pages to come up with an answer to his problems?

David propped his feet on the desk and ran his hands through his hair. Andrea's leaving was preying more heavily on his mind than he wanted to admit. They had carefully kept up the fantasy that she was only going home for a visit and that she'd be back in a week, but David was finding it harder and harder to lie to himself about it. There was too much to hold her when she got there. It had taken every bit of his persuasive powers to keep her from hopping the first plane headed west when she found out about Shawn's accident. Finally she'd agreed it made sense to finish the final four days of school before Easter break and give Shawn time to get home from the hospital.

Once she stepped back in her old life, nothing would pry her loose again. He'd be lucky to see her for a couple of weeks in the summer.

But then hadn't that been the whole idea? Just because Andrea had already stayed far longer than he and Carly had expected wasn't sufficient reason for him to allow himself to think she might stay forever.

From the day she'd arrived, their time together had been set up to be finite.

At least that was how it was supposed to have been. Who could have known she would stay so long or that he would derive such pleasure from her company?

He countered the sense of loss he was already feeling by telling himself that when she was gone, he'd be able to get his life together again. The book would flow; his publisher would be happy; Victoria would be happy. All would be right with the world.

He'd never been much good at self-delusion; now was no exception.

David looked up when he felt, more than heard, someone enter the room. Prepared to go on the attack at the intrusion, he buried his anger when he saw it was Andrea.

As soon as it had become obvious her stay was going to be longer than a couple of weeks, David had explained his working methods, stressing that when the door to his office was closed, he was not to be disturbed under any but the most pressing circumstances. What he hadn't taken into consideration was a teenager's interpretation of pressing.

“I'm sorry to bother you, David,” she said, hesitantly stepping into the room and closing the door. “If you're at an important part, I can come back later.”

“It's okay,” he said, swiveling his chair to face her.

She came across the room and sat down in the maroon leather chair opposite his own. The enormous wing chair seemed as if it would swallow her and she shifted forward so that she was sitting on the edge. She was still dressed in her school uniform and looked young and innocent and fragile.

“I just wanted to tell you that I won't be needing the ticket home, after all,” she told him, her hands folded primly in her lap.

Since six o'clock that morning David had been living in another world, one of his own making where, for the most part, he had control. Now the real world came crashing back. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on his fists. “You've changed your mind again?”

“Sort of,” she said.

“Want to talk about it?” He put aside any possibility of getting back to the book that afternoon.

“My dad called about an hour ago.”

David looked at the clock on the mantle. It was a lot later than he'd thought. He'd worked straight through both tea and dinner without so much as a stomach rumble. “Did he say something that made you change your mind?”

She started to answer and then stopped. “I don't know how to answer that.”

In the four months that she'd been living with him, he'd learned there were times when she wanted him to dig for answers and others when she wanted him to supply them for her. The indications were that this was the former. “Then why don't you just tell me what the two of you talked about?”

“Mostly it was about Shawn and how hard it is for him to get around and how much work it is for my mom to take care of him.”

Although Carly would have to be pressed to admit it, David had recognized her deft touch in using Shawn's condition to nudge an already receptive Andrea into coming home. He couldn't blame her; under the circumstances, he would have done the same thing. “You already knew that.”

Again she hesitated. “But I forgot how much more work she'd have if I came home.”

“Bullshit.” He couldn't believe he was doing this. By all rights he should be celebrating, not pushing her into changing her mind yet again. “You're no work to have around.”

“Just having another person to cook for and to think about can be a burden sometimes, especially if someone in the family is sick.”

“Shawn isn't sick,” he said. “He's temporarily incapacitated.” Anger welled in David. The words weren't Andrea's, they were Ethan's. The son of a bitch was not only shutting her out, he was making sure she took full responsibility for the decision. Carly would be devastated when she learned Andrea wasn't coming. And who would be standing by with a shoulder to cry on? Good old Ethan.

“If you're worried about me getting in your way during Easter break, Jeffery said I could go skiing in Verbier with his family.”

“Good God, whatever gave you that idea?”

She looked down at her hands. “I know how much trouble you're having with your book.”