Cinderella's Big Sky Groom (14 page)

She drew herself up in the chair. “Pardon me. But
you do not know my sister. Not really. And my family accepts the idea that I'm inviting you. They will be on their best behavior. So it will
not
be a disaster. It might not be a whole lot of fun. I admit that. But sometimes you have to do things in life that aren't particularly fun.”

He paced over to the window and remained there, facing away from her. She looked at his broad back, waited for him to turn to her again.

He didn't. He spoke to the drawn drapes. “Listen. I've been thinking. Thanksgiving's a four-day weekend. Let's not waste it. Let's…get away.” He did turn then, his expression both hopeful and bleak at the same time. “We could fly to San Francisco. Or even Hawaii. I think I could arrange it. How would you like that? Four days on Maui?”

She shook her head, murmured his name.

He said something low and hard, under his breath, so she couldn't make it out. Then he strode toward her. He pulled himself up short a few feet from her chair. “Don't look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“As if I'm suggesting something impossible. We'd have separate rooms, if that's what you're worried about.”

She stared up at him. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Why would we have separate rooms?”

“No, Ross. I mean, why in the world would we want to get away together? What purpose could that possibly serve? What we have isn't real, anyway. Is it?”

Ross glared down at her. He did look trapped. Yes. Trapped between what he wanted and what, for rea
sons she still didn't understand, he couldn't let himself have.

The time had come at last.

For the truth born of the lie.

She gave it to him. “I love you, Ross.”

He muttered, “No.” She felt as if something inside her was tearing, ripping a jagged wound in the center of her as he turned away once more. “No,” he said again. In three long strides he was back at the curtained window, miles and miles away from her, showing her only the uncompromising line of his back.

She stood. And she dared to say it again, with more force. “I love you.” He didn't move. He might have been carved from stone. She made herself go on. “I think I've loved you since the first. When you were my gentle, perfect prince for a night, when I knew there was more behind those cold eyes of yours than you let people see. I've…played this game with you. I've pretended, since you seemed to want it so much, that we were engaged. But not for the sake of anyone's reputation. Not for the sake of what people might say. I've learned that it's not really all that important, what people might say. I only—”

“Stop,” he said on a rasping whisper.

She went on as if he hadn't spoken. “—wanted a little time. To try to find my way to you. To help you…find your way to me. And I got it, the time. But really, time hasn't taken us anywhere. We're both still pretending. What we share is not real, not…complete. You pick me up and you take me to dinner, we laugh and we joke, we talk about safe things. But it's not going anywhere. We're never alone together. We don't
dare
to be alone together.
We both know we can't afford that. We can't…make love again. It wouldn't be right.”

She waited, willing him to turn and face her. When he didn't, she muttered low, “Ross. The time for pretending is up.”

He did turn then. His eyes were glacial, freezing her out.

She said very gently, “We had an agreement. One month, and then it would end.”

She had him there, and they both knew it. His shoulders rose in a hopeless shrug.

And she couldn't hold back a cry. “Oh, Ross. What is it? Why won't you take a chance with me? That's all I want. A chance to make this silly lie into the real thing. Please tell me, why won't you take that chance?”

But he didn't answer.

So she pressed on, into forbidden territory. “Is it whatever happened with your wife?”

He muttered a low curse.

She took a step toward him. “Ross…”

He put up a warding-off hand. “Stop.” He said it very clearly that time.

And she froze.

He swore again. She saw pain flare, a flash of heat in the coldness of those eyes. Pain. And something more. Something desolate. And hideously final.

He said. “You want to know, do you? You
have
to know. About Elana.”

Somehow she made herself nod.

And he said, “All right, then. I'll tell you.”

“E
lana was beautiful,” Ross said. “She had auburn hair and big brown eyes. When she walked into a room, every head would turn. I met her right after law school, a week before I went to interview with Turow, Travis and Lindstrom. I met her because I needed a good suit for that interview—and she sold me one.”

Lynn ventured a question. “She worked in a men's clothing store?”

“She worked in the
best
men's clothing store in Denver. She was one of their top sales reps. I walked into that store and there she was, in a tight black skirt and matching jacket, looking…perfect. She took me by the arm. ‘I'll take care of you,' she said. Then she put me together. That was how she said it. ‘I'm going to put you together, Mr. Garrison.'

“She sold me a whole damn wardrobe that day.
A wardrobe I couldn't afford at the time. Suits and shirts, ties and shoes. Everything. And then she asked me out to lunch. By that weekend, we were lovers. And we'd found out that we…suited each other.”

Lynn sank to her chair again, murmuring, “You fell in love.”

He gave her a distant look. “Love wasn't the issue. Neither of us was looking for that. Or at least, I wasn't.”

Lynn's disbelief must have shown on her face. He answered the question he saw in her eyes. “Yes, all right. I said the words. I
told
her I loved her. And she said she loved me. But the words weren't that important. Just something people say. We were right for each other, saw the potential in each other. The way I viewed it, we were partners. Partners who trusted and respected each other. We would treat each other right and work together for our future.

“She came from a poor family, just like me. From some little town in Arkansas. She grew up in a double-wide, with a drunk for a mother and a father who was never there. Just like me. She told me she'd been looking for the right man, to take her where she wanted to go. And guess what? She'd found him—me.

“We were married a month after we met. And she was everything I expected her to be. We had four houses as I clawed my way up through the firm. She decorated all of them, with an eye for color and detail that had the other wives in the firm green with envy. She was always the life of the party, too. Charming and funny. And sexy enough to strike sparks off a dead man.

“By the time I was twenty-eight and made partner,
I thought I had it all. Thought I had
earned
it all—with the help of my perfect wife. That we'd both gotten what we wanted—the good life. Success. My mama might have spent her life staring into the bottom of a bottle of rotgut whiskey. My daddy might have gotten his brains blown out all over a jealous husband's bed. But I had arrived. I had
made
it.”

He paused, took a deep and ragged breath.

She waited, hardly daring to breathe herself.

Finally he went on. “What I didn't know was that she had
helped
me in ways I hadn't realized. Because there wasn't a man in the firm who didn't want her. And she had…struck a few deals of her own. She had slept with my supervisors, with more than one of the partners. And after she slept with them, I got promoted.”

Lynn must have made some sound of distress. He turned a hard glare on her. “You wanted to hear this. Don't interrupt.”

Lynn pressed her lips together, gave a tight nod.

He laughed, the sound as cold as a midwinter's night. “What is it people say? The husband is always the last to know? Well, I was. The last to know. I'd been a partner for almost three years when the word finally got around to me. I went home that night, to my perfect wife in our beautiful house—and threw up. And then I confronted her. She must have had some inkling the ax was about to fall, because she was drinking, had
been
drinking, through most of the afternoon, even though, as a rule, she never had more than one or two cocktails a couple of nights a week. I started shouting at her. Accusations. She poured herself another drink, tried to stay calm. At first.

“She'd done it for my sake, she said, to help me
advance. When I called her a liar, she admitted there might have been more. There might have been just a little bit of revenge in it for her. Because I had never loved her. She knew I had never loved her. For years, she said, I'd hardly known she was there. I expected her to
perform,
she said, and that was all I wanted from her. To keep my house for me and give good parties and entertain my colleagues. And so she
had
entertained them. In spades. She had given me what I really wanted. She'd seen to it that I made partner, and that I did it fast.

“After she laid all that on me, I shouted even louder. I don't even remember all the names that I called her. All I remember is how much I despised her then. How just looking at her sickened me. To my mind,
we
had been partners, the two of us. I had trusted her, believed we were building something together. And she had betrayed me. Put me in my place. Son of a drunk and a wife-stealing gambler…whose own wife was no better than a whore.

“In the end, she grabbed her purse and ran out the front door. I heard her car start up and roar away down the drive. I sat down and I stared at the wall. For a long time. Hours. Finally I dragged myself off to bed.”

He was back at the drawn drapes again, staring at them as if he could see right through them.

“I didn't wake up until a little after 2:00 a.m. When there was a knock on the door. The Denver police. They wanted me to come to the morgue and identify her body. That fourth house we had was on top of a steep hill. She'd gone over the cliff on her way down.”

Lynn wanted to stand, to go to him. But he
turned—and he stared at her, a stare that froze her in her chair.

He said, “Why the hell are you crying?”

She blinked, felt the wetness, on her cheeks, running down her chin. “I don't…” She gulped back a sob. “Oh, Ross. I'm so sorry. For you. And for her…”

“Don't be,” he said harshly. “Not for me, anyway. Elana was right about me. I never did love her. I used her. And that change I said I wanted, the reason I moved here to Whitehorn? Well, I wanted a change, all right. I wanted to get as far away as possible from Denver and from Turow, Travis and Lindstrom—where half of the partners had slept with my dead wife.”

Lynn brought up both hands, smeared the tears off her cheeks. Then she forced herself to rise. “Ross. Please…”

He shook his head, a savage gesture, quick and ruthless as the slashing of a knife. “No.” He chopped the air with a hand. “God. You are amazing. You are…everything I ever secretly hoped might be somewhere in the world. Look at you. Standing there. Crying. For me. You are, aren't you? You're crying for me?” It was an accusation.

She saw no need to answer it. He was right. She cried for him. And for the woman he had married. For two people who had needed love so desperately, and had never had anyone to show them how to find it.

“Save your tears, Lynn. Save them for someone who deserves them.”

She swiped at her cheeks again. “Oh, Ross. I think you do deserve them.”

“No,” he said. “I don't. And you were right. You said I've been pretending. And I have. Pretending what might have been. If I was someone different. If I'd met you sooner. But I didn't meet you sooner. And now, you're right about the rest of it, too. The month is up. And you have just learned why I'm not the man for you.”

She opened her mouth to form the word
no.

He didn't give her a chance to utter it. “I'm no prince,” he said. “You can see that now.”

“It doesn't matter. Oh, Ross. It's…only the past. It can haunt you. And hurt you. But what really matters is who you are, what you do, how you live right now. What matters is that you've told me the things you thought you had to keep secret. And that I don't hate you for them. I only…understand you better. Can't you see? My love is still here. Still yours. And if you could love me in return…”

He made a low, cruel, scoffing sound. “But that's the point, Lynn. That's exactly the point.”

“What? I don't—”

“The point is, I haven't got a clue what love is.”

Those words struck her like blows. She could see in his eyes that he really believed them.

And that anything she said right then would fall on deaf ears.

But maybe, with a little time…

Lord. There she went again. Thinking that time would do it, when it hadn't, up till now. Thinking that her love was magic, as sweet old Winona Cobbs had promised her. That all she had to do was believe in it and it wouldn't let her down.

Well, she had believed in it. With all her heart and soul.

Too bad
he
didn't believe in it.

One last tear brimmed over her lower lid. Very deliberately, she wiped it away. “All right. Wait there, please. I won't be a minute.”

He was standing in the same place, a few feet from the wing chair, when she came back down the stairs. “Here are your rings.” She held out the small black velvet case.

He glowered at her, insulted. “I don't want them.”

“Neither do I.”

She kept her hand extended until he reached out and took the case. He stuck it in a pocket.

She gave him a last smile. “Come on. I'll walk you to the door.”