If I'd Never Known Your Love (23 page)

He laughed again, this time joyfully. Could there be a sweeter sound? "I've been dreaming about a garlic-tomato-and-olive pizza," he told her.

"And?" she prodded.

"Brunch with you at Venita Rhea's. Please tell me they're still in business. I used to wake up dreaming about their olive-and-mushroom omelets."

"They're still there. No olives in the jungle?" She caught her breath in surprise at the question. Could she be joking with him about their ordeal?

He leaned over to kiss her. "Thank you," he said, his voice cracking. "I need to be home again. I need to have things the way they were—normal."

Her heart went out to him."I'll do what I can, but there are people who—"

"I know. I expect that. I just want to get through it as quickly as possible so we can get back to our lives." He squeezed her hand in reassurance as he looked out at a suburban landscape almost unchanged in five years. "I'm worried about reconnecting with Shelly and Jason," he reluctantly admitted. He looked back at her. "Do they even remember me?"

"Not the way I do, but you are as real to them as you are to me." There was nothing she could say to reassure him. Only being with his children again, seeing for himself how much they'd changed and how much they'd stayed the same, would give him what he needed."They'll be here tomorrow at noon. It was the first flight Dad could get."

"I tried calling them when we landed in Miami, but Fred told me that they'd already left for Kansas City. I should have made time before I left Bogota, but they were already holding the plane." He stared out the window again, this time seeing Sacramento's city skyline, radically different from when he'd left.

"All these new buildings. Everything has changed so much."

"Not me," she said softly.

He turned back to her and smiled. "Even you," he said. "You've grown more beautiful."

The amazing thing was that she believed him. She knew without question that in his eyes, she would still be as beautiful at eighty. She leaned over and put her head on his shoulder. "I tried to imagine what your days were like. It hurt so much to think of you being mistreated or locked away that I finally stopped."

"For the most part I suffered more monotony than abuse."

"I have so many questions I don't know where to begin. We never did find out who took you or why. Every time we thought we had it figured out', another group would make contact."

"I'm afraid that's my fault. I kept escaping but never made it very far before I was recaptured by someone else. In the beginning it was a bunch of stupid thugs who simply screwed up and snatched the wrong man. They had no idea what to do with me when the people who'd hired them refused to pay. I spent months with them traveling from village to village before I realized I was being shopped around to groups that knew how the ransom process worked.

"Finally, they just dumped me with someone's cousin who said he knew some guys who would keep me until they found someone who would pay. These guys realized I had no sense of direction, and I became their source of entertainment. They'd take me a couple of miles from camp and leave me just to see how lost I could get.

"One day they left me near a stream. I followed it and a week later wound up in a village controlled by FARC. They were a little more savvy about controlling their captives and it took me longer to get away from them."

"How many times did you escape?"

He put his arm around her and settled her deeper into his side. "Successfully? Only once."

"And unsuccessfully?"

"A dozen times. I wound up with six different groups."

"It must have been the FARC group that sent the first note," she said."We couldn't figure out why they waited so long to make contact."

"I probably should have stayed put," he said. "But all I could think about was getting home to you and the kids."

At last, all the ransom demands by different groups made sense. How was it that none of them had ever figured it out?

"For the most part I was with people who knew I was useless to them dead. And since no one knew how long it would take to get their money, it was in their interest to feed me and keep me as healthy as possible."

Julia slipped her arm around his waist, still struggling to comprehend that Evan was really there beside her, that it wasn't a dream. "We got reports of a tall white man with black hair and blue eyes, but every sighting was so far apart from the last one that we didn't think the reports could be trusted."

He chuckled. "Next time I'll know not to going wandering around."

Julia reared back. The olives were one thing, but how could he joke about a wound so deep it was still bleeding? "Don't say that."

He touched her cheek and then her lips with his fingertips, mapping her face. "It's over, Julie. I'm home. You can let it go now."

Did he really think that was possible? "I can't."

"I never believed it would be possible to put what happened to my mother and brother behind me, either, but you showed me I could. We have to find a way to let this go, too."

His mother and brother were his pain, something she hadn't experienced, something she could philosophize about from a safe distance. Not until now did she truly understand what she'd asked of him back then. "I don't know if I can."

He touched his forehead to hers in a gesture as intimate as a kiss. "If you don't, you give what happened power over everything you do or say or feel for the rest of your life.

Every sorrow will feel deserved and every joy will be dampened by fear. I know this, Julia, because I lived it before I met you."

"You can really forgive them for what they did?" That's what he was asking. She couldn't forget without forgiving. "This easily?"

"It's either that or let them have power over me. Why would I want to do that?"

They weren't just words. "I don't know how," she admitted."It's been my life for almost six years. It's all I've thought about. How do I stop being angry for all the Thanksgivings and Christmases and birthdays we missed with you? And all the ordinary moments that make up memories we'll never share?"

"Look at me." She did. "You were told I was dead. You buried me. And yet I'm here with you now. Do you really want our lives forever tainted by the men who put us through that hell?"

He was telling her what she needed to hear, what she'd told him twenty years ago.

How easy it had seemed in theory, how hard in execution. "If I could, I would castrate every last one of them."

Evan laughed, deep and hearty. "That's my Julia."

"But since I can't," she added, "I'll find a way to forget them."

C H A P T E R 1 7

Evan stood at the open sliding-glass door with Julia at his side and stared at the backyard, awash in a brilliant orange sunset."It's exactly the way I imagined. Even more beautiful. You did an incredible job."

"Shelly helped." She smiled. "And the gardener I hired when I was doing so much traveling."

He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her into his side. "Tell me about the dog."

Pearl was busy investigating this new territory, an investigation Julia had cut short when she'd left for the airport. She'd been afraid that if she left Pearl outside, she would spook and escape through one of the weak spots in the twenty-year-old wooden fence.

Julia also worried what Pearl would do when yet another man invaded her territory, especially one who wouldn't yield to her threats. But instead of the fierce greeting she'd given Harold, Pearl stood her ground and stared at Evan for a full minute before going to the door and scratching to be let out.

Julia told him about Pearl and David and how meeting them had saved her sanity that summer.

"Do you think he'll stop by if he makes it this far?" Evan asked.

Julia shook her head. "He fell a little in love with me. When he realized I could never reciprocate his feelings, he left."

Evan didn't say anything for a long time. "You thought I was dead. I would understand if you—"

"It didn't matter that I believed I would never see you again, Evan. If I'd never known your love... I could have found someone else. But almost losing you made me understand what it means to have connected to my soul mate. This is for life. Nothing can change that."

He kissed her. She came up on her toes to return the kiss, to feel the length of his body against hers. A long-banked fire exploded in her. Tentacles of flame turned gentle passion into raging need.

Evan ran his hands down her back and over the soft rise of her buttocks. He cupped the flesh and brought her closer, his desire hard and throbbing.

She clasped his hand and led him upstairs to their room, to the bed where they'd made sweet, familiar love the last night they'd had together. He sat her on the corner of the mattress and lifted one foot and then the other, removing her heels and kissing the arch of each foot. She reached for her zipper and he caught her hand. "Let me."

"Hurry," she urged.

He did, but stopped to look at her when she lay naked across the bed. "I remember a hay field and a girl I thought the most perfect ever created. That was nothing compared with what you are now."

She undid the buttons on his shirt. Her fingers shook in fevered anticipation and she fumbled getting them undone. Impatient, Evan grabbed the hem and pulled the shirt over his head.

Julia gasped when she saw his chest and arms. He was covered in scars, some so fresh that they were still red. "What—"

He placed a hand over her mouth to silence her. "Another time, Julia. Not now."

He'd lied to her. His life hadn't been lived in the benign captivity he'd implied. How could he ask her to forgive the men who had done this to him? She pressed her palm against his chest, feeling his heart, the heart that had survived untold horrors to bring him back to her.

He had survived for her.

He had lived through a hell she could only imagine to return home to her, even when it would have been easier to stop trying. The depth of his love was more than she could comprehend. "Thank you for not giving up," she said through her tears. "Without you I would have been alone forever."

"Don't cry," he said softly."I came home. I'm here. Nothing else matters."

She placed her arms around his neck and kissed him, tasting his lips and her tears, surrendering herself to his desire to forget. She ran her fingers over his scars, making them something she shared with him, erasing their power and thoughts of the men who had put them there. He stood and removed the rest of his clothes and she saw there were more scars, so many that there were few places on his body left untouched.

Julia sat up. "Turn around."

He did, exposing his brutalized back.

She tried, but couldn't stop the tears. "I've always believed that seventeen-year-old boy I made love to on my grandmother's patchwork quilt was the standard I would use to judge every other man against. I've changed my mind."

Evan turned to her and smiled. "Why, Mrs. Prescott, I believe that's the sexiest thing anyone has ever said to me."

"Come here," she told him, holding out her arms. "If you think that was sexy, wait until you see what I have—"

Evan covered her mouth with his, and the rest of what she was going to say was lost forever.

Julia awoke with a start. Evan was gone. For one heartbreaking moment she was almost overwhelmed by a terrible fear that he'd never been there at all, that she'd been dreaming he was home, dreaming that he'd made love to her, dreaming that he'd told her he loved her over and over again until her heart was ready to burst with joy. But then she saw his clothes draped over the chair in the corner and she could breathe again.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed to go look for Evan and almost stepped on him. He was sleeping on the rug she kept beside the bed dressed in his old pajama bottoms, holding something white. Julia crawled out the other side of the bed and came around to look at him.

The "white" tucked into his arms was Pearl. She raised her head just enough to acknowledge Julia, thumped her tail twice and let out a contented sigh before settling back down, her nose resting on Evan's arm.

Two lost souls had recognized each other. Almost as if it had been predestined—if Julia believed in such things.

She backtracked to get her robe. Placing her hand on the nightstand for balance, she stepped into her slippers and accidentally bumped Evan's rose. A petal dropped, and then another. Slowly the rose shed its petals one after the other until they lay in a perfect circle around the vase. It was as if Evan's homecoming had released the rose from its burden.

Julia stood and stared, transfixed."Okay, Mother," she whispered. "I give up. You were right."

She gathered the petals and slipped them in her pocket to take downstairs and put in the wooden box David had given her, saving them to pass on to Shelly and Jason one day, maybe at their weddings, or maybe when they became parents. Her mother would like that.

In the meantime, she had a letter to finish.

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