No Longer Mine (3 page)

Outside her door one nurse was bent diligently over paperwork while two others stood at a tall desk, speaking quietly.

Nikki plucked the little rubber probes from her body, dropping each one over the rail before seeking out another. As the machine attached to those little probes began to beep steadily, she plucked the third one from her breast.

The nurses were rushing in as she reached up for the tape that secured the feeding tube. Before they could reach her, she had already pulled it out and dropped it on the sheet next to her. She barely blinked at the sharp pain it caused.

A familiar voice stayed her hand as she was reaching beneath the sheets. “Easy, Ms. Kline. That won’t be quite so easy to remove,” one of the nurses said. This one was clad in baggy blue scrubs. A nametag at her breast read “Leanne Winslow”.

Nikki recognized that name.

Her hand fell from her thigh, catheter forgotten as she leaned back. She reached out her hand and it was caught in a strong grip. She squeezed it, closed her eyes and whispered, “My son’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I’m afraid so, Ms. Kline.” Her soft pretty blue eyes were filled with distress and she sat on the bed next to Nikki for the second time.

Biting her lip, she turned her head away. “What about Shawn? My brother?” Her voice was calm, abnormally so.

“He’s fine. Just a concussion and some bruises. He went home the next day,” another nurse said softly, sounding glad she hadn’t been the one to break the news.

“But Jason didn’t make it,” Nikki whispered quietly. “He’s gone.” This time Nikki turned her face into the offered shoulder and started to cry silently.

Now

She came back to awareness at the sound of gravel crunching several hundred feet away.

Just like that, he had been gone. One minute he had been playing happily with his plastic keys and Mouse, and now he was buried under six feet of cold earth, all alone.

16

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No Longer Mine

Nikki had spent nearly a week in a coma. The day after she woke, she had walked out of the hospital against medical advice. Well, more like shuffled, almost crawled, right up until her dad realized if he didn’t help her, she
would
crawl. Hell, if she could have done it the day she woke, she would have.

But she’d left, alive, and ironically enough, with an unexpected cosmetic repair. Her eyesight was suddenly perfectly normal, the intense pressure that had caused her nearsightedness relieved when glass had cut her retinas.

She had left the hospital in better shape than she had entered it.

Jason had left it in a body bag.

Thankfully Nikki didn’t remember him being taken away. The time after the wreck was a blissful blank.

Now she sat quietly in the cemetery by her son’s grave, reflecting on the things they would never do.

Not exactly therapeutic thoughts, but Nikki wasn’t in the mood for therapy today.

Her depression weighed down on her shoulders, and she knew realistically that this wasn’t normal, that she needed to be talking to somebody about this.

But even after three years, she wasn’t ready to let go of her grief. It seemed it was all she had left of him, and once she stopped grieving he’d truly be gone.

A gentle breeze drifted past, ruffling her hair and bringing with it the scent of wildflowers. The scent of honeysuckle teased her senses and she remembered taking Jason for a walk on the hillside very close to where he rested.

It had been only two months before the accident. They had had a picnic and he’d toddled after butterflies and come back with a fistful of honeysuckle, which he had shared with her before trying to eat it.

They had waded in the stream, the very same stream that ran through the cemetery. Jason had laughed in delight as tiny fish no bigger than her little finger had darted around their feet.

“You’re going to be old before your time if you keep this up, sis,” a voice said softly, jerking her out of her reverie.

She turned her head and squinted up at Shawn. “Hey,” was all she said, not responding to his words.

“What are you doing here?”

“I saw your truck on my way to work,” he said, kneeling beside her. His left eyebrow was neatly bisected by a thin scar. That, and the scars he bore inside, were his only physical reminders of the accident.

There were scars inside. She sensed it, wished she could help him…but she couldn’t even help herself.

Jason had been like a little brother to Shawn. He’d adored the baby from the first and talked about how he’d teach him to wrestle, to go fish…all the cool boy stuff. Stuff Shawn hadn’t ever had much chance to do himself.

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17

Shiloh Walker

“You ever wonder what would have happened if we’d just stayed at the store that day?” she asked softly. It was a question she’d asked herself a hundred times. A thousand.

“Only a few dozen times a week,” he said.

As she looked over and met his gaze, he shook his head. “And you know as well as I do, those kinds of questions will drive us crazy. Some stupid drunk hit us, Nik. You weren’t speeding. You weren’t doing much of anything except driving in the rain. Bastard hit us, ran us off the road. You can’t blame yourself.” She just shrugged.

She could blame herself. And she did.

“Y’know, you’re going to be late for work,” she told him, turning back to study the headstone.

Shawn shrugged. “I doubt they’ll mind.” And even if they did, he didn’t care. How could work be that important when he looked at her and all but saw the dark cloud she had wrapped around herself? He settled on the grass next to her, uncertain of what to say. When he had been little, he had always run to her when he had been hurt. Nikki had always made the pain go away. And even when he had been nothing more than a street punk, causing trouble and raising hell, when he was in trouble, it had been her he had gone to. She had always fixed it in some way.

It didn’t seem fair that after so many years of patching him up and kissing away his tears that he wasn’t able to take away any of her pain.

“Jason is probably the sweetest angel in heaven, sis,” he said, looking at his feet as he spoke. He could feel himself turning red to the roots of his hair and he had no idea where those words had come from.

“I bet he is,” came her soft whisper.

And looking over, he saw the beginning of a smile on her face.

The words, wherever they had come from, had been the right ones.

Before Nikki got out of her truck she donned a dark pair of sunglasses and forced her unruly hair into a stubby ponytail. She hadn’t really thought she would be recognized when she had decided to use her own name on her books. She really hadn’t thought that far ahead. She had only wanted them to sell.

They had sold though, and she hadn’t exactly been in the best frame of mind when she was dealing with the contract negotiations. If she had thought things through, if she had listened to the agent she’d signed with, she would have gone with a pen name. She would have done something to have some modicum of privacy.

Now it was a little too late.

Besides, in a town the size of Monticello, everybody knew everybody else’s business. The hat and the sunglasses wouldn’t fool many people, but if it helped a little she was all for it. If she lived in a larger town she’d have more anonymity than she had in Monticello. In the past few years it had come to where she couldn’t go much anywhere without somebody hailing her down to talk about books.

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No Longer Mine

My little girl wrote this. Isn’t that something…

I got a book. Can you help me…

And lately, total strangers who were just in town to fish were recognizing her. Nikki wasn’t ever going to let another picture be taken of her, and her webmaster had taken down the one they’d conned her into putting up. Now if she could just get it off the back of the books…

For a while she hadn’t minded the attention too much, but as time passed she started to crave solitude.

People and questions were coming to grate on her nerves something bad. It was just a sign of her worsening depression, she suspected, and if she were smart, she’d just make the drive to Somerset where she was less likely to be noticed, but she didn’t have the energy.

She made it all the way through the store without any problems and was finishing up in the dairy section. She just might make it out of the store, she realized. It even had her mood climbing up a few notches—instead of toxic, it was just slightly hazardous.

She added a carton of yogurt and some cream cheese. As she went to turn the cart around she promptly ran into somebody else’s.

“Damn it,” she muttered, but her voice was lost under the sound of baskets crashing together and groceries tumbling to the floor.

A sheepish smile crossed her face and she said, “Sorry about that.” She would hit somebody whose cart was beyond full. Kneeling, she picked up a carton of cookies and Donald Duck orange juice. She placed them in the basket before stepping away.

The guy had knelt in front of a dark child of four or five, his face hidden as he scooped up items from the floor.

“No problem,” he said, although his voice belied his words. He sounded a tad—okay, he sounded a
lot
irritated.

Nikki was about to make a quick getaway, but then he stood. And revealed his face.

A very familiar face, one that haunted her dreams on a regular basis. His hair was shorter, cut at his nape, and his face had thinned out just a bit, the dimples at the corners of his mouth now slashes in his lean cheeks. But the eyes were the same, deep bottomless pools of brown velvet.

“Wade,” she whispered. Her eyes, stricken, then landed on the child’s face. A little girl, a little mirror of her father.

And of Nikki’s son. She wore a red T-shirt decorated on the front with a sketch of a bright-eyed puppy. A baseball cap in that same candy-apple red sat on top of thick black hair that fell razor-straight to her tiny shoulders. She held a stuffed cocker spaniel, a mirror image of the way Jason had carried his precious Mouse.

A knife slowly embedded itself in Nikki’s heart, started to twist.

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19

Shiloh Walker

For a moment his face was blank, and then his eyes narrowed. She was unable to move as he slowly reached up and tugged her sunglasses off.

“Nikki,” he breathed, his eyes lighting as though from within.

He took a step closer and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand.

That gentle touch shattered her like glass. Flinching, she grabbed her purse and took off running down the aisle. She had her keys before she was even out the door. Swallowing a sob, she dodged an elderly couple glaring at her with censure in their eyes.

As she dove into the dubious safety of her SUV, Wade came striding out the main doors of the grocery store. “Nikki!” he shouted, his little girl perched on his hip.

She spared him only one glance as she started the engine and threw it into drive. The little girl was staring up at her father in confusion, her dark hair streaming around her face.

The sight of it sent tiny daggers plunging into Nikki’s heart.

Dear God
, she thought.

And unable to go home where she’d just sit and brood and cry, she ended up making the forty-minute drive to Somerset, tears streaming down her face the entire time.

What in the hell…

Wade stood there, dumbstruck, as Nikki peeled out of the parking lot in a Ford Explorer, leaving a bit of rubber on the pavement as she went.

His mind was a total blank. He didn’t know what to think.

Nikki was
here
.

And she’d just run away from him…

“Daddy, who was that?”

Blankly he turned his head to look at his daughter. Abby was staring up at him, her small, sweet face puckered with confusion. His silence wasn’t helping.

“Daddy, was she a friend of yours? Do you know her?”

“Yeah, sweetie. I know her,” he finally said, talking not exactly easy considering how his vocal cords seemed to have frozen.

“Why did she run away?”

“I guess maybe she had somewhere to go,” was all he said, casting one last glance out at the highway, eyes following the path the black SUV had taken.

What in the hell…

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Chapter Four

Later that night Nikki stared dully into the freezer, eyes unseeing as she put away half-melted ice cream and nearly warm chicken breasts. She continued to stand there, staring woodenly, until the cold air on her already chilled flesh snapped her out of her daze.

Finally she realized she had been putting canned goods and dishwasher detergent in the freezer as well.

After removing what didn’t belong, she shut the freezer and dropped to the floor, exhausted.

“What’s he doing here anyway? Whatever happened to Texas?” she asked the empty kitchen. “He was supposed to move to Texas.”

Folding her arms at her middle to ward off a very real pain brought on by her misery, she leaned forward as a sob built in her throat.

Why now? I’m just starting to stand on my own two feet again.

Liar.

She wasn’t standing on her own two feet—she was just sort of wobbling. She was barely existing.

But, hell, she
was
existing. She didn’t need to have somebody holding her hand to get her through the day and she got
through
the days, damn it.

The little girl… The sight of her had been like a dagger into her already bashed, bleeding heart. A healthy, beautiful, alive little girl. The pain was more than she could bear.

Then

“Nikki?”

She looked up from her keyboard, eyes bloodshot and weary. Typing on the slow, old word processor she’d bought at a yard sale a few years ago didn’t do jack for her headaches, but it was a damn sight better than trying to use a typewriter.

What she wouldn’t give for a computer…