Unforgiven (10 page)

“Your mom said you had a hard time of it for a while.”

“I did,” she said simply. “I wasn’t ready for what happened.”

“I suppose not,” he said. He watched Keith for a moment, bent forward in his suit coat, his elbows on his knees, making points in a low-voiced, emphatic manner to his soon-to-be father-in-law. It didn’t escape Adam’s notice that Mr. Walker hadn’t spoken to him all evening, or, for that matter, at Brookhaven the night he got home.

“Good thing Keith was there for you.”

She ducked a plate under the running water, and her diamond winked as soapy bubbles dripped off her hand. “I don’t regret being engaged to you. I’m sorry it wasn’t right for you.”

She’d never been one for regrets, for second-guessing, perhaps because she’d never done anything regrettable in her life, or because she’d always followed her heart. “Good,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

He strode back to the dining room. “Thanks for supper,” he said with a nod for Delaney’s father. “It was good to see you all again. Good night.”

“Wait,” Mrs. Walker called. “Where’s your jacket?”

“Don’t need one, ma’am,” he said with a grin, just for her. Then he headed into the rain-swept night, thinking about one woman’s heart and where she belonged.

10

M
ARISSA HAULED OPEN
the library’s front door just as Alana came around from behind her desk, dressed for the weather in an ankle-length raincoat, a laptop bag slung over her shoulder and another tote dangling from her elbow. “I had a feeling I’d see you today,” Alana said, one eyebrow lifted.

She was too tired to maintain any emotion above resignation about Alana’s giving her books to Adam. She was trying to be helpful, but she didn’t know the whole story, and getting angry at her wouldn’t change anything. “I would have been here earlier but I had to load siding. It took longer than I thought.”

Alana crossed the library’s flooring, her boot heels clicking in the silence. “Adam gave you the books, right? He said he’d see you.”

He saw her, all right. It was like old times, driving around with him, and new experiences. Grownup experiences. Apartment shopping, having supper at a new restaurant. Having sex. It was everything they’d done and everything they hadn’t done, rolled into one night. The memories alternated between making her smile and gripping her heart in a tight fist. “I told you to send them back.”

“I thought you should take a look at them,” Alana said. She crossed the floor and tapped down the light switches, leaving only a single light burning behind the circulation desk to ward off the fall gloom. “You didn’t bring them back already. Tell me you looked at them.”

“No,” Marissa admitted. She couldn’t bring herself to return them. Not yet.

Alana’s gaze softened, then she opened the front door. “Have you eaten?”

“Not since breakfast. It was a very long day.” Loading the siding, piece by piece, into her truck, then unloading it onto pallets in Mrs. Carson’s side yard, was all her in a race against daylight. Dull, hot pain stretched from her shoulders to her lower back.

“Come on. I’ll cook,” Alana said, and locked the library.

She followed Alana three blocks into town and parked on the street in front of the small house Alana rented from Chief Ridgeway. In the kitchen Alana shed her coat, then turned up the heat and put a kettle on to boil water before ducking into the bedroom. Marissa shed her flannel-lined Carhartt coveralls, leaving her in jeans and a sweatshirt, then eased into a chair at the kitchen table, and rested her head on her folded arms.

“Feel good to sit down?” Alana asked, now wearing a pair of fleece pants and a belted wool cardigan. She turned off the flame under the kettle and opened a cabinet for tea bags and mugs.

“You have no idea,” Marissa said without lifting her head. Water from the tips of her wet braids beaded on her red fleece. She’d get up and help with supper in a minute.

A moment later Alana set a cup of tea in front of her, then turned on the local NPR station for background noise while she poked around in the fridge. “Stir-fry okay?” she asked.

“Sounds great.” The announcer moved to a story about four dead Marines in Helmand Province, and she cocked her head slightly to catch all the details until she remembered Adam was home, whole and sound.

When she refocused on the kitchen around her, Alana was watching her, a knife in her hand and a head of broccoli on the cutting board. “I get the feeling I shouldn’t have given him the books. I asked him how well he knew you and he said he’d known you all his life. I thought he knew.”

“He would have, if I’d been interested in sailing before he left. All I talked about then was Brookhaven. I guess it doesn’t matter, because he’s not staying. He says he is, but he isn’t. Can you see him living here? He’s totally out of place now.”

Alana looked at her, then added oil to a nonstick pan and turned on the heat under it. “Because it’s so strange that someone would want to live here, in the flyover states?”

“No. This is my home. Five generations of my family have lived here. But . . . what’s here for him?”

“His mother and a graduate degree?” Alana swept the broccoli into a bowl and went to work on a red pepper. “I seem to be missing a key point. Maybe you better start at the beginning.”

A spicy-sweet aroma drifted up from the tea. Marissa inhaled, then sipped. Warmth spread down her throat and into her stomach. “Now that he’s home, I’m sure someone with
good intentions
filled you in on the history.”

“Several someones,” Alana said. She scraped pepper innards into the trash, then dumped mushrooms onto the cutting board. “I prefer to hear it from you. Is this a Hatfields-versus-McCoys thing?”

Marissa laughed. “It’s more of a grasshoppers-and-ants thing. The Walkers are ants, through and through. They work hard, save what they make, marry prudently, live quietly. The Brookses, on the other hand, are grasshoppers. We sing all summer, and we throw the best parties,” she said, looking over at Alana. The other woman smiled at her. “Always have. I have pictures from Brookhaven in the twenties when there must have been a hundred people staying at that house. They pitched tents in the backyard, bathed in the creek. Some of the old-timers around here remember those parties, or remember their parents talking about them. The way Brookhaven used to be.” The way the Brookses used to be. Flying high, and taking everyone else along for the ride.

Mushroom caps fell to slices under Alana’s deft hands. “What happened?”

“The stock market crash, for one. We never really recovered from that. Droughts. A series of investments that went bad. Like grasshoppers, we made big leaps, usually in response to the last crisis, always in the opposite yet somehow wrong direction. Whatever scheme failed, we came up with a bigger, better dream. That’s why my mom left. She was from Rapid City, and married Dad on nothing more than promises and dreams. She left when she figured out she couldn’t count on him for anything more. She married a rancher in Wyoming. Dad finally couldn’t even pay the taxes and we lost the house when I was fifteen.”

“But you bought it back.”

She watched Alana add sliced beef to the hot oil. The meat sizzled for a few moments, then Alana tipped the bowl of vegetables into the pan as well. “Because my husband, Chris, got an inheritance. He wasn’t much better than I am when it came to practicalities. He was in construction. Buying it back so we could renovate it and use it as a showpiece was my idea. He could teach me what I needed to know.” She stopped for a second. “He died five months after we got the deed.”

And I lied to him. I never, ever would have sold Brookhaven.

“Why even bother to renovate it after he died?”

“I was tired of everyone in this town looking at me like I was just another big-dreaming Brooks. Living that way for another sixty years didn’t appeal to me. Plates or bowls?”

“Plates. I’ll have a glass of wine, too. So, if the Brookses are grasshoppers and the Walkers are ants, what are the Collinses? I don’t know Adam’s mother. She doesn’t come into the library.”

Marissa got up and pulled two purple stoneware plates from the cabinet, then added two wine glasses from the rack under the cabinets. “Darla Collins is a grasshopper trapped in an ant’s world,” she said as she set the table. “She was a single mother back before getting knocked up by a stock car driver was no big deal. She had big dreams of going to New York and making it in the fashion world. The driver made big promises, all of which included getting her out of Walkers Ford, but skipped town alone when she got pregnant.”

“What about Adam?”

“Adam then, or Adam now?” she asked as she got forks from the silverware drawer. Her stomach grumbled as Alana tipped steaming, seared vegetables and meat onto the plates, then carried them to the table.

“Adam then. Let’s start there.”

She speared a piece of broccoli, chewed and swallowed while she considered this. He’d had a dream then, of going on the motorcycle racing circuit, but time and the Corps replaced dreams with a plan, and completely eradicated his emotions, too. “Then was one running battle between testosterone and willpower. He was the life of the party, the strategist behind every prank, skating through school on charm and just enough to get by.”

“Girls?” Alana asked, her eyes bright.

“What’s the old Marine Corps slogan? Many were called. Few were chosen.”

“So he and Delaney weren’t high school sweethearts.”

“No.”

“Were you?”

There are no words for what we were. Love isn’t big enough. Lust isn’t deep enough. Lost covers it. We were lost in each other.
“No.”

“That’s why he looks at you like you’re the one who got away.”

I didn’t get away. He left.
“He doesn’t look at me like that,” she said firmly.

“Oh, but he does. And now? Who is Adam now?”

“I don’t know. He’s doing all the right things, saying all the right things, but it’s like he’s not actually in his body. He says he’s here because he’s home, and maybe that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. Yesterday we went apartment hunting in Brookings. Then we had supper.” She finished off the last of her wine. “Then we had sex.”

Alana lifted her glass in a toast. “Sounds like a date.”

“It wasn’t a date. He’s here for the wedding, and being home early has something to do with Delaney, too. I just can’t figure out what.”

“Tell me why he’s best man in that wedding?”

It always surprised her that there were people in the world who didn’t know every intimate detail of the Walker/Brooks/Herndon history. “He and Keith were best friends. The Herndons have been here for fifteen years, which is a drop in the bucket compared to us Walkers and Brookses, but Keith’s dad is the only lawyer in fifty miles. When he retires, Keith will be the only lawyer in fifty miles.”

“I can’t see Adam Collins and Keith Herndon as best friends.”

“They were. Keith liked Adam for the same reason the rest of us did. Things happen when he’s around. They always did. For better or for worse, things happen when Adam Collins is around. Keith . . . encouraged those things. None of us thought about it then, but Keith had a safety net Adam didn’t have.”

“People keep mentioning an accident,” Alana said quietly.

“We’d lost Brookhaven by then. The house was abandoned, but it was easy to get inside, and somewhere along the line it became the party house. As long as we weren’t too out of control, the sheriff turned a blind eye to the drinking. One night, things got out of control. Adam and I had put two hundred miles on his motorcycle that afternoon and watched the fireworks from Brookhaven’s roof. Then kids started to show up. There was a lot of alcohol. Someone decided to build a bonfire—”

“Using the wood paneling in the great room,” Alana finished.

That’s when she knew Brookhaven, and by association, herself, mattered to no one but her. She’d tried to stop them, but once Adam got in on the act, hauling a long, rickety wooden ladder out of the barn, she’d failed. When Adam was around, things happened. “After that, it was really out of hand. Adam’s motorcycle was there, and this other kid, Josh Wilmont, got one as a graduation present. Adam challenged him to a race, Josh accepted. It had rained the day before and the dirt roads were still a little slick. Josh lost control taking a corner, and died.”

She’d never forget that moment when she heard Adam’s screams over the drunken shouting. Never. Within seconds kids were piling into cars and running down the road, headlights picking out wheat in the fields, the dust plume from the bikes, homing in on Adam, on his knees in the stagnant water in a ditch, next to a crumpled, twisted scarecrow wearing Josh’s faded jeans and flannel shirt.

Adam’s hoarse, unearthly screams.

“Neither of them were wearing helmets, although at their speeds, I’m not sure it would have mattered. Josh died. He’d planned to join the Marines at the end of the summer. Adam joined in his place. Keith and Delaney went to college. I got married, and bought back Brookhaven. The end.”

“Maybe that’s why he’s back,” Alana said eventually. “Maybe he’s got something to prove.”

Marissa bristled. “It was a mistake. A stupid, horrible mistake. He was seventeen. No one here expects him to pay for that for the rest of his life.” She collected the dishes and took them to the sink.

“We all have something to prove,” Alana said with a small smile.

The sound of a car door slamming cut off Marissa’s response, and the moment was gone. “Thanks for supper. I should get going,” she said. “I’ve got a date with a hot bath.”

“I’ve got a date with a book,” Alana said, and opened the kitchen door to the driveway to let Marissa out. Chief Ridgeway looked up from greeting his dog, Duke, to give Marissa a nod of greeting before transferring his level gaze to Alana. Marissa climbed into her truck and turned the engine over. When she paused in the street to shift from reverse to drive, Alana and the Chief were still looking at each other. The only change was the pink flush high on Alana’s cheekbones.

A steady drizzle persisted the whole way to the house, and when she got home, Adam’s Charger lounged at the top of the driveway. She pulled in under the oak tree, shifted into park, and got out of the cab. Adam stood under the sheltering porch, one shoulder braced against the post, watching her.

“Hey,” she said. “Everything okay?”

“Define ‘okay.’”

A little laugh huffed from her nose as she came to stand in front of him. He’d stood there, still and waiting, long enough for the drifting mist to seep into his button-down shirt and cargo pants. She lifted her hand to his cheek. A tremor ran through his big body, but he didn’t move.

“You’re cold,” she exclaimed, then brushed her thumb over his lips. Even those were cool to the touch.

“I don’t feel cold.” His voice was distant, remote, as if the forty-degree temps and fog had chilled his voice, too.

She let her hand slip down his jaw to rest on his chest. He looked down at her, physically present, emotionally in the cold emptiness of space. “Says the Marine. I know cold. You’re cold.”

He reached up to pluck her hand from his chest and bring her hand to his lips. Warm breath gusted over her chilled fingers, then his tongue touched her knuckles. “So are you.”

Heat zipped sharp and electric deep in her belly. “I’m always cold.” The porch light behind him turned the drops on his hair into scattered diamonds set in the thick, lengthening bristle cut, and cast his face in shadows. “Are you coming in?”