It was Mitch.
Taller than she remembered, his shoulders wider and heavier with maturity, a new look of strength and power in his stance. The gleaming dark sable hair had gone silver at the temples, but rather than making him look older, it, along with the black patch over his left eye, gave him an almost piratical air of danger.
“May I come in?” His voice was deeper than she remembered, slightly husky, and despite the prosaic request, she could hear the note of strain.
She stepped back wordlessly and opened the door wider, holding on so tightly to the ornate brass handle that she felt her nails biting into her palm. Strangers, she thought with the detachment that comes of total shock. We’re strangers.
She pushed the door closed behind him as he came in, then led the way into the den, where a fire burned brightly in the stone fireplace. She didn’t know what to say to him. Her legs felt shaky, and she sank down in a comfortable chair near the fire, watching as he slowly crossed the room and stood just a few feet away near the hearth.
“You knew I had come out of the coma.” It wasn’t a question.
Kelly answered anyway, her own voice holding tension. “I saw a newspaper article.” She didn’t mention that it had been only a week before.
Mitch slid his hands into the pockets of his dark slacks and looked at her steadily, giving no clue to his thoughts. He was wearing a black leather jacket over a dark gray shirt, and the somber colors made him look even more dangerous.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly, almost blurting it out. There was a flash in the dark, watching eye, as if some emotion had surged inside him, but his face remained expressionless.
“Sorry for what, Kelly? That you didn’t wait for me? I’ve seen all the medical records; I know what they told you.” But there was something in his voice that didn’t jibe with the words, something that might have been bitterness.
She gestured helplessly, then let her hands fall back into her lap. “The weeks turned into months. Years.” Her voice was toneless now. “The only thing I could think of doing was to keep going the way we’d planned. Finish college, get a job. And wait. But they told me you’d never wake up. The doctors seemed so sure of that.”
“When did you give up on me?” he asked, the question somehow very important.
Kelly didn’t want to relive that period of her life, but she had to answer him. “It was after Dad died. He outlived Mom by only a few months. Neither of them was the same after the accident. When he died, I realized I was alone. You’d been in the coma nearly four years. Everyone else was gone. And it hurt so much to keep hoping.”
She drew a deep breath and met his gaze as steadily as she could. “It’s easy enough to say that I would have waited if I could have known you’d come out of it. But I can’t even tell you that’s true. I don’t know, Mitch. I don’t even know if that would have made a difference. You had been so much of my life for so long, and when you weren’t there anymore—”
“Someone else was.”
Kelly could feel a new tension seep into her, and tried to keep calm. She didn’t know if he knew of her marriage or was just guessing, but whichever it was, she wasn’t willing to talk about that. Not to him.
She was increasingly aware of the strain of this, the danger of exposing too many raw emotions. They were virtual strangers, but they shared too much pain, too many remembered dreams of the life they should have had. A large part of her shied away, urging her to cut whatever ties remained between them and finally end it, put it behind her once and for all. She was used to being alone now, and she knew all too well that she and Mitch could never go back to what they had been.
She rose to her feet, and somehow managed a distant, polite tone. “I just made fresh coffee; would you like some?”
After a moment he nodded slowly. He followed her as she went through the house to the kitchen, but it wasn’t until she was pouring coffee that he made a comment.
“This place is different.”
Kelly was standing on one side of a narrow, neat counter dividing the kitchen from a breakfast nook, and he was on the other side. She set his cup down near him, realizing only then that she had automatically fixed his coffee with cream and no sugar, as he used to drink it. Unwilling to think about that, she responded to his comment in the same polite tone.
“I was told your father had the house renovated before he died. Any idea why he left it to me?”
“No.” Mitch lifted his cup, watching her over the rim as he sipped the coffee. He chose not to mention that he noticed how she’d fixed it. “I went through some of his papers a couple of months ago, but whatever his motive was, he didn’t write it down anywhere.”
“You’re running the business now?” She was determined to keep to unemotional topics.
“Yes. It seemed to be where I belonged—if anywhere.”
Her cup clattered as she set it down on the counter. The tension inside her was winding tighter. There were too many emotions between them to be strangers, too much time between them to be anything else. Ignoring it wasn’t going to help, she realized tautly. She was too aware of him, too conscious of all the things they had both lost. The distant echoes of pain and regret and bitterness were growing stronger, the limbo of numbness receding.
Mitch had come here for a reason; probably, she decided, he simply wanted to close the book on that part of his life and go on. That was reasonable, to want an ending between them. He had never been a man to leave anything unfinished. The way he was watching her made it obvious that he was just biding his time, almost as if he were waiting for her to say something.
Get it over with! she ordered herself. End it now, before it hurt too much, before she had to open a door closed in pain years earlier. She couldn’t let that happen. Because she wouldn’t be able to survive losing him a second time.
“Did you expect to find me here?” she asked flatly.
He nodded. “I knew you were here. I hired a private investigator a year ago to find you.”
A year ago, soon after he’d come out of the coma. “Why? I gave up on you, remember?” She couldn’t manage indifference, but was able—barely—to keep her tone without emphasis. “I made a life for myself without you. I buried you, Mitch, just the way I buried Keith and Mom and Dad.”
Mitch set his cup down slowly, the intense gaze still fixed on her face. A muscle flexed in his lean jaw. Then, suddenly, he reached across the narrow counter.
She felt a cool touch against her throat near the neckline of her blouse, but before she could stiffen or pull away, he had slipped one finger beneath the thin gold chain and drawn it toward him. As he pulled the chain taut between them, the diamond ring lifted from its resting place between her breasts and hung suspended. The stone caught the morning light and glittered brightly.
Kelly stared at the ring for an instant, then looked at him. For the first time he was smiling, though the expression was hardly more than a slight curve of his firm lips.
“I don’t think so,” he said quietly.
Chapter 2
For a long moment she didn’t move, but only stared at him with her huge violet eyes. Then she reached up and caught the chain a couple of inches from his fingers, and pulled it away from him. The ring fell onto the smooth material of her blue blouse, and she fingered it for an instant before crossing her arms beneath her breasts.
“Don’t read too much into that,” she said stiffly. Mitch knew he was walking a tightrope and that his balance had to be perfect. Even though he didn’t feel the years that lay behind him—and between him and Kelly—he knew they existed. For her, the passage of time had been very real, and nothing he could say would be able to change it. He could only try to convince her that the past was no more dead and buried than he was.
He didn’t try to fool himself into believing it would be easy. He knew all too well that he couldn’t do for Kelly what the coma had done for him: make the years seem no more than a single painless night. Even if she hadn’t buried him,
she had mourned for what they had lost, and that was what set them apart right now.
Kelly had said her good-byes years before.
“What can I read into it, except the truth?” He held his voice steady and quiet. “You wouldn’t be wearing that ring if you really had buried me. You still feel something for me.”
She shook her head slightly, her shoulder-length copper hair gleaming with the movement. “The ring is habit, that’s all. Like wearing a watch or earrings. Something you do automatically.” She drew a breath. “I felt too much for too long, Mitch. One day I just stopped feeling.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s the truth. What did I have to hold on to? Dreams? The dreams faded. You weren’t there, and everyone kept telling me you weren’t going to be. Ever. I finally believed them. I said good-bye to you, and I walked away.”
“No regrets since?” He saw her almost flinch at the question, but even though he didn’t want to hurt her, he refused to let it go. Let her go. She looked exhausted, the strain of this obviously affecting her strongly despite the control that kept her voice steady and unemotional, and that was the only thread of hope he’d found.
“What good are regrets? If it helps you to hear it, then yes, I have regrets. A lot of regrets. But I can’t go back and change anything. I can’t change anything now. I’m sorry for what we lost, but I can’t bring it back.”
“Maybe not.” All his consciousness was so totally fixed on her that he was aware of nothing else. “But I have to try, Kelly. I don’t have a choice. For me, nine years passed in a night. I woke up loving you.”
She felt a pain so sharp it took her breath for a moment, and when it passed, it left behind a dull ache. “Not me,” she murmured. “Her. Don’t you understand? I’m not her anymore. You don’t know me, not now. I became somebody else while you were sleeping. I’m so different from that eighteen-year-old girl that we might as well be totally separate beings. The girl you loved is dead, Mitch. It’s your turn to grieve…and get on with your life.”
He was silent for a moment, his gaze so intense that it felt like an actual physical touch. Then he shook his head once, and said flatly, “No. I’ve already lost too much, all of it taken away from me while I slept, while I was helpless to stop any of it. But I’m not helpless now. I won’t lose you too, Kelly. Not without a hell of a fight.”
Ten years before, he had been the most determined, strong-willed man Kelly had ever known. Confident and assured, he had gone after what he wanted with a single-minded intensity that had utterly fascinated her. Their personalities had meshed perfectly then; he a leader and she willing to follow. She had, with the unconscious fervor of a young girl in love, begun molding herself into the kind of woman Mitch had wanted her to be; he was a strong man with a dominant personality, and in all likelihood she would have echoed his thoughts and opinions without forming her own.
But ten years stood between then and now, and for Kelly those years had been filled with events and emotions that had forever changed the woman she might have been. Looking back, she saw herself as weak and submissive, and with Mitch taken away from her, those flaws had become painfully evident. She knew now the price she had paid for her own lack of individuality.
Her maturity and independence had been hard-won, and she valued both now because the cost had been so great.
After a moment she said quietly, “What are you going to fight? Time? Fate? There’s no villain, Mitch. No thief you can get your hands on. A drunk driver crashed into a car, after which lives took separate paths. If you came here thinking you could change that, you were wrong.”
A muscle tightened in his lean jaw. “I can’t accept that. I’ll fight you if I have to. I’m not giving up on us.” He hesitated, then drew a breath and added in a hard tone, “You owe me. You owe me time.”
“I didn’t take that away from you.”
“No. But you walked away.”
She wanted to walk away again. Just turn and walk away, order him out of her life. But he had, whether deliberately or not, laid bare her greatest regret—and her guilt. She had given up on him. She hadn’t been strong enough, or hadn’t loved enough, to wait no matter how long it took. It wasn’t a rational guilt, and Kelly knew it, but knowing did nothing to lessen her feelings. She had lived with the guilt for more than five years, the only chain still binding her to the past.
She felt that she did owe him, that she should somehow atone for having failed him.
It had to be resolved, she knew that as well. The ring she still wore on a necklace was the constant reminder of everything and everyone she had lost one cold night, and until she made peace with herself she would never be able to put the ring—and the guilt—away. She had made so many mistakes in her life, and there would never be an opportunity to correct most of them. No matter what it cost her, at least she had to try to correct this one.
“Kelly?”
She looked at him, focusing on his face—a face almost as familiar to her as her own, even though it had changed in both stark and subtle ways. “I suppose in a way I do owe you,” she told him steadily. “I owe you an ending. You won’t be able to get on with your life until that chapter of it is closed.”
“That isn’t what I want, Kelly. I didn’t come here to finish anything. You weren’t a chapter in my life, you were the whole damned book. That hasn’t changed.”
“But I have. I didn’t sleep for nine years…I lived. I got through the days one at a time. I buried my brother. I buried my parents. I finished college and built a career. I even…I even married another man.”
“I know,” he said flatly.
Kelly didn’t want to let either of them dwell on that fact, and went on determinedly. “Then you know I’m not the girl you remember. I can’t be. Pretending anything else would only hurt us both. It’s over, Mitch. It was over years ago.”
He slid his hands into the pockets of his jacket, his gaze never leaving her. After a moment he moved slightly, his shoulders settling as if he had braced them against something. “All right.” His voice was even. “Maybe it is over. Maybe the girl I loved is lost to me, just like the years. But you still owe me. And I’m collecting on the debt.”
“What kind of payment do you expect from me?”
“You said you owed me an ending. Fine. Give me that ending, Kelly.”
“How?” she whispered.
“Let me find out for myself if the girl I loved is really gone. Is that too much to ask? A few weeks out of your life, a little time spent with me. Time without prejudice.”
The guarded, wary part of Kelly resisted that, but she had already accepted the existence of a debt that had to be paid. “How could it be without prejudice?” she objected.
“Maybe it can’t. But we can try. If it’s over, I have to believe that. I have to feel it.”
And then I’ll have to say good-bye to you again. She didn’t know if she could bear it. But she knew she had to. She couldn’t be the one to walk away a second time.
With a faint shrug, trying to pretend this didn’t matter to her, she said, “I have a career, and a job to do here. Your company’s in Baltimore.”
“I haven’t officially taken over yet,” he said. “After ten years, what’s a few more weeks?”
A few more weeks. If the past pattern held true, she’d be safe here for at least that long. She’d managed months in Tucson before feeling any need to move on. But, someone had sent her that clipping, someone who knew she and Mitch were connected in some way. And now here she was in the Mitchell family’s old vacation house. A house that was hers now—so it was a target. She hadn’t been able to prove the damage done to her apartment in San Francisco had been anything other than vandals, but she knew.
For the first time in years, she wished that she had someone to turn to, someone to confide in. Not Mitch, though. He had borne enough pain without having to bear hers as well. She didn’t want him to know about it, didn’t want him to see her shame and fear. And i
f she hadn’t been fairly certain she was safe here for a while, that there was no reason for him to know, she wouldn’t have even considered his request.
“Dammit, Kelly—”
Realizing that she had been silent for too long, she managed another faint shrug before saying, “I agreed that I owe you.”
Some of Mitch’s tension seemed to ease. His tone was carefully neutral when he said, “I talked to your employer before I came here. Went to his office outside Portland. An…interesting man. He says you’re going to work here in the house rather than at his company.”
Kelly knew somehow that he hadn’t changed the subject, but the tangent puzzled her. Making a mental note to ask Cyrus Fortune not to discuss her with anyone outside the office, she said, “That’s right. He’s sending all the equipment I need. The company’s so new they’re still getting organized, and I’ll work much more efficiently if I’m out of all the confusion.”
“So you’ll be here all the time?”
“Probably.”
He glanced away from her, looking briefly around the room in a considering way, then returned his gaze to her face. “Then it’ll be much simpler if I just move into the house. This is a big place, plenty of room for two.”
Kelly’s first realization was that the statement was no spur-of-the-moment thought; he’d had this in mind long before he’d rung her doorbell. She wondered if he believed it would be so easy. Her impulse—and a very strong one—was to refuse to allow him to stay in the house. But she had learned to weigh her impulses carefully.
This impulse, she knew, was purely selfish. Too guilty to push Mitch away and too afraid to cross the years between them, she’d been hoping for some painless solution—or absolution, some way of paying her debt without risking her emotions. But that wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair. Mitch wasn’t at fault for what had happened to them, and he deserved peace just as much as she did.
“If that’s what you want,” she agreed finally. She saw the flash of satisfaction in his dark eye, and went on in the same mild but firm tone. “But there are ground rules, Mitch.”