Prompted by his intelligent questions, she explained what was involved in writing a wide-ranging program for a company. He was most intrigued by the realization that by the time she finished her job, Kelly had to have learned virtually every function of the company.
“It’s really that involved?” He asked as they were finishing dessert—peach pie he’d discovered in the freezer.
“Sure. For instance, it’s easy to write a basic accounting program, but if the company involved has half a dozen sources of income, it gets a lot tougher. And if that same company has an eye to the future and wants to project their earnings years in advance, that’s another complication.” She shrugged. “Fortune’s company is definitely going to be a challenge. From what I can gather so far, he’s forming the Portland office as a base to consolidate a dozen different companies across the country. He wants a network, a solid link tying everything together.”
“Funny, he didn’t look like an entrepreneur,” Mitch commented.
“Neither did Colonel Sanders.”
“Touché.” Mitch smiled at her easily. “Why don’t you take your coffee into the den while I clear up in here.”
“You cooked. I should—”
He shook his head. “Let me take over kitchen duties for a while. I could use the practice, and you’re going to have your hands full writing Fortune’s program.”
Kelly wasn’t sure if Mitch was trying to score points or if he really did want to practice his domestic skills. You’re getting cynical, she thought, and wasn’t happy about that. She’d learned not to take anything or anyone at face value, but her own wariness sat uncomfortably on her shoulders.
“Kelly? You look tired. Go into the den.” His voice was suddenly gentle.
How long had it been since anyone had cared that she was tired? Too long, because it affected her too strongly. Nodding, she left the table, carrying her coffee back through the house to the front den. The fire had been rebuilt, and the room was warm and cozy. She could dimly hear the wind whining outside, and it was a lonely sound that disturbed her. The wind always grew stronger at night, and she’d thought she was getting used to it, but tonight the sound was unnerving. Ignoring the television in one corner, she went to the stereo nearby and put in a cassette tape of soft music.
She looked at the couch for only a moment before kicking off her shoes and curling up in the big armchair near the fireplace. She was tired. Half listening to the quiet music, she gazed into the fire and tried to ignore the sneering taunt that had begun running through her mind during dinner.
You can’t go back…can’t go back…can’t…
Somebody had wisely said it. You can’t go home. Can’t go back to your past. The problem was that Kelly’s past had come to her. Too much had been left hanging between her and Mitch, left unresolved, incomplete. And she could no longer fool herself into believing that her own feelings had died. Perhaps she had buried them when she’d said good-bye to him, but he had walked through her front door, bringing the feelings with him.
They were inside her now, a little alien because those old emotions were being filtered, passing through the experiences and awareness of ten years. She had been conscious of them while she had talked casually to Mitch, trying not to let herself feel but helpless to prevent it.
Though lovers be lost, love shall not…
The next line of that suddenly remembered poem was just as vivid in her mind, and she felt the stark truth of it for the first time.
And death shall have no dominion.
Mitch had cheated death, awakening from a coma that medical science maintained he should not have awakened from. He had come looking for her across the years and the miles, determined to find what had been lost, mend what fate had broken. And she had offered him the chance, wary and convinced she felt too guilty to refuse what he asked of her. But it wasn’t guilt, not just that.
“Did you love him?”
She turned her head slowly and looked at Mitch, everything inside her stilled. He had come into the room quietly, and now stood just a few feet away, gazing at her with a hard look around his mouth, a tightness in his jaw.
“I didn’t think I’d want to know,” he said in the same roughened voice. “But I do. Did you love him, Kelly?”
Chapter 3
Kelly looked away from him and returned her gaze to the fire. She felt curiously still inside, as if everything had stopped to wait for something. “It isn’t that simple,” she said finally.
“Isn’t it?” Mitch moved to the chair on the other side of the fireplace and sat down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring at her with the hard, almost driven intensity that made her feel wary. “It should be, Kelly. It should be that simple.”
She could feel his gaze, but continued to look at the fire. “No. It isn’t. I—I needed someone, Mitch. I was alone, and I didn’t know how to be.”
“So you didn’t love him?”
Kelly set her coffee cup on the small table by her chair, then looked at him. The stillness was giving way to a confused tangle of emotions, and she was trying to sort through them, trying to find only the bleached white bones of a truth that would satisfy him.
“I don’t know. I felt a need for him. An emotional need. He had a kind of aura. Purpose, strength. He said he wanted to take care of me, and I needed that.”
Mitch looked down at the hands clasped before him, and she could see that his knuckles were white. After a moment, steadily, he asked, “What happened?”
She rested her head against the high back of the chair, trying to think of an answer. She didn’t want to lie, but even less did she want to tell him the entire truth. “I suppose…I realized I had to learn to take care of myself.” Which was, after all, true enough. “That I had to stop depending on others to make me feel worthwhile.”
His gaze lifted to her face, and his voice was grim when he said, “Worthwhile. How could you not feel worthwhile? Was it really that bad, Kelly? Did I and your family smother you that much?”
She was relieved that he hadn’t pressed her for more detail about her marriage, but the question he asked was nearly as difficult to answer. Shaking her head slightly, she said, “I don’t blame you or my family. That was one of the things I had to face up to, that it was my own fault…not the fault of an old-fashioned family or an assertive fiancé. No, the flaw was in me, Mitch. Nobody told me I had to be the kind of woman my mother was—so totally devoted to her husband and children that nothing else was important to her, so wrapped up in them and their lives that she lost her own individuality.”
“I loved your mother,” Mitch said, and the statement was both wistful and defensive.
“So did I. She was easy to love. And she was happy with her life, I know that. She was a loving, gentle, motherly woman; that was her greatest strength. And her greatest weakness. She poured so much love into her family that when Keith died it was as if a part of her had been cut away. Twice as bad, because she thought of you as a second son. Her family was wounded, and she bled to death.”
Kelly drew a breath, and her voice was soft when she went on. “That was the kind of woman she was, the example I had in front of me all my life. It was natural for me to want to be like her, to consider the wishes of everyone I loved first and ignore my own. The problem was that Mom was the genuine article. I was just a pale copy. I didn’t know what I wanted or needed, I never stopped to think about it. It never occurred to me that I had to learn to value myself before I could expect to be valued by others.”
“I valued you,” Mitch said intensely.
She’d had ten long years to think about it, and now her response was immediate and certain. “What you valued was my reflection of you, Mitch. And my willingness to be what you wanted—it couldn’t have been anything else, because there was nothing else there.”
“Kelly—”
“Think about it. You have to see it’s true. I’m not saying you were conscious of your reasons. But love comes from need. What
did you need from me?”
“You tell me,” he said a bit tightly. “You seem to have it all figured out.”
Ignoring the sarcasm, she said, “Your own family was anything but traditional. Your father was a domineering man, and your mother refused to be dominated by him. She wanted a career, friends apart from him, travel. And maybe it was unfortunate for all of you that she was just as strong-willed as your father. They fought right up until the day she left. Not six months later, you met Keith in high school, and his very traditional family adopted you in spirit.”
Mitch was staring at his hands again, silent, a little pale. Kelly knew how hard it had to be for him to hear this, but she had to make him understand that even the past hadn’t been exactly as he remembered it.
“We were so different from your own family. There were no bitter disputes in our house, no struggle for authority or confusion about what we were supposed to be. My parents had been together since they were sixteen years old; they’d decided on the roles a long time before. There was Keith, so secure in his world, loved and supported.”
“And you,” Mitch said in a low voice.
She nodded. “And me. I was just a kid, Keith’s little sister. It was years before you really noticed me, and by then I adored you. I would have done anything to please you, even go on pretending I could be the kind of woman my mother was. That’s what you saw in me, that willingness to be whatever you wanted me to be. Unlike your father, I accepted you just the way you were. Unlike your mother—”
“You don’t have to say it.” He sighed roughly, lifting his gaze at last to look intently at her quiet face. “What would have happened if we had gotten married, Kelly? If there’d been no accident.”
Her hands rose slightly in a helpless gesture and then fell to her lap. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing drastic. I might have grown up slowly, and you might have accepted me. Both of us could have adjusted. Or I might have been like so many women who look around in their thirties or forties and realize they have gone from being somebody’s daughter to somebody’s wife to somebody’s mother, and they rebel. But I would have changed. I had to change, Mitch; it was inevitable. The accident and everything that happened after just made the changes come faster and more painfully.”
“And now? You said you didn’t know what you wanted or needed then. Do you know now?”
Another tough question. “Partly. I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to live through somebody else. To do what others expect me to do, be what they think I should be. I have to make my own choices, my own decisions. I have to control my own life, at least as much as any of us can.”
“Kelly…I never intentionally tried to make you be something you weren’t.”
“I know.” She looked at him steadily. “But you needed me to be something I wasn’t, Mitch, and I felt that even then. I’m not blaming you; none of us can help our needs. And I was more than willing. I needed the security of a dominant partner because I was afraid of being alone, afraid of testing my own strength. What you have to understand is that I don’t need that anymore. Or want it. And if your needs haven’t changed, you won’t find what you’re looking for in me.”
The click of the tape deck turning itself off was loud in the silence. Then, quietly, Mitch said, “I have changed, Kelly. I went to sleep in my twenties and woke up in my thirties. I lost an eye, my best friend, and the girl I was going to marry. The father I never made peace with has died. The whole world is so changed, not an hour goes by that I don’t notice I’m out of step in some way. I’m rebuilding my life almost from scratch. How could I not be different?”
Kelly felt the pressure of hot tears behind her eyes, and her throat was aching. His voice had held steady, the eloquent words not a plea for compassion but a simple statement of what had happened to him. It moved her in ways she hadn’t expected, made her feel his losses as keenly as she felt her own. For the first time, she was aware of her guard wavering, as if one or both of them had taken at least a small step to begin crossing the years between them.
She didn’t know what would happen when—or if—they met again somewhere in the present. Every step would be tentative and painful, the way carrying them across old hurts and new, unexplored ground. But if they did finally meet, it would be as two adults who had learned to see each other clearly.
Kelly was afraid of the distance yet to be crossed. She was afraid of opening old wounds. But she couldn’t deny even to herself the knowledge that the attempt was something she couldn’t walk—or run—away from.
Finally, she swallowed the ache in her throat and said, “Neither of us is the person we were ten years ago. And we can’t go back. The only way is forward.”
Mitch drew a short breath. “I want you to understand that even though I’m not sure of everything I need yet, I do know it isn’t what I needed ten years ago. I guess I wanted security just like you did, but in a different way. I’d seen my parents fight a tug-of-war all my life, and it was like being caught up in a storm of bitterness that never died. I suppose that I believed if only one controlled in a relationship, there’d be peace.”
“You don’t think so now?”
A faint, rueful smile tugged at his lips. “I think control is an illusion we build to protect ourselves, and the larger we try to make that circle, the weaker it gets. We can’t control our own destinies, much less someone else’s. And even the illusion is so fragile, any change can destroy it.
“I don’t want peace, either, not that kind. Not the false calm of one person’s individuality sacrificed. I saw the struggle my parents went through for years, and you’ve made me see what my own blindness would have done to us. But there must be a compromise between the two. There’s a balance, Kelly, and that’s what I hope we can find. A partnership. I don’t want us to be together because either of us is afraid. We have to be whole before we can share what we are with each other.”
She knew what he meant. For years she had felt incomplete. Finding her own strength had helped, but there was still, at the core of herself, some uncertainty she didn’t want to examine too closely. “Are you whole?” she asked hesitantly.
“No.” His answer was immediate, his voice steady. “There are still too many pieces missing. I have to come to terms with what I lost and how it’s changed me.”
In a sudden moment of understanding, she said, “You knew that before you came here. You knew what we had was gone. But I am the only emotional tie left to your past.”
Mitch nodded, his gaze holding hers. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since we talked earlier today. And in a way, you were right about that. But so was I. It’s something I have to feel, to accept. I can’t go forward until I stop looking back. I can’t reconcile past and present yet. You’re the only one who can help me do that, Kelly.”
“So that’s what you need from me now?”
He hesitated briefly. “Yes. For right now. You’ve had ten years to find yourself, and I think you have. But for me, the present’s blurred because there’s too much of the past standing in the way. I do have to close that chapter of my life and put it behind me.”
He had, she realized, carefully talked about what he hoped they could find together before saying anything about closing the door on his past. It seemed he still believed she would be a part of his life no matter what he came to understand about the past and the present.
Her eyes still on him, she said, “You think that by spending time with me you’ll be able to do that.”
“Yes.”
It was what she’d already agreed to, but the strain of this first day had stretched her nerves taut, and there was a request she had to make. “Mitch, I know we have to talk about all this. For both our sakes. But I—I don’t think I can take much more right now. Can we try to forget about the past for a while? Tackle it slowly?”
The crooked smile softened his hard face. “I’ll do my best.”
She uncurled from the chair and found her discarded shoes, then got to her feet. ??
?It’s been a long day,” she murmured, wryly aware of the understatement. “I’m going to bed.”
“See you in the morning,” Mitch said.
Kelly went up to her room. Without thinking very much, she closed the wooden shutters at the windows around the sunken tub in her bathroom and took a long, hot bath, trying to soak away the tension. When the water began to cool, she got out and dried off. She dressed in a fresh nightgown from the small bureau, then opened her bedroom window an inch and crawled into the big four-poster.
The wind outside whined softly, and the ocean was a distant roar, rhythmic and soothing. She turned out her nightstand lamp and lay watching the moving shadows in the room as the trees outside filtered the moonlight.
Mitch had changed, she thought, but the enormous strength in him had withstood the years and all his losses. It was an emotional strength, the inner toughness of someone who had grown up in the midst of other strong personalities; he had learned young to assert himself, to avoid being overshadowed. That quality in him had awed her once, but now she simply respected it because she’d found her own brand of strength.
He seemed more patient now, more willing to listen to what she had to say. And more willing to talk about his own feelings. She thought the last year had changed him in those ways. Not so much the coma itself, but the shock of awakening.
He’d said the past and present were blurred for him, and in a way she was coping with the same problem. The last years had taught her to resist the kind of man Mitch had been, to protect her individuality fiercely, and that lesson had been a hard one; she would never again be weak or submissive. If he had come back into her life with the manner she remembered, she would have ignored her own unresolved feelings and ended it between them no matter what he said.
But he hadn’t demanded, hadn’t tried to overpower her or make light of her objections. He hadn’t tried to impose his will on her; he had used reason, not domination. He seemed to her just as strong-willed as he had been ten years before, perhaps even more so, yet he was also watchful and quieter and more self-contained. She didn’t quite know how to react to this Mitch, her past knowledge warning her to keep a distance between them even as she was conscious of feeling drawn to him.