Currant Creek Valley (23 page)

“What if I were the one to leave? Would you stay then?”

She stared at him, oddly aware of the light glowing around him and the bright spangle of stars above that. “You’re not leaving.”

“But what if I did? Ethan and I have only been here a few months. It would be easy enough for us to make a new start somewhere else. Easier than it would be for you.”

She felt cold, suddenly, as if all the heat in the world had been sucked away, and then it rushed back, scorching through her like a brush fire. He would do that, for her? Pick up his son and walk away from the life he had spent these past months building so carefully?

She didn’t know what to say, what to do. Suddenly she was angry at him, furious that he would even make such an offer.

“You...you can’t just leave. You have a business here. A house.”

“You have a restaurant. And also a house,” he pointed out. “That’s not stopping
you
from running away.”

“It’s not the same. I don’t need you to be some kind of martyr for me. How pathetic do you think I am?”

He stared at her. “Where the hell did that come from? I don’t think you’re pathetic at all, but I do think you’re running from me, from what we could have together.”

How could he know that? She closed her eyes, gripping Leo’s leash to keep from bursting into tears. “We don’t have anything together, Sam. We kissed a handful of times. That’s it. For heaven’s sake! You really think I would pack up and change my whole life because of a few kisses?”

“Maybe not. Maybe I’m crazy.”

He was silent and she thought for one blessed moment he was going to give up and return to his house and his son and his life, but he shoved his hands in his back pockets, a funny little smile playing around that expressive mouth.

“No maybe about it. I’m definitely crazy. By the way,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “I’m in love with you. Does that make any kind of a difference?”

All her bluster and bluff seeped away and she could do nothing but stare at him, feeling as if the street beneath her feet had just sunk into Currant Creek. “You are not.”

He laughed roughly. “I’m pretty sure I know my own mind, after thirty-eight years on the planet. I’ve known I loved you for some time now. I’m sorry if it comes as a shock to you.”

Just for a moment, joy bloomed through her like Caroline’s flowers, bright and sunny and glowing with color and life, but harsh reality was a chilling wind that shriveled it like frost-kill.

“You’re not in love with me,” she said through lips that felt as frozen as the rest of her and didn’t seem to want to cooperate. “You might think you are but it’s all part of this fantasy you’ve built up in your head, that once you move to this perfect little town, you’ll have everything you ever wanted.”

“Oh. Is that what it is?”

“Yes! But you’re wrong. Hope’s Crossing isn’t perfect. People leave. They cheat on each other, they lie, they drink and steal and walk out on their families. They die.”

To her horror, her voice broke on the last word and the tears she had been fighting forever threatened to burst free.

“Oh, baby. I’m sorry.” He looked so wonderful there in the streetlight, big and strong and steady, and she wanted to sink into his arms and never leave. Instead, she forced herself to straighten shoulders that ached with strain.

“It’s not real. You’re not in love with me, Sam.”

“Will you stop saying that? I love you, and I’m not about to stand here in the street and argue about it with you! If I were going to daydream about the perfect woman to fit into this Hope’s Crossing fantasy you think I have, you really think I’d pick a smart-ass chef who fights me at every step and who’s too damn stubborn to see what’s right in front of her?”

He was angry. Heat flared in his eyes, and his jaw had hardened. He looked every inch a soldier—big, tough, scary.

“I love you,” he said once more, and she could see he was fighting to tamp down his temper. “Maybe if I say it enough times you’ll finally believe me.”

She had no choice, she realized, gripping Leo’s leash so tightly she could feel the imprint of it on her palm. She had to tell him. Everything. Every terrible detail. Then he would finally see she wasn’t the kind of woman who deserved him.

“You can’t love me, Sam. You don’t even know me.”

“I think I know you better than anybody.”

“Not this.”

She drew in a ragged breath that seemed to slice her lungs and blurted out the words she had never spoken aloud.

“I had a baby. I had a baby and he died. Because of me.”

* * *

T
HROUGH
THE
EDGES
of the temper he rarely let get away from him, Sam heard her words as if from a long distance away. A baby. She had given birth to a baby who had died.

He hadn’t expected that one. Shock froze him for just a moment but then he forced himself to speak.

“What happened?”

“I don’t... It’s ugly. So ugly.”

He didn’t need to hear—didn’t
want
to hear, but he sensed she needed to tell him, for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

He glanced back at his house and then at her. “Ethan could wake up. I need to be there. Will you come back and tell me? We can sit on the porch.”

“I don’t talk about it. Ever. To anyone. Not even... My family doesn’t even know.”

How could she have kept something like that a secret from her big, boisterous, loving family? His heart ached that she had carried that burden alone.

“It’s your choice. Tell me or don’t. Nothing you have to say will change the way I feel about you anyway.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Not unless you tell me.”

This was the reason she didn’t let him close. Somehow he knew it. Just that afternoon, Claire had told him Alex kept part of herself separate. This. This was the part she didn’t share with anyone.

He wanted to scoop her up and hold her close and tell her his shoulders were strong enough to help her carry any burden.

“Come on up to the porch, so I can hear my son if he wakes up. I can keep the light off if you want.”

Confidences always seemed easier in the dark, something he had learned in some pretty dark and ugly places in the desert.

She drew in a breath that sounded shaky and hollow, as if she wasn’t drawing air deeply enough into her lungs. “Yes. I...need to tell you.”

They walked up his sidewalk without talking or touching, her dog leading the way. She stood for a moment on the porch, her hands tightly clasping the dog’s leash.

“Can I get you something to drink?”’

She shook her head, her features in shadow. She didn’t seem to quite know what to do, what to say, so he made the first move, taking the ladder-back chair and leaving her free to sit on the porch swing.

After a moment’s hesitation, she sat stiffly. The chains rattled a little with the shift in weight then stilled.

She unhooked the dog’s leash and Leo immediately moved to Sam for affection. He petted him for just a moment then surreptitiously pushed him to Alex, sensing she needed the dog more than he did right now.

“This must have happened during your time in Europe,” he finally prodded.

In the dim light, her eyes were huge against her shadowy features as she stared at him. “How did you know that?”

“You said you hadn’t told your family. The way I see it, as close as you all are, as much as they love you, the only way you could have kept something like a pregnancy from them would be by living across the world.”

“Yes. I...I was in culinary school.”

She was quiet for another moment and then she pulled her knees up onto the swing and wrapped her arms around them, drawing into herself. “I was so stupid. From the very beginning.”

He let the silence linger. When she spoke, her voice was crisp, almost as if she had detached herself from the story.

“As part of my training, I worked in various restaurants in France and then Italy, learning different techniques. It was a wonderful adventure and I loved every minute of it. About a year into it, I started work at a restaurant near Florence when I...fell in love. Or thought I did. Marco was the chef and he was...brilliant. In the kitchen and out of it. Just this...irresistible force.”

She drew in another breath. “We had to keep our growing relationship a secret, of course. It would cause friction among the staff if people knew about us. Resentment, petty jealousies, that sort of thing. The political games played in a fine kitchen are as complicated and cutthroat as the Borgias.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Maybe that was part of the excitement, the forbidden aspect of it. For several months we lived that way, with him sneaking into my little flat in the middle of the night or taking me away for weekends in the countryside.”

She paused. “And then I discovered I was pregnant.”

She was silent for a long moment while a breeze blew through, rustling the leaves of the tree beside the porch.

“I was thrilled,” she finally said. “Beyond thrilled. I had all these ideas that we would marry, I would move to Italy permanently and we could run this wonderful restaurant together. It was a magical time. In my head, anyway. I didn’t tell him right away. Even then maybe I sensed something wasn’t quite right between us, but I told myself I wanted to wait until the moment was perfect. He could...have these moods sometimes, which I told myself was all part of his passionate, creative genius.”

Sam figured he had left his violent days behind him when he took his discharge, but right now he was struck by a fierce urge to rip a certain passionate genius into tiny, creative little parts.

“Finally, when I was three months along and starting to show—six or seven months after we began seeing each other—I set the stage. I cooked him my very best meal, I spent a week’s salary on a new dress, I even had the pastry chef at the restaurant prepare Marco’s favorite dessert.
Semifreddo
with grappa-poached apricots. You’ll never see that in my restaurant, by the way.”

An owl hooted somewhere on the Currant Creek but other than that, it felt as if they were alone in the night.

“You can probably guess what happened next. I finally told him about the pregnancy over dessert. He...wasn’t happy. Said I was a stupid American girl and why did I have to ruin everything. He said all manner of things about me, worst of all that my
alla bolognese
was bland.”

This would have made him laugh under other circumstances but right now he couldn’t find anything about this story funny.

“Only then did I realize he was right. I had been incredibly stupid. As he finally so clearly pointed out, we would never be together. All this time while I had been dreaming of the time we could make our relationship public—when we could start our happily-ever-after together—he had been going home every night when he left my bed to sleep beside his wife. The wife I had no idea existed until that night.”

He remembered that first day he had met her at Brazen, when she had grilled him so intently about whether he was married or not before she would consider dating him. The pain of that treachery and how she had unknowingly betrayed another woman must be etched deeply inside her.

“I have no excuse. I should have seen it a million times over, I just... I guess I didn’t want to see. I wanted to blame the language barrier, since my Italian was terrible and he refused to speak English, but really it was my own stupidity.”

“You were a young woman living in a foreign country and you made a mistake.”

“I wasn’t that young. Twenty-five. Not some naive teenager. I was certainly old enough to suspect something when the man who claimed to love me would only see me in secret.”

He was willing to bet the charming Italian son of a bitch was probably older, with worlds’ more experience. She had probably transferred all her pain over losing her father to him, but he wasn’t sure she would appreciate that insight right now.

“That’s not the worst of it,” she said, her voice small.

“What happened?”

“He fired me. Well, technically I quit before he could, but he told me he didn’t want me to come back to his
ristorante
ever, with much dramatic gesturing and throwing things around. And since the apartment was owned by the
ristorante,
of course I had to leave there
immediatamente.
”

Now he
really
wanted to find the bastard. Anybody who could throw a pregnant young woman out into the street deserved the full force of an angry ex-Ranger trained in hand-to-hand combat.

“I couldn’t see any other choice in the matter so I packed my things and I left Florence. What else could I do?”

“You didn’t come home to Hope’s Crossing, though.”

“No. I couldn’t. I... My older sister Maura had had a baby on her own when she was a teenager, my niece Sage, and I saw how hard that was for her. I heard the whispers and the way certain people looked down on her for it. Call me selfish, but I didn’t want to go through that or put my family through it. I didn’t want to tell my family what an idiot I had been and I certainly didn’t want the baby. My heart was broken and I didn’t want any part of Marco in my life.”

“Completely understandable.”

“I had some vague idea of giving the baby up for adoption, maybe, but I needed to work to survive, so I took a job at a restaurant near Bologna. A terrible place, with a horrible little man for a chef.”

The breeze sighed through the treetops and she sighed along with it. “I worked sixteen-hour days, six days a week. Some days I forgot to eat. I didn’t go to a doctor. I just wanted to pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened. I had loved him so much and I still couldn’t believe he didn’t want me. That he could hurt me like my...” Her voice trailed off abruptly.

“Like your father did,” he finished, wishing he could reach out and touch her. An arm around her shoulder, a hand on her arm. Anything.

“Claire
does
have a big mouth,” she said after a moment.

“She cares about you.”

“Yes. I couldn’t believe he could hurt me like my father. He abandoned us, and Marco basically did the same.”