Hidden Legacy (18 page)

“Antiquing? Jonah?” Juliana couldn’t help the disbelieving laughter. Jonah being pulled away from his precious computer sounded highly improbable. Granted it was Saturday, but that had never mattered to him before. It sounded as if Jonah had found himself a match in Caitlynn.
Good for you!

“He needs a breather, and this auction has a couple of paperweights I know he won’t be able to resist,” Caitlynn said. She opened the library doors and marched right in. “Jonah, we have visitors!”

Jonah looked up from scribbling notes. His face looked ten years younger than it had when she’d last seen him. His cheeks held healthy color. His brow was no longer so deeply furrowed with pensive lines. He looked just has driven as ever, but also relaxed… and happy.

The whole house seemed to vibrate with renewed life, as if a weight had somehow been lifted from it. Because of Caitlynn?

“Juliana?”

She smiled uncertainly. “Hi, Jonah.”

Jonah strode to her and hugged her fiercely. “It’s been a while.”

“Too long. It’s my fault.”

“We’re both too stubborn.” He spotted Lucas. Both men sized each other up, reserving final judgment for later, it seemed. Then he spotted Briana and squeezed Juliana harder. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, pressing her lips together to keep from crying again as she relived the pain of her argument with Jonah about her decision to bear her child alone. She’d left in a rush of emotions and vowed never to come back. Stupid. Childish. So much time lost. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”

“I should have supported you better.”

“I should have let you.” She pushed away from his embrace and caught the storm of emotion in his gray eyes. She’d missed him, she realized. Missed their conversations, their arguments. Even in the midst of his fevered quest for a cure, he’d always made time for her.

“This is Briana, my daughter.” She crouched beside Briana and held her gently. “Briana, I’d like you to meet your Uncle Jonah. He’s my brother.”

“Hi,” Briana said shyly. “I smelled cows. Do you got cows?”

Jonah laughed. Hearing that sound from him again felt good. Behind her came muffled sounds of laughter from both Lucas and Caitlynn. “Briana!”

“That’s all right, Juli.” Jonah smiled down at his niece. “No cows, but horses. Two and a half of them.”

“Half? How can you have half a horse?”

“It’s a brand new baby horse.”

Jonah had played right into one of Briana’s fantasies. “Oooh! Can I see him?”

“We can arrange that.”

In the name of love, Juliana had condensed Briana’s world to something tight and contained. She’d wanted to protect her from loss, from pain. Instead, she’d isolated her, kept her from knowing the love of her own family.

“Hey, I’ll bet you’d like some cookies,” Caitlynn said, reaching for Briana’s hand. “I was wondering why I was so determined to whip up a batch this morning. I must have known you were coming.”

Briana looked expectantly at Juliana, torn between the promise of a treat and her newly hammered in fear of not talking to strangers.
What a mess I’ve made of everything!
“Go ahead,” Juliana said. “Save some for me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Can I come, too?” Lucas asked, stepping forward, offering her privacy. “I’m in the mood for cookies.”

Briana smiled brightly and held out her hand for his. “Sure.”

When Caitlynn, Lucas, and Briana had left, chatting up a storm, Juliana turned back to the inside of the library and spotted the framed photographs on the mantel—an abbreviated history of her family’s life. She picked up a photograph of the five of them: her father, mother, Jonah, her brother Cameron—another lost member of their broken family—and her, on a picnic by the lake. Three months later, their father’s death would shatter their world. Nine months later, her mother would be dead, too. Her fingers tightened around the frame. She replaced it on the stone mantel.

“I need your help, Jonah.”

“Anything,” he said without hesitation. Just as she’d known he would. How foolish she’d been all these years.

* * *

Lucas held the kitchen door open. Juliana entered her Aubery home with the choppy movements of an automaton. Leaving Briana behind had been hard for her. She’d put on a happy face for Briana and held it in place throughout lunch, an afternoon exploration of the stables, dinner, and an extended bedtime good-bye.

She’d given up her pretense on the long ride home. They’d said nothing—she lost in her grief; he floundering in an unfamiliar sea of emotions, pulled in opposing directions by reason and heart. He’d gleaned a new understanding of Juliana, and didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Patience was easy when there was a plan to follow, an objective to obtain. But
this
, he had no experience with. Anger and longing. Regret and hope. Duty and desire. He didn’t know where all the players would end up, where he fit in the picture, what was best for any of them.

The taste of loss sat heavy and metallic in his mouth, and somehow seemed inevitable. Impatience jittered through him, demanding release. He wanted to run, he wanted to kick, he wanted to butt heads. But his schedule had not allowed him the pleasure of joining a soccer league in a long time.

Most surprising of all, he wanted to make love to Juliana with a fierceness he hadn’t thought he could feel, given her betrayal. He was definitely losing his edge.

She took off her jacket, draped it on the back of a chair, and stood looking about her as if searching for something.

She’d tried to hide her tears from him during the ride back, but he’d seen her sad reflection against the night-blackened window, the unmistakable sheen of tears wink at him every time passing headlights illuminated the car’s interior. He’d seen her wince at the Tiltons’ darkened half of the duplex when they’d arrived, and felt her sense of cold isolation echo inside him.

He should leave, leave her alone with her grief, but he couldn’t. The need to connect was urgent, critical. It was as if a pane of fractured glass hung between them waiting for a push to send the pieces in a thousand different directions, or a frame to hold all the jagged pieces together. As if his future, theirs, depended on whatever would he would say or do next.

Seemingly lost, Juliana moved about the kitchen, shoulders slumped, body slack. She zeroed in on the coffee maker, and hands shaking, made a mess of trying to get a pot started. She was trying valiantly to hold herself together, but falling apart before his eyes.

Without conscious plan, he stepped behind her as she stood before the green granite counter, slid his hands down her arms, crossed her arms tightly against her, and held her. His body responded to hers with a powerful rush of need. He closed his eyes, drew in a long breath perfumed with her light flowery scent, tried to tamp down the voltaic charge assaulting all of his senses.

“Briana will be fine,” he said, pressing the side his head against Juliana’s. His need for her shifted to something deeper, something slower, something… lost.

“We’ve never spent a night apart. Not before the Phantom. And now, leaving her alone just when I’ve found her again….” She shivered.

“Not alone. She’s with people who love her, who’ll take care of her.”

“I know.”

Hot tears streamed down her cheeks, flowed to the hollow where their faces met, joined them as one as they coursed down their jaws, and cascaded onto her shoulder, his chest. She needed to release her hold on her stiff control, the relief it would bring. Without it, he feared stress would keep her awake, and her exhausted body needed a good night’s rest. In this state, they would get nothing settled, and they still had plenty to resolve.

“Let go, Jewel.”

She shook her head, tried to suck the tears back in.

“Just let go.” His throat constricted, his voice cracked.

She turned in his arms until her head lay in the crook of his neck. Her shoulders shuddered. Her back shook violently. So raw, so close to the surface, her pain jackhammered through his body, echoed his own. A feral noise squeaked from her throat. His gut twisted. Her arms anchored around his waist, her fingers dug into the small of his back as she tried to stay the flood nearing the cresting point. He held her tighter. The dam broke.

Between sobs, a torrent of release flowed. “I miss her so much it hurts.”

“I know,” he said from experience. He’d missed Juliana so much in those early days, he’d busted through a pair of running shoes in one week trying to escape the pain. And now he’d had to let his daughter go just when he’d discovered her.

“What if something happens and I’m not there?”

“She’ll be fine. Jonah and Caitlynn will take care of her. She knows you love her. She knows this is temporary.”

“What if he finds her?”

The Phantom. He would be a specter of fear for Juliana until he was caught. Lucas had brought that terror into her life. Somehow the Phantom had known about their past and used it against him. Coincidence? No. He knew that with a certainty he couldn’t have explained. The choice of Juliana, of Briana, had not been random. How had the Phantom known? If Lucas could answer that question, he could solve the case. “He won’t. I promise. We’ll catch him, and Briana will come home.”

She sobbed harder. “I’m sorry, Lucas. I can’t change the past. I can’t undo what I’ve done. You don’t know how much I wish I could. I’ve made so many mistakes, so many stupid decisions.”

“We both have.” Holding her, feeling her pressed against him felt good, felt right. And when something felt this right, it deserved a second chance.

“Briana, she’s a great kid. You should know her. She should know you.”

He stroked her hair, kissed the top of her head. “She will.”

“So much time lost.”

He held her, just held her, snug in his arms until she cried herself dry, leaving the front of his shirt soaked.

Awkwardly, she pushed her head away from him, swiped at the dampness on her cheeks with her fingers. He reached for the dish towel hanging from the oven’s handle and gently dabbed at the remnant of her tears. “We’ll work it out.”

She looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes. “I can’t change the past, but I can give you glimpses of it.”

She grabbed his hand with her tear-slicked fingers, and led him out of the kitchen, into the corridor, and up the stairs. Turning on the overhead light, she guided him into a bedroom.

Sky walls, a rainbow floor, a white dresser spotted with stickers of all shapes and sizes, toys in stacked bins—neat, yet accessible, a crooked collection of books in a white shelf unit, two years’ worth of dog-eared
National Geographic
in a precarious pile beside a bed topped with a fluffy pink-and-white comforter, a collection of stuffed toys lined up against the wall.

A child’s room. His daughter’s room.

“Sit,” she ordered, and headed for the shelf unit. She took out three fat photo albums and sat beside him on the bed.

“I made these for Briana. I wanted her to know how much I loved her from the moment I saw her. I never wanted her to forget in case—” She shrugged. The shrug spoke a world of hurt.

From him? No, it went deeper. She’d lost so much already in her life. Her father. Her mother. Her child’s father. Even her brothers. He learned that much in the bits and pieces of interrupted conversations at her childhood home, and he was beginning to understand how the possibility of losing one more might prove unbearable.

She needed time. She needed proof. He would show her he could be there, depended upon.

“It’s there for her whenever she needs to see.”

She put the first album on his lap, flipped the quilted cover open. Her finger lingered over the first picture—a pink infant squalling in a nurse’s gloved hands. “She was beautiful.”

He couldn’t disagree. Even though the baby’s face was scrunched as she cried, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “What was it like, childbirth?”

“Scary, painful.”

“I’m sorry.” He hadn’t been there. He should have.

“It’s amazing how fast you forget, though. As soon as I saw her, I felt this incredible surge of happiness. At that instant, I understood perfection.”

He glanced at her. Her eyes were deep blue, full of joy, her smile true. Was this how she’d looked when she’d first held their daughter? The picture humbled him, and he closed his eyes to capture the moment and remember it always.

“Sounds silly, doesn’t it?” she said.

“No.” He saw it, too, in the soft, plump lines of the baby’s bare body, in the mother’s look of unconditional love—perfection.

Beneath the picture was a list of the baby’s statistics: Briana Hope Shales, time of arrival 3:47 a.m., September 25th, seven pounds five ounces, twenty-one inches long. Shales. By all rights, her name should be Vassilovich. Was it too late to change it?

Pasted on the following pages appeared a series of plastic hospital bracelets, a hospital birth certificate, a welcome letter from mother to daughter, headlines cut from a local newspaper, a lop-sided family tree—heavy on the mother’s side; blank on the father’s. “Will you let me fill this in?”

“Of course.”

Juliana had recorded every milestone in her baby’s life from doctor’s visits to memorable firsts to favorites. With each page, he watched his daughter grow. He read captions filled with details and felt himself transported into a different world—his own child’s world.