Sealed with a promise (26 page)

  He thought he understood now what the attraction to falling in love was.

  He slid his hands under the jacket he’d placed around her shoulders and let it fall unheeded to the floor. He found the crook of her shoulder with his lips. “How’s your shoulder?”

  “A little stiff. I start physical therapy next week. Until then, I follow the rule of: ‘Keep your hands where you can see them.’”

  “Okay.” He moved from the slight coolness of her cheek to the crook of her shoulder on the other side. “So no putting your hands above your head or behind your back. I can work with that. Anything else I need to know?”

  “Wait.” Emmie squirmed away. “Why are you asking? What’s going on?”

  “What do you think I mean?” Do-Lord laughed in disbelief, letting her pull away, but not outside arm’s reach. “You know where this is going. We’ve both been ready for hours.”

  Emmie blushed, her clear white skin suffused with rosy color. “Well, yes, but… You know when you asked me earlier if there was anything else? I knew there was, but I couldn’t think of it. But I just remembered. We can’t. Really. Not yet.”

  “Why the hell not?” He sounded testy. Hell, he
was
testy. No meant no. A girl didn’t have to have a reason, but he couldn’t believe he had read her so wrong. And this was the second time she’d called a halt, when he’d thought all the signals were go.

  Emmie gave him her wide-eyed look. “Pickett says women shouldn’t have sex on the first date.” She thought. Visibly. “I can’t remember if she said
men
could have sex on the first date”-her brow cleared-“but I think the rule would be the same for men, don’t you?”

  All the blood must have left his brain to fill his groin. Pickett, first date-he couldn’t even think of where to start. “Pickett?”

  Emmie nodded sagely. “Pickett is smart about people. She’s usually right about these things.”

  His mind was clearing. “But this isn’t our first date. We’ve seen each other several times.”

  “You mean at all the parties before the wedding? That didn’t count. We were together there whether we wanted to be or not. It’s not like you asked me.”

  “Could I talk you into making an exception to Pickett’s rule? Just this once?”

  Emmie looked at him a long time, an expression he couldn’t read in her eyes. “Yes, you probably could.”

  Shit. Why couldn’t she be flirty and silly like most girls? Why couldn’t she act teasing and sexy and make it clear she was going for a good time?

  Because she wasn’t like other women, that’s why. Over and over he’d watched her react to events in a way that was completely her own. He noticed a warm feeling in his chest and an upward pull on his lips as if he wanted to smile, though only a damn fool would be smiling at a moment like this. He should be acting on the advantage she just told him he had-any SEAL worth his salt would. A SEAL motto was: “Never fight fair.”

  He carefully pushed a strand of pale hair behind her ear. For many years he hadn’t desired the trust of anyone except another SEAL.

  The room was warm and dusky. The last rays of the setting sun coming through the plantation shutters painted gold stripes on the wall, while shadows in the rest of the room deepened.

  His hand, which had never left her waist, seemingly without any direction from him, reflexively stroked and kneaded the curve of her hip. The soft wool of the dress slid over the satin lining, and underneath that he could feel the warm supple flesh he craved.

  If he won now, she would regret it later. He didn’t think he could stand that. Slowly, slowly, he withdrew his hand and let it fall to his side.

  Emmie rinsed her hands far longer than necessary before she finally met her own eyes in the bathroom mirror. Her face looked as strange as she felt, which wasn’t reassuring. Her eyelids were lower than usual, the pupils large and unfocused. Her lipstick was gone, and her lips looked softer. Color that had nothing to do with makeup glowed under the skin of her cheeks. This business of being captain of her fate wasn’t easy. And her timing was atrocious. What on earth had made her decide to become less passive, more self-determined, just when she found a man she could safely turn everything over to? She could let him set the pace, and he’d make it good.

  All day long she’d looked at how passive she’d been, and it had made her a little queasy-because she wasn’t that way! Not in any area of her life except the most personal. Now that she had seen it, she couldn’t go back, though she had no idea where the road forward would take her.

  Emmie had doubted her place in the world since the day her missionary parents had sent her “home” to Wilmington, North Carolina, a place she’d never been. No promises to be good or to put the mission work first, either to them or to God, had changed the outcome. On the twenty-eight hour flight halfway across the world, her tears had dried. With her extraordinary capacity for logical thought, evident even then, she’d accepted that their work was essential. She was an extra in their lives.

  Consumed with bitter homesickness, Emmie’s first year was made hideous by her fear for her parents’ lives and her resentment of their dedication, mixed as it was with guilt because she couldn’t accept God’s will. These feelings were complicated by burgeoning hormones and fascinations she was at a loss to explain. She doubled her prayers and study of the Bible, since her grandmother told her repeatedly all the answers she needed were there. When nothing seemed to change, she added fasting, since that was the method recommended by the Bible.

  She grew thin… and then thinner. At first she liked the feeling of lightness, of emptiness. She liked the weakness and lethargy. She could drift through her days caring little about anything.

  One day she fainted. There had been a couple of near misses, but she’d always averted them. On this day though, she was walking home from school one hot afternoon in May. Thunderclouds were massing behind the steeple of the Presbyterian church, making it glare white against the purple-black of the sky as if she should read a portent. Her heart began to pound in slow thuds, and sweat dampened her forehead. She pulled off her sweater, and when that didn’t help, she unbuttoned her blouse to expose the long-sleeved T-shirt she’d taken to wearing to mask her shape and her thinness.

  Drapes of gray Spanish moss, swaying under the approaching storm, dripped from the live oaks that shaded Market Street, intensifying her dizziness. Emmie knew she needed to sit down before her legs gave way. Wrought iron benches were placed at intervals in shady spots along the street, but the next one was too far. And anyway, the thought of passing out where these strangers could see her made her feel even sicker.

  Just ahead, in the yard of an old white house, sat a huge hydrangea bush, five feet tall and just as wide. The sapphire blue flower heads, the size of soccer balls, glowed in the greenish light of the coming storm. In Emmie’s disoriented state she thought the bush radiated strength and power. Her head spinning and the edges of her vision darkening, she staggered to it.

  She couldn’t have been unconscious long. Fat drops of rain stung her face and dampened her clothes when she became aware again, but she wasn’t soaked. And she must have made it to the hydrangea because its musty-green scent filled her nostrils. Above her head a huge blue flower dipped and bounced with each drop that struck it.

  All the anguish of the past year seemed to have dissolved in her last moments of consciousness, and for the first time since her parents had put her on the plane for the States, she simply existed where she was, not wishing she were somewhere else, not wishing for anything at all.

  She discovered that the hydrangea blossoms were actually millions of tiny trumpet-shaped flowerets that spread into four blue petals around a lighter blue throat. Each floweret was lifted to its place by a pale blue stem finer than thread. This was her first experience with looking into the heart of life and her first experience of consciously seeing things the way they were, not the way she thought they were or wanted them to be.

  A drop of rain pelted her square in the eye and snapped her away from her timeless contemplation, but some remnants of that moment of clarity, when for one instant she had seen past the illusions that dance on the surface of the world, remained.

  The connection between fasting and lying beside a bush in the rain was as inescapable as a geometry proof. As an experiment in finding answers, fasting was an abysmal failure. She knew she would not do it again. Whether she would pray again remained to be seen, but she thought not.

  Emmie tied her sweater over her head like a scarf and tucked her schoolbooks under her T-shirt, sucking in a breath when the clammy plastic covers touched the bare skin of her midriff. On wobbling legs she walked the rest of the way to her grandmother’s house.

  Emmie dried her hands and watched the woman in the mirror do the same. She hadn’t thought about that day for years. Why had that memory come back now? It had been a wake-up call, a clear warning that she had to deal with problems herself, without help from her grandmother, her parents, or God.

  Do- Lord wandered Emmie’s living room while he waited for her to freshen up. It was going to take longer than he had thought to win her trust. He looked at the titles of the books open face down on her desk, carefully putting them back in the same order he found them. Her computer was in sleep mode, not turned off, and when he jostled the mouse, the screen lit. A little game he played was seeing if he could guess people’s passwords. It was amazingly easy. Birthdays, pet names, favorite color, favorite rock group, birthplace-people mentioned them in conversation all the time. All he had to do was pay attention.

  He frowned. He didn’t know any of those personal details about Emmie. Where she was born. Where she grew up. What her parents’ names were. She knew all the trivia about him, although she was the only person alive who did. He had created a fund of amusing stories, which he could recount by the hour. They were a smoke screen so others wouldn’t notice he didn’t talk about his origins. And yet, until this minute, he hadn’t noticed that private information about
her
wasn’t coming through. He doubted if her leaving out facts was as conscious as his. It was like she faded away behind her intellect.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t accuse her of keeping secrets. If he asked for her password, she’d probably tell him. Just like she’d told him he could get around her no-sex-on-the-first-date rule.

  As it happened he didn’t need the password to get into her files. A document titled “Remedial Conversational English” was open in the window.
Hello. Did you have
a nice trip? Was the traffic heavy? It’s nice to see you.
Isn’t it a nice day?

  Who had she been making this list for? Not herself. She didn’t chatter, but she didn’t have any problem holding up her end of a conversation. In fact, she was more interesting to talk to than-the thought broke off. Her first words at the door had been, “Not a pity fuck.” It wasn’t even close to, “It’s nice to see you.”

  The pieces of the Emmie-puzzle he’d been assembling suddenly interlocked. He could see the picture emerging now. He had always seen that she was vulnerable. It had been so easy to see that it had blinded him to the truth. A lump rose in his throat. He understood what kept going wrong. What had been wrong all the time. Why all her signals seemed to be on
go,
and God knows
he
was ready, and then the moment would vanish. Poof. The problem was with him. He hadn’t wanted to seduce her.

  Not that he didn’t want her. He did. Wanting her was like a toothache in his whole body. And it wasn’t an excess of scruples that held him back. If he thought seduction would make her his, he’d do it. She was a plum ripe for the picking. He could do it. She was sending out come- hither signals clearly now. Even though she hadn’t said an unequivocal
yes,
yet, it was only a matter of time. He had only to keep pushing her. And that’s exactly what he couldn’t do. Didn’t want to do.

  The trouble was, he wanted her to want
him.
The longing went too deep to have words to describe it, even to himself. If he pushed her, time’s one-way door would swing shut, and he’d never know if
she
would have chosen him.

  He knew what the trouble was, but damned if he could see what to do about it.

  Caleb tapped on the bathroom door. “Your phone is ringing.”

  Not ready to look at him yet, Emmie opened the door a crack and stuck her hand through.

  Still regarding her reflection, Emmie flipped the phone open. “Dr. Caddington.”

  “Hey!” Pickett’s voice came over the phone. “Did you turn your phone off and forget it again? I’ve been leaving you messages all afternoon.”

  “No- well, maybe yes.” Emmie couldn’t remember exactly what she’d done with her phone. “What did the messages say?”

  “I want you to meet me at Aunt Lilly Hale’s family reunion.”

  “I thought you weren’t coming home until Christmas.”

  “I wasn’t, but the last twenty-four hours have turned weird. Tyler’s birthday is this weekend. Jax has had to go out of town.”
Out of town
Emmie and Pickett had agreed was code for
doing something secret that couldn’t be speculated about.
“And there was a letter in this morning’s mail from Tyler’s grandmother, Lauren-actually, from her lawyer.”

  “Bad news?” Lauren and Jax had been locked in a custody dispute over Tyler. Pickett and Jax had hoped their marriage would make the question of custody moot.

  “I don’t know whether it’s bad or good. We haven’t heard from his grandmother since the wedding. Before then, she was calling him two or three times a week. But the letter says she’s gone into rehab. In the event of an emergency, we’re to contact the lawyer.”

  “You mean she’s gone for alcohol treatment? That sounds like good news.”