Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) (20 page)

She would keep it. As a
souvenir. As a reminder. As a lucky charm. Someday it would be filled with
other treasures. Perhaps a child’s tooth waiting for the tooth fairy to visit.
Shelly smiled at the thought. She would never touch this little blue bag
without being moved by its magic. If she lived to be an old woman she would
always remember the way it had helped her learn how to bet on life.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“Amazing,” Alanna said,
stepping out from behind a large urn of flowers in a far corner of the chapel.
“If you had told me three days ago that this woman was capable of making such a
selfless, generous gesture . . .”

Joe nodded, a little confused
by the size of the lump in his throat.

“She’s had a real awakening,”
Alanna said, still shaking her head, “and it sounds like, despite everything,
Ben is going to be okay. What have you been up to, anyway?”

“Trying to figure out my
life. You?”

“Oh come on,” she said,
leaning forward. So close that for a dizzying moment he thought she was going
to kiss him. “It’s not like you to be so modest. You go to plead her case and
boom, she gets her second wish. Are you telling me that’s accidental?”

“I’d love to take credit,”
Joe said, wondering what it would be like to really kiss her, to kiss her and
more. Alanna’s respect and gratitude would be wonderful things to have, but he
knew he was going to have to earn them. Earn them the right way.

“I’d love to take credit,” he
said again, leading Alanna to a pew. “But I’m telling you the truth. Shelly
granted this wish for herself.”

“So what happens now?” Alanna
asked, slumping a little against his shoulder

“I’m not sure.”

As they sat down, Alanna
realized she felt sad, as if she was about to lose something and that something
might be Joe. She recognized the feeling as breakup heart and she wanted to
turn and kiss Joe for real but before she could say anything, he stood.

“What I’ve remembered makes
me more certain than ever that I have to return to the world of living,” he
said. “Really return to it, in human form. There are things I have to do here.
Mistakes I have to rectify. Mysteries I have to solve.”

Alanna felt a tug at her
heart. In front of her was Joe, the risk taker, ready to go back to what might
be a dangerous situation for him. Up there was . . . what? Another wish to
grant to someone new? A different partner? Maybe something else. They couldn’t
know what would decide their fate. But if Joe was allowed to go back, and she
stayed . . .

“What about you?”

Alanna shook her head. “The
exact opposite. My memories have made me all the more sure that I want to leave
the earthly plane and move on. I think I was trying to do that anyway and
that’s why I was surfing alone that morning. It’s how I wound up here.”

Joe frowned. “Are you saying
you think you tried to commit suicide?”

Alanna sighed. “Nothing that
deliberate, but the memories seem to be showing that I put myself in risky
situations, almost like I was tempting fate to make the decision for me.
Whatever I was or whatever I had in my life on earth, I was evidently prepared
to leave it.” She looked him straight in the eye. “So where does this leave
us?”

“I don’t know.” Her
directness surprised him but she had said precisely what he’d been thinking.
They had been linked together by Morgan for some purpose, a purpose he was
pretty sure didn’t end with the story of Shelly and Ben. And throughout this
partnership they had begun to have feelings for each other. Feelings that the old,
earthbound, commitment-phobic Joe would have denied but that his new
sort-of-dead and sort-of-alive Joe realized he’d been craving and needing for a
very long time.

But he wanted to go back and
she wanted to go forward. This was not the sort of decision he could see a way
to compromise. It put a whole new spin on the question of “Your place or mine?”

“It’s hopeless,” Alanna said.
“We’re like puzzle pieces from two different boxes. No matter how much we want
it to work or how hard we try, this is a picture that we’re never going to
bring together.”

He squeezed her hand. “You
give up too soon,” he said. “This was just our first assignment and it changed
us a lot, didn’t it? I have a feeling they’re going to give us many more cases
before I get the chance to go back or you get the chance to move forward. We’ve
got time. Hell, that’s about all we have . . . but we have plenty of it. And
there are so many people out there, so many wishes to grant.”

“So that’s all there is to do
here now that the case of Shelly and her second chance is concluded?”

 “Just one more thing. We
have to say goodbye.”

“To each other?”

“Not yet,” Joe whispered.
“Not just yet.” And with that he leaned in to kiss her and when she moved
toward him, he pressed forward but after a moment pulled back.

“What’s the matter?” Alanna
asked and Joe realized he was as surprised as she that he was the one to resist.
“Don’t you want to?”

“Hell yes I want to. But I
also know that this isn’t real. It’s like a shipboard romance and we don’t even
know when we’re going back to port. This may all evaporate and leave us
stranded.”

“Can’t we be happy with what
we do have?” she whispered.

“Sounds like you’ve said that
before.”

Alanna realized that she had
said it before, somewhere, to someone. But Joe was still talking.

“I don’t want to be the ghost
of past relationships you’ve had,” Joe said. “Or walked out on. I grant you I
can’t remember everything about my life but I’m sure of one thing. There was
not one special woman in it. Because I’m sure if there was I couldn’t feel this
way about you. And you never meet the same person twice and never get the same
chance twice. You may get another chance. But not the same one. And I don’t
want to screw up this particular chance up.”

He had told her everything he
wanted to say but she greeted his words with a faraway look.

“Alanna,” he said softly.
“What’s wrong?”

The image of the man with the
briefcase had come back to her and this time it was not a still image but a
full on motion picture with sounds and emotions.

*****

He was angry. The man with
the briefcase. The kind of anger you can’t talk away with reasoned argument.

“When were you going to tell
me?” he was asking. “I mean you could have said something before.”

“I don’t know. It all
happened so fast.”

“Oh come on, Alanna, a
three-month pregnancy is not something that just crops up overnight. You knew.”

It was true. She had known,
had felt it right from the start. But she hadn’t wanted to know for sure and
couldn’t figure out why not. All right, they weren’t married. But he had asked.
She had worn the ring. The big square-cut diamond he’d presented at the club,
complete with a champagne toast down on his knee. She’d been embarrassed, asked
him to get up, blushed and wanted to run to the ladies room. There had been clapping,
the whole country club excited by his public proposal, their crowd happy to see
two of its members uniting. Her parents beaming. His parents raising their
glasses in a toast. It was good to keep the wall intact around the group. But
Alanna would have preferred a private moment of their own. Now here he was,
demanding an explanation and she had none to offer.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she
had so many times before.

“No you’re not. You’re a
stubborn bitch sometimes, you know.” He picked up his briefcase. It was
expensive, sleek black leather with a gold clasp. The phone in his pocket
buzzed but he ignored it for the moment. “You just keep stringing me along and
one of these days I won’t be there anymore. This is your last chance. I need to
make this move to Chicago. I’ve bought this company and now I need to put a
team together to integrate it into the others. I can only do that from there
and I want you to move north with me. I thought you wanted the same things I
want. Well this is it. My shot. And yours, too.”

“You know that’s not what I
want. I want to stay here. I love it here. I can’t live in Chicago in the cold.
I can’t give this up. I’ve told you that and you just won’t accept it.”

“But when this takeover
works, we can afford a place there and a place here. A better place than what
we have. You can have a mansion on the ocean for all I care. I’ve been working
on this deal for three years now and soon I’ll be able to sell the whole thing.
Can’t you see that?”

She could see it, had lived
it all for years. Always taking second chair to his mistress, the business. She
didn’t really believe he’d sell it out. She had a feeling he’d keep on buying
other businesses and building it until it was so huge he’d never have any time
for her or anything else. Certainly not for a baby.

“I don’t need a mansion. I
just need to feel a connection to the man I love.”

“I thought we were connected.
I thought that’s what a ring meant. We belong together. Everyone says so,” he
said coldly. “But obviously you don’t feel the same way you did once. If you
had told me about being pregnant, then if you lost it at least I would have
been included. But this . . .” his voice trailed off and his cell phone buzzed
again. He took it out and looked at it. “My car is here. I have to leave for
the airport.”

“As usual,” Alanna said.

“What the hell does that
mean?”

“You know what it means.
You’re always either on the way to the airport or on the phone or at the
office. If we got married I’d never see you.”

“You see me a lot more than
most wives see their husbands. You think there’s some mystical connection
waiting for you out there somewhere but you’re wrong. This is as connected as
two people get. Everything else is nothing but a fantasy and you’d better
accept that.”

“If that’s true I’d rather
dive into the ocean and never come up for air.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

They sat side by side in the
shade of a small roof overhang. Ben, his head swathed in a bandage like a white
helmet, was in a wheelchair, his bare calves showing below the thin, cotton
hospital gown, a pair of disposable slippers on his feet. He looked as
vulnerable as a child. The hospital had a number of these small outdoor
gardens, little shaded oases, still pleasant enough in April before the summer
heat reminded everyone that Las Vegas was built on the sands of a scorching
desert.

They didn’t speak right away.
Maybe it was some sort of post traumatic shock. It had been a rocky couple of
days.

“Everything’s changed,” Ben
said tentatively.

Shelly squeezed his hand.
“Not everything.”

“Yes it has. Who knows how
long it will take me to recover, or what recovery will even look like? I may
not be able to go back to work or to travel like I used to.”

“We’ll work it out.”

“I don’t expect you to go
through with it, Shell. I know this isn’t the deal I offered you originally.
You expected to be married to a strong, healthy man who could take care of you,
not an invalid who doesn’t know what tomorrow might bring. Nobody would blame
you if you opted out.”

“You’re not an invalid,
Benji. I have no intention of opting out,” she said, turning in her seat to
face him. “We’ll face whatever the future holds together and here’s the thing
I’ve learned. We never did know what tomorrow might bring. No human does. You
just have to hold on to the people you love and figure it out as it comes.”

“When did you get so smart?”

She laughed softly. “I don’t
know.”

He was still looking straight
ahead. “No man,” he said, “wants to depend on the woman he loves to help him.
We had a pattern, Shell, where I took care of you and it might not be that easy
for either one of us to let it go.”

“We’ve already let it go.
Everything changed the minute you hit that casino floor. Everything except the
fact I love you. And that I want to be your wife, come what may.”

He looked at her, his eyes
welling with tears. “I love you too, Michelle.”

They sat there for a few
minutes more in silence. Taking in the view, holding hands, listening to each
other breathe.

So this, Shelly thought. This
is what the big win feels like.

Chapter Forty-One

“Where are we?” Alanna asked.

“You know, my dear,” Joe said
with a laugh. “In our brief time together, that’s the one question I most
associate with you.”

“Well it’s a good question,”
Alanna said, laughing too.

“Well for once, I can answer
you,” Joe said. “This is the famed Little White Wedding Chapel on the Vegas
strip and apparently we have come to stand witness to the wedding of Shelly and
Ben.”

“Ah yes,” said Alanna. “There
they are now.”