Sweet Home Carolina (36 page)

He laughed into her hair, and his hand did treacherous
things to her breast. “It is all yours for the asking. Come with me to Europe.
I will give you silk sheets and your own maid. We will find you beautiful
clothes and a wee dog you can carry in your purse.” He paused thoughtfully and
nipped her earlobe. “The children will see all the sights of Europe.”

She knew he’d been teasing at first, describing the
glamorous shallow world where she didn’t belong, but the serious note that had
crept in when he mentioned the children opened the can of worms she’d been
avoiding. She pushed him away and sat up. The patter of rain on the windows
warned of impending thunderstorms, and she desperately needed to see that Josh
and Louisa weren’t afraid.

She desperately needed her feet on home ground to think
through what was happening to her. “I need to go home tonight. You and Luigi don’t
need me to oversee the packing up tomorrow.”

Zack caught the corner of the sheet she had wrapped around
her and tugged her backward. “It is late. It is pouring hard and nasty out
there. Listen to the wind. We have meetings tomorrow. After them, we will go.”

“No, I need to go now.” Instinct insisted, although she
didn’t think she could explain that to the satiated man sprawled naked across
the sheets. There was no logic to this craving to see that her children were
all right. “My truck is at the market. Could Luigi take me over there?”

They’d used her pickup to haul boxes from the plant. They’d
need it to haul them back up again, but she didn’t care. If she didn’t get out
now, this quicksand of luxury would pull her under, and she would never surface
in her world again. She needed her children to keep her grounded.

“The children are fine.” Zack sat up with the sheet over his
knees. “Call if you are worried, but they will be in bed.”

She couldn’t look at Zack sitting there all masculine amid
the sheets, his hair tousled, his jaw stubbled, his sinewy arms ready to reach
for her. Her womb clenched just thinking of how it would feel to climb back in
with him. It was a damned good thing she used birth control, because they
hadn’t shared an ounce of sense between them.

The idea of creating babies with him loomed too vividly in
her mind. She had to get out before she started imagining a little boy with
Zack’s laughing eyes or a little girl with his mischievous mouth, and she fell
into that hormonal trap all over again.

“I’ll take the orders back to the mill and set up a
production plan. I need to be home.” Amy couldn’t look at him as she escaped
into the shower, but she mentally begged him to understand.

Zack followed her in, striding naked across the tiles,
stepping into the pounding water to press her up against the wall, bringing his
nose down to hers. “You are running away, Amaranth Jane. Why?”

“I am going home, Jacques Saint-Etienne, to where I belong.
Being with you is running away.” Sidestepping him, she reached for the soap.

“Being with me is running away? How? I will take you home
tonight, if that is your wish. I will take you with me to Paris when I go next
week. I want you to be home with me.”

Cold shock hit her with the same force as icy water, and Amy
stared at him with incredulity. “You are leaving for
Paris
? Next week? When did you plan to tell me that?”

Trying not to show how badly she was shaken by this
unanticipated announcement, she shut off the shower and grabbed a towel. He was
leaving. She’d known he had to sometime. But the immediacy felt like
abandonment to her, and she’d had enough of that for three lifetimes. Uprooting
lives should take time. And planning. And a better warning than this.

She had been determined to look on this as a brief affair,
an escape from reality until she’d adjusted to her new one. But she hadn’t
expected it to end so abruptly.

Accepting that she had to divorce Evan had come gradually,
after a long struggle. Accepting that she had to let Zack go walloped her all
at once. She was amazed she hadn’t hit the tiles and slid to the floor from the
shock.

“I did not know if I could go until now. We have much to do
here.” Zack grabbed another towel and began angrily rubbing his hair. “But you
have done so wonderfully well that I thought it would not hurt to check on
another project. I have a business to run.”

He was right, of course. He had a business, and it wasn’t
hers. She knew that.

She would not cry. She refused to cry. She had cried for
months when Evan had left. She had no more tears left in her. She’d vowed never
to need a man ever again.

He wasn’t leaving her. She was leaving
him
.

Positive affirmations did not fill the hollow inside or
avert the need to cry herself sick. She didn’t want to think of being alone and
vulnerable again. Amy stalked out of the bathroom, grabbed a shirt from the
closet, and jerked it on, then rummaged in a dresser for panties before heaving
all the rest of her clothes from the drawers into her open suitcase.

Zack watched her in frustration. “I need to do many things
here, but my real work is over there. That is how I make my living. You
know
all this.”

“I do know all this. It has nothing to do with my need to
see my children
now
. My children come
first. You
know
all that,” she added,
mimicking him.

“Why are we fighting?” he shouted. “I will take you home.
You will see your children. We will make production plans. I will be back….”

He halted hesitantly, and she sent him a scathing look.

“Right. You’ll be back. Sometime. Don’t do me any favors. I
am perfectly capable of making a production plan. We will find a plant manager
because I sure the hell won’t do it on my own. Unlike you, I have a life. Give
us a call occasionally to remind us that you exist. But give us first option on
the mill when you decide to sell.”

She slammed her suitcase and jerked the zipper. It stuck. Of
course it stuck. She didn’t fix things. She broke them. It was a wonder she
hadn’t blown all the electricity in the hotel.

She hadn’t blown any gadgets in weeks.

Shoving a loose sleeve into the bag, she tugged the zipper
and got it closed.

“We cannot live on two continents,” he said firmly. “What we
have is special. We can’t throw it away over a moment’s disagreement.”

“I don’t want
special
!”
she yelled in frustration and fury. “I want every day. I want boring. I want
someone who hangs around long enough for meals and fights.
Special
is for holidays!”

“I’ll take you home with me,” he said with a shade of
desperation. “I’ll introduce your children to my parents. We’ll share Christmas
in London. Give me a chance!”

She did weep then. Tears started rolling down her cheeks and
wouldn’t stop. She didn’t want him introducing her to his parents, pretending
they had a chance. “I can’t live in London.” She hiccupped. “This is my home.
London is where you belong. Let’s not pretend anymore, all right? I’ve done
what you’ve asked of me here. Just let me get my life back.”

Wiping hastily at her cheeks, she retrieved a pair of slacks
from the closet, pulled them on, then swept the rest of the hangers into her
garment bag while Zack hastily dressed.

“I do not beg, Amy,” he said through clenched teeth. “I
offer you everything I have. I cannot do more.”

“There is nothing you can offer me besides yourself, Zack,”
she said sorrowfully, rubbing her eyes dry. “I have a family and a home and a
life of my own. I won’t give them up for you.”

He snatched the garment bag from her and opened the door.
She didn’t have the heart to look into his eyes and see anger there. Or even
hurt. She knew he was capable of being hurt.

But if she left now, it wouldn’t be as bad as it would be
later, when they tore each other apart attempting to be what they could not
because they were in each other’s way. She knew that from cold, hard experience.

Amy insisted that Zack stay at the hotel. He insisted that
Luigi drive her home in the Bentley. Since the rain was coming down in sheets,
and she didn’t look forward to the four hour drive home in her current state of
hysteria, she agreed. Her children needed a mother all in one piece.

When they arrived in Northfork after midnight, she
apologized to Luigi. He seemed stoic about the whole episode, while still
managing to emanate an air of disapproval. She swore she’d make up for the
ungodly hour to him later, then stumbled upstairs to her empty apartment rather
than wake Jo’s household.

She crawled into her cold bed and shivered in the dampness
generated by the torrential rain pounding on the roof, missing Zack’s warm body
radiating heat next to hers, yet knowing the longer she stayed and continued to
dream, the harder it would be to say good-bye. She’d spent this last year
sleeping alone. She’d learn to get used to it again. Somehow. In a million
years or so.

Zack had wanted to take her and the kids to London. She’d
thought he just wanted an affair. He wanted them to meet his parents. Was he
insane? Or was she?

What he suggested was impossible. An international
entrepreneur might be used to living on planes and in hotels. Change was
nothing to him. He’d worked his way into the community, the mill — her life — in
a few days, and could walk away just as easily.

She couldn’t do that.

Assuming she could as easily fit into his life as he did
into hers was a monstrous leap of faith even she couldn’t make. It had taken
her years to figure out what she wanted…and he wanted to turn everything she
knew about herself inside out on a whim? Her children needed stability.
Routine. Consistency.

He hadn’t mentioned marriage.

What in hell was she thinking? She didn’t want marriage,
ever again.

She wept into her pillow, too exhausted to sort it all out.

* * *

The wind ripped at the roof over the apartment as Amy
staggered from bed and wrapped herself in a robe the next morning. She’d left her
electric kettle at the office, so she filled a sauce pan with water for her tea
and reached for the phone.

She hated wind. She watched the rain course down the huge
windows, shielding the view of the mountain, and waited for Jo to answer the
phone on her end.

“I got in late last night,” she told her sister at her
greeting. “I thought I’d take today off and putter around the cottage. What do
you say I take the monsters off your hands? You’ve been a gem to take care of
them. I owe you and Mom heaps and bunches.”

“You got the mill running,” Jo replied. “Mom thinks you walk
on water. Of course, if you’ll look out the window, you’ll see that you might
have to walk on water to get over here. The highway has turned into white-water
rapids.”

Amy carried the cordless to the front window and tried to
see the street, but everything was a gray haze of wind and water. “That looks
bad. Maybe I better go down to the café and start some coffeepots running.”

She had an ugly thought. “Have you heard anything from the
mill? Has the river started rising?”

Jo’s usual effervescence went silent as she grasped the
horrible implication. “Let me call someone to look. The SUV won’t be safe out
there. Or Flint could come up and get the pickup and drive over.”

“Left the pickup in High Point. All I have is Luigi and the
Bentley. I’ll call Hoss. He has that old Land Rover. We might have to call off
the shift today.”

She hung up on Jo and flipped through her card file for
Hoss’s number. Punching it into the phone, she clicked on the television for a
weather report.

She’d been living on such a high cloud this past week that
she hadn’t heard the news or weather or anything outside her own little bubble.
This was what happened when grasshoppers convinced ants to play.

“I’ve just done been down there,” Hoss reported when she
asked. “It’s rising fast. The bridge ain’t safe once the water goes over it.
You’d better start calling and canceling. Guess that hurricane that hit the
Gulf is finding its way up here.”

Amy stared out the window in growing horror. “You remember
what happened the last time a hurricane came inland from the Gulf?”

“Yeah, baby,” Hoss said with regret. “That man of yours got
a yacht to save us?”

Amy said a word that hadn’t passed her lips in a decade,
then started giving orders.

* * *

Zack found one of Amy’s sweaters on the floor of the hotel
closet. He picked it up, and the gentle aroma of jasmine wafted around him. His
insides knotted at the memories produced by the scent.

He’d made colossal mistakes in his life. Letting Gabrielle
drive to the Alps with Danielle had been one of them.

He didn’t want to lose the woman and children he loved…again.

He couldn’t help thinking that his leaving Northfork now
would be a mistake that would hurt a lot of people. But he didn’t trust his own
judgment. He wanted Amy, and he liked getting what he wanted. He was capable of
justifying and rationalizing until he was convinced that going after her was
the right thing to do.

Maybe she was right and they didn’t belong together. His
parents certainly had proved that love didn’t make a marriage work. He thought
his parents loved each other. They simply couldn’t live together. Or even
choose a country to live in. He and Amy had entire continents separating them.
So maybe they needed time apart to think about it.

The only thing he knew absolutely was that he loved his work
and he didn’t want to return to the lonely way he’d lived these last ten years.

Crushing the silk knit in his fist, Zack punched Pascal’s
speed-dial number on his cell and waited for his financial consultant to
answer. He watched the rain patter outside the hotel window and wondered if Amy
had made it home safely last night.