The Wreck (26 page)

“Thanks, Mom.” She took a tentative sip
of the hot brew and felt the whiskey burn its way through the numbness.
“Where’s Brian?”

“In a huddle on the back deck with his
father, Matt Collins, and the FBI agent, Nathan someone.”

“Barclay,” Carly said as she took another
sip of tea. “Nathan Barclay. Is Brian still bleeding?”

She nodded. “His mother’s after him to
have it looked at, but he’s keeping the towel on it and brushing off her
attempts to hover.”

“We were coming to tell you we’re
engaged.” Carly’s eyes filled, and she blinked back the tears. She refused to
give in to the overwhelming desire to weep. “We just wanted to tell you.”

Carol took hold of Carly’s left hand.
“Your ring is beautiful, honey. You must be thrilled.”

“I’m so far beyond thrilled, I don’t even
know what the word is,” Carly admitted. “He wants to do it in three weeks. Do
you think we can get it together that fast? Nothing fancy, just something
small.”

“Of course we can.” Carol eased her
daughter’s head onto her shoulder and stroked a loving hand over Carly’s hair.

“Did Cate and Caren leave?”

Carol nodded. “They took the kids home to
bed.”

“Where was Zoë?”

“A group of her friends got together to
spend the night at someone’s house. They figured they’d do better together than
they were doing alone.”

“Cate took her there, right?” Carly
raised her head to look at her mother. “You’re sure she’s safe?”

“Of course, honey. Don’t worry.”

Carly put down the teacup and stood. “I
need to see Brian.” With an odd feeling of detachment, she walked through her
parents’ house, aware of worried glances from her father and Brian’s mother,
who were talking quietly at the kitchen table.

She slid open the screen door and stepped
onto the deck.

“There’s
no way
,” Brian was
saying. His back was to her, but she could see him dabbing at his face with a
paper towel. A branch had caught him just under the eye, cutting open his
cheek. One glimpse at his bloody, furious, frustrated face emerging from the
woods after an interminable wait had caused Carly to faint in the road next to
his mother’s convertible. A day that had begun with such promise had ended with
fear and pain. “You are
not
using her as bait. I don’t want to hear
another word about that, Dad. Think of something else.”

“I’ll do it,” Carly said, startling them.

Dropping his hand from his face, Brian
spun around.

She winced at the angry cut beneath his
eye, which had swollen shut. That he had come so close to losing his eye… A
quarter of an inch higher and he would be in the hospital.

He reached out to her. “Are you all
right, honey?”

“You want to use me to lure him out of
hiding,” she said to Michael as she took Brian’s hand. “I’ll do it.”

“The hell you will!” Brian said.
“No
fucking way!”

“It’s me he’s after,” Carly argued. “Let
me do this before he hurts someone else.”

Brian’s angry outburst had caused the
wound to reopen. “It’s not an option,” he said, wiping the fresh blood from his
face.

Carly took the paper towel and gently
tended to him. “This seems to have begun with me, so doesn’t it seem fitting it
should end with me, too?”

“No, it does
not
seem fitting. It
seems stupid and risky. Call me crazy for not wanting to dangle my fiancée in front
of a psychopath.”

“Your
fiancée?”
Michael asked, the
delight all but radiating from him.

“That’s what we were coming to tell you,”
Brian mumbled.

Michael put his arms around them both and
simply held them.

Nathan Barclay cleared his throat. “Well,
it seems you all have other fish to fry tonight. We can discuss this in the
morning.” To Brian, he added, “Get that looked at. You might need stitches.”

After congratulating Brian and Carly,
Matt left, too.

“I found a couple of butterfly bandages,”
Carol said.

“Let’s see if we can get one on without
getting too close to your eye.” Mary Ann took Brian by the hand to lead him
inside. “Come in here under the light.”

Carly watched Brian work at standing
still while his mother fussed with the bandage.

“There,” Mary Ann said. “That ought to do
it. If it’s still bleeding in an hour, I’m taking you in.”

“I don’t have to do what you tell me
anymore,” he reminded her in a teasing tone.

“Where’d you get that misguided idea?”

The others laughed, and the tension that
had filled the air suddenly lifted.

“What we need is some champagne,” Steve
Holbrook declared. He rummaged around in a kitchen cabinet, returning a moment
later with a bottle he held up with a smile. “The good stuff left over from my
retirement party. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, and I can’t think
of one more special than this.”

He popped the cork and poured it into the
glasses Carol had gotten out. When everyone had one, Steve raised his glass.
“To Brian and Carly, may your future be bright and full of all the happiness
you so richly deserve. Congratulations.”

“Hear, hear,” Michael said, touching his
glass to Mary Ann’s.

After they polished off the first bottle,
Steve went looking for another.

As she listened to their mothers discuss
what needed to be done to throw together a wedding in three weeks, Carly began
to believe for the first time that it might actually be possible. Caught up in
their excitement, she almost didn’t notice when Michael stepped out on the
deck.

He
rested his hands on the rail and hung his head, rolling it back and forth in an
effort to relieve some of the tension that had gathered at the base of his
neck. Better there, he had discovered, than in his chest.

“Dad?”

Turning, Michael could have swooned once
again with relief at the sight of his boy, even with the nasty cut on his face.
He was safe, he was alive, and that was all that mattered to Michael. When he
considered what could have happened earlier, in the very same place as before…
It didn’t bear thinking about.

“How’s the cut, son?”

“Hurts like a bastard.”

“Maybe you should get to the E.R. You’ll
have a scar if it doesn’t heal right.”

“A scar would add to my rakish good
looks.”

Michael smiled. “What kind of B.S. has
that lady of yours been filling your head with?”

“The very best kind,” Brian said. “The
kind I somehow managed to live without for far too long.”

“I’m happy for you, Bri. You can’t know
just
how
happy.”

“Then what’re you doing out here by
yourself when there’s a wedding to be planned?”

“I’ll leave that to the ladies.”

Brian snickered. “I’m told I have no
place in the process.”

“You know what I did for my wedding?”
Michael asked, resting back against the rail.

“What’s that?”

“Got married.”

Brian laughed. “Sounds like the wisest
course of action.” A moment of quiet passed between them before Brian said,
“Why didn’t you collapse or do something equally dramatic to force me home
sooner?”

“Because it wouldn’t have been time.”

“You could’ve saved me—hell, all of us—a
lot of aggravation if you’d come up with something,
anything
, to get me
back with her again.”

“You wouldn’t have wanted to hear it,
especially from your old man, even if he’s all-knowing and filled with wisdom.”

Amused, Brian said, “You’ll be my best
man again, won’t you?”

The burst of pleasure in the midst of
mayhem surprised Michael. “Of course,” he said, touched to be asked and at the
same time oddly saddened, as he’d been twice before, to know there was no one
else his son could ask. “We should have it down to a science by now.”

Brian hooted with laughter. “You
had
to say that, didn’t you?”

Michael shrugged. “In this case, the
third time will definitely be the charm.”

“Yes, it will. Do something for me?”

“Anything.”

“Let go of this idea of using Carly as
bait. It’s not going to happen. I can’t believe you’d even consider it.”

“She’d be surrounded by cops and FBI.
She’d be safe.”

“You can’t guarantee that.”

“Don’t you want to
nail
this guy,
Bri?” Michael pleaded. “For Sam, for the others?”

Brian shook his head. “Don’t play that
card with me, Dad,” he fumed. “Don’t make this a ‘who do you love more’ thing,
because the answer is Carly. She’ll
always
be the answer. I want to
clear Sam’s name as badly as you do, but he’s not here anymore and she is. I
plan to keep it that way, so think of a plan B.”

“What if this guy gets to her before we
get to him?”

“He’d have to kill me to get her.”

“You underestimate him at your peril and
Carly’s. For whatever reason, you seem to have what he wants. Do you honestly
think he’d hesitate to kill you?”

Brian looked down at the deck, a tick of
tension pulsing in his injured cheek.

“You’d better be thinking of your mother,
and you’d better be thinking of me,” Michael said softly. “We’ve already buried
one son. Don’t you dare get yourself killed by thinking you can outsmart and
outmaneuver a madman, Brian Westbury. Do you hear me?” His voice broke. “Don’t
you dare.”

Brian took a step to close the space
between them and put his arms around his father. “I won’t.”

Michael
drove Brian and Carly to her apartment in downtown Granville. After ensuring
the officers positioned at the bottom of her stairs and across the street at
the town common understood they were guarding his son and future
daughter-in-law, Michael left them for the night.

When they were alone, Brian rested his
hands on Carly’s shoulders. “How’re you doing, hon?”

She shrugged him off. “Don’t.”

Surprised, Brian followed her into her
yellow and white bedroom. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t treat me like I’m fragile and
might break under the strain.” She took off her sandals and flung them into the
closet. “I can handle that kind of mollycoddling from my mother and yours but
not from you, too. That’s not what I need from you right now.”

He moved fast, so fast she had no time to
anticipate his intentions before he was devouring her mouth in a hot,
breathtaking kiss. Wincing, he turned his head so he could delve deeper.

“Wait,” she gasped. “Your cut. You’ll
split it open again.”

“Don’t mollycoddle me.” Unbuttoning her
blouse, he worked quickly to get rid of her clothes. When she was naked, he
stepped back to look his fill.

Carly trembled under the heat of his
gaze.

He kissed the palm of her hand but never
once looked away from her. “You make me want like I’ve never wanted before,
Carly.”

“Then take.” She reclined on the bed and
reached out to him. “Don’t go slow. Just take.”

He tugged the shirt over his head and
dropped his shorts. He covered her, held her, took what she offered, and lost
himself in her.

Her nails scored his back, fueling the
flame that blazed through him. Filling his hand with a breast that was fuller
now than it had been when she was younger, he laved at her nipple and sent her
into a soaring climax.

Sweat stung the cut under his eye, but it
didn’t slow the frantic beating of his heart or the rapid-fire pace of their
coupling.

She must have sensed he was hurting,
because she forced him onto his back, straddled him, and took him in. Arching
her back, she cried out when she was surprised by a second orgasm.

“
Carly
,” he moaned, burying his
hands in her waterfall of curls and bringing her down to him to give her a
moment to recover from the rush. “I love you so much. So very, very much.”

She kissed him, a sweet, innocent brushing
of her lips against his that undid him. “I love you, too,” she whispered. “More
than you’ll ever know.”

He held her tight against him and came
with a choked cry of release.

The
happiness, the bone-deep satisfaction of having everything she’d ever wanted,
had Carly floating through her routine over the next week. Every time she
turned around, Brian was there. She woke up to him every morning, went to bed
with him every night, shared every meal, every thought, every dream with him.
Nothing, not even the threat of the man who would do them harm, could detract
from her joy.

Brian had finally succeeded in convincing
her to quit her job at Molly’s. On Thursday morning, the day of her last shift,
he walked with her to the coffee shop and then lingered for a while to have
breakfast and read the paper.