From Glowing Embers

Chapter 12

  “I came back for you.” Gray choked out the words. “After I left the beach house, I was so angry at the way you’d treated me that by the time I’d calmed down, I wasn’t even sure where I was. I’d found my way back to Pass Christian and a bar on the main drag. I was on my third beer when I realized the roaring in my ears wasn’t the jukebox.”

  It was ten years later, and Julianna knew she shouldn’t care what Gray had done that day, or where he had gone. But she did care. She leaned against the lanai railing and willed the dawn breeze to dry the tears that were so close to falling.

  “And you came back for me?”

  “I came back. Didn’t you ever wonder who found you. . .and the baby?”

  “Of course I wondered. But I remember so little. I remember passing out, coming to, passing out again. I remember waking up and hearing a tiny whimper.” She drew in a breath. The damp air went through her lungs like a knife, but still she fought the tears. “I sat up and saw the baby. And I saw blood.”

  “Hush, you don’t have to go on.” He rested his hands on her shoulders for comfort—although for whose he couldn’t say.

  “We’ll finish, and then never, never speak of this again.” She shrugged to push away his hands, but he wouldn’t release her.

  “You don’t have to go on,” he repeated.

  She ignored him. “The baby was so tiny. I reached for her, and then I fainted again. But I saw her eyes. They were blue.” She couldn’t finish.

  “I found you sometime after Ellie was born.” Gray swallowed hard.

  “For a long time afterward, I wished no one had found me.”

  He shut his eyes as his hands gripped her shoulders. He knew what she meant. Hemorrhaging badly, she had almost died. If he had found her even minutes later, she would have. “Does it help to know that I understand?” he asked. “Because afterward, I wanted to die, too.”

  “It doesn’t help.”

  “Then maybe finishing the story will,” he said. Even as she began another protest, his next words took them back a decade.