~ ~ ~
“I cut the cord,” he told Julianna in a monotone. “I didn’t know what else to do. Ellie was still alive, although at first I didn’t believe it was possible. I took off my jacket and shirt, then wrapped her in the shirt, because it was dry. After I carried her to the car, I went back for you. I knew I was going to lose you both if I didn’t get you to a hospital.” He stopped, recalling the nightmare of roads that seemed to lead nowhere and turns that didn’t take him where he wanted to go. In actuality he had made it to the hospital in record time, but even now it seemed to him that hours had passed.
“You held her.” Julianna’s voice broke. “You held her and I never did!”
“She was so small. She never opened her eyes, but she was so beautiful.”
Julianna was sobbing now. “They never even let me touch her. I begged them to let me touch her, just once. But they wouldn’t.”
“They were afraid for you. You almost died.”
She remembered waking up in the hospital with tubes and needles attached to her body as if she were no longer human. She was alone in the room except for a machine beeping in a regular rhythm beside her. She had opened her mouth to scream and discovered that she couldn’t, because there was a tube down her throat.
Later a stern-faced nurse had come in and noted that her eyes were open. She had disappeared, returning minutes later with a doctor, and he had been stern-faced, too. Julie Ann had drifted in and out of consciousness, never quite understanding where she was, or why, never seeing a familiar face.
“You didn’t come to see me,” she said, sobbing still. “No one did. I lay there and wondered if I was really alive.”
“Times were different then, and doctors thought differently. They wouldn’t let me see you.” Gray’s hands tightened convulsively on her shoulders. “You were so near death. And after they took Ellie away from me, they wouldn’t let me see her again, either. They said it would be best that way, because she probably wasn’t going to live. I could only get as close as the swinging doors leading into intensive care. I lived there night and day for a week.”
Another sob broke through her control, and then another. “I thought you’d gone back to Granger Junction. By the time they unhooked me from all the machines, I was afraid to ask where you were. I kept begging them to tell me about Ellie, but nobody would.”
“And then, when they finally let me see you, I had to tell you.”
“And you were so cold about it!”
He shuddered. “Not cold, guilty! Do you have any idea how I felt when they told me she hadn’t made it? I’d killed our daughter. And I very nearly killed you! If I’d shown even one hint of emotion, I would have come apart in front of you, and I thought that would kill you for sure. I thought I had to be strong.”
“I needed your arms around me!”
“I was afraid to touch you.”
Julianna was sobbing uncontrollably now. Gray turned her toward him. He wrapped his arms around her and drew her against him. She didn’t fight; she wasn’t even sure he knew what he was doing.
“I felt so unclean.” He tightened his hold, and one hand tentatively stroked the silken length of her hair. “I couldn’t touch you, because I would have made you unclean, too.”
“You didn’t kill her. I did!”
“How can you say that?” His fingers threaded through her hair, and he gently tugged to turn her face to his. In the faint light of dawn she could see the suffering in his eyes.
“I shouldn’t have chased you away. I should have known I was going into labor.”
“None of it was your fault. None of it. Please don’t tell me you’ve believed that all these years?”
She couldn’t answer.
Gray loosened his grip on her hair, and she burrowed into his chest again. His arms were locked in an embrace he wouldn’t end until she understood the truth. He laid his cheek against her hair. “Neither of us killed her,” he whispered. “She wouldn’t have lived, even if she’d been full term and born in a hospital. She only lived as long as she did because she was a little fighter, like her mother.”
She tried to argue, but he held her still. He stroked her hair with trembling fingers. “She didn’t die because of the way you gave birth to her, Julianna. One of the chambers in her heart never developed. The doctors said that even with surgery, she wouldn’t have made it to her first birthday. Maybe today, with all our medical advances, but not then.”
“No!”
Gray let her move away, but only inches. “I’m not trying to absolve my guilt, Julianna. I’ll never forgive myself for what happened. But you deserve the truth.”
“Why didn’t you tell me then? Why didn’t somebody tell me?”
“You left town the day of her funeral. The doctors suspected, of course, but definitive results from the—” he swallowed “—the autopsy didn’t come in until weeks later.”
“No,” she wailed. “No!”
He forced himself to go on. “You left, and there was no way to tell you anything, not that I loved you, not that I’d found out about my father’s abuse, not that our child was spared months of suffering by her death. The words were ashes in my throat.”
Julianna wanted to cover her ears with her hands, but Gray held her arms to her sides. “I hated you,” she said. “You took me back to Granger Junction the day of Ellie’s funeral, but you wouldn’t even let me go. They buried my baby without me!”
“The doctor insisted you couldn’t. Your health was so fragile. He wanted to keep you in the hospital, but you threatened to walk out, so he let you come home with me. I was under orders to make sure you stayed in bed for the rest of the month.”
“And when you went to the funeral, I got up, took off that necklace you’d given me and left Granger Junction.” She threw her head back. “And I never looked back.”
“Liar,” he said gently. “You’ve looked back every day since. Every time you see a child the age Ellie would be now, every time you see a pregnant woman, every time you hear the crash of thunder, every time you shut your eyes and try to fall asleep at night.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I look back, too. I look back, and I ask myself, what if? What if I’d let you go to the funeral with me and ignored the doctor’s orders? What if I’d held your hand and cried with you the way I wanted to? What if I’d never left you alone on the morning of the storm? Sometimes I even hold the necklace you left behind and hope that maybe, by magic, it will give me an answer to all those questions. It was the only thing of yours I had.”
It was light enough now for Julianna to see Gray clearly. His eyes were filled with tears.
“Do you?” She lifted her hand, and his dropped to his side. Tentatively she touched his cheek, wet where one tear had fallen. “Gray, do you?”
His fingers covered hers, and he held her hand. “I went home after burying my daughter, and I found her mother had disappeared. Sometimes since then the questions have almost driven me crazy.”
Julianna realized that he wasn’t lying. There was nothing to gain and no reason to. “All these years,” she whispered. She couldn’t go on. Her insight was so fragile, so tentative, that she was afraid if she uttered it, it wouldn’t be true.
“All these years you believed you were the only one who suffered,” he finished for her.
She nodded. No matter what he’d said since their reunion, she hadn’t really believed his feelings ran this deep.
“There were others who suffered, too. My mother hasn’t been the same since Ellie’s death. She blames herself for letting my father treat you the way he did.”
“She was as frightened of his cruelty as I was.”
“The day Ellie died, the entire nursing staff cried.” He squeezed her hand. “They said they’d never seen a baby who wanted so badly to live.”
Julianna sobbed, and Gray dropped her hand to pull her close once more. “Ellie was only alive for a little while,” he said, tears falling to her hair,
“but there were people who loved her.”
Julianna wrapped her arms around Gray’s waist and held him tight. Until this moment she hadn’t understood why he had come. Now she did.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said brokenly. “You don’t know what that means to me.”
“I’ve looked for you for ten years just to tell you.”
She nodded against his chest. She believed him now. If he hadn’t cared about Ellie, or about her, he never would have put himself through this. “Do you understand why I left?”
His arms tightened. “Yes. But it was a mistake. We both made so many mistakes.”
She could admit it now. “We both did. I did.” She said the words with wonder. She had made mistakes, too. All these years she had blamed everything on Gray and on Gray’s father, but she had been wrong, too. Wrong not to tell him exactly what Judge Sheridan was doing, wrong to believe he didn’t care about her. Had she been wrong about one more thing, too?
“Were you going to divorce me, Gray?” She tried to move away, but he held her fast. “If things had turned out differently, if the baby had been born healthy, would you have divorced me and tried to get custody?”
“No! I was young and immature, but I wanted our marriage to work. I was doing everything I could to make a life for us.”
He was telling the truth. What greater proof did she need than the fact that he hadn’t divorced her in all these years? She had let Judge Sheridan’s venom kill the only thing in her life that had been good. She had given Gray’s father exactly what he’d sought. “God help us both.”
Gray rocked her back and forth, as if he understood her cry, as if he knew her agony because it was his, too. “We can’t change the past, but we can go on now,” he said finally. He cupped her face in his hands and turned it to his. “Now we can start to heal.”
Her breath caught at the look in his eyes. She saw the young man she had loved. She saw his vulnerability; she saw tears still wet on his cheeks. “How?” she whispered.
She expected him to say that by sharing their pain they had diffused it, that now she could begin to trust again. But he said neither. Instead he bent forward as if his will had melted with his tears. His expression said he knew he had no right. He knew he was going to undo whatever good he had just done. But he didn’t stop.
Julianna closed her eyes when Gray’s lips brushed hers. His touch was feather light. She held her body stiffly, but his lips brushed hers again, this time lingering at the corner of her mouth, as if he were unwilling to end the kiss. “Let me hold you for just a minute,” he murmured against her cheek.
“This is wrong. We’re reacting.” She tried to pull away, but both of them knew she didn’t try hard enough. His fingers tunneled into her hair, and he held her still as he kissed her. She felt the insistent pressure of his lips, and, hers parted. As he moved closer, desire surged through parts of her he hadn’t even touched.
She had been numb for ten years, and she hadn’t known it. She felt the warmth of desire like blood returning to a sleeping limb. The kiss was a memory, a reality, a blossoming where nothing had blossomed in a decade. When his tongue stroked her bottom lip, she welcomed him, and as the kiss deepened, she forgot her doubts.
She brought her hands to his chest, but not to push him away. They glided up the cotton fabric of his shirt to his shoulders, and then around his neck. Her fingers remembered the feel of his hair, and she let it slide through them as his tongue sought hers. She felt his hips against her as she moved in an unconsciously erotic rhythm. Her breasts pressed into his chest, and still she didn’t feel as if she were close enough.
He was so warm, and it seemed at that moment that she had been cold forever. Just for the moment, she let herself dream that the last ten years had never existed.
They parted at last, stepping backward simultaneously. Gray’s hands dropped to his sides, but not before he had let them trail through the length of her hair.
“We’re not the people we were,” she said, trying to remind herself as well as him.
Gray wondered how true that was. He wasn’t the same, but he wasn’t completely different, either. He was the same man who had been entranced by a rare and lovely flower growing in the midst of squalor. He was the man who had plucked that flower and, through his carelessness, let it wither and nearly die. But he was also an older, wiser man, a man who couldn’t deny what he was feeling. For the brief time he had held Julianna in his arms, he had been whole.
For the first time in ten years, he had been completely whole.
He reached up to brush a strand of hair away from her cheek. “We’re more than we were,” he corrected her. “But no less.”
“I am much less.” She tried to find the words to tell him who she had become. “I’m filled with hatred, with anger.”
“Only because you loved so much,” he said, still touching her cheek. “Only because you were so badly hurt. And I know you, Julie—Julianna. You kept everything to yourself because you didn’t want to damage anyone else, and because you were afraid to be hurt again.”
She wondered how he could be so sure. Was the vulnerable young woman she had once been still a part of her? She met his eyes, hoping she would see sincerity. She did. Gray still believed in her. After everything, he still believed in her.
That knowledge was as important to her as everything else that had been revealed that night.