From Glowing Embers

Chapter 14

  “I thought the storm was over!” Jody sat on the edge of her bed, her lower lip wobbling. “I thought my mommy could come tomorrow.”

  Julianna joined her and put her arms around Jody’s shoulders. By lunch-time the morning’s promise had turned to rain. By late afternoon the heavens were exploding with nature’s fireworks and the winds had picked up again. By dinner everyone’s optimism had vanished, even though the rain had subsided once more. “Eve’s a funny storm,” she said, trying to comfort Jody. “She just can’t make up her mind what she’s going to do.”

  Jody rubbed her eyes, and Julianna silently blessed Gray for keeping the little girl so busy she was tired from a long day of activity. “Will you stay with me for a while?” Jody asked.

  Julianna hugged her. “Sure. And if you wake up and I’m not here, I’ll just be out in the living room with the others. All you have to do is call.”

  Jody snuggled under the covers, and Julianna tucked them around her, kissing her cheek. “Sleep tight, honey.” She turned off the lamp and settled on her own bed. The room was quiet except for the regimented ticking of a clock on Jody’s night-stand and the moaning of the wind. Julianna’s eyes drifted shut, and she relaxed in the darkness.

  She had been up since before dawn, but she knew sleep would not come easily, if at all, that night. Somewhere between dawn and dusk her life had changed. Irrevocably. She had not yet begun to put it into perspective. She wasn’t sure she ever would.

  A sudden stillness brought her out of her thoughts. The wind still moaned, Jody sighed and turned, obviously asleep, but something was different. Julianna realized that the clock beside the little girl’s bed was no longer ticking. She opened her eyes and saw that the room had been plunged into total darkness. There was no light from the hallway seeping under the door; no thin beams from the street lamp filtered through the uncovered corners of the window. The electricity had gone off.

  Julianna rose, shaking out the long folds of her muumuu. She hadn’t thought to bring candles to their room, but now she went to search for some. Jody was so tired she probably wouldn’t wake up until morning, but Julianna wanted to be prepared, just in case.

  The marble-tiled hallway, like their room, was as dark as the night sky, but as she neared the living room, a golden glow spread across the floor. She heard the sound of voices and found Dillon, Paige and Gray sipping brandy by candlelight.

  “I thought you were asleep for the night.” Paige leaned forward and turned over a snifter on a silver tray on the coffee table in front of her. She held up the brandy bottle. “One inch or two?”

  “Are we celebrating, or preparing ourselves for the worst?”

  “We’re not sure. No one is.”

  “Then half an inch, please.”

  Julianna looked for a place to sit. The most obvious spot was next to Gray on an upholstered love seat. The only other choices were between Dillon and Paige on the sofa, or on a leather chair slung on a stainless-steel frame that Dillon had aptly nicknamed The Rack.

  Paige passed the snifter to her after she’d settled beside Gray, and Julianna cradled it in the palms of her hands. “Why do you suppose the lights went off? The wind doesn’t seem that bad.”

  “We’re getting gusts over fifty miles an hour. You’re just getting used to it,” Gray said.

  Julianna snorted. “Hah!”

  “You should see what wind does out in the bush,” Dillon reminisced. “In Coober Pedy we have dust storms as thick as the rain falling out there. There’s nothing much to stop the wind, either. Just a bit of scrub.”

  “Why do you call it the bush if there aren’t any bushes there?” Paige held up the bottle, and Dillon nodded, offering his glass for more.

  “We’ve got other names for it, but I shouldn’t like to repeat them to a lady.”

  “How do you exist in a place like that? It must be like living in the Sahara.”

  “The terrain’s not the same. Coober Pedy’s hilly, but the hills are made out of rock. Sandstone and gypsum, mostly. We tunnel into them and live underground.”

  Julianna let the brandy’s warmth spread through her. They were chatting like old friends, as if there was no drama to their situation. They were bound by the most fragile of bonds, and yet they could sit across from each other and talk about their lives as if they could all go back to them, unchanged, when Eve finally made her decision. She made a silent toast to the human spirit.

  “How can you stand living in a cave?” Paige seemed fascinated.

  “Not too many years ago we couldn’t stand not to,” Dillon explained. “We didn’t have the power we needed to heat or air-condition our homes. A dugout stays comfortable year in and out.”

  “They must be damp and dark.” Julianna smiled at the expression on Dillon’s face. “I’m wrong?”

  “In a wet year, we might get five inches of rain, so the houses aren’t damp. Dark? Well, I reckon it depends on how good the architect was and how many air shafts he sank.”

  “Architect?” Gray asked.

  “Anybody with paper, pencil and access to a tunneling machine is an architect in Coober Pedy.”

  “There must be something to keep you there,” Paige said, pouring herself more brandy.

  Dillon’s eyes lit up. He set his glass on the coffee table and leaned back against the sofa cushions. With lazy grace he unbuttoned the top two buttons of his sport shirt and reached inside, lifting out a thick gold chain. A huge, uncut opal winked at them, its flashing colors resplendent in the candlelight. “This is what keeps me there,” he said, swinging the pendant from side to side. “Rainbow Fire. That’s the name of my mine.”

  Entranced, Paige held out her hand. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

  Dillon moved closer so she could see it better. “I never take it off,” he apologized. “Opal miners are a superstitious lot.”

  “Did you find it yourself?”

  “My first strike. Sorry to say, this was the only really good piece I found. I made just enough off the rest to keep myself going. But someday there’ll be a better one.”

  “How long have you been mining opals?” Gray asked.

  “Three years. I’m an engineer by trade. I still do consulting. To support my habit,” he added with a grin. “That’s why I was in the States. I don’t need much, but I do like to eat now and then.”

  “And you don’t get discouraged?” Paige fingered Dillon’s pendant once more, then let it drop. “Three years is a long time with only this to show for it.”

  “The day I get back I could find half a million dollars waiting in the Rainbow Fire.”

  “You’re a gambler,” Julianna said, admiring Dillon’s easy grin and relaxed demeanor. He was an interesting man, an extraordinarily attractive man whom she would like to have gotten to know better if their situation had been different. She had seen his eyes follow her often enough to know that the feeling was mutual. But even though Dillon might be a gambler, he wasn’t enough of one to try and stake a claim where there was no possibility of success. While her relationship with Gray was unresolved, she was obviously not in the market for a new man in her life. Instead, in their brief days together, Dillon had become a friend.

  “A gambler,” Dillon acknowledged. “I think you might be one, too.”

  Julianna was pleased he had seen that about her. “Professionally, yes. If I weren’t, I’d still be sewing muumuus in a back room instead of designing my own fashions.”

  “How did you come so far so quickly?” Paige asked.

  Julianna had been looking for hostility ever since her conversation with Paige that morning. She had detected none.

  “I came to Honolulu when I was twenty and took a job sewing clothes for tourists at one of the factories. After a few months I began to think of ways to improve the things I was working on, but, of course, nobody was willing to listen to a twenty-year-old nobody with a G.E.D. and no fashion training. I started putting in a lot of overtime, and with the extra money
I made, I bought fabric and began to sew some of my own designs.”

  She didn’t talk about the nights when she had slept two hours at most, or the weekends when she hadn’t seen the sun come up or go down because she was a virtual prisoner of her sewing machine. The exhausting work had kept her mind off her loneliness. There had been no room in her life for midnight-hour despair.

  “When I finally got a batch of clothes together, I started making the rounds of the hotel boutiques,” she continued. “The big markets were closed to me, but some of the smaller ones were interested in taking my things on consignment. I priced the clothes fairly, and they were snapped up.”

  “A one-woman cottage industry,” Paige said.

  “Before long, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to keep my job and still keep my own customers supplied, so I quit my job.” Julianna smiled. “That was an act of great faith, believe me. But pretty soon I was breaking even, and I was a lot happier sewing my own designs.”

  As they talked, Gray tried to picture her slow climb up the ladder of success. It was strange that they could sit next to each other and casually discuss the years since she had disappeared from his life, almost as if they had happened to someone else. He visualized a young woman, alone, grief stricken, working to forget the events that had caused her so much pain. He knew there was a lot she wasn’t saying, and although he’d thought he wanted to know everything, he was glad.

  “You were always so talented,” he said when she seemed to have finished. “It must have felt like a gift just to have the time you needed to do what you liked best.”

  “I hadn’t even thought much beyond that point,” she said, pleased at his perception, “until one day I went to take some clothes to a shop on Waikiki. The owner gave me the card of a lady who had been asking about my product. I called her that night. Lehua owned a clothing factory, like the one I’d been working in, and she was interested in beginning a new designer line. She wanted me to be that designer.”

  Julianna stared at her brandy and thought about those years, some of the happiest of her life. It would take all night to tell the whole story. There was no adequate way to put into words the gratitude she still felt to Lehua, who had shown her what success really meant. There was no way to explain the pride that Lehua’s recognition of her talent had instilled in her.

  She condensed the next five years of her life in a few sentences. “Lehua essentially adopted me,” she said, swirling her snifter to watch the amber-colored whirlpool. “She was old and lonely; I was young and lonely. She died when I was twenty-five. By then I’d developed a clientele for myself, because even though I was designing for Lehua, the line carried my name. Lehua left the factory to me.” She looked up and smiled sadly. “I miss her.”

  “That’s an amazing story.” Paige held out the brandy bottle to Julianna, who shook her head. “You’ve lived the American dream.”

  As if to punctuate Paige’s sentence, a clap of thunder shook the house. Julianna got up and stood by the door to listen for Jody, but there was no sound from their bedroom.

  “I envy you,” Paige continued as Julianna seated herself again, careful not to touch Gray.

  “I find that surprising.”

  “So do I, but it’s true. You can look at everything you’ve accomplished...” Her voice trailed off. For just a moment she seemed curiously vulnerable.

  “You’ve accomplished a lot,” Gray reminded Paige. “You’re the vice president of a multimillion dollar development company.”

  “A company my father owns,” she said dryly. “But thank you, Granger, for the kind thought.”

  Julianna wondered if she had misinterpreted boredom as vulnerability. Either Paige was the most dispassionate woman she’d ever met, or one of the more emotional who had to sequester her feelings under lock and key to keep from being hurt.

  “Your job must be interesting,” she said, probing. “A lot of traveling, a lot of contact with people.”

  “One place is pretty much like the other, and underneath the exterior, all people are alike.”

  “You’re too young to be so jaded,” Dillon told her. “And much too intelligent.”

  “Not jaded, realistic.” Paige started to reach for the brandy bottle again, then seemed to think better of it. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Being rich and beautiful has its compensations. Right, Julianna?”

  Julianna wanted to deny that she knew, but the truth stopped her. By Paige’s standards, she wasn’t rich, but her inheritance from Lehua and her personal success had ensured that she would never want for anything again. And enough men had told her she was beautiful that she wasn’t willing to dispute that.

  “Maybe the difference between us is that I was neither for so long that I don’t take anything for granted.” She smiled at Paige, wanting a smile in return. “But we both know it’s not enough to make us happy. We have that much in common.”

  Paige’s smile was touched with vulnerability again. “I’m not sure either of us knows how to recognize happiness.”

  “And you, Gray. What’s your profession?” Dillon asked, obviously uncomfortable with all the undercurrents in the room.

  “Architect. I specialize in restorations.”

  “In Mississippi?”

  “All over. My office is in Biloxi, and I do a fair amount of work along the Gulf coast. But I also have jobs as far away as California.”

  Paige seemed to recover her equilibrium. “Granger’s one of the biggest names in his field. He’s won more awards than he has wall space to put them on.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Julianna said, truly pleased for him.

  “Nothing like a bottle of grog to loosen the tongue.” Dillon poured himself more brandy and held the bottle up for the others, before putting it back. “Or a storm we all want to forget.”

  “Jody ought to be up to tell her story,” Paige said.

  “I’m not sure Jody knows her story,” Gray said cryptically.

  Julianna frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Gray lifted his empty glass. “Nothing like a bottle of grog to loosen the tongue.”

  “That’s not fair, Gray. If something’s wrong, I’d like to know what it is, in case she needs my help.”

  Gray considered Julianna’s words. “I’d be happy to tell you, but knowing could cause you trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Trouble with the law.”

  Julianna’s eyes widened. “You’d better clarify that before I start thinking the worst.”

  Gray’s eyes swept the room. Dillon drained his glass and stood. “Early doors for me.”

  Paige stood, too. “It’s been one of those days,” she said, motioning Gray back to his seat.

  Julianna said good-night and watched them go.

  “Do they know something I don’t?” she asked when the room was empty except for herself and Gray.

  “Only when to leave well enough alone.”

  “I care about Jody.” And about you, she almost added, but didn’t.

  “I’m kidnapping Jody.” He waited for her protest, but her eyes only widened.

  “Why?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  She nodded, watching as he leaned back as if to make himself comfortable.

  “Jody’s mother is a friend...” He hesitated, “...of a friend of mine,” he finished.

  “You’re leaving something out.”

  “Only names you don’t need to know. You might recognize them.”

  She contemplated that, then nodded again. “Go on.”

  “Our mutual friend came to me one day and asked for help. It seems that Jody’s mother needed to get Jody out of the country. I don’t know all the details, but I learned enough to convince me to help. So, posing as a family friend, I picked Jody up from school and brought her here with me. Her mother was supposed to fly a different route, through Canada, and meet us at the Honolulu airport, but you know how that turned out.”

&
nbsp; “You could be in serious trouble.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why maybe? Won’t somebody notice she’s missing?”

  “Alexis, Jody’s mother, is divorced, but she has custody of Jody. Her ex-husband doesn’t even have visitation rights. Alexis notified the school that Jody would be absent for a week.”

  “If she has custody, what’s the problem? Why didn’t she pick Jody up herself?”

  “Alexis is watched all the time. Jody’s watched, too, but with some maneuvering, I was able to get her away undetected.”

  “Watched? By whom?” Julianna leaned forward, forgetting that she was already too close to him.

  “Jody’s father and the people he hires to harass Alexis.”

  She was silent, searching his eyes. “How dangerous is this man?” she asked finally.

  He shrugged, as if it were of no consequence.

  “Gray, what have you gotten yourself into?”

  “Are you worried?”

  She realized she should deny it. She couldn’t, however. It was only too true.

  She touched his arm. “Could you be in danger?”

  “Alexis and Jody are in danger.” The unspoken corollary was that if he was also in danger, it didn’t matter.

  “Why did you help? You didn’t even know them.”

  “I helped because they needed help.” He hesitated. “And when I heard about Jody, I thought of Ellie and how little I’d been able to help her,” he finished.

  How many other things had Gray done for Ellie’s sake? How many times had he paid penance for something that wasn’t his fault?

  She forced herself to speak. “Will Jody be all right?”

  “Jody doesn’t know what’s happening. She thinks she’s going on a vacation. But Alexis is taking her to Australia to live. She thinks her ex-husband will lose interest once they’re out of sight. She’s found a place there, on a remote island.”

  “That poor woman.”

  Gray shrugged. “People do what they have to do. You know that better than anyone.”

  She was beginning to wonder if that was true. Now she knew she wasn’t the only one who’d had to find ways to make it through each day. She looked down at her hand and realized it was still on Gray’s arm. She moved it to the back of the love seat, asking her next question against her own better judgment.

  “And what do you do to survive?”

  He shrugged. “I work hard. I try not to think about the things I can’t change.”

  “But you do think about them, don’t you?”

  “We both do.”

  “Maybe there’s really very little we can’t change.”

  Gray cocked one brow in question, and Julianna went on before she lost her nerve. “I don’t mean we can change everything that happened, but we can change the way we think about it.”

  “Philosophy, Julianna?”

  “Not philosophy. Apology.” She met his eyes squarely. “I’ve wronged you. I know it now, and in the next few weeks, when this all begins to come together in my head, I’m afraid I’m going to know it even more. All these years...” She took a deep breath to keep her voice steady. “All these years I blamed you for everything that happened. But you were caught up in circumstances as thoroughly as I was.”

  “Then you forgive me?”

  “I’m no longer sure there’s anything to forgive.”

  He moved his hand across the back of the love seat to cover hers. “Did I do the right thing by finding you?”

  Julianna knew instinctively that Gray had grown into a man of few insecurities. She also knew he was allowing her to see this part of himself because it was important for both of them. She turned her hand up and threaded her fingers between his. Entwined, their hands fit together as if they’d been made for this intimacy.

  “You did the right thing.” This time her voice wasn’t steady. “At least for me. Was it right for you?”

  “It was.”

  “It’s been awkward. For you.” She looked at their hands. “And for Paige.”

  He didn’t deny it. “We’re all adults.”

  “Funny, sometimes I don’t feel very adult.”

  His hand tightened around hers. “How do you feel?”

  “Confused. Afraid. You made me face things I didn’t want to face. You made me feel things I never wanted to feel again.”

  “You were right. It’s going to take time to put everything in perspective,” he said, as if trying to convince them both. “We’re both too raw not to feel confused.”

  Julianna managed a smile when, oddly enough, what she wanted to do was cry. “We’ll put it in perspective, and we’ll go on the way we did before. Only now you’ll know I wish you well.’’ She lifted her eyes to meet his and thought of Paige’s plea to make the end of her relationship with Gray quick and clean. “And I do wish you well,” she added softly. “I wish you and Paige the happiness you and I never had a chance at.”

  He didn’t look relieved. Instead he pulled her hand to his cheek. “I’m still a married man. Paige and I aren’t discussing our future until that changes.”

  “That’ll change very soon. I won’t stand in your way, Gray. I don’t want anything from you. You must know that. The divorce will be easy to get.”

  “You think it will be easy?”

  She was surprised by his tone, a mixture of irony and pain. She was also surprised by her reaction, an astonishing surge of hope. “Won’t it be easy?”

  “God no.”

  “It’s been ten years. Surely we’re both used to not having a marriage. The divorce is a formality, nothing more.”

  “Divorce is an end. We loved each other once.”

  “That died with our daughter.”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulled her closer. “Did it?” he asked. “Can you remember exactly when it died? I can’t. I can remember when it began, and when I first recognized it. But, God help me, I can’t remember when love died.”

  “Gray, no,” she said softly as his head bent toward hers. “This is going to make everything more difficult.”

  “Could it possibly be more difficult?”

  Despite her protests, Julianna knew she wanted this, too. When Gray found her mouth, her lips were already parted, expectant. Her hands rested on his shoulders, and as he pulled her closer, she stroked the back of his neck in tentative flutters. The rest of her protests remained unspoken.

  Sometimes in dreams, where bitterness had been forgotten, she had remembered the feel of Gray’s lips on hers. She would awaken slowly, expecting to find him there, and then bitterness would return. Now she kissed him as she had kissed him so often in her dreams. Bitterness gone, her body’s sweet yearnings eclipsing doubt, she gave herself to him, and as she did, she realized that in spite of everything, a part of her had always been his.

  And always would be.

  She thought he sighed, and she knew his sadness came from the pain-pleasure of their reunion. How could something that felt so right hurt so much? How could each second bring them more pleasure as it also brought them closer to the kiss’s end?

  She fought the inevitable by pressing against him, her breasts flattening against his chest, her fingers locking behind his head. He matched her desperation, sliding his hands down her back to settle them at her hips, positioning her so she was closer still.

  Finally he tore his mouth from hers to cover her face with more kisses. She heard the ragged sound of his breathing and felt the rapid beat of his heart against her chest. The moan she heard was her own, a protest against his withdrawal, a protest against the Fates that had brought them together again, only to force them apart once more.

  “No!” She clung to him, wanting the sweet oblivion of another kiss. She had a lifetime to face the loneliness and the what ifs. She did not want to start that lifetime now.

  Gray pushed her head to his chest and held her as tightly as she held him. “I’ve never forgotten the way you felt in my arms.?
?? He kissed the top of her head before he buried his face in her hair. “Never. I searched for you, Julianna. I hired people to search for you. I never forgot you.”

  She hadn’t wanted to be found. Now she knew what a mistake that had been. “I moved every few months. I took different jobs everywhere I went, jobs no one else wanted. I was always looking over my shoulder, afraid you’d find me.”

  “What were you afraid of? How could I have hurt you more?”

  She clung to him, trying to make sense of his question. “I didn’t want you to find me,” she repeated.

  “Why not?” Gently he pushed her away and lifted her chin so that their eyes were even. “What could I have done to you?”

  She knew in that moment something she hadn’t known in all the years since she had packed one suitcase and left his parents’ house. Her eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head.

  Gray wouldn’t accept her denial. “Tell me, Julianna. What were you afraid of?”

  She couldn’t say the words. She knew they would choke her.

  He said them for her. “In spite of everything, you still loved me when you left Granger Junction.”

  She shook her head, but he was relentless. “You don’t want to believe it, not even now, but it’s true. You were afraid I’d ask you to stay out of pity, and you had too much pride to take a chance you might say yes.”

  “I didn’t love you. I hated you.”

  “You hated my father. Were you afraid of him?”

  “No! He was a bastard, but I wasn’t afraid of him!”

  “You could have faced him, but you couldn’t face me. You were afraid of love then, and you’ve been afraid of it ever since.”

  “How do you know what I’m afraid of?” She tried to move away, but he held her.

  “How many men have you loved?”

  “Do you want a body count?” she asked angrily. “Shall we match lovers one for one?”

  “Not lovers, damn it. Love. How many men have you loved?”

  “How many women have you loved?” she countered without answering.

  “There was a girl once,” he said, forcing his fingers apart so she was free. “She was all the sweetness and sunshine and warm-hearted devotion any man could ever ask for. Then, just as I realized what she meant to me, she was gone. Nothing I could do would bring her back.”

  Julianna drew a shaky breath. “I loved a young man once. But the love turned into something else.”

  “Pain, Julianna. Not hatred. If you had hated me, you wouldn’t have run. You ran because you loved me. The hatred came later.”

  And now the hatred had fallen away like dead leaves in a storm. What a thin facade it had been to cover such a deep well of suffering. She dropped her head and closed her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve set each other free now.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to know. Can’t you give me that much?”

  It seemed like little enough, yet she was frightened to say the words. She felt as if he were asking for something more. She opened her eyes and stared at her folded hands. “I didn’t hate you, not then. I was in such pain.”

  “Did you still love me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve never heard you lie before.”

  Slowly she raised her eyes to his. She saw his pain, his questions, and she knew she couldn’t lie again.

  “I loved you,” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes. “And I was so afraid you’d know it. I knew I couldn’t face your rejection. You would have been so kind, and it would have killed me, Gray. That would have been the thing that finally killed me.”

  He looked stricken, although she knew he had already guessed the truth. His head moved from side to side in denial. “I sat at our daughter’s funeral, and I promised her I’d make you happy again. I promised Ellie that somehow, someday, I’d find a way to make you laugh again, and then I went home, and you were gone.”

  “How could two people bring each other so much pain?”

  “It wasn’t pain I felt when I kissed you.”

  She knew that whatever his next words were to be, she couldn’t bear to hear them. They had come too far already. She got quickly to her feet. “You’ve fulfilled your promise to our daughter,” she said softly. “We’ve talked. You’ve explained.”

  “The only laughter I’ve heard from you makes me want to cry.” Gray stood, too.

  “I have my work, I have my friends. And now I understand the past. That’s much more than I ever thought I’d have.” She turned to go, but his hand on her arm stopped her.

  “And love?”

  She kept her face turned from his. “What did love ever bring me, Gray, that I’d want it in my life again?”

  She felt his fingers tighten momentarily, then relax. Her arm was free. She left the room without looking back because she knew that if she did, she might not leave at all.