Kiss River

  Get a grip, she told herself. That had to be her focus. The lighthouse. Her daughter. Not the man who cared enough to give her a gift, who validated her longing for her little girl in a way very few people had.

  CHAPTER 34

  Working at his office late the following afternoon, Clay received a call from Gina.

  “I’m at the service station near milepost three,” she said. He could hear a whirring sound in the background.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “When I went out to my car after work, it wouldn’t start. I got them to tow me here.”

  Clay was frankly amazed that her car had made it all the way across the country. He wouldn’t be surprised if the trip had been its last hurrah.

  “I tried Lacey, but haven’t been able to reach her,” Gina continued. “Is there a chance you could pick me up on your way home from work? Would you mind?”

  Clay looked at his calendar. He had planned to leave the office in thirty minutes for an appointment in Southern Shores.

  “I can pick you up,” he said, “but I need to make a stop on my way home to see a client. If you don’t mind stopping off there with me, I could—”

  “That would be fine,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “See you soon,” he said, then hung up the phone.

  The night before had not gone as he’d hoped. Clay was certain Gina’s enthralled reaction to the doll had been sincere, but he had not expected her to fall apart the way she did and then disappear upstairs for the rest of the night. He’d eaten the entire pizza by himself. When he went downstairs that morning, she had already left for work, and he’d felt enough concern for her that he called her at Shorty’s. He worried that he had inadvertently done something to upset her, but she reassured him that she was fine.

  “I’d just had a long day,” she’d said. “I needed to crash.”

  Despite her denial, he couldn’t help but feel that he’d made a mistake in giving her the Barbie doll.

  He arrived at the service station and speculated with the guys working there about what might be the problem with Gina’s car. He knew these guys, and although he thought they were honest and not likely to tack on extra charges just because Gina was female, it wouldn’t hurt to have them know he was involved.

  “Fix the air conditioner, too, while you’re at it,” he said, when they were about to leave.

  “I can’t afford it, Clay,” Gina whispered to him.

  “Fix it,” he repeated to the attendant. Then to Gina, “I’ll take care of it.”

  She was quiet as they walked back to his Jeep. Finally, she spoke. “You’ve done too much for me,” she said.

  “You need air-conditioning.” He opened the door for her. “And I can afford it.”

  He noticed she was perspiring when he got into the driver’s seat. The hazy cool air from the day before had given way to a brutal heat. “I don’t mean to make you feel obligated to me in any way,” he reassured her.

  “I know,” she said, her voice soft.

  He asked her more questions about the rattle in her car, his mind clicking through the possibilities of how that sound might relate to the problem she was having with the car now. She suddenly interrupted him.

  “There’s Lacey!” she said, pointing past him to a strip of shops.

  Clay turned to look.

  “You missed her,” she said. “She just went into a store with a guy.”

  He groaned. “Yet another one of Lacey’s men,” he said. “Was it Josh, I hope? Or at least someone you’ve seen her with before?”

  “Nope. A new one,” she said. “He looked like kind of an old guy. He had a ponytail and—”

  Clay laughed, relieved. “That’s Tom. Her father.”

  “Her…Oh! I forgot Alec is not her biological father.”

  “She spends a lot of time with Tom,” he said. He felt nearly euphoric to know that Lacey was with Tom and not another nameless boyfriend.

  Gina fiddled with the air-conditioning vent for a moment. “There’s something I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re older than she is, and Alec’s your father, but—”

  “My mother had a brief affair with Tom.” Clay bit the words off. It was so hard to imagine his mother cheating on his father. Unbearable to think about, really. “My father needed to travel a lot in the early days of their marriage. My mother was young and vulnerable and I guess she felt neglected. But they had a strong marriage. They were able to work it out.”

  “That’s good,” Gina said. “I have a real problem with infidelity.”

  He thought he should ask her what she meant by that. The comment seemed like an invitation, but he couldn’t make himself form the words to ask such a loaded, personal question, and an awkward silence stretched between them for a few minutes.

  “What do you need to do for this client?” Gina asked as they neared Southern Shores.

  “It’s a couple, Joe and Fiona Reiker, who used to be friends with Terri and me,” he said. He hadn’t seen them since Terri’s funeral. “They own an old cottage in Southern Shores and they want to bring it up to date a bit.”

  “May I come in with you? I’d like to watch you work.”

  “I don’t know how exciting it will be,” he said with a smile, “but of course you can come in. I wouldn’t leave you in the car in this heat, anyway.”

  He pulled into the long driveway of the oceanfront cottage, which always looked a bit out of place tucked among the flat-roofed houses in Southern Shores. He’d had ideas for redesigning this cottage for years now, and he was pleased the Reikers finally wanted to do it.

  Inside the cottage, Clay felt unexpectedly uncomfortable. It was strange to see Joe and Fiona without Terri’s presence—and with Gina’s. Fiona had been Terri’s closest friend. She had probably grieved nearly as hard as he had over her loss. He introduced Gina to them, hoping they didn’t think there was something going on between the two of them, that he’d been able to move on that quickly. He explained in far too much detail how Gina happened to be with him that evening, giving them more information than they could possibly want to know. But although Gina squirmed at the attention being given her, the explanation seemed to put Joe and Fiona’s curiosity to rest. They showed him the house, and he took pictures and measurements and talked with them about the changes they wanted. It was a typical visit with a prospective client. No surprises, until they were about to walk out the door.

  Gina hung back when Fiona gave him a long hug. “You know, Clay…” Fiona leaned away from him, but kept her hands on his arms. There were tears in her eyes. “We never talked about the baby.”

  “The baby?” He felt stupid. What was she talking about?

  “You know. Learning that Terri was pregnant just days before she died,” Fiona said. “I know that made it a double blow for you. I’m so sorry.”

  He kept his face impassive. “Thanks,” he said with a curt nod that belied the sudden turmoil inside him.

  His cheeks were burning by the time he and Gina reached his Jeep, and he thought he might be sick. He leaned against the driver’s-side door, while Gina got in. Terri had been pregnant. When had she planned on telling him?

  Whatever Gina might have thought of his reaction, she said nothing for the drive home. He barely remembered she was in the Jeep with him, as he tried to piece together all that had happened in those few days before Terri’s death. She could have told him she was expecting triplets then, and he wouldn’t have reacted. He’d had other things on his mind.

  When they reached the chain across the dirt lane, he unbuckled his seat belt to get out and unlock it, but Gina already had her own key at the ready. She hopped out of the Jeep and unlocked the padlock, then got back into the car. He started driving again, avoiding the ruts in the road to the best of his ability.

  “Something’s bothering you,” Gina said when they had come to a standstill in the parking lot.

  “Not really.” He felt himself shutting down, running away, and the
feeling comforted him in its familiarity. Open up to her, his father had said. Then he heard Terri’s words: You’re disabled. You can’t help it. You’re a guy.

  He turned off the engine, and the car quickly filled with heat. “Yes,” he said, turning toward Gina. “Something’s bothering me,” he said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  He sighed, rubbing his temple with his fingertips before he nodded. “Let’s go up on the tower,” he said.

  The sky had turned a bruised purple color as they walked toward the lighthouse, but inside the tower, it was already night. They clutched the railing as they climbed the spiral staircase. Gina needed to stop on one of the landings to catch her breath, and he waited for her, leaning against the cool surface of the bricks. When they reached the top, he sat down next to her, wondering how he would start the conversation. But she made the first move for him.

  “Something upset you at Joe and Fiona’s,” she said.

  He looked out to sea. It was already too dark to see the buoy, but he knew the general location of the lens, and kept his gaze on the area.

  “I didn’t know Terri was pregnant.” He blurted out the words.

  “I thought that was it,” she said. “I could see it in your face when Fiona said that about the baby. What a painful way to find out.”

  “Do you know how Terri died?” He glanced at Gina. Her cheeks were stained with purple shadows from the sky.

  “Lacey told me she died in an accident,” she said. “I didn’t want to pry, though. Were you driving?”

  He was confused, but only for a moment. “Oh, no,” he said. “It wasn’t that sort of accident.”

  She waited for him to speak again.

  “She was a terrific wife,” he said. “I was less than a terrific husband.”

  “Did you have an affair?” she asked, and he remembered her comment from a couple of hours earlier about having “a problem with infidelity.”

  “Yes,” he said, then offered her a rueful smile. “But not the way you think. I had an affair with my search and rescue work and with my diving and windsurfing and architecture and with my big fat ego. I didn’t give Terri the attention she needed. I took her for granted.” He watched the lights of a ship move slowly across the horizon. “I wasn’t the right husband for her, really,” he said. “She needed someone who could talk to her about…you know the sort of guy women want. Men who can talk about their feelings. Men whose eyes don’t glaze over when women talk about theirs. Men who can sit through a chick flick without falling asleep.”

  Gina laughed lightly. “That’s what we have girlfriends for.” She rested her hand on his back. “You know, you are one of the nicest men I’ve ever met,” she said. “And you and Terri were together a long time. People tend to take each other for granted after a while. But you had a shared passion, right? The search and rescue work?”

  Clay shook his head. “People thought we did, but that wasn’t the truth. It was my passion. I started doing search and rescue right after I got out of college, about the same time we got married. Sasha was a natural, and I took seminars and really threw myself into learning search and rescue skills. Terri got into it mainly in self-defense. She knew if she didn’t, she’d never see me. I was only thinking about myself.”

  “But she enjoyed it, didn’t she?” Gina removed her hand from his back and he missed the feeling of it there. “I mean, once she got into it?”

  “Not like I did.”

  “I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Clay.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I feel responsible for her death,” he said, surprising himself. He had never spoken those words out loud before.

  “Why?”

  “Because…” He wasn’t sure how to explain it. “I became reknowned as a dog trainer and it went to my head,” he said. “The Discovery Channel wanted to film me for a show they were doing on search and rescue work, and I was so blown away by that fact, so damn puffed up about it, that I couldn’t think about anything else. They were going to come on a Tuesday, right after Thanksgiving, to film me working with Sasha. But on Monday, I got a call that a building had collapsed in Florida and that Sasha and I were needed down there. I talked to the Discovery people, and they said that Tuesday was the only day they could be in the area to tape. They sounded like it was no big deal, that they would find another well-known trainer to film. I asked Terri if she would take my place in Florida with her dog, Raven. I knew she didn’t really want to go. She liked the search and rescue training itself, I really believe that, but she would get extremely upset when she was at a site after a tragedy. She couldn’t handle blood and gore and finding people dead instead of alive. She couldn’t handle the human suffering.” He remembered the nightmares Terri would have for weeks after a search. He remembered her telling him that she didn’t want to do it anymore. “You don’t really mean that,” he’d said to her, ignoring her feelings because they didn’t mesh with what he wanted her to feel.

  “Terri said she would go,” he told her. “I know I should have talked to her about it more. I knew she didn’t really want to do it, but once she said yes, I just tuned her out. My ego had better things to do.”

  Gina was quiet, her hands folded and still on her bare knees, and he wondered what she was thinking.

  “They came to do the taping,” he continued, “but I got the call while they were setting up. The part of the building Terri and Raven had been in collapsed, and they’d been crushed.”

  “Oh, God,” Gina said. “How terrible.”

  He was glad of the falling darkness, glad the emotion in his face would not be that visible to her.

  “A couple of months later,” he said, “I was cleaning up the files on her laptop computer and I came across an e-mail she’d written to a friend in Texas the day she left. She talked about how much she didn’t want to go, how much she hated putting herself and Raven through it all. How she knew she would have nightmares afterward. But that she was glad she could do it for me, because…” He felt his voice starting to break and took in a deep breath. “Because she was so proud of me and so glad that I was finally getting the recognition I deserved.”

  “She didn’t say anything in the e-mail to her friend about being pregnant?” Gina asked.

  He shook his head. “She must have just found out. I know why she didn’t tell me. She knew if she did, I would have stopped her from going to Florida in my place, and I’d miss out on being on the Discovery Channel.”

  “And you would have done that, wouldn’t you? Gone in her place.”

  “Yes!” he said. He would give anything to have that chance all over again. To do things right this time. He was not a monster. He squeezed his eyes shut as Fiona’s words about the baby came back to him. “I can’t believe I was going to be a father.”

  “Is that something you wanted?”

  He nodded. “We both did. We’d been trying, actually, but it just wasn’t happening.” His voice caught in the back of his throat.

  Gina turned to wrap her arms around him, and the gesture unleashed something in him and he began to cry. She rocked him ever so gently, half mother, half friend, one hundred percent confidante. After a while, he lifted his head from her shoulder and she loosened her grip on him. Only then did he see the tears in her own eyes.

  He smiled, touching his fingers to her wet cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  She smiled back. “It’s all right,” she said.

  “No one knows that I sent Terri in my place,” he said. “Except you. And I didn’t mean to dump it all on you.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad you did.”

  “Let’s go down,” he said, standing. He held his hand out to her to help her up.

  Carefully, silently, they made their way down the spiral staircase, then across the yard. At the door to the house, Gina touched his arm.

  “Terri was wrong about one thing,” she said.

 
“What’s that?”

  “You can, too, talk about your feelings.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Gina sat cross-legged on her bed in her robe, the Barbie doll in her hand. She’d opened both her windows wider, but still, the steamy heat of the night was barely broken by the ocean breeze. For once, she was not thinking about Rani or the lens. Out there on the lighthouse stairs, for just a moment, she had forgotten about her own pain and been caught up by Clay’s. He’d lost his wife, his child. His future. The anguish in his voice was still with her. Hard to believe his wife had said he was unfeeling. She’d had him all wrong.

  For the first time in years, she wanted to hold a man, to wrap her body around his. She wanted to awaken in the safety of his arms, a safety she had once imagined but never truly known and had given up on ever experiencing. In the room down the hall, she thought she might find it. She might find comfort, and she might be able to give it back.

  Standing up, she tightened the belt of her robe over her T-shirt and opened the door to her room. The hallway was dark and silent, except for the ever-present whisper of ocean waves in the distance. Courage, she said to herself, taking a step forward. The worst he can do is tell you to leave. You’ve had worse done to you before.

  She moved quietly down the hall, then knocked softly on Clay’s door, not wanting Lacey to hear.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Gina, Clay,” she said. “May I come in?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, and she bit her lip, waiting.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She opened the door. The room was dark except for the rectangle of moonlight falling across his bed, and she could see that he was sitting up, bare-chested, leaning against the tall, wrought-iron headboard. He was covered only by a sheet, a light summer quilt folded at the foot of the bed. Sasha padded toward her to nestle his head beneath the curve of her palm.