Ten Years Later... Read online

  Rather than clear anything up, she’d just confused the issue even further for him. “Too far in the wrong direction?” he echoed. It made even less sense to him when he said it than when she had. “What wrong direction am I taking it in?”

  “There was no divorce—”

  “You’re still married?” he asked, stunned.

  No, Brianna wasn’t the type to step out on a husband, he told himself. And yet, how else was he to interpret her words? Was there a second husband? Taking what she’d said into account, did that mean that Carrie’s father was an ex-husband whom Brianna had left behind? Some man she’d found too difficult to put up with and had gone on to shed before marrying someone else?

  Or...?

  “Light’s green,” she prodded just before the driver behind them lightly beeped his horn.

  Sebastian quickly took his foot off the brake and put it back on the accelerator. As they drove down the next street, Brianna bit back a sigh.

  “If you want the full, accurate story, you’re going to have to let me talk in something a little bit longer than just sound bites,” she told him.

  He opened his mouth to protest, then realized that she was right. He had cut her off more than once. “Sorry. I guess I am jumping to conclusions,” he allowed.

  “More like you’re pole-vaulting to them,” she corrected. She searched for the most concise way to summarize the past few years. “Okay, to give you just the brief headlines—one, I’m not married—”

  “Currently,” he tacked on as if the word was the bow on the present.

  “Okay,” she allowed, letting him have his way for a second if it made him happy. “Currently. Two,” she continued, her next words completely surprising him, “I was never married. Consequently, three—since there was no marriage, there was no divorce.”

  He was still, he realized, utterly unenlightened about the state of her life. “Then are you still seeing Carrie’s father?” he asked, becoming acutely aware of the fact that the thought of Bree being with another man, of seeing that man and creating a child with him, disturbed him far more than he’d thought possible. He knew, logically, that he had no right to feel that way.

  She laughed softly to herself, despite the absence of humor in the situation.

  “No,” she answered, “I’m not seeing him. Not unless I’m doing a great deal of drinking. And just in case you’re wondering, I don’t drink more than a glass of wine at any given occasion.”

  Sebastian frowned in utter frustration. “I don’t follow you.”

  “I’m not still seeing Carrie’s father because he died in a boating accident a week before we were supposed to get married. I guess I’m just one of those people who’s not meant to walk down the aisle.”

  There was a touch of ironic resignation in her voice. She’d grown up just assuming that a husband, marriage and children were in her future. Who knew she’d been assuming incorrectly?

  He was putting together the pieces as fast as he could, but there were still edges that didn’t fit. He had more questions. “And you had the baby after he died?”

  “What baby?” she asked.

  Were there more children? Children she hadn’t introduced him to? Just how much had she changed in the past ten years?

  “Carrie,” he prompted.

  He still hadn’t gotten it straight, she realized. “I think that in order to get the right picture, you’re going to have to do some more listening, Sebastian. Silent listening,” she emphasized.

  He turned right at the end of the block. “Okay,” he agreed.

  All right, from the beginning. “To start with, J.T. was Dad’s partner at the hardware store. After Dad’s near-fatal accident—” she still felt a cold shiver down her spine every time she thought of that “—J.T. ran the store all by himself, putting in eighteen-hour days. Dad would have lost the store if it wasn’t for J.T.” There was no mistaking the gratitude in her voice.

  Was that why she’d gotten engaged to the man? Out of a sense of gratitude? Sebastian caught himself wondering. He realized that gratitude worked far better for him than thinking she’d done it out of love.

  “Once I finally got Dad to the point that he decided he was going to recover, I took a second look at the store and knew I needed to pitch in.

  “I guess J.T. and I grew closer. Couldn’t pinpoint when or how, but we just did. He was a shoulder I could cry on, someone who would let me vent when I had to, and he never asked for anything in return.” As far as she could see, the man was totally selfless. “But I sensed that he cared about me. A great deal. And then he had to deal with his own tragedy. He lost his wife in childbirth. I guess I helped him through that. He’d bring Carrie to work with him and we’d take turns taking care of her while one of us ran the store.”

  When she paused, he saw his opening. Sebastian couldn’t help himself—he had to ask. “So then, is Carrie yours?”

  “Yes.”

  There wasn’t even a micromoment’s hesitation on her part—because the child was hers. Carrie was locked away in her heart, and though she and the little girl didn’t share a drop of the same DNA, they shared love and there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for Carrie.

  “But not in the sense you mean,” she added. “Carrie’s mother died giving birth to her. She was an infant when J.T. and I became engaged. At four, I’m the only mother she’s ever known, although I did tell her about her birth mother. She knows I adopted her.”

  He couldn’t imagine how to start a conversation like that with a child. “Isn’t four a little young for that?”

  “Possibly,” she allowed. “I do know that four is too young to be lied to,” she told him. “I thought that if Carrie knew about her birth mother from the very start, she’d just accept things the way they are and not be bothered by the fact that she was adopted.”

  Brianna knew that she didn’t owe him any kind of explanation, but she could sense that unanswered questions crowded his thoughts, so she proceeded to give him as much information as she thought was needed.

  “When J.T. was killed, there was no next of kin to step up and adopt Carrie. She would have just been absorbed into the system, and I knew that J.T. wouldn’t have wanted that. Hell, I didn’t want that. J.T. did so much for my dad, I felt that adopting Carrie was the least I could do for him.

  “So I petitioned to be allowed to adopt her. I held my breath for a whole year,” she readily admitted, “putting up with unannounced spot checks where social workers would swoop down on their brooms, night or day, and just commandeer the premises. I had to stand back, let them go over everything with a fine-tooth comb and hope that I met whatever lofty requirements were in place at that particular time. I have no idea what they were expecting to find. Maybe they thought I was running a brothel,” she speculated with a dry laugh.

  “But in the end, you passed their inspections.” It wasn’t a guess on his part. No matter what else might have changed, he knew that much about Brianna. If she set her sights on something, she never backed off until she reached her goal.

  Bree was stubborn that way.

  She smiled now and nodded. “I passed their inspections,” she confirmed. “And before you think I’m just being noble, I’m not. I love that little girl as if she was my very own and I couldn’t begin to picture my life without her. Right now, if some long-lost relative came creeping out of the woodwork and claimed her, I don’t know what I’d do,” she confessed.

  “Other than tie them up and dump them in the river?” he guessed.

  “There is that,” she acknowledged, managing to keep the grin off for a full fifteen seconds.

  And then Sebastian nodded, thinking about what she had just told him. “It must have been very hard on you,” he speculated, adding, “when Carrie’s father was killed,” in case he hadn’t been clear in his comment.
/>   Sebastian frowned. He hadn’t used her late fiancé’s name. He had no idea why he couldn’t get himself to say the man’s name, but he couldn’t.

  He was being petty and he knew it. After all, technically Sebastian had given up all claims to Bree when he’d walked out of her life. But though she had physically been out of his life for years now, she hadn’t been entirely out of his thoughts.

  Never, really.

  She lingered in his mind like a song whose melody refused to fade away, as if threaded onto an endless loop.

  “It was,” she admitted with no fanfare, no dramatic pause. “I began to think that maybe I was jinxed.” She looked at him. Did he think about her? After he’d gone off to college, had he spared her the occasional thought, or was she, then and now, being delusional? “Except that you at least didn’t die. You just went away.”

  Sebastian searched for the slightest sound of blame or recrimination, for the accusation that he had just walked out on her when he should have remained at her side, offering his support and help.

  But there wasn’t any to be found.

  Then again, Bree had never been one to throw blame on anyone, even if they deserved it. She’d always just tried to carry the load on her own, always being the very personification of independence.

  “About that,” he began, picking his way through the possible minefield spread out ahead of him. “I should have stayed,” he began. “After your dad’s accident, I should have stayed with you.” She’d been, he knew, all alone at the time.

  “You should have done exactly what you did,” she countered.

  He looked at her, surprised.

  But to her way of thinking, there was nothing to be gained from blaming him all these years later. It wouldn’t get back even a minute of lost time and it certainly wouldn’t make her feel vindicated.

  “You were supposed to go on to get your degree and do what you love doing—teaching,” she insisted.

  “That wasn’t the only place to get a teaching degree,” he pointed out. He could have gone to a local college. Granted, it wouldn’t have been as prestigious as the school he’d ultimately attended, but in the end, the knowledge he’d accumulated would have been the same. He was too determined to succeed.

  But again, there was no need to rub any of that in.

  It seemed to her that they had somehow switched sides on the argument, that he was picking up the banner that by all rights should have been hers and that she was backing what clearly sounded like his side of the argument.

  “You’re right—it wasn’t. But the path you took led you to your current job, and from what I can gather, that job makes you happy. In the final analysis, that means a great deal,” she assured him. Shifting in her seat, she gazed out the window. She’d only been paying moderate attention to the route, but it was looking exceedingly familiar. “Where are we going?”

  “I thought maybe we’d stop at Nate’s,” he said, mentioning the restaurant where they had sat for hours, scribbling their future on napkins and dreaming of the day they could finally get married. “I was surprised to find that the restaurant was still there,” he confessed.

  Brianna inclined her head. “Not all that much changes in Bedford,” she reminded him.

  Even as she said it, she couldn’t help wondering if going to Nate’s was really such a good idea. She hadn’t been there since he’d left for college.

  There was a reason for that. The place was fraught with memories.

  Too many memories.

  She had a feeling they would hit her the moment they walked into the place.

  Can’t be any more difficult facing the restaurant than it was facing Sebastian, Bree. You can do this—you know that.

  She gave the mental pep talk her all, but nonetheless she still felt the tsunami gathering again in her stomach as Sebastian brought his car to a stop in the restaurant’s parking lot.

  Chapter Seven

  It hit her the moment she walked in.

  The ghosts of memories gone by. Dreams that never had a chance to take hold.

  For just a second, Brianna felt herself catapulted back over the sea of years to another, far more innocent time. A time when she had been filled with such great hopes.

  As she walked into the dimly lit atmosphere, she could feel anticipation pulsing through her, just as she had all those years ago.

  Except that she wasn’t that girl anymore. Now she knew better.

  “Two?” the brightly dressed hostess in the soft peasant blouse and flowered skirt asked, looking from Sebastian to her.

  “Two,” Sebastian confirmed.

  Why did that sound so lonely to her? Brianna wondered. It was like a promise that had lost its bloom and had been left to die, unfulfilled. “Two” used to sound so intimate, so powerful, like “two against the world.”

  But again, now she knew better.

  “This way, please.” Turning on her short, stacked heels, the hostess led the way through an already semifull dining area.

  The restaurant hadn’t changed at all, Brianna thought, quickly taking in her surroundings as she walked behind the hostess and just a step in front of Sebastian. Not one little bit. It looked just as if she had walked out of here only yesterday, instead of more than ten years ago.

  There were the same eighteenth-century Early American decorations along the wall, including a blunderbuss she’d once admired. Back then, it had appeared real to her. Now she thought of it as all part of the make-believe world she knew that she’d inhabited back then.

  “Is this all right?” the hostess asked politely, gesturing to a booth for two located just a shade away from the heart of the dining area.

  The booth seemed almost too intimate, despite the fact that there were other tables, filled with patrons, all around that section of the room.

  Brianna became aware that Sebastian was watching her. It was obvious that he was leaving up to her the final yea or nay on the seating arrangement.

  She would have preferred being out in the middle of the room, but she heard herself saying, “It’s fine,” even though it really wasn’t.

  The booth, although not the one that they had usually occupied, was close enough in appearance and location to have passed for it, even upon close scrutiny.

  After sliding in, Brianna accepted the menu that the hostess handed her.

  Even with a table between them, she was acutely aware of Sebastian’s nearness as he took the seat opposite her. The table might as well not have been there, for all the difference it made.

  This felt even more intimate to her than when she’d danced with him last night. Why? After all, there was at least some space between them here, while there really hadn’t been any last night.

  Maybe her resistance against him was weakening, Brianna thought, concerned. Again she told herself that she shouldn’t have gone to the reunion, shouldn’t have agreed to have dinner with him like this tonight. She’d survived last night and she should have congratulated herself for that and tucked the whole thing away into some faraway box within her mind.

  Sebastian studied her face and could almost read the tiny, telltale signs her thoughts left behind in their wake as they crossed her mind. Some things never changed.

  “Something wrong?” he asked once the hostess had given him his menu and then retreated into the noisy dining area.

  Startled, Brianna looked up. “No, nothing’s wrong. Why?” she asked just a little too quickly.

  “I don’t remember you ever being this quiet,” Sebastian told her.

  Brianna shrugged, doing her best to look somewhat bored and disinterested. “Just sorting a few things out in my head,” she replied rather vaguely.

  His eyes never left her face. “Yeah,” he said softly, “me, too.”

  She looked at him sha
rply when he said that. To her dismay, their eyes met and held for what felt like an endless, unsettling moment. She was tempted to ask just what it was that he was sorting out, but that would have left her open to the same question and, for the life of her, she had no acceptable answer.

  The truth was she was just trying to deal with the ghost of a romance that was no longer even on life support. But there was no way she wanted to admit that to him right now.

  Or ever.

  Brianna looked so uncomfortable, he couldn’t help noticing. Was that his doing? God, he hoped not. He could remember a time when there was nothing in the world more comfortable for either of them than sharing a conversation, or sharing a dream—or even just sharing the silence.

  Back then it was as if Brianna was truly the other half of him. The part, he now realized, that made him better. A better man, a better person.

  A better everything.

  Sebastian searched for an opening. For something to say that would eventually lead him back to that place that he’d taken for granted because it had seemed so commonplace to him.

  Back then he didn’t have a real appreciation of just how special that niche actually was.

  Sebastian suppressed a sigh. He supposed it went along with that old adage about never knowing what you had until you didn’t have it anymore.

  And now it was too late. Too late to reclaim anything. Too late to go back and start again.

  “So, you became a nurse.” He knew the words had to sound incredibly stilted to her, but he pushed on, hoping to somehow work out the kinks, to smooth out the dialogue so that it became more natural sounding.

  He wanted, he silently admitted, to get back what they had lost.

  What he had lost.

  If only for a few hours.

  “Yes, I did.” She was almost certain that she had told him she was a nurse while they were dancing last night.

  Dear God, had they run out of conversation already? she thought sadly. There’d been a time when they could literally talk for hours and never come close to running out of words.