The Last Bridge Home. Linda Goodnight
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high blood pressure. Jilly did not want her mother getting in a tizzy for any reason, certainly not red wasps.
“No, Mom. No wasps. I’m fine. Just…” She clapped her mouth shut, not wanting to discuss Zak’s personal life. She already took enough guff from her mom and two younger sisters about her friendship with the handsome fireman across the street. They would have a field day with this information. Living at home with her mother had its good points but the overinterest in Jilly’s love life was not one of them.
“Then what is it?” Mom insisted. “You’re white as a ghost.”
Which meant every freckle on her face stood at rust-colored attention. Had Zak noticed?
“Maybe I got too hot.”
“I thought you went over to Zak’s.” Mom went to the window and pulled back the curtain to gaze out. “Didn’t I see a woman and some kids in his yard?”
Great. Mom had seen Crystal. Zak’s wife. Jilly’s insides started to shake. A wave of nausea pushed at the back of her throat. Zak had a wife. “I need some water.”
Hurrying past her frowning mother, Jilly ran a glass of tap water and kept right on going through the laundry room and out the back door. She needed time to think about the stunning revelation. Time to peel the pieces of her shattered heart off the sides of her chest cavity.
Mugsy and Satchmo trotted along, eager for a run in the backyard. “Stay inside. Back.”
The terriers skidded to a halt, dejected but obedient. Sorry to disappoint her two babies, she reached down and picked up the Frisbee from the back porch step and tossed it through the house. The two dogs zipped off after their favorite toy, happy again. She wished she could be that easily mollified.
Glad to be alone, Jilly walked to the left corner of the fenced backyard. Beneath a sprawling, thirty-foot maple, planted years ago by her now-deceased father, three pairs of pink eyes gazed out at her from a rabbit hutch. Fat, fluffy and friendly, all of them rescue rabbits dumped after Easter when they were no longer tiny and adorable, the trio awaited her attention.
People thought she was a soft touch, especially her sisters, but with a career as assistant to Dr. Trace Bowman, veterinarian, what did they expect? She loved animals.
She also loved Zak Ashford.
With a distressed moan, she opened the hutch, lifting each one to the grass. Then she plopped down beside them for a cuddle. Faith and Hop wiggled from her lap to explore. Lucky, the one-eared mini-lop who’d had a close encounter with a cat, remained where he was, snuggled safe in Jilly’s arms. She pressed her face into his silky silver fur.
“He’s married, Lucky,” she whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”
Lucky, the good listener, sniffed the side of her face, whiskers tickling.
“Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t he tell me?” The shock had begun to wear off, but she still felt as if she’d swallowed a hot brick. She was in love with a married man. The bold fact of that statement went against everything she believed in. Wanting someone else’s husband was a sin, a direct violation of the Ten Commandments.
And Lord help her, she didn’t know how to stop.
Zak stared into the face of his past, stomach churning, sweat beading and wished he could run out the door and follow Jilly. He wanted to be anywhere but here with Crystal.
“You can’t be serious,” he said, incredulous. “You left me a note. You said you had filed for divorce.”
“I meant to.” She shrugged. “But you know how I am. I got busy and things happened…”
He recalled the helpless girl who couldn’t remember to pay her electric bill, but a marriage dissolution was a tad more important. She’d wanted Tank Rogers, not Zak Ashford. That should have been enough to help her remember.
At the time, he’d been embarrassed by her betrayal, humiliated to have been duped by her pretty face and the way she’d wrapped him around her finger with her sob stories. He’d felt sorry for her. She’d been raised in the foster system, had no one to turn to, and Zak’s ego was stroked by being her savior, the go-to guy who could make everything better. So much so that he’d followed her to the courthouse and married her to, as she’d put it, “give her baby a name.”
The memory struck terror in him. “Your kids?” The chatter in the dining room made him lower his voice. “Whose—” He didn’t know how to ask if his name was on their birth certificates. “Do you still use my name?”
“It’s my name, too, Zak, so yeah, sometimes.” Zak could hear the “when it’s convenient” behind the words. That’s the way Crystal had done everything. Whatever was easy and convenient. “But Brandon and Jake have Tank’s last name—Rogers. He insisted.”
Zak nodded, so relieved he thought he’d slither off the couch. “Good.”
“Bella has yours.”
An electric shock went through him. “What?”
She shrugged again and smiled, a glimmer of the charming-as-sin young woman she’d been coming through. “I had to put something.”
“What about her father?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t sure. He wasn’t around. I wanted her to have someone good—”
Zak grabbed his head with both hands to keep it from exploding. “Whoa, Crystal, this is insane.”
“I didn’t think it mattered. You wouldn’t know.”
“You didn’t think it mattered?” This woman was a nut job. And he was married to her!
“I wouldn’t have come to you now if I hadn’t been desperate.”
He’d heard that before. The day she’d showed up at his apartment with bruises on her cheek crying that Tank had left her for good. He’d fallen for it then, but he was older and wiser now.
“Okay,” he said, heart leaping around like one of Jilly’s terriers. “Let’s deal with this and get it over with. I’ll pay for a divorce.” He wrestled with that for a moment but won. As a man of faith, he didn’t believe in divorce but this was different. Wasn’t it? “An annulment would be better. We weren’t married that long. What, a few weeks? A month?”
“Nearly ten years now.”
“Stop it, Crystal. We’re not married, never were. We had a piece of paper, and I gave you a place to stay and a sympathetic shoulder. We weren’t in love. I filled a need until Tank wanted you back.” He felt like a jerk for saying these things to her, but they’d been in the back of his head since the day he’d come in from class and found a note propped with a banana against his pillow.
“I never meant to hurt you, Zaky.” The old, juvenile endearment grated on him. He’d fallen for it back when he was a boy, but he was a man now.
This was the way with Crystal. Charming and manipulative in an innocent way, she never intended any of the foolish things she did.
Zak studied her ravaged body, a shell of the vibrant, self-seeking kewpie doll that had crooked her finger and had him running. Zak searched his heart, his conscience, and prayed. Had he loved her? He’d been eighteen. He didn’t know. He’d been in…well, not in love. Playing the knight in shining armor had made him feel like an adult, a man.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“I told you. I’m dying.”
That tiny niggling in the back of his brain started up again. Something buzzed around like a gnat, pestering, warning. “And you wanted to clear your conscience?”
“That’s not why I’m here, Zak. I don’t have time.”
“What if I’d gotten married to someone else,