My Secret Valentine. Marilyn Pappano
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streaked through her body, clenching her muscles and bringing a sick feeling to her stomach. She said a quick prayer that she would turn and find her friend Rebecca’s husband Steve, or maybe Juliette’s husband Colton, but she knew Steve’s and Colton’s voices. More importantly, she knew his voice. It had seduced her, haunted her, taunted her…and then gone silent on her. No, It’s over. No, Goodbye. No, I don’t want you anymore. Just silence.
Forcing all emotion from her expression, she slowly turned to face him. Watching him walk past at a distance was nothing compared to seeing him up close. Handsome? Try incredible. This close she could see the deep blue of his eyes, the straight line of his nose, the perpetually stubborn set of his jaw.
She could see the resemblances to Katy that she’d conveniently persuaded herself weren’t there.
She thought of all the things she’d promised herself she would say to him if she ever saw him again. Every sentiment, every accusation, could be condensed into two harsh words—Damn you—but she didn’t say them. She didn’t say anything at all.
He shifted in a manner that should have screamed He’s nervous! Of course, it didn’t. It just seemed natural. Calm. “I wondered if you were going to speak to me.”
“Actually, no. Speaking to you makes it harder to keep up the illusion that I’d never met you.”
“And you like pretending you never met me.”
She smiled coolly. “I’d like it better if I really had never met you, but this is the next best thing.”
A faint hint of bitterness came into his eyes, and his mouth formed a thin line. After a moment, he flatly said, “I’m sorry about Golda.”
“Everyone here is sorry about Golda.” But in some tender place inside, she was touched by his acknowledgment that losing Golda was a bigger loss to her than him. After all, she’d seen the old lady every day. He’d stayed away for six years.
Because of her? Or because he hadn’t cared any more about his aunt than he had about Fiona?
He shifted again, and this time he did look… Not nervous. Uncomfortable. As if he wasn’t at all accustomed to the position he found himself in—the grieving nephew, the polite ex-lover. “I understand your being here has nothing to do with me, but…thank you anyway.”
“You’re right. Nothing in my life has anything to do with you.” Hoping her hand wouldn’t tremble, she gestured toward the center of the church. “You should probably get back over there. There are people waiting who actually want to talk to you.”
With a solemn nod, he turned and walked away, leaving her feeling… Edgy. Guilty. Ashamed. She wasn’t a rude person, and had never been cruel a day in her life. She could blame it on Justin. She hadn’t been a lot of things until she’d met him—easy, foolish, careless, dreamy, gullible, broken-hearted, pregnant. She hadn’t been so strong until she’d loved him and lost him. She needed that strength now to get through the next thirty hours.
She needed it desperately.
Justin turned onto the three hundred block of Aspen Street and slowed to well below the speed limit. The houses on the block were moderately sized, reasonably priced and in good shape considering they were nearly double his age. Golda’s was in the middle of the block on the left side of the street. Fiona’s was one closer.
It looked the same as it had six years ago. It wore a fresh coat of white paint on the siding, dark green on the shutters and door. The same car she’d driven then was parked in the driveway in front of the two-car garage, and what appeared to be the same lace curtains hung at her bedroom windows on the second floor.
But there were a few differences. A bike with training wheels was parked at the bottom of the steps. A kid-size basketball goal stood in the driveway next to the car. A red wagon on the porch held a soccer ball and a basketball among other toys. A remote-control Jeep lay upside down near the curb.
Maybe the toys belonged to her nieces and nephews, he reasoned, or maybe she’d been baby-sitting a friend’s children. But the cold, hard place that formed deep in his gut said otherwise. Fiona had a child.
Which meant she also had a husband.
He wondered how long she had waited for him before moving on. A few months? Six, maybe eight? And then she’d replaced him, gotten married and started the family she’d promised him. She was another man’s wife, raising another man’s child. Damn her.
And damn him. He’d promised he would come back, but he never had. He hadn’t written, hadn’t called, had ignored her calls. Plain and simple, he’d been afraid. All the intense emotions she roused in him had seemed perfectly normal when he was with her, but with distance had come doubt.
His parents had seen to it that he’d grown up with little belief in love and no faith at all in marriage. Their own marriage had been a mistake, and so had the ten or so they’d made since their divorce from each other. They’d acted on impulse every damn time, completing the meeting, lust, so-called love and marriage in record time, only to wake up with strangers they neither knew nor liked. Within a year, often less, the divorce was in the works and they were looking for the next person willing to make a fool of them.
He’d watched it happen time and again, often from the same household, usually from a distance, and he’d sworn it would never happen to him. If he ever married, it would be to someone he’d known a long time, someone he considered a friend, someone who didn’t believe in fairy tales of love and romance any more than he did. And if the marriage ended, he wouldn’t be so emotionally vested in it that it disrupted his life. He would deal with it like a mature adult and move on. He’d been so confident, so determined.
And yet the first time he’d mentioned marriage to Fiona, he’d known her all of seventy-two hours. After only three days, he’d been willing to tie the knot with a woman he hardly knew merely because she made him feel things he’d never felt before. He’d been not only willing but eager to follow in his parents’ footsteps, and that had scared the hell out of him.
So he’d cut her out of his life. Refused her calls at work. Let the machine pick them up at home. Ignored her quiet pleas. With eighteen hundred miles separating them, he’d convinced himself that Fiona had just been a fling, that the affair had been about sex and not love, that nothing so hot and intense could last. It hadn’t been difficult. He came from a long line of emotionally-stunted bastards. He’d had excellent role models.
Just past Fiona’s house, he pulled into Golda’s driveway and shut off the engine. He’d intended to spend the night at a motel, but his timing wasn’t the greatest. There was no room at the inns, and so the wayward nephew was left with no choice but to stay at Golda’s. Next to Fiona.
The lawyer had given him the key at the funeral—just in case. Taking his bag from the trunk as well as his briefcase, he let himself into the quiet, old house.
The parlor opened off the foyer and was filled with mementos of Golda’s life. He walked around the perimeter of the room, touching nothing, gazing at countless photographs of himself, from first grade through graduation, both prep school and college. His mother had missed one, and his father had missed both, but Golda had been there both days.
There were other photographs, mostly of people he didn’t know, as well as some childish drawings that had been framed and hung as if they deserved it. He assumed they were the work of the pretty little dark-haired girl whose photos on display numbered second only to his own, and wondered who she was.
A framed portrait on the piano answered that question. It was the same girl snuggled on her mother’s lap while they read a children’s book. She looked sleepy, contented, and her mother… Fiona looked happier, more beautiful and more in love than he’d ever had the fortune to see her.
Angrily he turned away from the picture. He didn’t care. Their affair never could have been more than it was, and it had ended six years ago. She felt nothing but contempt for him, and he…he felt nothing. He was just tired from