“Hurts?”
“Like hell. You sure I’m going in the right direction?” It seemed to him that he was in worse shape now than when he broke his ankle in that fall ten weeks ago.
“Two breaks on the same leg in three years,” Nina said in the matter-of-fact tone he had come to know very well. A good physical therapist could make a crushed pelvis sound like a hangnail. “You can’t expect to be one hundred percent.”
“I’d settle for forty percent,” he grunted as he shifted position slightly. “Right now I’d be lucky to push twenty.”
“Since when are you such a pessimist?” she said, giving him a playful sock in the left shoulder. “It’s not like we haven’t done this before. No reason to think we can’t do it again.”
“I’ve got a wedding coming up, Nina, and right now I’d have to ask the best man to dance with the bride for me.”
“Have you set a date?” She asked it with just the right note of casual interest, but he wasn’t fooled.
“September twenty-first, and it’s starting to sound like the circus is coming to town.” He tried to match her casual tone. “I tried to convince Maddy to catch a flight to Vegas and throw a party when we get back.”
Nina groaned and rolled her eyes. “Great idea, sport. Bet Rose and company loved that.”
“September twenty-first,” he repeated, the attempt at laughter dying. “What do you think?”
“Four months plus a little,” she said as much to herself as to him. “No crutches, but you’ll still need a cane.”
“No cane.”
“I don’t know, O’Malley,” she said, meeting his eyes. “It’s possible, but—”
“No cane,” he repeated.
“Then we’re going to have to work your ass even harder.”
“Good.”
“And I’ll expect an invitation to the wedding.”
“Play your cards right,” he said, “and I might save you a dance.”
She was still laughing as she headed toward the weights room to torture another patient.
He clocked another six minutes in the whirlpool, then hoisted himself out of the tub, swearing slightly when he lost his grip on the handrails and almost tumbled backward into the water. He understood how Mel Perry felt the time he fell off a barstool and needed help to get up off the floor. “Getting old’s a bitch,” he’d said with a shake of his graying head. “I used to deadlift hundred-pound bales of wire at the plant, and now I can’t even haul my sorry ass up from the floor.”
Aidan knew the feeling. Physical strength had always been a given with him, like chestnut hair and blue eyes. It wasn’t something he thought about; it was simply a large part of who he was. Big. Strong. Immortal. Until the day he found out he wasn’t any of those things.
Not that he thought much about the fire anymore. He had learned long ago when his wife Sandy died that the human heart could survive the greatest blows and keep on beating. There were many times when he wished that wasn’t true, but as the months and years went by, the sharp pain of loss began to lose the jagged edges, until one day he woke up and realized he was almost happy again. Not happy the way he had been before she died, but happy in a new way.
He had tried to explain this to Claire not long after his brother Billy died, how one day she would wake up and she wouldn’t feel like a stranger in her own body, in her own house, but it had been too soon and she had turned away from his words.
She had been married for sixteen or seventeen years when Billy died. She had given birth to five kids, built a life with the man. It wasn’t like losing the family dog. You didn’t go out and find yourself a new one to replace that empty spot in your heart. Sometimes that empty spot stayed empty while you struggled to rebuild what was left of your life around it.
Aidan was one of the lucky ones. After all those years of being alone, happiness found him. He hadn’t been looking to fall in love. He liked the life he shared with his kid and would have been willing to go on living it for another few decades if Maddy Bainbridge hadn’t come back to Paradise Point and captured his heart. She was funny, honest, loving, warm, sexy as hell, talented, smart, everything he ever wanted in a woman, in a partner. Everything he had always hoped his daughter would be.
And he loved her. When she wasn’t with him, he was lonely. He wanted to see her first thing in the morning and last thing at night and all the hours in between. The last time he had felt anything close to this depth of feeling, he was seventeen years old and falling in love with Sandy. Love was easy when you were seventeen. You were all hormones and heart, Viagra packaged inside a Hallmark card.
And they would have made it for the long haul. He had never doubted it. If Sandy had lived—if God had shown them that kind of mercy—they would still be together today, watching their baby girl grow up into a beautiful and accomplished young woman. There would have been more kids, too. Another daughter. Maybe a son or two who would look up to him the way he had looked up to his father.
He tried to picture Sandy at almost forty, but it was impossible to project her beautiful nineteen-year-old self into the dark and murky future. She would always be nineteen to him, always be the way he had seen her on that last day with her blond hair scraped back into a high ponytail, her blue eyes sparkling with mischief as she grabbed the car keys and said she would be home in an hour with an anniversary surprise from Kutscher’s Bakery on the other side of town.
Twenty minutes later, two cops were peeling him off the front step where he’d dropped when they told him his wife was dead.
Life was never what you figured it would be. Just when you thought you had it nailed, life pulled the rug out from under you, then laughed when you landed on your ass. He should have been an old married man by now. He’d been looking forward to growing old with Sandy, watching their kids grow up and leave the nest, waiting for the next generation of O’Malleys to be born.
Instead, he was a middle-aged single father, a little bit worse for the wear, counting down the days until he married the woman he loved. He might look every single one of his thirty-six years, but inside he was eighteen again, filled with excitement, almost believing that this time life would look the other way and let a happy ending sneak by.
“Hey, O’Malley!” Fred DeTrano, a bar regular who was rehabbing a hip replacement, called out from the stairstepper. “Slow down. That pool’s a safety hazard. You don’t wanna slip, do you?”
They all worried about him like he was still the muscle-bound kid who had escaped Paradise Point on a football scholarship, only to return a year later as a twenty-year-old widower with a baby daughter and a future that looked every bit as bleak as the town’s.
Grandma Irene had been caught in one of her own dramas, and the offer of a room in her small two-bedroom cottage had been extended only when he and Kelly were already settled in with Billy and Claire on the other side of town. He could still hear the sound of relief in his grandmother’s voice when she realized she was off the hook.
Billy had always been the wild one, even though he was married with kids and a mortgage meant to keep a man humble. He loved Claire, but that didn’t stop him from screwing around. Their house seemed to vibrate with secrets. The excuses. The late nights and early mornings that Aidan struggled to explain away to his patient sister-in-law. He hated being part of Billy’s other life. He didn’t want to know that the woman chatting up Claire at the school bus stop had shared a bed with his brother the night before.
Claire deserved better. She was smart, opinionated, a great mother and wife. There were times when he wanted to cut through the layers of lies and spell it out for her, all the things she knew in her gut but refused to acknowledge, force her to see what was going on and make Billy choose. He tried once, late one night when they were closing up the bar together. Billy was supposed to close out on Fridays, but he said he had a Knights of Columbus meeting in Little Egg Harbor. Or maybe he said he was pulling an extra shift at the firehouse. Aidan couldn’t keep track any longer, and neither could anyone else. He had stumbled over the first few words when Claire had fixed him with a look that stopped him cold.
I don’t need you to tell me what I already know,
her look said. He never brought it up again.
He and Billy had been close as kids, and that closeness remained right up until the end. Still, he never had managed to find out what made Billy tick. He never found out what his brother worried about at night when the lights went out or where he wanted to be ten years, twenty years, into the future.
When you came down to it, the only thing he had really known for sure was that no matter what happened, no matter what shit came their way, they had each other’s back. No matter what else happened, no matter who came in or out of your life, you took care of your own. It was as simple as that.
Ancient history,
he thought, as he showered away the pain and grit of physical therapy. Billy had taken his secrets to the grave, and whatever Claire knew or didn’t know didn’t matter anymore.
Twenty minutes later he waved good-bye to Nina and pushed his way through the rear exit that led to the parking lot. He was an old hand at crutches by this time and knew to avoid the brick pathway in favor of the smooth asphalt surface on the other side of a narrow strip of well-manicured grass. The trick was to stay focused. Scan the ground for potential hazards and plot the simplest, safest course from point A to point B.
And, while you’re at it, try not to fall on your ass.
“HOW DID MOTHERS survive before cell phones?” Maddy asked as she tossed her Nokia back into her tote bag.
“Smoke signals,” Gina said. “That or carrier pigeons.”
“It boggles the mind.”
“So is the kidlet safely home?”
“She’s playing Barbies out on the back porch with Priscilla.”
“And Rosie?”
“I think Hannah put her in charge of Ken and the Dream House.”
Gina laughed as they entered the Paradise Point town limits. “If anyone can whip the Dream House into shape, it’s our Rosie.”
“Remember the time she redecorated my Dream House?”
“You cried for a week,” Gina said.
“I was the only kid in school with wainscoting.”
Childhood was all about fitting in, being one of the crowd. If your friends were wearing green leggings, you wanted green leggings, too. It didn’t matter if you hated them. It was all part of belonging to something bigger than your own small self.
“She meant well,” Gina said. “She always did want you to have the best.”
“I know,” Maddy said on a sigh. “I’m praying it’s not genetic. If you catch me installing wall-to-wall in Hannah’s Dream House, you have my permission to kick me in the butt.”
“You got it.” They stopped at the traffic light at the corner of Bank and Main Street. “Isn’t that Aidan’s truck?” Gina gestured toward the parking lot behind Shore Fitness and Rehabilitation on the opposite corner.
Maddy twisted around in her seat to take a look. “It sure is.” She could feel a goofy smile spreading across her face.
The light changed. Instead of turning right toward The Candlelight, Gina rolled across the intersection and stopped in front of the entrance to the parking lot.
“So go already,” Gina said. “Seduce him in the back of that Jeep before he has a chance to close the door. You don’t want today to be a total loss, do you?”
“But Rose expects me back in time for supper.”
“Screw Rosie,” Gina said cheerfully. “I’ll tell her Aidan’s bringing you home. Life is short, kiddo. Make the most of it while you can.”
“I’ll remember this when it’s time to pick the matron of honor’s dress,” she said, kissing her cousin’s cheek.
“You mean I won’t look like Bo Peep on crack?”
“It’s a promise.”
His car was parked near the fence, but there was no sign of Aidan. She glanced at her watch. He usually finished around four, which meant she had just enough time to arrange herself seductively on the hood of his Jeep . . . or as seductively as possible for a size ten.
The air smelled faintly of early lilacs and sea spray. She had forgotten how beautiful the shore was in the spring. Her years in Seattle had dulled her memory of the magical transformation that happened every year when winter finally loosed its grip. Brilliant yellow forsythia lined walkways, vying for space with fuchsia and scarlet and baby-pink azaleas in full bloom. Buttery daffodils made room for tulips in red and yellow and orange. Their appearance was usually short-lived, which made the whole thing that much more magical.
She had just climbed up onto the hood when the back door to Nina’s clinic opened, and she saw Aidan starting down the steps. The process had his full concentration. His head was down, eyes focused squarely on the ground beneath his feet. Late afternoon sun picked up the russet and gold lights in his thick, dark hair. He wore his usual uniform of boots, well-worn jeans, and an old long-sleeved cotton sweater that had probably been dark brown once upon a time but was now faded to the color of café au lait. Broad shoulders. Broad chest. Narrow waist. The classic lines of a man born to play football.
Strength seemed to radiate outward from him in waves, interrupted only by the slow, deliberate gait and the crutch he wielded like a weapon. Anger radiated outward, too. It had been his constant companion since the fall in February that had sent him back into surgery and long-term rehabilitation. He viewed his injury as a sign of weakness, something that diminished his worth, and it worried her that she hadn’t been able to convince him of how wrong he was. Love was still new to them, its power still untested. That kind of trust would come with time.
Right now it was mostly about love. The romantic kind that made her heart beat fast every time she saw him, made her breath catch in her throat at the sound of his voice on the phone. Even the sight of his E-mail address—
[email protected]
—in her in box was enough to make her head spin. She loved everything about him: the way he looked; the way he smelled; the taste of his mouth on hers; the solid, comforting weight of his body when he held her close. The way he listened to her when she talked and heard the words beneath the words.