Carly's Gift (30 page)

If only those consequences were hers alone.

But they weren't.

This time when she put her hand against his chest, she pushed him away. “I can't.”

His hands dropped to his sides. “I know.”

A lonely chasm grew between them, a foreshadowing of what lay ahead. Gently, with a poignant sigh of acceptance, he brought her back into his arms.

For a moment she was a young girl again, filled with sweet promise and consumed by love. She closed her eyes and saw the green meadow behind the mill. She breathed deeply and smelled the tall grass swaying in the breeze, the grass where she had lain with him and made promises she believed with all her heart she would keep. At seventeen there had only black and white. Gray was still a year away.

Carly cradled David's face between her hands. “My heart has been yours since the day I was seven years old and you rescued me from Mr. Dugan's sweetgum tree. I knew then that I would love you forever. At the time I didn't understand how deep that love would become or that one day you would be the one to show me that love is faceted. I will never be able to put words together that can express how I feel about what you've done for Andrea.”

“Andrea has been a gift. My life was day-to-day and without direction before her. It has purpose now. I'm sorry that your sorrow has been my joy, Carly, but I'm too selfish to wish it hadn't happened.”

“If only—”

He put his finger to her lips. “I can't do that anymore.”

He kissed her with an aching tenderness, their tears mingling, their hearts breaking . . . yet again.

Twenty-six

David balanced a
breakfast tray with one hand and tapped lightly on Carly's bedroom door with the other. Not expecting a reply, he turned the antique brass knob and quietly went inside. He moved across the room, his footsteps muffled by the thick Chinese carpet. As he neared her, he saw that she was still sound asleep.

He carefully put the tray on the dresser and sat on the edge of the bed to watch her as she slept.

Carly had never been beautiful in the classic sense. Her nose was a little too long, her forehead a little too high. Her lips were too full and too quick to smile to give her an air of mystery, her eyes too honest and revealing for coquettishness. Still, with all her supposed flaws, she was the standard by which he judged all other women.

A tightness gripped his chest, constricting his breathing. He'd lied about being able to get on with his life when she was gone. And that asinine metaphor about a starving man not denying himself the first course of a meal because he couldn't have the rest should have gone one step further—that man would live the rest of his life unsated, forever doomed to know and remember what he had missed. A part of him would die when she left, the part that believed anything was possible if you wanted it badly enough.

As if sensing his presence, Carly rolled to her back, stretched, and let out a soft groan. Seconds later, she opened her eyes. “Good morning,” she said, and smiled.

“Would you rather sleep in this morning?”

“What are my options?”

“Hampton Court?” he asked. Given the choice, David would have crawled into bed with Carly, brought her into his side, and spent the day holding her, reliving the early years when their dreams were like buds on an apple tree, filled with rich promise.

“Ah yes, the magnificent castle built by Thomas Wolsey and ceded to the envious Henry VIII.”

“You've been doing your homework.”

She laughed. “I've learned more about England in the past two months than I did the whole time I was in school.”

“Andrea will be pleased.”

“Do you have any idea where she plans to take me next week?”

“Give me half an hour.”

David turned to leave.

“Thank you,” she called after him.

“For what?”

“For making all this possible. For understanding.”

A stream of water fell from the canvas awning on the ancient riverboat as it maneuvered around a curve in the Thames. The stream had dwindled to a trickle when a gust of wind picked it up and carried it the three feet to where Carly was sitting. She looked at David, who was sitting next to her on the wooden plank seat. “I thought May was supposed to be the ideal month to visit England,” she said, tucking her hands into her coat sleeves.

He put his arm around her and drew her into his side. “The sun will come out tomorrow.”

Despite herself, she laughed. “If you burst into song, I swear I'll dump you overboard.”

“Would you like me to get you another cup of tea?”

“I'd rather freeze than chance having to use that bathroom again. I swear the graffiti dates back to the Middle Ages.”

He gave her a quick chaste kiss. “Hang in there. We'll be pulling up to the dock any minute now.”

“Ha, that's what you said four hours ago.”

“Has it been that long? Time really passes when you're having—”

She poked him in the side. “Don't say it.”

The humor left his eyes. “It's true, you know. I promised myself I would hold on to every minute we have together until it seemed like two.”

“Worrying about my leaving the whole time I'm here isn't going to make it less lonely when I'm gone.”

He held her closer and gently rested his chin on the top of her head. “You're the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“You can still say that after all I've put you through?”

If he wasn't careful, he'd drag her down in his emotional hole with him. At least he had Andrea. Carly had two boys who loved her, but who would never understand what their mother had given up for them. “I'll still be saying it when I'm sitting in a rocking chair at a nursing home and some fine-looking nurse is feeding me stewed prunes and wiping the drool from my chin.”

“You silver-tongued devil. You sure know how to get a girl's heart beating faster.”

“Was it the rocking chair or the drool that got to you?”

“I know what you're doing, and I love you for it.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Before she could say anything more, he sat up straight and pointed to the right. “My God, I think we actually made it.”

David waited with renewed impatience as the boat eased against the dock. The last thing he'd wanted to do with Carly was spend the day wandering through the rambling chambers of Hampton Court. He would have preferred a drive in the country, stopping at a quiet inn, and making love on a feather bed in front of a crackling fire. “You're going to love it here,” he told Carly, seeing the excitement building in her eyes. “The place reeks with history.”

“Do you think we can go through the maze and still get back in time to meet Andrea?”

“We'll go there first.”

“If we do that, we might not see everything in the palace.”

He shuddered. “You're going to turn tourist on me, aren't you?”

“This could be my only chance to ever do something like this.” She took his hand. “I want it all, David.”

It shamed him to realize how easily he forgot what she had given up for him. “Then you shall have it,” he said standing and pulling her up beside him.

He would search his memory for every site, monument, building, or tourist trap that had caught his fancy when he'd first come to London and do whatever it took to get her there in the little time they had left. In the future, when she saw something on television or in a movie that had been filmed in London, she would smile and remember.

And he would be with her.

Twenty-seven

Carly dragged her
hand in the water as she stared at Andrea and Jeffery in the boat ahead of them. No, she reminded herself, it wasn't a boat they were in, it was a punt.

Oxford had surpassed every one of Carly's expectations. As they walked through the town visiting the colleges, an actual physical ache for the years of school she'd missed came over her. She found herself longing for the freedom and excitement that came with learning and the exchange of ideas.

The plan she'd brought with her—to try to talk Andrea into coming home to go to college—died unspoken. How could she in good conscience ask her daughter to give up something she herself would have traded ten years of her life to experience?

Besides, it wasn't the next three years that would take Andrea from her forever, it was the young man who was even then looking into her daughter's eyes with undisguised passion.

“A shilling for your thoughts,” David said.

Carly looked up at him and smiled. “Why so much?”

“Because the look on your face told me I'd never get them for a pence.”

“I was thinking how much I like Jeffery.”

“Me, too.”

“I didn't want to, you know.”

“That doesn't surprise me. If things work out between him and Andrea, England will be her permanent home.”

“Something tells me she would stay even if she wound up with someone else. This is her home now. It's where you are. I can't imagine her ever being happy living in Baxter again.”

David slowed his rhythmic movements with the pole and concentrated more closely on Carly. “You don't seem as upset about that as I'd expected you would be.”

“I guess I've had time to grow accustomed to the idea.” She brought her hand in from the water, flicked it in the air and patted it dry on her skirt. “Or maybe it's seeing how happy she is here. And how good you are to her and for her.”

“Your being with her these past few days is a big part of her happiness.”

“We stayed up to talk last night. She tried in every way imaginable—other than coming right out and asking—to convince me to leave Ethan and to move over here with Shawn and Eric.”

“I'm sure she thinks it's only a matter of time before Victoria and I call it quits. And she figures with you here, and available, we'd eventually get together.”

She had the feeling he wasn't talking about Andrea and her needs as much as his own. Intended or not, he'd added yet another layer of guilt to those she'd laid on herself. Andrea wasn't her only child, even if she was the neediest. “And I'd like it if there was a total ban on guns,” she said, the words coming out sharper than she'd intended. “What do you suppose the chances are that either one of us is going to get what we want?”

“Hey, back off,” he said, meeting her flash of anger with one of his own. “I'm just the messenger. And besides, I wasn't telling you anything you didn't already know.”

Carly avoided the challenging look he shot her and turned her attention to Andrea and Jeffery's punt. She watched them for several seconds and then frowned.

“What's wrong?” David asked, picking up on her concern.

“I don't know. Just a second ago, Andrea was hanging over the side like she was going to be sick. Now she's got Jeffery's handkerchief covering her face.”

David twisted to look over his shoulder. “It looks like she's got a nose bleed.”

“See if you can catch up to them.”

When they pulled alongside the other punt, Jeffery was hunkered down in front of Andrea, brushing her bangs back from her forehead. “No cause for alarm,” he told them. “She's been sneezing right along. That last one must have broken a blood vessel.”

Carly would have felt more reassured if Jeffery had been a little further along in his premed studies and if Andrea's crisp white blouse hadn't looked as if it were a shade darker than her complexion. She took a packet of tissues from her purse and handed them to Andrea. “I have more if you need them,” she said, keeping her voice casual.

“Perhaps we'd better get her indoors,” David added, his gaze sweeping the banks of flowers on either side of them. “Just in case it is the pollen that's bothering her.”