The Wonder of You (6 page)

The girl didn’t move, just stared out at the chaos, the men still fighting the current, yelling. The scream of the sirens undulated louder.

Amelia edged toward her, aware of the current eddying up onto the rock, turning it slick.

Maybe whoever was with the little girl had slipped and fallen. Amelia cast a look at the water and saw one of the men surface, this time with a body.

A woman.

Oh no. She glanced at the girl, who watched without a flicker of emotion as the rescuers pulled the woman from the creek.

Amelia crouched next to her. “Honey, where’s your mommy?”

The child had blue eyes, which suddenly shook free from her trance and focused on Amelia. But when she spoke, the words were foreign and soft, a lilt to her voice that suggested a question.

Except something made sense
 
—a niggle of familiarity, buried under layers of memory.

Prague. One of her flatmates spoke Russian. Or Ukrainian.
Or maybe Polish
 
—she couldn’t remember, but it seemed that the words might be of the same Slavic origin.

Of which she’d learned three phrases.

I’m hungry.

I need the bathroom.

And conveniently,
Are you okay?

The smallest redemption for her broken heart. She tried it out on the little girl, probably mangling the words.

A flicker of understanding. Or maybe just the recognition of an attempt, but it ignited a barrage of words. Unintelligible, but the little girl stood. Pointed at the group of rescuers.

Maybe her father was among them. Amelia shielded her eyes as she scanned the group. She could get their attention, if one of them looked
 
—

The woman lay prone, two Good Samaritans giving her CPR
 
—one administering compressions, the other breaths.

The man at the head
 
—she recognized him as one who’d pulled the woman out of the current
 
—offered a breath, then leaned back while the other pressed her chest.

Now she saw his face.

Oh. No. It couldn’t be.

She hadn’t a hope of forgetting those high cheekbones. That curly black hair, wet and falling over his blue eyes
 
—so blue they could lift her out of herself, make her believe
 
—

No.

Even the outline of his sopping wet shirt betrayed the truth.
Chiseled,
Ree had said. Yes, Roark had the frame of a man who could dive into a raging river and rescue a lost soul. Delicious biceps, wide shoulders, lean hips, and he leaned down to breathe life into the dying.

Except it was Amelia who needed resuscitating. Hadn’t he left? Freed her from the grip of his memory on her heart?

A cold hand touched her cheek and jolted her out of herself.

“Mamichka?”

Even Amelia could translate that. “No, honey. I’m not your
 
—”

And then she got it.

Roark St. John was trying
 
—vainly, it seemed
 
—to revive the little girl’s mother.

Regardless of what he might be doing back in Deep Haven . . . regardless of the lies and the way he’d humiliated her . . . in that moment, yes, she could forgive him.

She might even love him. Just for right now.

She pulled the little girl close and held her, running a hand over her back. “Shh,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Her hands trembled. Roark couldn’t be here. She held the little girl, but her brain tracked to the last time she’d seen him. Leaving the resort, with Darek, Casper, Jace, and Max watching from the driveway.

It’s going to be okay.

Behind her, the fire trucks arrived, and she turned to watch as the EMTs climbed out
 
—as Seth climbed out
 
—donning life jackets and heading to the river.

Seth hadn’t actually met Roark, just heard the story. Over and over.

Oh no. Amelia turned back, but a crowd had gathered around the woman, obscuring the men who’d been working on her. She’d lost sight of the rescuer who might be Roark.

“Amelia? Are you okay?”

She spotted her sister Grace, in a white sundress, her blonde hair loose, running across the rocky shoreline.

“Max and I were coming home to surprise everyone, and I saw your car. What are you doing here?”

“There’s a drowning. And I found this little girl. I think . . .” She looked again at the river, where a firefighter had gone in, roped to the shore, and was dragging out another body, male, older. “I think her mother is one of the victims.”

As if to confirm, the girl lifted her head. Watched, bearing that same strange, enigmatic expression.
“Papichka.”

Amelia picked up the girl, turned her away, scanned the shore. The rescuers had fanned out as the firefighters and EMTs took over. She saw Seth attach a safety rope to his harness, wade into the water.

Her throat tightened as the current took him, pulling on his rope.
Please don’t die.

But even as he swam down into one of the deadly pools, her gaze went back to the shore.

She studied each of the soggy civilians who had risked their lives. A burly blond college student. A man
 
—dark hair, stocky, probably belonging to the woman in khakis. The young husband who’d finally wrestled out of his wife’s grip.

But no Roark.

She searched the embankment, spied the elderly couple, the young family, others from town she recognized. Pastor Dan, the fire chief, and Joe Michaels, hauling the woman onto a stretcher. Mayor Seb Brewster and another volunteer firefighter at the water’s edge, belaying Seth, and Deputy Kyle Hueston, taking statements.

But no Roark.

“Let’s get off this rock, see if we can track down some relatives,” Grace said. She grabbed Amelia’s elbow to steady her as they trekked back to safety.

Amelia searched for Roark one final time as she made her way up to the fire trucks. But he seemed to have vanished.

Or maybe he was never there at all. Maybe her stupid, belligerent heart simply refused to surrender him to the past.

Life, on this blue-skied spring day, had never seemed quite so fragile.

The birds chirruped, calling from the trees over the rush of water cascading in a raucous froth down to the great lake. Mist hung in the air, and just an hour ago, Roark had watched a teenager
 
—no more than fourteen
 
—jump from boulder to boulder across the foamy river.

He could be that boy, had played that game in rivers tucked away in far east Russia. Could nearly taste the carefree danger pooling in the back of his throat.

The parents stood closer to shore, yet still at the edge of a boulder, the father holding the hand of a little girl in braids, her red bows twisting in the wind.

Roark had leaned against the rail of the bridge, working up a strategy
 
—or perhaps just the courage
 
—to talk to Amelia. His conversation with Claire had caused him to rise early, to take a run up the highway until he had to double over and haul in deep, cleansing breaths.

If Amelia, bearing all the facts of my case, still chooses to reject me, I will walk away and be content to leave her in peace, despite my broken heart.

He hated his words then, the very real prophecy in them.

So he’d walked back to his meager flat, showered, tracked down a pastry at the local donut shop, then made his way to Jensen’s suggestion
 
—Cutaway Creek.

He parked with the other vehicles, hiked up to the high falls, then back, sorting through ways to find Amelia alone, to plead his case. At the bridge, he sat on a bench and watched families hike the shoreline. Parents holding the hands of their children, couples taking selfies. The joy of family hung in the air like the cool mist off the river.

“Isn’t it breathtaking?” He heard the words from an elderly woman standing nearby, and right then, he was back on the Charles Bridge, admiring the artwork of a local who’d set up an easel, drawing a fresh view of the Judith Tower on the far end of the bridge.

The sun hung low, lighting the red-tiled roofs and turning black the haunting gothic spires of the castle on the hill. The Vltava River was a rich mulberry, the bright lights of riverboats pinpricks against the deepening shadows.

Roark had framed it in his viewfinder, waiting.

And into this magnificent skyline walked Amelia. She wore high boots, jeans, and a black trench coat, an emerald-green scarf twined around her neck, her auburn hair long.

When she pulled a camera from her rucksack, something latent and sweet stirred inside him. Like he’d seen her before, perhaps, and tucked the memory deep inside only to be stirred like a remembered song.

It pulled him to her side of the bridge as she took a few shots, adjusted her aperture exposure. And still he watched.

Until her gaze turned to him, and he’d blurted out the crazy line about wishes and hopes and . . . felt like a fool.

But she smiled and healed the urge to run. He gathered his wits, and his next words came out saner. “Did you know that after
the sunset, in about twenty minutes, the sky will light up again? It’s even more brilliant the second time around.”

She had green eyes. Eyes that could stop his heart, hold it, make him see himself and cringe.

“Really?”

“Indeed. Turn off your auto white balance and switch it to shade. You’ll draw all the gold tones into the picture.”

He didn’t know when he’d become a professor of photography
 
—his own Nikon barely had a scuff on it. But that seemed to impress her, and she tried it.

He wanted to train his camera on her, capture that smile.

“I’ll bite
 
—who are you? The local photography bum?”

He liked that. Because yes, it fit. Still, it came with too many explanations, so . . . “I just like the view. You?”

“I’m enrolled in a photography program at Charles University. We’re also touring through Germany, Austria, and then over to Switzerland. I think we’re even spending the New Year in Paris.”

She turned around, framed the setting sun, the trail of gold along the river southwest of the bridge.

His brain, meanwhile, did the math. “Do you mean the course taught by Claude Dupré?”

She lowered her camera. Nodded. “Do you know him?”

Roark was sleeping on his sofa. Which meant, yes, he could probably talk his former schoolmate into letting him tag along.

“Indeed. It seems we are taking the same class.”

The first of too many white lies, the trailhead of secrets.

The scream had shaken him out of his memory as he stood on the bridge above Cutaway Creek. He’d watched as the teenager grasped at rocks, tumbling into the current. Then, in horror, as his mother reached out to grab him and fell in too.

Roark wanted to shout, already on his way down the embankment as the father released the hand of his daughter and headed into the froth.

Roark reacted more out of instinct than training, but he had learned to swim in the choppy waters of the Sea of Japan and rowed for two years at Eton.

Point of fact, he didn’t exactly remember hitting the water, just that he’d shucked off his jumper, down to his vest, torn off his trainers, and waded in, his eyes on the teenager, now frantic in the water.

“Lie on your back! Put your legs out in front of you!” he yelled. “Ride the current until you can find a rock and brace yourself!” But the river gobbled his words. The icy water stole his breath as he worked his way to the teenager, grabbing at him, missing.

The swell took the boy under the bridge. Roark did get a hand on the mother, however, his grip on a boulder scraping at his other hand.

As his legs went numb in the frigid water, the woman clawed at him, fighting him. “My son!”

Her husband half paddled, half twisted in the rapids, also disappearing under the bridge. Tempests of water would suck them under, relentless in their hunger.

“Ma’am!”

But she shook free of Roark’s grasp, kicking him in the gut as she fought. His breath heaved out.

Before he could lunge again, she went under.

The current took her body, sucked her down. Roark clung to the rock, waiting for her to surface.

Waiting.

He finally saw a hand
 
—just a glimmer
 
—peek from the surface in the middle of a cauldron on the far side of the river.

Another man, older, had plunged into the water beside him.

“She’s over there!” Roark pointed to the hole, then launched himself through the rapids toward her.

His feet barely found purchase, pushing at rocks for leverage as he floundered against the current, swimming hard above her.

He landed just below the hole, grabbed the edge of a boulder, and pulled himself to the churning pool.

She had to be down there. Caught. He gripped the rock, tried to reach for her.

A hand closed around his wrist. A younger man perched on the rock. “I got you,” he said and lay prone, another buddy holding his legs.

In the distance, sirens whined.