Loe raamatut: «A Vow to Keep»

CHAPTER ONE

AT FIRST she thought he was not there.

Linda Starr laid low in the long September-gold grass and adjusted the binoculars on the reedy area of bulrushes just beyond the boundary of her picket fence–enclosed backyard.

The ground was gilded silver with frost, but she was only vaguely aware of the cold penetrating her pajamas as the morning light, cool and gray, seeped into the darkness, turned the river’s back eddy into a startling strand of light. Across the river, downtown Calgary hummed to life, headlights like strings of moving pearls joined the high-rise reflections in the still waters of this tiny, quiet inlet of the swift moving Bow River.

Unbelievable that she had seen him here, nearly in the heart of the city. It had been a gift, and she realized, resigned, it was one that might not be repeated.

She began to feel the cold and to notice the steady hum of life across the way, in stark contrast to the stillness where she lay shivering. She had turned on the coffeepot before she had come out, and now its scent drifted out her open back door, calling her back to the warmth of the tiny house she had only slept in for three nights.

She rose to her knees, groaned at the stiffness in them and then froze. She saw him, his silhouette that of a ghost taking solid form as the light deepened to rose on the river. Her breath caught in her throat as she witnessed alchemy, dawn turning white feathers to platinum. A whooping crane. Linda had read about him after her first sighting yesterday.

He was one of the rarest North American birds, and the tallest. His wingspan was seven and a half feet. Most people would never see such a bird in their lifetimes. She, startled at her own whimsy, took it as a sign that she had made the right decision to buy the tiny house behind her.

Her knees protested, and she shifted her weight ever so slightly but enough that the bird turned to her suddenly, the brilliant red of his face filling her binoculars, the yellow of his eye defiant. With a buglelike trumpet—ker-loo, ker-loo—he stretched his wings so that she could see the black-tipped undersides, witness how truly magnificent he was.

He lifted his wings, and then rose, all power and grace, into a morning sky that had turned a shade of turquoise blue that left her eyes smarting. She could hear the whoosh as he claimed the freedom of the heavens. She watched him, felt as if he were setting course for the morning star.

Whimsy, again. Where was that coming from? She had always considered herself so pragmatic. Not, she reminded herself, that a pragmatic woman would have purchased the faintly dilapidated little house behind her.

She kept the binoculars trained on him long after he was just a speck. That’s when she became aware of the miracle.

Happiness had eased into her, as sneakily as the morning light had chased away the darkness.

She contemplated the feeling for a moment, let the word roll through her mind. Only thirteen months ago her world had turned upside down, been broken to pieces as if picked up by a tornado and smashed back down. She remembered thinking on that black, black day, I will never again know joy.

Or that most dangerous of things, hope.

There was that whimsy again, because spotting the rare bird made her hope for a life where tiny surprises could delight, where cold grass could make her skin tingle with the simple awareness of what it was to be alive.

She had barely formed that thought when the hair on the back of her neck rose. She was aware, before she heard the softly cleared throat, that she was no longer alone in her backyard. Ah well, Linda chastised herself, that was a lesson about believing in happiness that she should’ve learned. It was like throwing a challenge before the gods, one they seemed all too eager to accept.

The intruder must be a murderer, she decided, just as her daughter had warned her when Linda had insisted on buying this little house, next to the bird sanctuary, in an old, old neighborhood where crumbling houses, such as hers, stood next to in-fills and add-ons and houses lovingly restored to dignity.

Mother. What are you thinking? You’ll be murdered in your sleep, Bobbi had said. As if dead bodies littered the quiet streets of one the oldest districts in Calgary. Though, of course, those scruffy young neighbors, tattooed and long haired with the pit bull and boards over their windows, had given Linda pause.

Well, she thought, with faint satisfaction, if her daughter was right about the murderer, at least Linda was not asleep. In her pajamas, though! Heart hammering, ridiculously embarrassed about the pink flannel printed with cartoon devils, she rose off her knees, stretched with what she hoped was a lack of concern—she was sure the criminal element could smell fear—and turned to face her fate.

Her heart stopped.

A murderer, she thought, would have been much easier to handle. She became aware that her pajamas were soaked nearly clean through from the frost, and she was afraid her breasts were probably doing something indecent.

From the cold. Not from him.

At least she hoped the reaction was from the cold. She folded her arms firmly over that area before he got any ideas.

Did he have to see her like this?

The pajamas, which had seemed to be making such a statement about the new her—not caring about the opinions of others, eccentric, free—when she had plucked them off the rack, now made her feel faintly ridiculous and all too vulnerable.

“Rick,” she said, hoping to load that single word with as much frost as what painted her lawn. He flinched, so she knew she had probably succeeded, and wondered why the success gave her so little satisfaction.

Rick Chase was six feet of utter male appeal. He was tall, broad-shouldered, the perfection of an impeccably cut suit, probably Armani, accentuated rather than disguised the sleek power of his build.

Gorgeous, she thought, almost clinically, a man of forty in his absolute prime. His features were masculine and clean, his chin faintly dimpled, those amazing eyes as green as the edges of still water, and just as calm. He was dressed for work—the suit charcoal-gray, the white shirt crisp, the tie silky and classy and perfectly knotted at the swell of his throat.

He was really the kind of man a woman did not want to see without her makeup and her hair done and a dress that turned heads. She reminded herself she had just been happy that she had not worn makeup in more than a month, happy with the new her.

Trust a man to wreck happiness without half trying.

She noticed for all the magazine cover perfection of his looks, his dark hair—devil’s-food-cake brown—was spiky and uncooperative, still wet from the shower. It wakened some rebel in her that wanted to press down the worst rooster tail, the Dennis-the-Menace one, with her fingertips. She noticed, surprised, there were strands of gray threaded through the rich brown.

How was it possible he was still unmarried, unattached? He had been divorced for more than seven years. And how was it possible she’d forgotten how handsome he was? Or maybe it was just that she had refused to think about it, her battle-scarred emotional self not needing a complication like the one that had just materialized in her yard. Even when he’d left message after message for the past thirteen months, she had refused to conjure the image of him. Somehow she had known it would make her ache. Make her feel as lonely and as pathetic as only a betrayed woman could be.

Betrayed by her husband, now dead thirteen months, and betrayed by this man who stood in front of her, her husband’s friend and business partner, who had known about her husband’s secrets and had never once…

Don’t go there, she ordered herself.

“Linda.”

They stood staring at each other as morning deepened around them. Across the river a horn honked and tires squealed.

She was aware of time standing still.

“You look like you’re frozen,” he finally said.

She resisted the temptation to look down at her chest to see if that’s where he was drawing his conclusion.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, not politely, either.

“I called this morning. When I didn’t get an answer I decided to drop by.”

Drop by, as if this was right on his way to work, which it wasn’t. Drop by, as if she had sent him her new address, which she hadn’t.

She was a woman who had felt the complete and humiliating sting of being too easily fooled. Now she felt she could sniff out a half-truth at five hundred yards.

“And what exactly is the reason for your sudden concern, Rick?”

Something in his eyes grew very cold, and made her shiver more than her frosty pajamas. She had known Rick for twenty years. Had she ever seen him angry? She was suddenly aware that there were facets to him that were powerful and intriguing, and it felt like a terrible weakness that she was suddenly curious…

“Don’t say that as if I haven’t been concerned all along,” he said with surprising force. “It’s you who has chosen not to return my calls. Because I respected that, does not mean I was not thinking about you.”

“Well, thank you,” she said, her tone deliberately clipped. “And you have chosen not to respect my need for space now, because—?”

He glared at her, raked a hand through the wet tangle of his hair. The Dennis-the-Menace tail popped right back up. He looked very much like he wanted to cross the ground between them, take her shoulders and shake her. But the temper died in his eyes, and he said evenly, “I need your help with something.”

Patting down that rooster tail, for one.

“You’re asking a woman who is out in her yard in her pajamas at dawn for help with something? You might want to rethink that.”

She had said it with mild sarcasm, but he chose not to be offended. Instead he grinned. Oh, she wished he would not have done that. The masculine pull of him was almost instant, more powerfully alluring than before. A smile like his—faintly reckless and unabashedly sexy—could build a bridge right over the painful history that provided such a safe and uncrossable chasm between them.

“I’ll take my chances. You never know when you might need the skills of a woman who’s handy with binoculars.”

She glanced down at the binoculars that hung around her neck.

“So, what were you doing? Spying on the neighbors?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said, fighting down the impulse to explain herself. She was done with that. She was free to watch the birds at dawn if she damn well pleased, and offer explanations to no one. It was the new—and improved—Linda Starr.

“You’re shivering.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle. Pity? The new and improved Linda Starr did not want his pity; she wanted to be insulted by it. Instead his gentle tone touched the place in her where she least wanted to be touched. The place that said, in the darkness of the night when she could not outrun it, I want someone to care about me.

“The coffee is on in the house,” she said coolly. “You can come in and tell me what you want.”

And no matter what it was, she would say no to him.

She would say no because he was part of a world she was trying desperately to leave behind, and because he made her aware that while she thought she was being independent she probably only looked wildly off balance and possibly pathetic.

She would say no just for practice, and for all the times she had said yes when she hadn’t wanted to.

Rick Chase followed Linda toward her house thinking Bobbi really had no idea what she had asked of him. He could tell from the warriorlike pride and anger in Linda’s face when she brushed by him that she was going to say no, no matter what he asked.

So, that made his life simple, right? All he could do was try, even Bobbi couldn’t expect more than that.

Linda had taken him by complete surprise. She looked astounding, standing outside in her pink pajamas, shivering. She was different. Her hair, short now, light brown and terribly misbehaved, scattered around the dainty, defiant features of her face.

The last time he had seen her she had been in black. Her hair had been black, too, pulled into a sophisticated bun at her nape. She had looked elegant, cold and unforgiving.

“Did you know?” she had asked him, her eyes, momentarily vulnerable, pleading for him to say, no, he hadn’t known.

He had not answered, and in his lack of an answer, she had known the truth.

His own sense of shame, for being a keeper of the secret—secrets, one that she still did not know about—preventing him from being there for her. Not that he didn’t go through the motions. He called. He left messages. But when she didn’t return his calls, he did not pursue it. Was relieved not to pursue it.

Still, the difference he saw today was not just in Linda’s physical appearance. Before, she had always seemed faintly fragile, now she seemed strong. Before, she had carried herself with a certain remoteness, now she looked engaged. Before she had seemed controlled, now she seemed…was passionate too strong a word?

No.

Who was this new Linda?

He remembered how Bobbi had finished the conversation last night. “I should never have agreed to college, not this year. I better come home. Do you think I should come home?”

Of course he thought she should come home! He certainly didn’t want to be the one put in charge of the rescue of Linda Starr, especially since it was now perfectly evident to him she would resent rescue or even the insinuation one was needed.

“Not that I have a home to come home to,” Bobbi had announced, faint sulkiness in her tone. “My stuff is in boxes!”

Last night he had taken that as evidence that maybe something was wrong.

But now, standing in the brightening morning, looking at Linda’s back, her shoulders set with pride, Rick knew he’d never seen a woman who looked less in need of rescuing. Had he been talked into playing the good Samaritan—used the flimsy excuse of her daughter’s stuff in boxes—to come and see her for himself?

Linda, he calculated, was thirty-eight years old.

She had looked ten years older than that at her husband’s funeral. Now she looked ten years younger. She looked confident, defiant, madder than hell at being found so vulnerable. And she looked beautiful in a way that threatened a wall he had long ago erected around his life.

His job here was nearly done. He would make Linda an offer. She would refuse. He could report to Bobbi that her mother appeared to be fine. More than fine. On fire with some life force that he had not seen in her before, or at least not for many, many years.

Could he leave now, without making the offer? If he left like this he would be filled with the regret of a challenge only partially completed. His own self-preservation was not the issue here, though he felt the threat of the new Linda strongly.

The issue was if Linda was really okay.

She went through the back door of her house, bare feet leaving small prints in the silver grass. He followed them, directly into her kitchen.

He looked at her house with a curiosity he had no right to feel, a spy gathering info. Was it the home of a woman who was doing okay? Or was it the home of a woman secretly going to pieces?

Certainly her house from the outside had been a bit of a shock, had underscored Bobbi’s assessment of the situation. Though many of these Bow Water houses were getting million-dollar facelifts, thanks to their close proximity to downtown, Linda’s was not one of those. Evaluating houses was his specialty, and hers had no curb-appeal. It was a tiny bungalow, shingle-sided, nearly lost in the tangled vines that had long since overtaken it. It was a long, long way from the gracious manor nestled in the curve of the Elbow River that she had just sold.

Still, the interior smelled headily of coffee and spices he could not identify. Despite the fact that it needed work, it had a certain undeniable cottage charm that suited the Linda with short messy hair and funny flannel pajamas.

She motioned at a chair and poured coffee into a sturdy mug. She slapped the mug down in front of him and left the room in what seemed to be a single motion, leaving him free to inspect for signs of craziness. For Bobbi’s benefit? He was kidding himself.

It was obvious she had just moved. Boxes were stacked neatly, labeled Kitchen, waiting to be unpacked. The floor’s curling linoleum needed to be replaced and so did the cabinets, the kitchen sink and the appliances. He was willing to bet the neglect was just as obvious in the rest of the house. Still, he could see the place had potential. Possibly original hardwood floors under that badly damaged linoleum, deep windowsills, high ceilings, beautiful wood moldings with that rich, golden patina that only truly old wood had.

She came back into the kitchen. She had tugged a sweatshirt over her pajamas, gray and loose. He was accustomed to women making just a little more effort to impress him, but for some reason he liked it that she hadn’t. He liked that somewhere, under the layers of pain, they were still Rick and Linda, comfortable with each other.

The sweatshirt had the odd effect of making her seem very slight, the kind of woman a man could daydream about protecting, if he wasn’t careful. A man could remember how, for a moment, when he had told her he had a problem, the wariness had melted from her eyes, briefly replaced with trust.

She got her own coffee, but didn’t sit. Instead she stood, rear end braced against the countertop, and regarded him through the steam of her coffee.

Her eyes were brown, like melted chocolate. Once, he had thought, they were the softest eyes in the world. Now they had shades of other things in them. Sorrow. Betrayal. Maturity. But all those things just seemed to make them more expressive and mysterious, the way shadows brought depth to a painting.

Her hair was two shades lighter than her eyes. He realized, slightly shocked, that the black had probably never been her true color. It was as if, before, she had worn a mask, and now the real Linda was beginning to shine through.

“So,” she said, “say it. I can tell you’re thinking it.”

She’d always been perceptive, almost scarily so. He looked at her lips, full, moist and incredibly sensuous. What might they taste like? He hoped she wasn’t perceptive enough to gauge that renegade thought!

“Okay,” he said, as if he had not thought about the full puffiness of her lips. “It seems like a rough neighborhood.”

She cocked her head at him, as if she was politely interested in his opinion, so he rushed on.

“And the house seems, um, like a lot of work for a woman on her own. Why did you sell your Riverdale house for this?”

She took a sip of her coffee, as if debating whether to talk to him at all. Then she sighed. “That house never felt like mine. It was Blair’s, his love of status in every cold stone and brick. I hated that house. I especially hated it after the renovation. A glass wall thirty feet high is monstrous. Besides, it was a ridiculous place for a woman alone to live.”