Butterflies in Honey (Growing Pains #3) (47 page)

“He said he was wondering how long it would
take you. He was surprised you stuck it out for as long as you did.
He said Emily didn’t wait as long. He said you must really care for
me to ‘cope’ for so long. That was the word he used,
cope
.
He thought the situation was as funny as it was familiar. Called it
the ‘follies of youth’.”

“Oh. Hmmm.” Krista’s skin was prickling. She
was waiting for the hammer to drop.

“He said we were a good team. Hoped we would
continue to be. It was a hint, obviously, and I heard it loud and
clear.”

That was good. This was going in the right
direction. Albeit slowly and randomly.

Sean turned back around. His eyes traveled
the length of her and his face was pained. “He got another call he
had to take and had to quickly say goodbye. I was sitting in my
house for the call. I hadn’t decided to come to San Diego yet.”

“Oh?”
Get to the damn point!

“If that call had lasted five more minutes,
you would be dead.”

Hammer.

That was a pretty realistic view of the
current events.

Sean stepped closer, his eyes were
glistening. His face was peeled of every defensive layer he
possessed. The result was raw pain.

“If I hadn’t filled up the car last night
even though I didn’t really need it at the time…If I hadn’t decided
to skip fast food because the drive-thru line was too long…If that
idiot hadn’t been at the bar when I asked about you…Krista, there
are a million and a half things that might have delayed me. A
million and a half. If any
one
of those things happened, you
would be dead. As it was, it was a narrow miss.”

“But it
was
a miss. I am okay. I made
it—thanks to you. There is no sense replaying everything that might
have gone wrong. The fact is it didn’t.”

“I thought I lost you when you left San
Francisco. But I didn’t. Not really. I shrugged it off the other
day when you said all those things to me. I didn’t think you were
really gone. Not for good. I work with you—I’d still see you every
day. But today, when you weren’t breathing on that beach, and I
couldn’t revive you…” his voice hitched. He clenched his jaw as a
tear leaked out of his eye. “I almost lost you. For real. And it is
killing me.”

Sean’s voice broke. He stood rigid, trying to
be the man of the 1940’s when the rule was, men don’t cry. All he
needed was a soft wind and his card house would come tumbling down.
Krista knew she was that wind, and she needed to go to him. Problem
was, she was hooked up to a freaking IV even though she could just
drink some water and problem solved.

“But you didn’t, Sean. You didn’t lose me,”
Krista said softly. She gestured for him to come to the bed, but he
didn’t budge. This wasn’t over. He wasn’t done purging.

“This is my fault because none of this should
have happened. You shouldn’t have been alone. Not for any of it.
Not the car ride down—I bet you didn’t even sing along to the radio
because you were thinking about my not calling you…”

He was right. She didn’t even have the radio
on. She hadn’t been in the mood.

“You shouldn’t have had to talk to that
reject at the bar. You shouldn’t have been at that beach—which is
the number one spot in San Diego for drowning, by the way. The
waves there are unpredictable, as you saw. You shouldn’t have been
surfing alone. And you shouldn’t have been planning to drink
yourself into a stupor tonight. I swore that if I got you back when
I got to L.A., I would hang on to you. I would do everything in my
power to make you happy. And look, I nearly killed you.”

“Now, that is just stupid. You had nothing to
do with my near miss, as you call it. Sometimes I get into fixes,
but I don’t need you to be my shadow to keep me safe. Except for
today, obviously.”

“Don’t you? It seems to me like you have a
habit of doing foolhardy things. Kate, Jasmine, and Ben all know
this. But it seems to escape your notice.”

“I’ve made it this far.”

“Barely. All I am trying to say is, I need
you to keep me level, and you need me to talk some sense into you
when you stop relying on logic. If I change, if I work less and
spend more time with you, will you consider coming back?”

Sean stood five feet from her, his eyes still
glistening from unshed tears, his hands limp at his sides. He was a
strong, powerful man that currently looked so fragile, he might
topple over and shatter.

“When I was down in that water, I thought of
two things I gave up on that mattered. Only two in my whole life.
One was the fight to survive that…predicament.” Pain flashed across
Sean’s face. “The other, and the one that made me so unspeakably
sad I still hate thinking about it, was the fight to keep you. Not
ever. Not when I left San Francisco, and not when you were working
all the time. I just let it go. Let you go. I once told you that
you were a coward. Well, you weren’t the only one. I was afraid you
didn’t want me. It was easier to leave than to hear it.”

“I do want you, Krissy. I want you forever. I
want to add your name to my property and my bank accounts. I want
to share my life with you. And most importantly, I want to stop
hurting you.”

“Well…that’s a bit overboard. Would you have
come if Tory didn’t hint about it?”

Pain lanced Sean’s face again. “Yes. But not
as soon. I would have sat and thought about it some more. Thought
about what I would say. How wrong I was. Tory took the thinking out
of it. Thank God. He saved your life.”

“No actually, you did. I saw your rescue on
the news. You might be a celebrity. It was risky, though. You might
have gone down with the ship.”

“I’ll tell you the story once, and then I
would prefer never to talk about it again, okay?”

She nodded mutely.

Chapter Thirty-Three

“I went straight to the beach that idiot sent
you to. Because of the currents and tides, also because of the
unpredictability of the waves because, as I said, it is an
intermediate surf spot. Great waves, but they come at a price.

“I had a bad feeling in the pit of my
stomach. From the time you walked out of my house earlier in the
week, I had a bad feeling, and this heightened it. You tend to lose
sense of yourself when you have things on your mind. Judging by the
frosty reception I was getting from your friends, you definitely
had things on your mind. I can always tell how the winds blow with
you by how Kate responds to me. You have loyal friends.

“Anyway, I saw your car at the beach and knew
two seconds of relief. When I got to the top of the path,
overlooking the beach…”

Sean paused, his eyes glistening again. He
was fighting to keep back emotion. “I saw the group of people at
the water’s edge. I looked where one of the guys was pointing. You
had just bobbed up. I knew it was you the second I saw your head.
It was a long way away, but I just knew it was you. Then that
enormous wave came crashing down on you…” Sean paused to quickly
wipe his eyes.

“I started jogging down the path. I didn’t
know you had been stuck in the waves for a time. I thought it would
sweep you up and spit you out near shore. You’ve gotten better at
diving the waves, I guess.”

“I had to learn fast. The waves earlier in
the day weren’t nearly the size you saw, but they were still bigger
than I was used to.”

“You are an idiot. A brave idiot.” A tear
leaked out of Sean’s eye again. He didn’t turn away.

“When you came up again and started
swimming,” Sean shook his head, “I heard snatches of conversation
when I was making my way down the beach. You had been caught a
while. You aren’t the strongest of swimmers. Then you were trying
to swim out…”

“So you ran in to save me.”

Sean slumped into a chair. “I saw that wave
wash over you and thought, ‘there goes the woman I love.’ I thought
I just saw you alive for the last time. I knew you couldn’t swim
out of those waters. I should have been there with you. How scared
you must have been. All alone.” Sean bowed his head and suddenly
Krista knew the fear and pain from it was overwhelming him, like
that wave had her.

“I stopped thinking,” he went on after a
pause, “I went in after you. I didn’t think about my chances of
reaching you in time. I didn’t give up hope when I dove down and
couldn’t find you. And if it came to the worst, I couldn’t let you
die down there all alone.” Sean wiped his face, still shaking his
head.

“Romeo, Romeo, where for art thou, Romeo…”
Krista muttered. It would have been a romantic story if Sean’s
emotions weren’t so raw and bleeding. Ben was right. Like Kate, he
had thought her dead for a time, and it played hell on him.

“On the third dive, I felt something that
might have been an arm. I clamped my hand on it and started yanking
it toward the beach. The arm was limp…” Sean took a deep breath,
small sobs escaping from his clenched jaw. “But I couldn’t swim
straight up or we would never get out of the waves. I had to chance
you had a little bit longer. Once you broke surface and didn’t take
a breath…” He shook his head for the hundredth time.

“I swam you in as fast as I could. Someone
came out to meet me. We performed CPR and, for a while, I thought I
was too late. Then you started coughing.”

Sean put his head in his hands and his body
heaved.

“Krista, what if I didn’t catch your arm?
Seconds.
All you had were seconds.” Sean pleaded.

She knew she had to go to him. He wouldn’t
come to her. She couldn’t stand the hurt he was in. She tried to
disentangle the wires connecting her with the IV and struggled to
sit up. Man, she was sore.

Sean was at her side in an instant. “What are
you doing?”

“Going to put my arms around you.”

He chuckled and muttered, “Stupid.”

Krista was wrapped in the solid, safe arms of
Sean McAdams.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Krista was sitting on her deck, watching the
ocean roll in, when the next wave of pain washed through her torso.
She was about three hours in and gently floating with the tides of
pain as they flowed and ebbed, hinting of stormy seas ahead.

She and Sean had been married a little under
three years. They had a small ceremony in Hawaii, and then flew to
France for their honeymoon. Only the closest of their friends and
family attended, which was exactly what they both wanted. Sean
would have gone bigger, and almost did, but scaled it down at the
last minute. He had never said why, but it became clear when, a
week before the wedding, he got notice that his father wasn’t
planning on attending. Business. He didn’t elaborate as to what
kind. Sean was devastated, but he covered it well, muttering that
he knew it and glad he didn’t have many people to witness it.

His mother, a gracefully aged lady with
expensive taste and a legacy of beauty, spent the whole time asking
Krista if she was pregnant and bad mouthing Sean’s dad. Krista
didn’t talk to her much. The woman could really throw a black cloud
into a person’s day.

Krista’s parents were there, of course—plain,
sometimes frumpy, but reliable. Her mom was ecstatic that one of
her children was getting married and her dad was constantly trying
to wrestle the bills from Sean’s grasp. “The father always pays!”
he would yell as Sean bought him another drink.

Cassie, who had moved to L.A. shortly after
‘The Incident,’ fell in love with Krista’s parents and was adopted
immediately. She didn’t like them half as much as Sean did,
however, who became the favorite. Sean and Cassie’s desire for a
close family melded with the Marshall parents’ desire to keep their
family close. The four went together like mashed potatoes and
gravy. The Marshall daughters were quickly and effectively
forgotten.

Although, and as a surprising turn of events,
Cassie and Samantha, Krista’s sister, got on surprisingly well.
Cassie got free reign to be villainous and took advantage of it.
The two of them played practical jokes on everyone, much to Sean’s
dismay. They both got scolded by the parents. Everyone else just
shook their heads.

Sean and Krista left for France straight from
Hawaii. Describing their time there would be impossible. Simply
put, it was the best time either of them had ever had in life. They
tasted wines, they ate impossibly good food, and saw breathtaking
countryside. With Sean knowing a word or two of French, and Krista
speaking a little more, plus their love of good food and wine. all
helped. It also meant they didn’t get as many snobby comments about
stupid Americans. Krista had yet to meet Sean’s grandparents on
either side, but Sean said they would work them into a trip the
following year.

The following year came and went without a
trip or even a lengthy vacation—work turned unreal busy. Their
branch was number one in sales by 10% and going strong. New York
was hot on their heels, but with Krista’s ability to organize
departments and motivate employees, and Sean’s unique solutions to
hit unreal goals, they hit and stayed number one consistently.

Tory’s daughter graduated from Harvard
Business School and found a managerial position in San Francisco.
It was about the time that Sean promoted both Kate and Jasmine, who
were nearly as good as Krista at hitting numbers with the added
bonus of being universally liked. Dean was long gone and the
Arizona region was shut down because of lack of performance, so
with the increased work load and vacancy, K-Jaz was forced into
more responsibility. Neither really wanted it, but took to it like
a fat man to a buffet. When the numbers bumped up in the next
quarter, Ron nearly crapped himself he was so pissed.

Krista and Sean were going strong. The few
fights they had turned into an excuse for great makeup sex. They
spent a lot of time together and never seemed to get tired of each
other. Every once in a while, Sean would look at Krista with a
somber look,
remembering.
Back in the day, it would be
followed by a fervent bout of lovemaking that boarded on
desperation, but as time wore on, he would simply wink at her and
hug her tight.