Deep Blue (31 page)

Horns blared on crowded Sixth Street far below Hope’s apartment window. Taxis fought to reach the sidewalk in front of the building where frantically waving patrons huddled in their heavy wool coats. Hope had been back in the city for nearly a week. It felt like a year.

It was the eighteenth of March. Gray clouds hovered over the tops of tall buildings. An icy wind whipped against doors and blew papers into the streets. God, she missed the heat and the sun. She missed the blue-green waters and sugary white-sand beaches. Mostly she just missed Conn.

Since the day of her return, she had thrown herself into her job. She had stayed long hours in the office, volunteered for extra assignments, anything to block memories of him. Nothing had worked. She thought of him day and night, couldn’t sleep, could barely force herself to eat.

Her friend Jackie Aimes had stopped by as often as she could, but Jackie was involved in a serious relationship with the man she had met some weeks back. Besides, seeing how happy she was only made Hope feel worse. Jackie was worried about her and so was her family, who had begun to call on a daily basis.

She knew they could hear the brittle edge in her voice, the tears she couldn’t quite hide no matter how hard she tried. She was working on a feature for the
Living
section of the paper about a local grammar school being remodeled and all the problems it entailed, but it wasn’t challenging enough to hold her interest. Unable to resist, she had phoned Mrs. Finnegan to find out why the old woman had finally decided to sell.

On the other end of the line, Mrs. Finnegan’s voice sounded defeated and weary. “It was Skolie, dear.”

“Buddy’s dog?”

“Yes, that’s right. They abducted him. Stole his leash right out of the dog-walker’s hands. I received a ransom note the following day. They said they would send him back to me in little pieces if I didn’t agree to sell.” She made a tired, sighing sound into the phone. “Buddy loved that dog. It was just too much.”

“Oh, Mrs. Finnegan.”

“I’ve signed the first few papers. I’m sure there will be more. We have to be out in sixty days.”

“I’m so sorry,” Hope said.

That had been two days ago. After all that had happened, Mrs. Finnegan and the tenants of Hartley House were still going to lose their homes. She hadn’t believed her mood could possibly get worse.

Then this morning, her sister Charity had arrived completely out of the blue, smiling and excited, having traveled all the way from Seattle to New York to impart her thrilling news.

“I know I should have called,” she said as Hope pulled open the apartment door. “But I wanted to surprise you. I wanted to tell you the good news in person. Call and I—we’re going to have a baby!”

Hope had looked at her sister’s radiant complexion and the wide smile on her face and simply burst into tears.

She started crying and couldn’t seem to stop. Until that moment, Hope had always been the one to take charge. Now she sat back and let her middle sister take over, let Charity brew tea for her, prop pillows behind her back on the sofa, cover her legs with a blanket.

“You have to tell me everything,” Charity demanded. She was three inches taller than Hope’s five-foot-three, with straight blond hair that reached her shoulders, beautiful and sweet, and not yet showing the baby she carried.

“I should be happy for you,” Hope said between fits of tears. “I mean, I
am
happy. It’s just that…just that…” She broke off, unable to finish, and simply shook her head.

“All right, that’s just about enough. You are going to start from the beginning and tell me what’s going on. Then we’re going to figure all of this out.”

Hope sniffed into her Kleenex. “We can’t figure it out. Even if I went to see him, it wouldn’t do any good. Conn told me if I left, not to come back.”

“If he loves you, he’ll want you back. The question is, are you sure you love him?”

Hope started crying.

“Okay, okay, you love him.” Charity reached down and stroked Hope’s hair. “Really, really a lot, right?”

“Yeah. Really a lot.” She accepted the fresh tissue Charity held out to her, blew her nose, and dabbed at the wetness on her cheeks.

“Tell me all of it, Hope. I want you to go all the way back to Richard. I have a feeling that was where your problems really began.”

And so that was just what she did. For the next half hour, Hope spilled out the pain of loving someone and suffering his betrayal, the crushing disappointment and feeling like a failure. Then she told her sister what she hadn’t told her before.

“That day I found them together…I was two months pregnant with Richard’s child. I saw them and I don’t know…I just seemed to go a little crazy.” She told Charity about running away, about how she had slipped on the ice on the front steps of the building. “I lost the baby, Charity. Dear God, I wanted that child so much.”

She cried for a while, and Charity cried with her. They talked about what had happened and she cried a little more, but now that she had told Glory and her sister, and Conn knew the truth, it didn’t seem to hurt quite so much.

“Conn said he would give me another baby. Why did I have to be such a coward?”

Charity reached down and caught her hand. “Hey, it’s okay. When I left the Yukon, I never thought I’d see Call again. I thought he was still in love with the memory of his first wife. The truth was, Call was afraid, just like you.”

“What if I married Conn and it didn’t work out? What if things went wrong? What if he doesn’t really love me the way I love him?”

“What if he does?” Charity asked softly. She squeezed Hope’s hand. “What if he gave you a child and loved you just the way he said? Wouldn’t that be something worth risking everything for?”

Hope inhaled a shaky breath. “Funny, all week, I’ve been thinking that same thing. What if Conn is the one man who would really love me for all of my life?”

“Do you think he’s that kind of man?”

Hope’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes.”

“Then you have to tell him. Tell him that you’ll marry him.”

She only shook her head. “I can’t. He said he wouldn’t wait. He said if I walked away, not to come back. His mother ran off and left him when he was a little boy. His wife never really loved him. She left him just like his mother. Now I’ve done the same thing. He’ll never be able to trust me. And if I went down there and he turned me away, I couldn’t…I just couldn’t bear it.”

Charity didn’t say more, just got up from the sofa, marched over and picked up Hope’s address book off the desk and started thumbing through the pages.

“What are you doing?”

“If you don’t want to call him, I will.”

Hope sat up on the sofa. “Are you crazy?”

But Charity just started dialing. And despite her reservations, Hope didn’t stop her. Instead, she tossed back the blanket and walked up next to her sister.

“Hello, I’d like to speak to Conner Reese. Is there any chance he’s there?”

The only number Hope had was the satellite phone on the
Conquest.
The boat was in Jamaica for repairs. Conn was probably not even aboard.

“Thank you.” Charity flicked Hope a look. She held the phone a little away from her ear so that both of them could listen.

Hope’s heart leapt as a familiar deep voice came on the line. “Hello.”

“Hi, is this Conner Reese?”

“This is Conn.”

“My name is Charity Sinclair. We’ve never met but I believe you know my sister.”

She could feel the sudden tension on the line. “Has something happened to Hope?”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that. She’s fine. Well, actually, she’s not fine. She’s completely miserable. You see, Hope is desperately in love with you.”

He grunted. “I think you must be talking about someone else.”

“I’m telling you the truth. My sister loves you. I was kind of hoping…well, that you might come up to New York and talk to her.”

“No way. Not a chance. Hope left me—I didn’t leave her. I won’t play games, Charity. And I don’t want a woman who doesn’t love me enough to stay with me.”

“But—”

“Hope has to trust me or it would never work out between us. She has to look inside herself and know with absolute certainty that I’m not going to fail her. That I can be the man she needs me to be.”

Charity bit her lip. She glanced over at Hope. “At least let me tell her you still love her.”

“Sorry. That’s something Hope has to figure out for herself. Tell her the boat will be in dry dock for a few more weeks. I’ll be working aboard her for at least that long. Tell her if she figures out what she wants, she knows where to find me.”

“She won’t come, Conn. She’s afraid you’ll turn her away.”

Hope thought she heard a dirty word. “Tell her I’ll give her a sign. I’ll hang a light on the bow. If she’s welcome, the light will be on. If the light’s not on, she’ll know it’s over.”

Conn said good-bye and hung up the phone, and Hope sank down on the chair in front of the desk.

“You have to go,” Charity said firmly.

“If he still wanted me, he would have said so.”

“In his own way, he did say so. You just weren’t listening.” Charity clamped her hands on her hips. “Dammit, I’ve never known you to be such a coward.”

Hope managed a smile. “I was always a coward. I just hid it well.”

Charity walked over to the window, looked down on the traffic below. “None of us wants to get hurt, Hope. But in a way, Conn’s right. If you can’t trust him not to hurt you, if you don’t have complete faith in him, then you shouldn’t marry him. Think about it, Hope.”

Conn stood on the bow of the
Conquest,
his hands braced on the rail as he stared out into the darkness. A thousand times he had thought of the phone call he had received from Charity Sinclair. A thousand times he wished he had said something different, wished he had told Hope he loved her.

And yet he knew in his heart he had done the right thing. If Hope couldn’t trust him, if she believed he would cheat on her like Richard, or hurt her in some other way, then he didn’t want her.

The night was quiet. He could hear the water lapping against the dock, the groan of the ropes on the boat in the next slip over. Then the sound of footfalls intruded, approaching along the deck as Joe walked up beside him.

“You’ve been out here quite a while. The guys have a hot card game going on down in the galley. I thought maybe you’d be interested.”

Conn raised an eyebrow. “You’re playing cards tonight?”

Joe gave him a sheepish smile. “Actually, I’ll be spending the night with Glory at our apartment. I just thought you might want to play.”

“Thanks, but I’m not in the mood.”

Joe’s gaze followed Conn’s back to the darkened water. “I know what she meant to you, man. I know how you must be hurting.”

“Even I didn’t know how much she meant to me. Not until she was gone.”

“It’s probably not the right thing to say, but maybe Hope was never really the one. With Glory and me, we knew—practically from the moment we met. We knew we were right for each other. Maybe you’re supposed to find someone else.”

Conn just stared out to sea.

“Why don’t you fly back with me to the wreck site tomorrow? We’ll do a little diving, a little treasure hunting. Maybe it’ll take your mind off Hope.”

Conn ignored him. “Damn, I forgot to turn the lights on. Do it for me as you leave, would you, Joe?”

Joe sighed. “It’s been two weeks, Conn. She isn’t going to come.”

A muscle jerked in Conn’s cheek. “Just turn on the goddamned lights!”

Standing in the darkness of the Port Antonio dock, Hope heard men’s voices coming from the bow of the
Conquest,
but she was too far away to hear what they were saying. All she knew for certain was that there was no light hanging on the bow. All she knew was that Conn didn’t want her.

She could feel the tears beginning to build, feel them spill over onto her cheeks. She thought she had cried herself out in New York. She wished she could find a way to regain her tough facade, but during the weeks with Conn, somehow she had lost it for good.

Turning away from the boat, she started walking, moving briskly, anxious to get away, trying to outrun the pain. As she raced along the boardwalk, something caught her eye. A flash of light behind her illuminated the darkness, arresting her where she stood. Slowly turning, she looked back at the boat. The bow of the
Conquest
was awash in light, a sea of tiny white bulbs that lit up the night. White lights flickered from the rigging, strings of lights dangled from the crane. More strings draped across the railings.

There were lights everywhere, lights that said she was wanted, that she was still loved.

“Hope!” She saw him then on the deck, his big hands braced on the rail. “For God’s sake, don’t move!” He raced for the gangway, ran down to the dock, turned, and started running toward her.

Hope made a strangled sound in her throat, dropped her bag, and started running back to him. Conn caught her in his arms, lifted her against his chest, and just held her.

“I can’t believe you’re really here.” A faint tremor ran through him, and her arms went around his neck.

“I was so afraid you wouldn’t want me,” she whispered against his ear.

“If you hadn’t shown up by the end of the week, I was coming to New York to get you.”

Her eyes slid closed. “I love you, Conn. I love you so much. I was a fool to leave.”

Conn set her on her feet and captured her face between his hands. “That’s right, you were. Don’t do it again.” And then he kissed her. The sweetest, fiercest kiss she had ever tasted.

“I love you so much,” she said again and smiled up at him through her tears. “When are you going to marry me?”

Conn threw back his head and laughed with pure joy.

Then the laughter slipped away. “Are you sure, baby? Are you sure this is what you want? If we get married, it’s got to be forever.”

Forever.
It was the most precious word she’d ever heard. “I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.”

Conn kissed her. “Then how about we get hitched tomorrow?”