Love Is Patient and A Heart's Refuge (10 page)

Dylan angled her a smile. “Maybe we won’t. What would you think of that?”

The teasing comment tantalized her, bringing back all the emotions of the kiss they had shared. A kiss she shouldn’t have allowed to happen.

She thought of the two of them staying here, in this self-contained place—each surge of the boat pulling them farther away from Vancouver and the complications of their lives there.

It was too compelling a thought and she couldn’t reply.

“What would you miss?” Dylan asked, carrying on the fantasy.

Lisa leaned over the side, watching the flow of water streaming past the boat.

She’d miss her brother, but she couldn’t tell Dylan that. What else did she have to miss? “I’d probably miss my blow-dryer,” she said with a grin. “Maybe my thesaurus. How about you?”

Dylan shrugged, looping his forearms over the wheel, looking straight ahead. “I don’t use a blow-dryer.”

“Just pomade, I understand. I bet you’d miss your family, though.”

“Probably.”

“Your mother, your father?” Lisa couldn’t stop herself. Each time she saw Alex and Dylan the strain between them bothered her more and more.

“I suppose I’d miss him, too.”

“You
suppose
you’d miss your father? That seems a strange way to say it.”

Dylan rested his chin on his stacked hands, the faint breeze teasing his hair. He sighed deeply. “I love my dad. I just don’t love what he does.”

“And what does he do?”

Dylan didn’t answer for a moment and Lisa kept silent, content to let the moment draw itself out.

“You know the story of the prodigal son?” he asked. “From the Bible?”

“My stepfather read it to me a couple of times,” Lisa said. “Next to the story of Joseph it was one of my favorites.”

“Did you ever feel sorry for the older brother?” Dylan tilted his head, held her gaze.

Lisa paused, pondering that thought. “Sometimes. A little bit.”

“I always did. I could never figure out why Jesus had to make that poor guy out to be the bad example.”

“Well, he was the ungrateful one.” Lisa leaned forward, then sat up as her life jacket dug in to her knees and the back of her neck. “He wasn’t happy to see his brother come back.”

Dylan noticed her discomfort. “You can take your life jacket off it you want.”

Lisa had donned the flotation device as a feeble protection after Dylan had kissed her. “That’s okay. I feel
safer with it on.” She realized the double entrendre too late. “So why do you sympathize with the older brother?”

“Because in many ways, I’m him,” Dylan continued, looking back at the boat. “Birth order aside, of course.”

“Ted being the wastrel, I take it.”

Dylan laughed. Corrected his course. “I have lost track of how many times my father has given Ted second chances.”

“Your father is a good man. I think he’s fair and trustworthy. It’s that quality that makes him do that.”

“My father broke trust with me when he put Ted in charge of the company here in Vancouver.”

The suppressed anger in his voice made her wince. “Ted is the older brother.”

“That was my father’s reason, as well.” Dylan straightened. “Anyway, that doesn’t concern me as much as it used to. Once I’m back on my own, the company can slide down the tubes the way it’s going now.”

“Surely the company isn’t doing that badly.”

Dylan shrugged. “Maybe not, but Ted has never been leadership material. The fact that money had gone missing for so long doesn’t say much about his control of either his wife or the company.”

Lisa felt a flare of hope. “What do you mean, control of his wife?”

“She’s the one who hired that accountant. He worked under her so in a way I hold her responsible for his actions.”

Don’t know if I can keep doing this. Ted needs to know.

Lisa felt as if the words on Gabe’s memo were burned on her forehead for Dylan and all the world to
see. “So you don’t know if Ted was in charge or if Dara was in charge.”

“I don’t know if Ted has ever been in charge of anything.”

Lisa knew she did not imagine the tone of bitterness in Dylan’s voice. “Surely Ted must have been able to do
something.
Why else would your father give him so much responsibility?”

“My father has always had a soft spot for Ted, and Ted has used that to his advantage. All my life I’ve tried to live up to Dad’s expectations. But it hasn’t done me any good.” Dylan flashed Lisa a casual smile. “And now that’s enough about my brother, my father and all the other things in my life that I can’t control.”

Dylan’s comment reflected feelings so close to hers that Lisa felt a flash of connection. “That makes me think about what the minister was talking about on Sunday. About letting go.”

“That’s one thing about religion I’ve always had the hardest time with. Letting go. Letting God.” Dylan spun the wheel of the boat. “I guess that’s why I stopped going to church.”

“I used to go to church,” Lisa said softly, looking at the islands ahead of them. “Me and my family.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

Lisa nodded. “My mother and I seldom went when I was growing up. When Rick and—” she stumbled, almost mentioning Gabe’s name “—and my mother got married, he was a strong Christian, so we all started going.” She bit back the flow of words—her nervousness making her chatty.

“So what made you want to go with my family?”

Lisa pulled her legs up, pressing her knees against the bulk of the life jacket. She cast about for the right way to articulate her reasons. “A promise I’d made.” And that was all she was going to tell him.

“Yet you seemed sad in church.”

Lisa only nodded. That day in church Dylan had given her his hankie to wipe her tears. He was probably wondering what that had been about. But she couldn’t tell him. Couldn’t share the sorrow she felt over her fractured life. Her parents dead. Gabe living in a dumpy apartment and all the while she was lying to one of the kindest families she had ever met.

“I missed my parents,” she said simply, surprising herself at her confession. “I didn’t think I had any more tears in me, honestly. It’s been ten years since they died.”

“It’s okay to be sad. It shows you loved them.”

“I enjoyed the service, too, though.” Through it all she had heard God calling her. Drawing her back into a relationship with Him. The only one that mattered.

“What did you like about it?”

“It would be easier if I said it was nostalgia,” she said. “The sort of thing happy families do. You know, the Norman Rockwell calendar pictures. But it was more than that. I realized I missed God.”

He didn’t respond to that. Their silence was broken only by the swish of water against the hull of the boat, the faint groaning of the mast and the line, holding the wind in the sails. A gull wheeled overhead, its piercing cry adding a melancholy note to the day.

After a while Lisa let her gaze wander around, over to Dylan. To her astonishment and discomfort, he was looking directly at her.

“You continually surprise me, Lisa Sterling,” he said quietly. “Just when I think I know who you are, something else comes up.”

“Better to be a surprise than a shock, I guess,” Lisa said, her forced laugh pushing away the gentle intimacy of his remark.

“You might be that, too.”

Foreboding slivered through her at his oblique comment. If he only knew….

She hugged her knees tighter, the plastic buckle of the life jacket digging in to her legs. A small penance for her evasions and secrets.

Enough, enough. She was doing what she had to do. Her first priority was Gabe.

“Tomorrow is my parents’ anniversary party,” Dylan said after a while. “You still up to going?”

She realized he was giving her a gracious out, and for a flicker of a heartbeat she was tempted to take it. “I promised to come to both events—the wedding and the anniversary,” she said, resting her chin on her knees. “I like to keep my promises.”

In her peripheral vision she saw Dylan nodding his head, the faint breeze teasing his hair around his face. “I sensed that about you. You are an honorable person, Lisa.”

She didn’t allow herself to follow that comment through. She shifted in her seat.

“You getting bored?” he asked.

She quirked a challenging grin at him. “What if I say yes?”

“Then I’ll make you unbored.” Dylan winked at her, spun the wheel and pulled in two lines. The boat listed and sped up. “Hang on and lean back. We’re going for broke.”

Lisa clamped one hand over her mouth, stifling a squeal as the boat lurched. Dylan laughed aloud, a spray of water flecking his hair.

But Lisa said nothing, her heart thrumming with a mixture of anxiety and exhilaration as she clung to the boat. They went faster, skimming over the water, the hull thumping over the waves, the sound getting louder.

Dylan flashed a grin at her, as if taunting her. On they raced, the boat tilting so far that all Lisa saw when she looked down from her perch was the deep gray water rushing past the boat.

Dylan looked like a pirate, his shirt billowing around him, his hair falling over his face as he held the wheel. Water sprayed as they flew over the water, and Lisa laughed out loud in sheer pleasure.

She didn’t want him to stop. She wanted this mad rush of freedom to take them away from Vancouver and the complications of their lives back there. Just her and Dylan.

When Dylan finally eased the sheets and the boat slowed, Lisa felt a thrum of disappointment.

“I’m impressed, Lisa,” Dylan said. “I thought for sure you were going to yell at me to stop.”

“No. It was great.” Lisa couldn’t stop grinning. “What a rush.”

Their eyes met. Held by the shared experience. And when Dylan held out one hand to her, Lisa didn’t even stop to think. She slipped off her seat, took his hand and let him pull her to his side.

Then she let him kiss her again.

And this time she gave in to an impulse and lifted her hand to his head. Slipped her fingers through his thick, dark hair and let herself pretend that all this—the kiss, Dylan, this moment—was normal.

She didn’t want to contemplate how this would end. For now she had this moment and she intended to treasure it. To savor it.

A memory for her to draw on when this was all over.

“O
kay, Lisa, who is this man and what did you do with my brother?” Ted stood in the side doorway of his parents’ house, barring Dylan’s and Lisa’s entrance. He grinned at his own joke, his hazel eyes flicking over them both in unwelcome speculation. “The Dylan Matheson I know would never play hooky and go sailing in the middle of a weekday no matter how pretty the girl. And he’s been with enough.”

The afternoon had been so wonderful, so entirely perfect, Ted’s insinuations couldn’t even get a rise out of Dylan.

“I thought maybe you were avoiding me and Dara,” Ted said.

“I didn’t know you were coming for supper. And I took Lisa sailing because she’s never been before,” Dylan said, waiting for his brother to let them by. He glanced at Lisa, her hair a tousled mass of curls framing her face. She had taken off her hat and her cheeks had
been kissed by the sun. She looked adorable and he had to resist the urge to kiss her again.

“Mom was getting ready to call up the Coast Guard.” Ted stood aside to let them by.

“She knew where I was,” Dylan said easily.

Stephanie stood with her back to them, wiping the table, when they entered the kitchen, Dara was loading the dishwasher and Erika was leaning on the counter chatting on the phone.

Alex looked up from the newspaper he was reading at the table and smiled at Lisa, then Dylan.

Dylan held his glance a moment, his mind sifting back to what he and Lisa had talked about. He wished he could understand exactly what his father was doing. He wished he could simply, as Lisa suggested, trust his own father.

Stephanie, catching the direction of Alex’s gaze, looked over her shoulder, then straightened, her hand on her chest. “There you two are. What happened?”

Dylan shrugged away her concern, though he couldn’t ignore the guilt her worried face gave him. “Lost track of time,” he said, bending to kiss her on the cheek.

“My Dylan? Losing track of time?” Stephanie held his shoulder with one hand and gave him a long, hard look. She looked over at Lisa as if for confirmation of what she had just heard.

“Our brother, transforming into a human being right in front of our eyes,” Ted said, dropping into a chair beside his father.

“Hey, Dylan.” Amber came up behind him, grabbed Dylan and spun him around. “Where were you? We were getting worried. You’re never late.”

“Lisa and I went sailing,” he said, flicking his little sister under her chin.

Amber blinked. Threw a puzzled glance at Lisa. “In the middle of the day?”

Dylan shook his head at his family’s unsubtle bewilderment. They made him sound positively neurotic.

“Did you two have supper? I’ve some left,” Stephanie said, flipping her hand in the direction of the kitchen. “Ted and Dara were coming over, so I had lots.”

“Thanks, Mom, but we grabbed a burger at a drive-through on the way home.”

“Burgers? My goodness, you must have been hungry,” Dara said.

“Some people like burgers,” Ted said, glancing at his wife.

Dara turned away, her shoulders stiff. The tension between Dara and Ted was palpable, making Dylan thankful he and Lisa had missed supper.

“Hey, Dylan, Erika and I are going to a movie. We’re leaving in half an hour,” Amber said. “Do you wanna come?”

Thankful for the diversion, Dylan turned to Lisa. What better way to finish off a perfect day than by spending it in a darkened movie theater with Lisa? Even if he had to do it with his little sisters.

“What do you think, Lisa? Are you up to a movie?”

Her glance darted to Dara, then back to him. “I…I don’t know. I, uh, was thinking I might go out on my own.”

He frowned at her, puzzled at the change in her
demeanor. All the way home she had been a laughing, pleasant companion alternately serious and teasing, never at a loss for words. But since Ted had met them at the door she had said absolutely nothing.

“Sure. I could bring you wherever you want to go.”

“No…no…it’s okay. I’d like to go by myself.”

Her hesitant speech was nothing like the laughing, confident girl he had spent the day with. What was going on? “Are you sure? I don’t mind driving you.”

“Goodness, Dylan. Let the girl be. I doubt she’s spent more than a minute away from any Mathesons since she got here,” Ted said with a forced laugh.

Dylan threw him a warning glance, peeved both with his brother’s interference and Lisa’s sudden change.

But Ted’s words reminded him of the rehearsal party. Lisa had elected to stay home then, as well, and when he’d come back early, she’d appeared to be just coming back from somewhere. And had acted just as unsettled.

Lisa toyed with her hat, her eyes avoiding his. “I better get going,” she said quietly.

Fifteen minutes later Dylan stood by the window of the study, watching Lisa get into a cab and leave. Dylan propped his shoulder against the window, pondering the puzzle of Lisa. Just before she left he’d overheard her talking to someone on her cell phone in her bedroom and she hadn’t sounded happy.

The kisses they’d shared this afternoon had been surprising and had created a need to know more about her. So on the way home he had tried to draw more out of her. Her past life. What she did for fun. How she spent her time.

And while she was fun and witty and chatty, what he had found out could be written on a postage stamp.

Dylan pushed himself away from the window, his thoughts an unorganized chatter. He wanted their relationship to change. To deepen. This afternoon was a movement in that direction.

But where was it going?

He was leaving as soon as he was finished here. And when they got to Toronto, they would be going their separate ways.

They didn’t have to.

He allowed the thought to settle. Played with it. He knew that compared to any other girl he had ever dated, she was by far the one he felt the closest to. The one who filled a need in him that others didn’t.

But there were questions surrounding her that needed answering before they moved on. And she didn’t seem willing to answer them.

With a light sigh he walked past her computer, glancing down as he did so. His eye caught the crumpled invoice lying beside it. When he had given it to her this morning he’d been quite sure there were two pieces of paper stuck together. But Lisa had said it was only a single invoice.

He picked it up, looking at it more closely. The invoice was white, but it had bits of yellow paper still clinging to it. He was right. There had been another paper.

He flipped through the file, but found no similarly stained memo. In fact, he found no yellow paper at all.

So where was it?

Dylan closed the file, impatiently tapping his fingers on the green folder. Why had she lied to him about it?

And where was she going right now?

Frustration battled with weariness. His father had asked Dylan to come and sort the business out but wasn’t helping him. The woman he was growing more and more attracted to was becoming more and more of a mystery.

What was he doing here anyway?

“So what does this mean?” Lisa laid the memo carefully down on Gabe’s table, her heartbeat pushing heavily against her ribs.

Gabe read the memo and clutched the back of his head with his hands. “Where did you get that?”

“It was stuck inside an invoice that was stuck to the outside of a file. I’m guessing Dylan and I weren’t supposed to see it.” Lisa leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. “What couldn’t you do anymore, Gabe? What did you neglect to tell me?”

“Did you show that to anyone?” He spoke without any of his previous bluster.

“No. I had to lie to Dylan about it. I hid it in my bedroom.” Lisa cringed inwardly as she thought once again of the subterfuge she’d had to practice to get the memo to Gabe without Dylan’s knowledge. It hurt to think of the puzzled look on his face this evening when she had said she wanted to go out.

She had never been very good at lying. And after the two kisses they’d shared, her duplicity bothered her even more.

Gabe leaned his head against the window, rolling his forehead back and forth. “Have you gotten into the files in the office?”

“No. Dylan and I spent the day sailing. Dara was gone and Alex didn’t think we should go looking without her around.”

Gabe hit the window with his fist and spun around. “I thought I threw that memo away.”

“You didn’t answer my question, Gabe. What does it mean?”

Gabe fell into the chair across from her, looking defeated. “You have to promise to just listen, okay?”

“Listen to what?” Her impatience made her short-tempered. “You haven’t said anything worthwhile yet.”

“Just listen.” He held his hand up in warning. He tunneled his hands through his hair, clutching his skull. “Remember how when I first came to Vancouver, I had trouble finding a job? So I was running out of money and I met some guy.”

Lisa sat back, clutching her midriff with her arms, an all too familiar tingle of dread beginning in her stomach. She bit back her anger and listened as Gabe had asked her to.

Gabe quietly related a story that echoed ones she had heard before. The wrong crowd. Questionable activities. A brush with the law.

“Lucky for me, they couldn’t pin anything on me because I wasn’t really involved. Just along for the ride. So I got off. No criminal record. Nothing. I made a deal with God that I would never do that stuff again. Then I met a girl. A nice girl. She worked for Matheson Telecom. Told me they were looking for an accountant. So I applied and got the job.” Gabe stopped here, tapping his thumbs together. He gave Lisa a wavering
smile. “Needless to say, I didn’t make any mention of my little adventure. Things were going really well. Then one day I found a set of duplicate invoices. One was for less than the other. I wasn’t supposed to see them both. I asked Dara and she sat me down and told me if I didn’t keep my mouth shut I would get fired. She said she had asked around, had talked to that girl. She said she knew about my activities and that I had lied on my application about any involvement with the law.” Gabe closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with his forefinger. Just as he used to when he was a little boy. “And I had. But what could I do, Lisa? Nothing came of it. Nothing happened. Next thing I know she was getting me to do just the work on her father’s company. They’re customers of Matheson Telecom. It looked a little fishy to me and when I asked her about it, she said to mind my own business. Then there was talk around the office of missing money. I got scared, wrote the memo and got fired.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this right away?” The dread in Lisa’s stomach grew with each word her brother uttered. “Why didn’t you go to Alex?”

Gabe shook his head. “And tell him what? That I lied on my job application? Tell him that I thought his daughter-in-law was cheating him?”

Lisa thought of her own job application and her own evasions. She could hardly call Gabe out for that when she wasn’t innocent, either.

“Did you do anything wrong, Gabe?”

He looked away. “I did what I was told until I realized it was stupid to be manipulated like that.”

Dread clutched Lisa with chilly fingers. “Did you take any money, Gabe?”

Gabe’s gaze flew to hers. “Not a penny. That’s why you have to get into my computer. That will let you know if anything’s been done on it. It’s the only way she could have moved stuff around.” Gabe held Lisa’s gaze. “Didn’t you go to the office this afternoon?”

Lisa pushed back a beat of guilt. “No, I told you—Dara wasn’t in and Alex wouldn’t let us access the files without her being around.”

“I’ll give you my password to get into my computer. If it’s still there.” He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote something down on it. “This is it. You don’t have much time, you know.”

Lisa knew that far too well. Each day she spent with Dylan brought them closer to the end of their time here. And each visit to Gabe created a combination of subterfuge and fear of being found out.

She glanced at her watch. She didn’t dare stay away too much longer.

“I better go,” Lisa said, getting up. She leaned over her brother and dropped a light kiss on his head. “You take care. I’m going to see if we can get into the office soon. Love you.”

Gabe caught her by the hand. “I never tell you often enough, do I? How much you help me?”

Lisa smiled down at him, her heart overflowing with love. “I think I know,” she said softly, absently brushing a strand of hair away from his forehead, just as she used to do when he was younger. “I have to help you. You’re all I’ve got.”

“Now Dylan’s got himself a girl, “And she’s a pretty thing.”

Erika and Amber stood on a stage at the front of the hall decorated with balloons and ribbons in honor of Alex and Stephanie’s anniversary. Laughter swept over the large group of people seated at tables as the twins looked up from the crumpled paper they held between them.

“We hope that this one sticks around “Long enough to get a…”

Erika paused, her grin mischievous.

“Raise,” she said.

“That doesn’t rhyme,” someone called out from the crowd.

“Neither does stock option,” Amber said, singling Dylan out with her smile. “And that was our only other choice.”

Lisa glanced sidelong at Dylan, wondering how he took this bantering. But Dylan was sitting back in his chair, his tie loosened, his hands folded over his stomach, laughing as hard as anyone else.

Amber sent a wink in Lisa’s direction. “Thanks, Lisa, for daring to show up to yet another Matheson family function, Mom and Dad’s anniversary. You deserve a medal.”

“She deserves our sympathy,” Ted called out in an overloud voice from another corner of the hall.

Lisa couldn’t stop the blush that reddened her cheeks at the implications in the comments. Nor could she stop the surge of guilt at the deception she and Dylan were playing out.

And the deception she herself was playing out on a family that had accepted her with open arms and an open heart.

She endured an instant of pain, intense and familiar, remembering the many times she and Gabe had stood in the hallway of a new home, wondering how they were going to fit in. The Mathesons had taken in Dylan’s unknown girlfriend with grace and aplomb and love. Even the twins had accepted her and had offered clothing and makeup and little inside jokes and stories about Dylan that made him both more endearing and kind.