On Borrowed Time (10 page)

“Lindsey, you awake?” he asked.

“Yep,” she said.

“Ah, I wasn't sure if that was you or Heathcliff snoring,” he said.

“I don't snore,” she protested.

“You sure about that?” he asked.

Lindsey felt her face grow warm. When they had been dating, he had never mentioned that she snored.

“Yes!” she snapped. “Quite sure. You must have me confused with some other girl.”

Ha! Let him chew on that
, she thought.

“Could be,” he said. His tone was so matter-of-fact that Lindsey sat straight up and turned to look at him. When she did, she found him propped up with his chin in his hand, grinning at her.

“Oh, you—”

“Shh,” he said. “You'll wake the baby.”

Then he pointed to Heathcliff.

“Do not try to hide behind the furry boy,” she said. She looked him straight in the eye. “Are you seeing someone?”

“N
o,” he said. “I'd like to be, but I get the feeling she's not ready yet.”

“Maybe she's just waiting to see if you can learn to communicate more effectively,” she said. Lindsey could not believe those words had just flown out of her mouth. She wanted to smack herself in the forehead. Honestly, she sounded like a corporate chucklehead.

“Well, it's hard to find an opportunity to express myself what with that annoying, limelight-hogging Brit always circling her,” he said.

Lindsey knew him well enough to know he was making his voice sound grumpier than he actually was.

“He's married,” she said. “So I believe that locks him firmly into the just friends category.”

Sully stared at her for a second, and Lindsey felt like they were coming to an understanding. She settled back down on her pillow, shifting on her side so she could still see him while they talked.

“There is one other small detail,” Sully said.

“What's that?” For a panicked moment, Lindsey wondered if he had some secret bombshell to drop on her.

Was he married, too? Did he have a gambling, drinking, drug problem? Maybe he had an offspring from a previous relationship that he had neglected to mention. Lindsey felt her palms get sweaty as random thoughts flitted through her head, but she couldn't latch on to anything specific. It was all white noise.

“You may not have noticed, but I'm not a big talker,” he said. “The communication thing is challenging.”

She looked at him. That was it?

“Shocking, I know,” he said.

Lindsey couldn't help but smile. She supposed she could have rolled her eyes or made a sarcastic noise, but she was too afraid of derailing him when he was actually sharing to risk mucking it up.

“The thing is, just because I don't tell people how I'm feeling doesn't mean I'm not feeling anything,” he said. He stared into the fire for a moment. “I always thought it was obvious that if I showed up every day, I cared.”

“Sometimes people need a little more to go on,” Lindsey said.

“So my sister has been telling me,” he said. “And telling me and telling me.”

The harangued look he gave her told her more than words that his sister Mary had a lot to say about his relationship status.

“Sorry,” Lindsey said. And she was. Sully was a private man and she knew he had to be uncomfortable with everyone being up in his business.

“No, it's my own fault,” he said. “I should have talked to you before I cut things off between us. I should have given you a chance to explain what you were feeling before I walked.”

Lindsey would have disagreed just to be polite, but since he was right, it seemed silly not to agree with him. Over the summer when her ex-fiancé had arrived in town in a misguided attempt to win her back, they had gotten embroiled in a murder investigation that had nearly gotten them all killed.

Lindsey had naturally felt responsible for her ex's role in the situation and had felt terrible about what could have happened to him. Sully had misconstrued her concern for her ex as something more and had broken up with her to give her time to figure out her feelings. Lindsey had pretty much been mad at him ever since.

“It was a preemptive strike,” he said.

“You don't say,” she said. This time she couldn't keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

He flopped over onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “Couldn't I just drop and give you twenty and we could call it even?”

“You owe me at least fifty,” she said. “And no.”

“I could run five miles in the rain with a knapsack full of books on my back,” he said.

“Relationships are not boot camp,” she said. She had to look away so he didn't catch her smiling and mistakenly think she might give in.

“No, they're a lot harder,” he grumbled. “Fine. It was my first year in the Navy and I was stationed in San Diego. I met a girl, a gorgeous girl.”

While he paused to collect his thoughts, Lindsey chided herself for the spurt of jealousy that was wreaking havoc with her insides.

She wanted to ask how gorgeous and demand a description, but her good sense prevailed and she kept her mouth shut. She also promised herself that she would interrogate his sister Mary at their next crafternoon and see what she knew about the gorgeous girl from San Diego.

“We spent all of my free time together,” he said. “Her family was all career Navy, so I knew she understood the life. I really thought she was the one.”

“How old were you?” Lindsey asked.

“Twenty-two,” he said.

Lindsey nodded. It was all coming into focus now. That age was never kind to relationships. While old enough to drink, vote and go to war, picking a mate in the early twenties was fraught with hormone-induced disasters. The relationships that survived from those early years were the stuff of legends.

“I shipped out, a low-ranking officer on my first time out to sea. We were out in the Pacific on a guided-missile frigate. While there was a lot of excitement, a ship full of sweaty men sure does make whatever you left behind seem even more lovely in comparison.

“We stopped in Tahiti, which was unlike anything I had ever seen, and I found a pretty black pearl ring. It was set in gold nestled in a ring of diamonds. I knew I had to buy it for her. It wiped out all of my pay and my one credit card. But it was worth it because I was sure she was worth it.”

Lindsey had a feeling this wasn't going to end well. A part of her wanted to tell him to stop. She didn't need to know, but then, wasn't this what she had wanted from him? To know how he felt and why he felt that way? She hadn't expected that hearing the hurt in his voice would hurt her as much as it did.

She forced herself to buck up. “What happened?”

“When I got home, I called her up and asked her out to dinner,” he said. “I told her I had something to tell her and she said she had news, too.”

“When I picked her up, she threw herself at me,” he said. “It was a pretty passionate reunion.”

Again, Lindsey felt the green-eyed monster roar in her chest. She shook it off like a dog shedding rain off its fur.

“Over dinner I gave her the ring and asked her to marry me,” he said. “She hesitated for just a second. I knew I had surprised her, so that was all right. I was enthusiastic enough for both of us. I outlined my dreams for us, you know, big wedding, me moving up the ranks in the Navy, a houseful of kids, the whole shebang. She was quiet and looked like she was going to cry. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe she didn't want all that. I braced myself for a solid rejection and then she said yes.”

Lindsey was shocked. He had never mentioned being engaged before. She knew she shouldn't feel like it was a sort of betrayal, but that sort of thing was supposed to come up in the first few weeks of dating. That's what all those awkward meals over sourdough and linguine were made for—to discover the other person's previous engagements, marriages, time spent in jail and communicable diseases. How could he not have mentioned it?

“So you were engaged?” she asked. Her voice sounded faint and she cleared her throat.

“You would think so, wouldn't you?” he asked.

Lindsey turned and propped herself up on her elbows while Sully was still lying down. She stared at the top of his head, waiting for him to explain.

“I'm not following,” she prompted him, and Sully heaved a long sigh.

“My girl neglected to tell me one thing in her letters to me,” he said. “While I was gone, she had managed to catch herself a higher-ranking officer and married him.”

“S
he didn't!” Lindsey gasped. Out of anything he might have said, that she did not expect.

Sully looked rueful at her outrage.

“Yes, she did,” he said. He reached up and rubbed Heathcliff's ears. “Believe it or not, it gets worse.”

“She was pregnant,” Lindsey guessed.

“No,” he said.

“She already had a child?”

“No,” he said.

“What could possibly be worse?” she asked.

“She managed to conceal her marriage from me for two weeks,” he said. “So while I was walking around all hearts and flowers, she was running a covert op to rival the skills of a CIA operative to make sure I didn't find out the truth, which naturally, I did.”

Lindsey noticed that he didn't call
her
by name. She wondered if it was just habit or if there was a reason, like it was too painful for him. She was a librarian, an information gatherer of the first water, and details could not be ignored. She swallowed hard and then posed her question as simply and directly as she could.

“What was her name?”

“Kelly O'Laughlin,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “She was my wild Irish rose.”

Lindsey had to force herself not to let her eyebrows shoot up at the affectionate note in his voice. She frowned instead. Sully sounded almost fond of the woman who had tossed him aside so callously. Surely, he could not still be in love with her.

“Well, I should clarify that was the name I knew her by,” he said. “Her married name was different.”

Sensing that would cause him pain, Lindsey did not ask for her new surname.

“How did you find out?” she asked.

“An officer from my ship was childhood pals with her husband,” he said. “He'd heard that Kelly and I were out together romantically and he called me out for hitting on his friend's wife.”

Lindsey cringed. That could not have gone well.

“A fistfight ensued, which ended with me at Kelly's house confronting her about her marriage,” he said. “It wasn't pretty. I was hurt and angry. I said things I shouldn't have. She was from a military family, and the man she married had been a friend of the family forever. While I was gone, they started dating and their wedding had been a spur-of-the-moment idea right before he shipped out.”

He was quiet for so long that Lindsey was sure he wasn't going to say another word. Really, she couldn't fault him. It was much worse than her walking in on her fiancé while he was fornicating with one of his grad students. At least, her ex hadn't lied to her about it. He hadn't had the chance.

“She was having second thoughts about her marriage when I showed up. The man she married was significantly older and had already done the kid thing and didn't want any more. When I pitched my idea of the perfect life, I caused her to doubt her choice. She was feeling utterly confused, and I didn't help,” he said. “When I asked her why she said yes, she said she couldn't bear the thought of losing me.”

His voice sounded as if every word cost him, and Lindsey felt terrible that he'd had to go through such a horrible time and that in order to prove himself to her, he was being forced to relive it.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It sounds like it was rough all around.”

“Mostly for her. I wasn't very nice or understanding about the situation,” Sully said. “I was immature and angry. I lashed out at her and said some truly awful things.”

He sounded as if this was the part that bothered him the most. Lindsey couldn't imagine why. Kelly had lied to him; she had betrayed him. Why did he feel bad because he was angry about it? It seemed perfectly reasonable to her. Of course, she'd had visions of running her ex over with a car, repeatedly, when he had cheated on her, so maybe she wasn't the best judge of post-relationship niceness.

“Kelly begged me to give her a chance to figure it out. She said she needed time,” he said. “I told her I was through wasting time on her and that she wasn't worth it.”

Lindsey could hear the raw pain in his voice, and the hair on the back of her neck tingled with dread. In a flash of understanding, she knew there was more here, much more.

Her voice was just over a whisper when she asked, “What happened?”

“A couple of days after our argument, she fell asleep at the wheel of her car, exhaustion they said, she hit a tree head on and died instantly.”

Lindsey felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her stomach. Kelly's death was a punch to the chest. She felt small and petty for feeling jealous of a woman who had made a disastrous choice and died too young to fix it.

Lindsey knew Sully, and if she felt blindsided by the story's end, she could only imagine how he felt having lived it. He was not someone who lost his temper. Ever. In fact, the most negative emotion she'd seen rise up out of him was annoyance or irritation, and a person had to push him pretty hard to get either of those reactions.

To have spoken harshly to someone even if she deserved it, well, if Sully cared about the person, and obviously he had since he'd wanted to marry Kelly, then to have hateful words be the last words between them would dog him mercilessly.

Finally, finding her voice, she said, “Oh, Sully, I am so sorry. It must have been awful.”

“Her husband forbid me from going to the funeral. He blamed me for her death,” he said. “I did, too. If I hadn't been so hard on her, if I had been more understanding and given her the time she asked for . . .”

“Sully, you can't take the blame on that one,” Lindsey said. “I know that the tragedy surrounding her death makes you feel obliged to, but truly, if she had told you the truth from the start, none of those tragic events would have played out the way they had.”

“Or we would have argued earlier, and she could have died earlier,” he said. “I never should have bought the ring.”

“That's a lot of woulda, coulda, shouldas,” she said.

“She was wearing the ring when they found her body,” he said. “Not her wedding ring but the engagement ring I'd bought for her. It was another reason I was barred from her funeral.”

“That must have been brutal,” Lindsey said.

“I shipped out the morning of the service so I wouldn't be tempted to gate crash. I figured she deserved better than that,” he said. “I took the first available post and bugged out all the way to the Philippines.”

Lindsey didn't know what to say. She couldn't imagine how awful it must have been. Sully was the sort who would feel responsible for Kelly's death. It didn't matter that it was a chain of events that he only played a small part in; he would still think that if he had never asked her to marry him, she would still be alive today.

“It wasn't, you know,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“Your fault,” she said.

He made a grunting noise that she figured would translate into
yeah, right
in word form, a big blow off from any absolution. She had expected as much. She knew it wouldn't do any good to argue with him. He would believe what he chose to believe and he wouldn't be swayed, not about his responsibility at any rate.

“Thank you for telling me about this,” she said.

“You're welcome,” he said. He looked up at her. “It was important to me to help you understand why I did what I did between us.”

“You didn't want to get burned again,” she said.

“No question,” he agreed. “But it was more than that. I didn't want you to feel pressured to make a choice that you weren't ready to make. When I said I was walking away to give you time, I meant it.” After all these months, it finally came into focus why Sully had stepped back from their relationship when her ex had reappeared.

“So you were just trying to make sure you didn't put me through what Kelly went through?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. His voice was gruff, but Lindsey couldn't tell if it was exhaustion or emotion making it deeper than normal.

She rolled onto her back and thought about all that he'd shared with her. This was by far the biggest glimpse into the inner workings of Mike Sullivan than he had ever given her. While she felt badly that it was obviously hard for him, she couldn't help but be awed that he had willingly shared such a personal story.

“You are a brave man. I really admire you for telling me all of this,” she said. He didn't say anything, so she took it as encouragement that he didn't grumble in denial. “I mean, I know it wasn't easy for you to open up, and I know this experience must have been particularly painful to share.”

Still he was quiet, so she wondered if he was feeling that vulnerable ickiness a person feels when they've overshared. Yeah, she hated that feeling. She hurried to reassure him.

“You don't have to worry. I will never tell a soul what you told me. And I don't want you to feel badly for telling me all of this. Even before we were dating, I considered you a close friend and you can tell a good friend anything. I hope you know that.”

He said nothing and Lindsey feared she had offended him by calling him a friend. Oh, why were words so hard for her? She had spent the better part of her life with her nose in a book; surely she should be able to articulate how she felt or at least rip off someone who knew what to say better than she did.

Her brain did a quick scan of snippets from Emily Dickens, “Each life converges to some centre,” and W. H. Auden, “Let the more loving one be me.”
No, no, no! These would not do.

“Listen, Sully, I just want you to know that I truly appreciate what you told me, and I feel that I understand you and your actions better than I did before, and it truly helps me to rethink everything that happened . . . between us . . . before.”

At this point Lindsey really expected him to say something, anything, or to at least acknowledge what she was saying. But in usual Sully fashion, he had gone silent. A flash of irritation lit up inside her.

She sat up and turned around. She glanced over Heathcliff at Sully and found him dead asleep. She nodded. Well, at least that made sense. The poor guy had obviously taxed himself by speaking way more than usual and had plum tuckered himself out.

Lindsey put her hand on his soft wavy hair and leaned forward to whisper, “Good night, Sully, and don't worry, I have your back. Always.”

A soft exhale was his only response. Lindsey burrowed under her blanket and contemplated all that Sully had told her. She couldn't help but feel sorry for Kelly. Obviously, she had loved Sully, but she had wanted the status of wife to a higher-ranking officer more.

Lindsey couldn't pretend to understand that. Anyone could see that Sully was a great guy who would be successful at whatever he worked at, and if he had chosen to be career military, Lindsey had no doubt he would have been promoted right to the top.

Then she reminded herself that Sully and Kelly, and didn't those two names go together like salt and pepper, were very young. Navigating a long-distance relationship was hard at any age, but in the twenties it was particularly tricky.

That made her think of her brother and the beautiful woman who had absconded with him. Had long distance made her miss him so much that she felt the need to kidnap him? Or was her husband really so dangerous that she had to snatch Jack to protect him?

Lindsey felt the same sick dread she always felt when she thought about that moment at the pier when Jack was in the bottom of the boat speeding away. What had he gotten himself into? The dead man at the library made her feel like there was more going on than anyone was telling her.

Why had that man been following her and Sully tonight? Were they just being paranoid, or did he want something from them, okay, more accurately from her because she was Jack's sister? And if so, what?

A yawn crept up on Lindsey and she realized that despite the crazy events of the past few days, she was snug and cozy with Heathcliff and Sully beside her. Her eyelids drooped and she felt the woozy abyss open up before her. Without any hesitation, she fell fast asleep.

*   *   *

M
orning was unkind to people who slept on couches in their clothes, Lindsey decided as she examined her reflection in Sully's bedroom mirror. She borrowed his hairbrush and luckily he had a spare toothbrush. Really, she could not face the outside world without a good scrubbing of the pearlies.

Once they had fortified themselves with a pot of coffee, a stack of toast and some fluffy scrambled eggs, they bundled up in their coats and scarves and headed out into the crisp December morning.

Neither of them had broached the topic of last night's discussion this morning. Lindsey didn't because she didn't know what to say. She suspected Sully had said all he could muster, and she didn't want to be one of those women who talked a subject to death. Although she could easily discuss his past at greater length, she was pretty sure he had shared as much as he could for now.