A Wedding to Remember
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JoAnna Sims
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16
Chapter One
“Hello?”
It was the middle of the night, but for the last week Bruce Brand had been sleeping lightly, waiting for any news from the hospital. Savannah, his soon-to-be-ex-wife, had been in a coma after a near-fatal car accident.
“She’s awake.” It was Carol, his mother-in-law, on the other end of the call.
Bruce tossed the covers off his body, sat up on the edge of the bed and dropped his head into the palm of his free hand. “Thank God. Jesus—thank God.”
“She’s been asking for you,” Carol added after a pause.
Bruce lifted his head in surprise. “Asking for me?”
“Yes,” Carol confirmed matter-of-factly. “Will you come?”
“I’m on my way.”
Not thinking, just acting, Bruce stood up as he was ending the call. He grabbed his jeans, which were draped over a chair in the corner of the room, and tugged them on. With his jeans pulled up but still unzipped, he pushed the pillows off the chair, sat down and shoved his foot into his boot.
“What’s going on?” Kerri, the woman he’d been dating for the last six months or so, flipped on the light.
“Savannah’s awake.” Bruce rose after his boots were on.
In the yellow glow of the lamp, the nipples of her full, naked breasts peeking through her wavy, sun-bleached blond hair, Kerri wore an expression of disappointment mixed with resignation on her pretty girl-next-door face.
“And she asked for you,” Kerri stated in a monotone as she pulled the sheet up over her breasts and held it in place with her arms pinned to her sides.
Bruce didn’t bother tucking in his T-shirt; he ran his fingers through the front of his silver-laced black hair several times to push it off his forehead before he put his cowboy hat on. He checked to make sure his wallet was in his back pocket, then grabbed the keys to his truck off the top of the dresser.
“I’m sorry. I have to go.” When he leaned in to kiss her on the lips, she turned her head so her mouth was just out of reach.
Bruce straightened; he understood Kerri well enough to know that this was the beginning of a fight they were going to have later.
Kerri looked up at him, and he genuinely regretted the raw hurt he could easily read in her eyes.
“If this hadn’t happened,” Kerri reminded him, “you’d already be divorced.”
She was right about that. He’d spent the last two years paying for his lawyer to fight with Savannah’s lawyer. He’d received the final draft of the divorce agreement a couple of days before the accident. For now, the divorce was on hold. And, even though they hadn’t lived as man and wife for years, legally he was Savannah’s husband.
“She’s still my wife,” Bruce paused in the doorway to say. “I’ll call when I can.”
* * *
The night of Savannah’s accident, and every day since, had felt more like a surreal dream sequence than reality. For the last week, when he wasn’t working, he was with the Scott family, crammed into the small waiting room designated for families who had a loved one in the critical care unit. Truth be told, he’d never expected to speak to any of Savannah’s kin again, much less spend several hours a day in a confined space with them drinking burnt coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and trying to make sense out of the sudden detour his life had just taken.
When he arrived at the hospital, the feeling in the waiting room had changed dramatically from somber to celebratory. Savannah’s two sisters, Joy and Justine, were smiling with tears of relief and happiness drying on their faces. The peaches-and-cream color had returned to Carol’s plump face, and John, Savannah’s burly father, was actually smiling broadly enough so that the tips of his upper teeth, normally hidden from view behind his thick salt-and-pepper mustache and beard, were visible. But there was one person in the room who didn’t seem to be happy at all.
“Hi, Carol.” Bruce stopped next to Carol and the cowboy Savannah had been dating. He didn’t offer his hand when he said, “Leroy.”
Beside the fact that the cowpoke was dating his wife, Bruce had a hard time keeping his cool around Leroy. It was Leroy’s high-powered muscle car that Savannah had been driving the night of the accident. Leroy had been in the passenger seat and had walked away from the accident with a broken wrist and a couple of scrapes and bruises, while Savannah had shattered the windshield with her skull.
Leroy had a stricken look on his narrow face. “She doesn’t remember me.”
Carol put her hand on Leroy’s arm to comfort him. “She will, Leroy. The doctor said that it may take a couple of days. We just have to be patient and give her some time.”
The cowpoke left with his head bent down, and it occurred to Bruce, for the first time, that Leroy was in love with Savannah.
“What’s he talking about?” he asked Carol.
The Scott clan closed ranks and surrounded him as if they were worried he would try to escape.
Now Carol’s hand was on his arm. “Savannah’s neurologist thinks she may be experiencing some...temporary memory loss.”
No one spoke for a second, but all of the Scotts were watching him like a cat watching fish in a fishbowl. “How temporary?”
“They don’t know.” John spoke directly to him for the first time, instead of communicating through his wife and daughters as was his usual route.
“Bruce.” Carol’s fingers tightened on his arm. “Savannah doesn’t seem to remember the divorce.”
Until right then, Bruce hadn’t felt like he needed to sit down. Now he did. Wordlessly, he took a couple of steps backward and settled in a nearby chair.
Savannah’s family moved as one unit as they followed him, making loud scraping noises on the floor as they pulled chairs closer to him, boxing him in again. Bruce realized now that Savannah’s tight-knit family wasn’t trying to protect him—they were trying to make sure he didn’t leave.
As much as his in-laws knew about Savannah’s condition and potential recovery, they shared with him. Savannah was awake and talking; her speech was a little slurred, but she was making sense. But she had lost, at least temporarily, memory of the last several years. As far as Savannah was concerned, there was no divorce, they hadn’t spent the last two years fighting through their lawyers and she had never moved out of their home. In her mind, they were still happily married. Now he understood why she had been asking for him. Savannah needed her husband.
* * *
Waking up from a coma had felt like swimming up to the surface from the bottom of a seemingly bottomless pool. Savannah had felt tingly all over right before the awareness of the throbbing, stabbing pain coming from the left side of her head along with the achiness and stiffness that she felt all over the rest of her body. She had been petrified, unable to understand why she was in a hospital hooked up to monitors with needles in her arms. She didn’t have any memory of the accident; the last thing she could remember was kissing Bruce goodbye as he left to start his day on the Brand family ranch. Her husband, her one and only true love, was the first person she asked for when she had awakened from the coma. Savannah could count on Bruce to make everything okay for her. He always did. So, when she finally saw her husband walk through the doorway of her hospital room, Savannah reached out to him weakly, palm facing up, and the tears of confusion and terror she had been holding back began to flow unbidden.
“It’s okay, Savannah.” Bruce quickly dried her tears with a tissue. “I’m here now.”
She tried to pull the full-face oxygen mask off, so she could talk to him, to tell him that she loved him, but he stilled her hand by taking it into his and holding on to it firmly.
“You have to get your strength back,” Bruce told her.
The mask on her face made her feel claustrophobic, and she wanted to talk. Perhaps her memory was fuzzy about the events that had landed her in the hospital, but she had very distinct memories of her family and Bruce and nurses and doctors all talking around her when she was in the coma. She could hear them murmuring, but no matter how hard she tried to respond, she couldn’t. Now that she could talk, she wanted to talk.
“I love you,” she said, her words muffled by the mask.
Bruce looked at her with an expression she couldn’t place. Why didn’t he respond right away, as he always had before?
Finally, he squeezed her fingers gently, reassuringly. “I love you.”
Behind the mask, her smile was frail, her eyelids slipping downward from exhaustion.
“I’d better let you get some rest.” The sound of Bruce’s voice made her fight to open her eyes.
When he tried to let go of her hand, she held on, moving her thumb over the empty spot where his wedding band should be.
“Ring?” Her voice was so raspy from having a trachea tube down her throat.
Again, an odd expression flashed in Bruce’s sapphire-blue eyes as he glanced down at the ring finger of his left hand.
“It’s at home.”
“My...ring?”
“I have it,” Bruce told her after he dropped a quick kiss on her forehead. “I have your wedding ring.”
* * *
Retrograde amnesia secondary to traumatic brain injury and stroke. Bottom line, according to Savannah’s neurologist: Savannah had lost large swaths of her memory. With time and patience, some, or even all, of her memories could return. Until then...
“What are you suggesting that I do, Carol?” Bruce asked his mother-in-law in a lowered voice. “Move her back to the ranch?”
“We’ve all tried to talk her into coming home with us, but she wants to be with her husband.” Carol’s eyes were wide with concern. “She wants to be with you.”
Bruce held up his left hand to show Carol his wedding ring. “All she’s been talking about for the last two days is getting back into her own bed.”
Savannah had been moved to a regular hospital room soon after she had regained consciousness. Her appetite was healthy, she was laughing and talking. Her speech was still a little slurred from the dysarthria, her right hand was a little weak after the ministroke she had sustained, and of course, there was the memory loss. But even with all that, the doctors were getting ready to discharge her and continue with her care as an outpatient. Considering her near-death experience, Savannah was making a quick recovery.
“I know it. I know it.” Carol’s brows furrowed worriedly. “It’s gonna break her sweet heart when she finds out the truth.”
They had all hoped that Savannah’s memory would return on its own; none of them, including him, wanted to be the one to bring her up to speed on her failed marriage. But her discharge date was barreling toward them with no sign that she had any inkling that they were a signature away from being divorced.
Carol seemed to have something on her mind that she had been skirting ever since he had arrived at the hospital. He had a feeling he knew exactly what his mother-in-law was thinking.
“Would it be such a horrible thing if Savannah moved back to Sugar Creek with you?” she asked him after a couple of silent moments.
Bruce knew it was only a matter of time before Carol asked this question. It was a question that had crossed his own mind a time or two. But it wasn’t that simple. Savannah hadn’t lived at the ranch with him for a long while. And although he hadn’t changed much since she had left, she didn’t have clothing or personal items at the ranch.
“Maybe this could be a second chance for the two of you,” Carol added.
Carol had always wanted their marriage to work, and had always advocated for spending their attorneys’ fees on more marriage counseling.
“You still love her. Even after all that’s happened.” His mother-in-law looked up into his face hopefully. “Don’t you?”
“I’ll always love her,” he admitted because it was true. And even as angry as he had been with Savannah after all of the fighting and money wasted on attorneys fees, seeing her unconscious in critical care slammed home the truth for him: he still loved her.
Carol’s eyes welled with tears. She put her hands on his arm. “And she loves you.”
Savannah did love him. Again. It felt bizarre to walk into her hospital room and be greeted with that sweet, welcoming smile he’d first fallen in love with, her hazel-green eyes filled with love and her arms outstretched for a hug. In an odd twist of fate, Savannah was back to being the woman he had married. In an odd twist of fate, Savannah was back in his life.
“Now,” Bruce reminded Carol. “She loves me now. What happens when her memory comes back and she remembers that she doesn’t love me anymore?”
* * *
“I just want to go home,” Savannah complained to her husband. “I’m so tired of being here. All night long, people are barging into my room, taking my blood pressure, pumping me full of fluids! How can they expect anyone to get better in this place if they won’t let us sleep? I’m exhausted, and it’s all their fault.”
When Bruce arrived at the hospital after giving directions to his crew of cowboys at the ranch, Savannah was sitting up in a chair next to her bed.
“Can’t you bust me out of this place? I want to sleep in my own bed, with my own pillows.” His wife pointed to the small, rectangle pillow on the hospital bed. “That horrible thing is a brick disguised as a pillow.”
Every time he came to see Savannah in the hospital, she said something that made him laugh. Perhaps that was one of the initial qualities he had liked about her the first time he’d really taken notice of her. She was funny—funnier than any female he’d ever known. And although they had gone to school together virtually all of their lives, they hadn’t moved in the same cliques. Savannah had been on the honor roll and sang in the choir and was heavily involved with the school paper and the Beta Club for high achievers.
He’d been the captain of the football team, the popular kid, who happened to be going steady with Kerri Mahoney, the head of the cheerleading squad. He could barely remember seeing her in the halls at school when, as a junior at Montana University conducting research for a bachelor’s thesis, Savannah came out to Sugar Creek Ranch looking to study the grazing patterns of their cows. He would never forget how she looked that day—so serious with her round-rimmed glasses, loaded down with an overstuffed computer bag, and the ivory skin of her face devoid of makeup. Savannah hadn’t been the least bit interested in him. All of her focus was on his cattle. It had been a rare blow to his ego.
“Let’s get you out of this room. Go for a walk.”
With one hand, Savannah held on to the rolling stand that held her IV drip, and with the other hand, she held on to his arm. He had to cut his stride in half to make sure that he didn’t push her to go faster than her body could handle.
“I feel a breeze on my left butt cheek,” Savannah told him. “Take a peek back there for me, will you, and make sure my altogether is altogether covered.”
Bruce smiled as he ducked his head back to check out her posterior parts. “You’re good.”
Halfway down the hall, the pallor of Savannah’s oval face turned pasty-white. She swayed against him, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders.
“Whoa—we’ve gone far enough for today.”
She didn’t put up a fight when he helped her make a U-turn so he could take her back to her room. He didn’t want to wear her out completely; he still needed to have a serious talk with Savannah. Her doctors were ready to discharge her, and she was ready to leave. If she still wanted to go home to Sugar Creek after he told her the truth about the divorce, he was willing to take her back to the ranch with him. But she had to know the truth. It was her right to know.
He’d already discussed the best way to tell Savannah about the divorce with her doctors and her family. They all agreed that he could tell her privately, but that Carol and John would be on standby in case Savannah needed their emotional support. Bruce had never dreaded a conversation like he dreaded the one he was about to have with his wife. He didn’t want to hurt her—even when he had been at his angriest with her, he’d never wanted to hurt her.
After he got her settled back in bed, and the nurses had taken her vital signs and administered medication, Bruce pulled a chair up next to Savannah. He took her hand in his, and it surprised him how easy it was to fall right back into the habit of holding her hand.
“What’s bothering you?” Savannah asked him.
Bruce ran his finger over the diamond encrusted platinum wedding band that he had just recently slipped back onto her finger. Savannah didn’t remember the day she had taken that ring off and put it on the kitchen counter before she left their home for good. That memory was burned into his brain. He only wished he could erase it. After she’d left, he’d held that ring in his hand for hours, plotting its demise. He thought to throw it away, crush it in the garbage disposal, flush it, melt it down or pawn it. But in the end, he’d thrown it into a dresser drawer, mostly forgotten, until the early-morning hour when Savannah asked about it.
“You’ve lost a lot of time, Savannah.” Bruce started in the only way he knew how.
Fear, fleeting but undeniable, swept over her face. She was scared—scared about the memories she’d lost—and scared that they weren’t going to come back.
“Once I get back to my own home, surrounded by all of the things that I love, I really think that it’ll all come back.” Savannah had an expectant look on her face. “Don’t you?”
He wanted to reassure her, but he wasn’t as optimistic. She’d lost so much in the accident—it was hard for him to believe that Savannah would ever be exactly as she once was.
“I’d like to think.” Bruce tried to take the long way around.
“I just need to go home,” she restated. “That’s all. I just need to go home.”
Still holding on to her hand, Bruce cleared his throat. “Well—that’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”
With her head resting on the pillow, her dark brown hair fanned out around her face, her eyes intent on him, Savannah waited for him to continue.
“There’s a lot that’s gone on between us, Savannah. A lot that you don’t remember.”
Savannah’s fingers tightened around his fingers, that look of fear and discomfort back in her eyes. “You’re scaring me.”
He didn’t want to scare her—and he told her as much.
“Just tell me what’s on your mind, Bruce.”
Her entreaty was faint and laced with uneasiness. Savannah had always been a “pull the Band-Aid off quick” kind of person. She didn’t like to draw things out.
Bruce had spent the last two years fighting like cats and dogs with this woman, and now all he wanted to do was protect her from the pain they had willingly caused each other. He dropped his head for a moment and shook it. The only way out was forward.
“For the last couple of years, we’ve been going through a divorce,” Bruce finally mustered the guts to tell her. The sound of her sharp intake of breath brought his eyes back to hers. The look in her eyes could only be described as stunned.
Savannah looked down at their hands, at their wedding rings. She swallowed several times, her eyes filling with unshed tears, before she asked, “You weren’t wearing your ring. When I first saw you. You weren’t wearing it. Are we even...married?”
He held on to her hand even though it seemed as if she were already trying to pull it away. How many times had he wished for a second chance with Savannah? He hadn’t wanted it this way—never this way—but he would be a fool to let her slip away from him a second time without putting up one heck of a fight.
“We’re still married,” he reassured her. It wasn’t important, right at this moment, for Savannah to know just how close they had come to ending their marriage.
“I don’t remember...” Savannah stopped midsentence, tears slipping unchecked onto her cheeks.
“It’s going to be okay, Savannah.” He felt impotent to console her. There weren’t words that could make this right for her.
Savannah stared at him hard, with a look of distrust in her eyes. “How can you say that? We’ve split up, but it’s going to be fine? Why would you want a divorce? What happened to us?”
When he didn’t answer right away, she tugged her fingers loose from his hold.
“Tell me why.”
How could he explain the last several years of their marriage in a sentence or two? There were things that they had all agreed that Savannah didn’t need to know right now.
“I didn’t file for divorce, Savannah. You did.”
Bewildered, she stared into his eyes, seeming to be searching for answers. “I did? Why? Why would I do that?”
“We had a lot of problems we just couldn’t seem to work out,” he told her honestly.
Savannah covered her face with her hands. In a muffled voice, she said, “I just want to go home.”
Bruce moved to her side; sitting on the edge of the bed, he pulled her hands down from her face and tugged her gently into his arms so he could comfort her in the only way he knew how. He ran his hand over the back of her hair, the way she always liked him to do, and was relieved that, instead of drawing away from him, Savannah leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder.
“Come home to me, Savannah.” Bruce hugged his wife, his eyes closed.
Savannah broke the embrace and studied his face, looking directly into his eyes again when she asked him, “Do you still love me?”
The cowboy answered firmly and without any hesitation, “Yes, Beautiful. Yes, I do.”
