Left at the Altar
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Justine Davis
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Chapter 1
Hospitals. He’d sworn once that he would never set foot in one again. But here he was, Sean Holt thought as he reached the closed double doors, turned and began crossing the small waiting room. If he didn’t love his sister so much...
“Sean, why don’t you sit—”
“I’m going outside,” he said abruptly, and headed for the doors that led out to the parking lot of the small, private hospital. If his mother told him one more time to sit down and stop pacing, he was going to lose it. He didn’t want to stop pacing. He didn’t care that he would probably pay for it later. He needed the distraction.
The moment a rush of cooling afternoon sea breeze hit his face, he knew he should have done this long ago. Not that it eased his worry about Stevie, but it seemed like he’d been in that tiny room forever. And he absolutely, positively detested hospitals. He’d spent more time than he’d ever wanted to in them, all those years ago.
For some reason he kept thinking about Aurora Sheridan’s father. The old man had died in this very hospital three weeks ago, of an unexpected heart attack. When he’d read the headline story in the local paper, he had wondered if Rory would come back, then decided it didn’t matter at all if she did or didn’t. It didn’t even matter that the old man was dead. He even believed it. Almost.
He supposed he could walk over and see if Pete was still at the clinic next-door—no, Sean thought, he couldn’t. He’d worked himself into a limp now, and he could feel the strain in his lower back and the tightness that told him his leg was swelling in the socket of the prosthesis. Pete would notice instantly, and Sean would get another of his lectures.
He turned and headed toward the driveway instead, idly noticing the bright red Emergency sign. No ambulances, thankfully, Sean thought as he kept going. Just a golf cart used by the hospital staff, and a sleek, expensive European sedan parked sideways near the entrance.
Maybe he would go see Pete, after all. Maybe a good lecture about changing stump socks when he should would take his mind off Stevie and what she was going through. He knew she truly wanted this baby, but...
As he neared the crookedly parked car, Sean heard the emergency room doors open. He had barely noticed it was a woman exiting when he nearly let out a low whistle at the sight of her face. She had a shiner around her right eye the likes of which he’d never seen before. He’d had a few of his own during his football days, but never one that looked like that. This woman looked like...
Rory.
It was Rory. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t seen her for five years. He knew. And all the effort he’d put into banishing her from his memory proved wasted in that first split second of recognition.
And all he could do was stand there, awash in the memories he’d tried so hard to bury, memories of an afternoon five years ago that had begun so hopefully and ended so grimly. Oddly, it was Katie, his little niece, he thought of first; her crying had signaled the beginning of the disaster.
* * *
“But I wanna be a flower girl!” Katie wailed from the foyer of the packed church, all the wedding guests turning to look.
Sean knew instantly that something was wrong, but not until he was standing on Rory’s front porch, her cool, formal note saying she couldn’t go through with the wedding clutched in his hand, did he realize just how wrong. The moment the carved oak door swung open and he saw her father there, he knew....
His heart sank; the man was gruff, overbearing and a bit pompous, and he hadn’t liked Sean from the moment he’d met him. He hadn’t come out and said why, but Sean had a very good—and very bitter—idea.
“I see you couldn’t leave well enough alone,” Jacob Sheridan said, his voice revealing the disdain his controlled expression hid.
Sean ignored both the disdain and the words. “Where’s Rory?”
“Aurora is no longer your concern.”
Aurora. That was how she’d signed the note, too. It was crazy, he thought, that the worst part of it was that name. In the beginning he’d teased her about it, about how her nose went up automatically when she corrected anyone who shortened it. It was pretentious, he told her, purposely annoying her by using the “Rory” he preferred. And then, one day, she had stopped being annoyed and begun looking at him in a way that told him his ploy to get her attention had worked.
Now she was back to Aurora. And that, more than anything else, told him how serious she was. The case of prewedding nerves he’d noticed in the past two weeks had clearly been much more serious than he’d realized. His jaw clenched as he faced her father.
“The hell she isn’t. Today is our wedding day.”
“Not anymore. The wedding is off. It should never even have been planned, let alone allowed to go this far. I should have put a stop to it long ago.”
“Damn it,” Sean snapped, “where is she?”
“I suggest you leave, Mr. Holt.” The man had never once called him Sean, not even after the engagement was announced. “The wedding is off, and if you love my daughter as you say you do, then surely you understand why.”
A chill swept over Sean, cooling his anger. He had the sudden feeling that he was about to be hit by a train but was powerless to get out of the way.
“Why?” he asked softly.
“My daughter deserves the best,” Sheridan said, his lip curling. “She deserves a man who will make something of himself in the world. A man who can keep her—” he gestured toward the lavish interior of the house behind him “—in the life-style she’s grown up with.”
Again Jacob Sheridan’s gaze lowered, his gaze flickering downward over Sean’s body to his legs, as if for emphasis. “Most importantly, she realizes now that she deserves a man who’s whole. Not,” he added bluntly, “a cripple she’d have to close her eyes to stomach going to bed with.”
* * *
The memory of those cold words, so long buried, hit Sean now like a blow to the gut as he looked at the woman who had delivered that blow. He had gone on a year-long binge of self-pity after his humiliation at her front door, leaving town, later even the state, trying to pretend she’d never existed. He’d once thought that losing his leg would be the worst pain he’d ever face in his life; he had been a fool to think that fate was through with him.
When he had at last come back, Stevie had quietly told him that Rory was gone, nothing more. It had been Stevie’s husband, Chase, with more experience at facing all the ugliness at once, who’d told him that she’d left town within a week of running out on him, and with another man—a rich, whole man. Sean had known Chase wasn’t being cruel. He was furious, and his anger had, in an odd sort of way, made Sean feel better.
In his shock now, it took Sean a moment to realize she was still heading straight toward him. She was dressed in a slim, pink silk suit—odd, she’d never cared for pink—matching pumps and small pearl earrings. He could see the golden glint of the chain that held a heart-shaped locket beneath her throat. A set of keys dangled from her fingers, on a ring that also held the symbol of the white car he was standing beside. Hers? He glanced again at the luxury vehicle. Of course, he thought, bitterness welling up inside him.
She didn’t even look at him, just reached out to put the key in the door. Sean’s mind was screaming a warning, ordering him to turn and walk away before she looked at him, but he couldn’t seem to do it. She turned the key, then reached for the door handle.
“Nice shiner.”
Rory jerked, and her face went white, stark beside the ugly bruise. She looked up and gasped, one slender hand going to her mouth.
God, what the hell had possessed him to say that? Sean wondered as he stared at her. And why was she looking at him that way? Shocked, yet as if she’d expected this meeting. Or dreaded it. The silence spun out, building its own kind of pressure, until at last she spoke.
“I...I bumped into something.”
Her voice was tiny, wavering under Sean’s stare. He felt a ridiculous urge to comfort her. He was saved from his own foolishness by the approach of a young man in hospital whites. Sean hadn’t even heard the doors open.
“Are you all right, Miss Sheridan?”
Miss Sheridan. So she hadn’t married the guy. Or it hadn’t lasted. Not, Sean told himself, that it mattered one whit to him.
“Is this man bothering you?” The young man gave Sean a sideways look that was rank with suspicion.
Jeez, he thought, you’d think I gave her the black eye.
“N-no,” Rory said, in a stumbling little voice Sean couldn’t believe was hers. “He’s not. I’m fine. Thank you.”
The man lingered, eyeing Sean warily, as if assessing his six-foot height, the breadth of his chest and shoulders, lingering on the strongly muscled arms that stretched the sleeves of his polo shirt. Try pushing a wheelchair around for a couple of years, Sean silently told the man.
“We’re...old friends,” Sean managed to tone down the irony in his voice.
When Rory didn’t protest, the young man nodded and left. Silence spun out between them as they studied each other. Her hair was as honey blond as always, although now it was clawed back in a tight little bun. She seemed thinner, Sean thought, minus weight she couldn’t really afford to lose.
She looked older, of course, Sean thought, but it wasn’t just that. There was a difference about her, an edginess, like some frightened creature that wants nothing more than to find a safe lair. There was a fragility about her, a brittleness that had nothing to do with the ugly bruise that marred her face.
And when his gaze went back to that face, there was a look in her hazel-green eyes that even the bruise couldn’t hide. She was watching Sean with a hunger that was so palpable it staggered him. And then, in the instant he’d noticed it, it was gone. Or hidden, behind an emotionless mask he’d never seen her wear before.
That, he told himself, didn’t matter, either. None of it did. Not anymore. It was ancient history. He hadn’t wasted time or energy on regrets for years, just as he’d given up railing at fate for the loss of his leg. It had taken him a long time, but he had finally realized that both activities were useless.
“I didn’t know you were back,” he said, striving for a casual tone. Simply two old friends, meeting unexpectedly, he told himself.
“I...just moved back. A couple of weeks ago.”
“To your father’s house?”
“Yes.”
Sean lifted a brow, wondering why he hadn’t seen her before now. Everyone ran into everyone in La Pacifica in the space of two weeks. It was a tiny coastal town in northern San Diego County, with this the sole hospital and medical building, and with the single sizable shopping center across the street. The only residential areas were on the bluffs overlooking the ocean, where Chase had built Stevie the house that was so special to them, the apartment complex where Sean himself lived, and the older, wealthy area in the foothills, which he hadn’t gone near for five years.
“I...don’t get out much,” she said, as if she’d read his thoughts.
Don’t get out much? Rory? Rory, who used to be on the go eighteen hours out of every twenty-four, who begrudged the necessity of sleep, who had once joked that she would simply have to live to be one hundred years old, because it would take that long to see all she wanted to see and do all she wanted to do? She had infected him with her enthusiasm, made him see a whole new world opening up before him to replace the one that had been taken away.
He didn’t like remembering the way she’d made him feel back then. It made him realize painfully what a young fool he’d been, believing life had handed him something in place of his loss, believing that there truly was some fairness in life after all, that Rory would balance the scales that had been so viciously tilted the day a drunk driver had forced a college football team’s bus off the road....
“With those kind of wheels,” he said hastily, gesturing at the sleek sedan, “I’m surprised you’re not driving around all the time.”
“I...don’t get out much,” she repeated.
Her voice, small, hesitant, almost timid, bothered him more than he cared to admit. It was so unlike her. Or, at least, unlike the Rory he remembered. The Rory who had been the bright sun come to warm his dreary days. The Rory who had made him hope for things he’d given up on. The Rory who had stirred his blood like no other.
And still did. It hit him like a blow to the belly. God, after all this time, after what she’d done, how the hell could he react like this? How could he be standing here, his pulse suddenly racing? If anything, he should be feeling distaste, or at the least indifference. Certainly not this sudden male-female awareness.
He automatically took a step back, as if distance were a defense against her potent lure. He knew better, he thought ruefully. Distance had never saved him before; she’d always been able to turn him to mush from across a room with one look from those wide eyes.
She seemed to find the distance enough, though, because after a moment she spoke. Her words came softly, with an undertone that told him she’d tried to hold them back.
“You look...good, Sean.”
“For a cripple, you mean?”
He hadn’t meant to say it, and he certainly hadn’t meant to sound so acid. The old, forgotten bitterness had risen up out of nowhere, and the words were out before he could stop them.
Rory paled. Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Then she whirled and yanked the car door open. Just as quickly, she was inside and slamming the door. She had the engine started and was pulling away in seconds. Sean had to back up to get out of the way of the black sedan that pulled out just behind her. But he couldn’t seem to turn away; he watched the white car until it was out of sight.
Even after it had vanished, he just stood there, looking after the woman who was supposed to have been his wife.
* * *
It was well past ten when he got home. He tugged off his jacket and sat down wearily. Thoughts tumbled through his mind in a sort of ricocheting chaos. It had been a tough day for everyone. Stevie’s lengthy labor had been hard on her and on Chase, but the squalling, healthy boy who had resulted had brought tears to everyone’s eyes. Sean had assigned himself his own task, that of keeping his fussy mother under control—and of shooing both her and his father down to the nursery to look at their new grandson when he caught the plea in Chase’s eyes. Stevie, he thought, was going to have her work cut out for her if she wanted another child; Sean doubted Chase would ever willingly let her go through this again.
Chase, wreck that he was, had thankfully accepted Sean’s offer to pick up his parents at the airport and bring them back to the hospital to greet their new grandchild. His sister, Cassie—better known to the world as Cassandra, the newest supermodel—was off on a photo shoot in the Caribbean somewhere and wouldn’t arrive for a while yet. Sean was looking forward to that. Cassie was the one sure way to tease Chase; the resemblance between them was startling.
Stevie had been wearily grateful when Sean had also promised to go right to little Katie and tell her that her mom was all right, and that she was still the much loved firstborn. Sean didn’t mind all the tasks. They had kept his mind occupied. Occupied almost enough to make him stop thinking about the fact that his sister and her husband were sharing a joy he doubted he would ever know. Occupied almost enough to ignore his mother’s semiaccusing sidelong glances, as if she were thinking the same thing. And occupied almost enough to keep it off a certain green-eyed honey-blonde.
But now there was little left to distract him except his own exhaustion, and even that wasn’t enough to keep him from thinking about her.
So think about her, he told himself. You haven’t, not for a good long time. Drag it all out and look at it. Get it over with. Maybe then, when you think about what she did, you’ll get over thinking about how she looked today, not just older but...worn down somehow. As if life had gone sour on the golden girl.
The golden girl with the extremely black eye.
The image of Rory’s battered face lingered vividly in his mind, and Sean remembered the way the hospital staffer had looked at him. Suspiciously, assessingly. And the way Rory had claimed—rather weakly—that she had done the damage herself. Rory, whose innate grace had always made him think of a dancer, limber, lithe and perfectly balanced. He’d been very aware of that quality in her, he supposed because he’d lost so much of the athletic grace he’d once had.
The Rory he remembered might have had an accident, but she would never have just “bumped into” anything hard enough to cause that kind of damage. Nor would she have sounded so panicked at admitting it if she had. Which left a possibility he didn’t much care for.
Wrong, he corrected himself. You don’t care at all, remember? She’d gotten herself into this. She’d made her choice. She’d chosen the whole man, and he was probably beating her. A bleak sense of irony filled him. She hadn’t been able to face life with an amputee and had apparently wound up living with an abuser instead. If it was even the same guy she’d left him for in the first place.
And it was those memories, the memories of the pain-filled days after her choice had ripped him apart, that enabled him at last to convince himself that he didn’t care one bit what Ms. Aurora Sheridan had gotten herself into.
He let his head loll back wearily on the sofa. His missing ankle itched; he was halfway to scratching it when he remembered and stopped. He stood up long enough to shuck his jeans, catching the hem of the left leg with his toes and tugging it off with the ease of long practice. Sitting back down, he methodically removed the lightweight graphite carbon prosthesis and peeled back the stump sock that had kept him from developing abrasions or blisters during the long hours he’d been on his feet today. He should have changed to a thinner sock much earlier, when he’d first realized edema was tightening the fit of the socket, but by then there had been too much to do.
He massaged the swollen flesh, wishing not for the first time that there was a way to let his brain know the leg was gone. He could live with the fact that the fluids that would normally pass through collected here, unable to make the return trip. It was a nuisance, but a controllable one. It was the phantom pains and itches and twitches that made him crazy. They had lessened over the years, but every once in a while, especially when he was tired, like now, the missing leg would ache and itch like mad.
He told himself it was this that had clouded his joy in the arrival of his new nephew, not thoughts of a spoiled rich girl who clearly had some big problems of her own now.
He looked down at himself, at the long, muscled length of his right leg, then the left, ending neatly but abruptly just above where his knee had been.
He no longer felt much of anything, looking at his asymmetrical body. Not the nausea he’d felt at first, or the anger that had come later. But he’d had almost nine years to get used to it, he thought. Rory had never even seen him, never seen what was left of him, never seen the tidy but still shocking stump. Maybe she had been right; maybe she couldn’t have dealt with this.
In a rush of memory, he was back to that night on the beach so long ago. She’d been wearing his ring, looking at it every few moments as if she couldn’t quite believe it was there. He’d hidden it in a graceful little seashell he’d bought at one of the innumerable tourist-trap shops, then, when she wasn’t looking, dropped it onto the moonlit sand for her to find, knowing she wouldn’t be able to resist picking up the unexpectedly perfect shell amid the usual broken ones strewn on the beach by the powerful Pacific.
When he wasn’t worrying about walking—uneven sand was not the best surface for the kind of prosthesis he’d had then, which was why he usually avoided it—he’d wondered if she would find his method too corny. But the look that had glowed in her eyes when she’d picked up the shell and the ring fell out into her hands, when she’d looked up at him and realized what it was, had erased any worries.
They had wound up in a secluded corner of the beach, hugging each other as they watched the sun go down. And as the huge orange ball sank below the horizon, their passion rose to a pitch neither had experienced before. They’d done their share of heavy necking, but that night, in the hidden shelter of the rocks, kisses and caresses grew more heated as the air around them grew cooler.
Rory had shuddered as he had at last unbuttoned her silk blouse and unfastened her bra to lave her nipples with his tongue, and he had shuddered in turn as her slender hand had stroked him through the fine wool of his dress slacks. She’d even begun to tug down his zipper, and the thought of her touch on his naked, swollen flesh had nearly made him lose control right then.
They came perilously close to making love right there on the beach that night. But he knew it wasn’t right, not for their first time, not on a public beach with the possibility of being discovered at any moment. Besides, he didn’t have the nerve, not yet. He believed she loved him, but he wasn’t ready to see her face when she saw him for the first time. And he knew that there were things they had to talk about first.
“You mean it, Rory?” he’d asked urgently, knowing that with a few more caresses like that he wouldn’t have the breath left to speak. “You’ll really marry me?”
“Oh, Sean, I thought you’d never ask.”
He reached down and stilled her hand. He had to; she had aroused him to the point of pain.
“Rory, listen...I...we have to talk. There’s more to this than just—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said quickly. “I love you.”
In the face of that simple declaration, he hadn’t been able to find words. Words to tell her to think, to be sure. Words to say she didn’t yet know what she was saying yes to. Knowing intellectually that he was an amputee and facing the reality were two different things, and no one knew that better than he did. But every time he brought it up, she changed the subject. His heart told him confidently it was because it truly didn’t matter to her; his common sense was waving a red flag, telling him it was because she was avoiding the truth.
And somewhere deep inside him, a little voice was whispering that he’d been helping her avoid it by making sure he never got tired enough to limp around her, by making sure the hard plastic of his prosthesis never touched her, by making sure she never saw him without at least jeans and shoes. And by acceding willingly, even gratefully, to her seeming reluctance to make love, telling himself it was only virginal qualms, not fear that once she saw him, saw what was left of him, she wouldn’t want him.
He would have saved himself a lot of pain if he’d forced the issue back then, he thought now. Instead he’d waited and had it forced on him on the day she left him to face a church full of people alone.
“God, you’re in a fine, self-pitying mood tonight,” he muttered to himself.
At one time, in such a mood, he would have called his sister’s house. Oddly enough, not to talk to Stevie, although his beloved sister was always more than willing to listen, but to talk to Chase, who would listen, then verbally kick his butt again. Sometimes he needed his brother-in-law’s acerbic mockery much more than sympathy. Chase had a very unsentimental view of most of the world; being hunted down and nearly killed by first the racketeer he’d testified against in a murder trial, and then the convicted man’s son, who had nearly killed Stevie as well, had given him a sometimes sardonic outlook. Especially when it came to those who threatened those he cared about.
While both Stevie and Chase had been through hell before they’d found their way back to each other, Chase’s torment had been physical, as well, and it gave him an understanding of Sean’s down times that Stevie, for all her loving compassion, didn’t have.
Thinking of his by now no-doubt-exhausted brother-in-law, he reached for the phone. He would call Chase to make sure he didn’t need anything—like to be rescued from his mother-in-law—but for nothing else. Not for anything would he intrude his own melancholy on his family’s joy.
In spite of his obvious fatigue, Chase laughed at Sean’s query. “No, I’m fine. Your mother’s sleeping.”
“And therefore quiet,” Sean retorted.
“Yeah. Thanks for being there today. And not just for Stevie. For me, too.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
He meant it, he thought as he hung up a few minutes later. Chase had done more to pull him out of the nose dive he’d gone into after the fiasco of his aborted wedding than anyone, even Stevie. Chase had hired him to work on the Laurel Tree project. While it might have started as an idea to drag Sean out of the gutter, Sean knew it had become more than that to Chase, who stayed much more involved than he normally would. Just as it had become a cause of sorts for Sean. He’d never built anything before, and to stand in front of the site and watch the specialized apartment complex, carefully designed by Chase for people with various handicaps, rise before him, made Sean understand why Chase loved being an architect.
He sat for a while, pondering what to do. Despite the long, emotionally tough day, he knew he was wound too tightly to sleep. And that if he tried, he would no doubt wind up back on the same subject he was trying so hard to avoid. He had to do something. He reached for the phone again.
It was answered on the second ring. At least, the ringing stopped; all Sean heard was, “Nice shot, Stan! Nick, you let him wheel right around you. Don’t forget, these chairs are a lot quicker than you’re used to. Let’s try it again.” Then at last the voice spoke distractedly into the receiver. “Yeah?”
In spite of his mood, Sean grinned. It wasn’t at all unusual that they would still be practicing at this hour. The squeak of rubber wheels on the polished gym floor was a familiar sound to Sean after the hours he’d spent watching his best friend push his basketball team for perfection. And what Dar Cordell pushed for, he usually got. He demanded as much effort from others as he gave himself—which usually meant about a hundred and fifty percent. And it worked. They had won the state wheelchair basketball championship last year, less than a year after Dar had reluctantly taken over the job.
“How’s practice going?” Sean could almost see the man whose dark hair and broad, strong shoulders often made people mistake them for brothers. Dar would be waving his players into place with one hand while he held the phone with the other; only Dar would consider a mobile phone standard equipment for a wheelchair.
“Never mind that, how’s Stevie? Okay?”
“Yes. Tired, but okay. I gave her a hug for you.”
“Good. Tell her I’ll be waiting to see my new godchild.”
Sean smiled. Dar had never had much of a family of his own, and he had practically adopted the whole lot of them, and they him. And everybody felt they’d gotten the best of the arrangement.
“And what have you got for Katie, hmm?” Sean knew that Dar, who had very few soft spots, had a special one for the quicksilver little girl.
“A kiss, of course.” Sean could almost see Dar grinning. “Any female who’s astute enough at seven to realize that I’m the handsomest man in the world—”
“After her father and her uncle,” Sean inserted.
“Yeah, well, I love her anyway. And I already talked to her earlier. I thought she might need a little reassurance.”
“That she’s still your best girl?” Sean teased, but when Dar answered, he sounded solemnly serious.
“The very best.”
“On that we agree,” Sean said.
There was a pause, oddly silent despite the background noise of the practice drill. “You’re a lucky guy, Sean,” Dar said at last, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.
Sean knew Dar didn’t mean physically; he never dwelt on the differences between them. Sean couldn’t imagine what it had been like for Dar, who had lost both legs, one above and one below the knee, to face the maiming of his body alone. At least Sean had his family. And still he’d barely pulled through—and might not have, if Chase hadn’t come along.
“Yeah, I know,” Sean agreed. “That’s why I feel like such a jerk.”
“A jerk?”
“I can’t explain it, I just...”
As was uncannily frequent with Dar, he didn’t have to explain. “Feeling guilty?”
“I...yeah. How’d you know?”
“Nothing like an overdose of other people’s happiness to send malcontents like us into the dumps. Want to come over and whine later?”
Sean laughed, already feeling better. “I’ll bring the pizza if you’ve got the beer.”
“To cry in? Always. See you in an hour or so.”
That would be nearly eleven, but Dar never seemed to sleep much. The night demons, he’d told Sean once, were easier to fight if you were awake. And Sean knew he had some powerful night demons of his own to fight tonight.
