“The pictures of your family in the hall?” She looked up at him, a silent pleading in her golden eyes. “The photos all over the house? They’re of you and your brothers. Your parents. Cousins. But—”
He knew what she was going to say and still swayed with the slap of her words.
“There are no pictures of Monica and Jeremy anywhere. Why is that, Adam?”
Steeling himself, he kept his voice steady, emotions hidden. “You’d prefer that I filled the house with photos? You think I want to look at pictures of my son and remember him dying? Does that sound like a good time to you, Gina? Because it sure as hell doesn’t to me.”
“Of course not.” She grabbed his forearm with both hands and he felt the strength of her grip, the heat of her touch right down to his bones. “But how can you just shut it all out? How can you refuse to remember your own son?”
He remembered, Adam thought as an instant image of Jeremy leaped up into his mind. Small, with blond hair like his mother and his father’s brown eyes. Smiling, always smiling, that’s how Adam remembered him. But that was private. Something he didn’t share.
Slowly he peeled her hands off his arm and took a step back from her for good measure. “Just because I don’t surround myself with physical mementos doesn’t mean I could or would forget him. But I don’t run my life on memories, Gina. My past doesn’t infringe on my present. Or my future.” He forced himself to look at her and distance himself from the regret, the disappointment shining in her eyes. She’d known going into this that he wasn’t looking for love. If she’d allowed herself to hope for more, that wasn’t his fault, was it?
When she didn’t speak, Adam continued. “We have a business arrangement, Gina. Nothing more. Don’t expect what I can’t give and we’ll both come out of this with what we want.”
Eleven
For days, Gina wrestled with that last conversation she’d had with Adam in the barn. She kept forcing herself to remember not only the fierce fire of his kiss, but the icy shards in his eyes.
Had she been fooling herself for months? Had she really been holding on to a childish dream that had no basis in reality? Was it time to admit defeat and bundle her heart up before it could be shattered completely?
She tugged on Shadow’s reins and urged the gentle Gypsy mare down a well-worn path to the King family cemetery. As she approached, storm clouds that had been crouched at the horizon all day suddenly moved forward, sweeping across the sky like an invading army.
The temperature dropped in an instant and the sun’s light was obliterated. Grayness surrounded her and a cold wind kicked up, lifting her long braid off her shoulder, tossing it behind her back. Shadow danced uneasily beneath her as if the horse sensed the coming storm and wanted nothing more than to return to the warm comfort of the stable.
But Gina was on a mission, and wasn’t going back to the house until she’d completed it. How had Adam cut his dead family so neatly out of his life? With surgical precision, he’d sliced off that part of his past and shuttered it away completely. What kind of man could do that?
The last of summer was slipping away into fall. Soon, the trees guarding the old cemetery would be awash in brilliant golds and reds, their leaves shuddering in the wind and falling to the ground in a patchwork of color. Already, the wind was colder, the days were shorter.
Shadow blew out a breath, shook her head and again tried to stray off the worn path. But Gina was determined to face the past Adam had locked away.
The scrollwork in the iron trellis fence surrounding the cemetery looked time worn yet still elegant and strong. As if it had been built with love to last generations. Like the King family itself.
Bougainvillea vines twisted through the metal work, their deep scarlet and pale lavender flowers fluttering in the wind. Headstones crowded the small cemetery that had stood in this place since the early eighteen hundreds. Some tipped drunkenly, the letters carved into their stone rubbed away by time and weather. The newer additions stood soldier straight, their stones still bright, the engraving deep and clear, hardly touched by wind and rain.
Gina swung off of Shadow, tied the reins loosely to the iron fence and cautiously as a thief, opened the intricately worked gate. A squeal of metal on metal scraped at her nerves and the wind pushed at her, as if someone or something were warning her to turn back. To stay away from the home of the dead and to return to the living.
She squinted into the wind as the first raindrops pelted her. Icy drops soaked into her shirt, snaked along her neck and down her back. The leaves on the trees rustled, sounding almost like a crowd of people whispering, wondering what she would do next.