Walking carefully across the wet and getting-wetter grass, Gina eased around the older graves and made her way back to the last row, where brilliantly white granite tablets awaited her. Adam’s parents were buried side by side more than ten years ago, after the private plane they were piloting went down outside San Francisco. There were fresh flowers on their graves. Roses from the ranch garden.
But Gina hadn’t come to see Adam’s parents. It was two other graves, silent and chill beneath the splattering raindrops that called to her.
Monica Cullen King and Jeremy Adam King.
There were flowers here, too. Roses for Monica, daisies for Jeremy. The now-steady rain made streaks across the surface of the granite and the brass nameplates affixed there. And the silence that reached for Gina nearly choked her. Here lay the family that Adam couldn’t forget and wouldn’t allow himself to remember. Here was the reason he was living only a half life. Here was the past that somehow offered him more than a future with her ever could.
“How do I make him love me?” she asked, her gaze sliding from one of the stone tablets to the other. “How do I make him see that having a future doesn’t take away from the past?”
There were no answers of course and if there had been, Gina would probably have run screaming from the cemetery. But somehow, she felt as though her questions were being heard. And understood.
Going down on one knee in front of the twin graves, she felt the cold wet soak into the denim fabric as she smoothed the flat of her hand across the neatly tended grass and absently picked up fallen twigs to toss them aside. “I know he loved you. But I think he could love me, too.” She glanced at the stone bearing Jeremy’s name and the too-brief span of years that marked the life he’d led. Her eyes filled, remembering that sunshiny boy and the devastation she’d felt for Adam when Jeremy had died.
“It’s not that I want him to forget you. Either of you. I only want …” Her words trailed off as she lifted her gaze to the horizon where black clouds roiled.
“I have been fooling myself, haven’t I?” she whispered finally, the wind throwing her words back in her face. “He won’t risk it again. Won’t risk loving when he’s already paid too high a price for it.”
The rain thundered out of a sky gone black and dangerous, coming down in a torrent that soaked her to the skin. A fierce wind wrapped itself around her and cold settled in Gina’s bones. She knew the storm wasn’t the only reason though. It was the chill realization that what she’d longed for would never happen. It was time to surrender. She wouldn’t put herself through staying with a man in the hopes that he would one day love her.
Time to throw away the diaphragm.
Standing up slowly, she looked down at the graves of Adam’s family and whispered, “Look after him when I’m gone, okay?”
Adam was in the barn saddling his own horse by the time Gina rode into the ranch yard, soaking wet and looking as miserable as a woman possibly could. He’d been getting ready to go out looking for her—which even he’d had to silently admit was practically useless. On a ranch the size of the King spread, it could have taken him days to find her. And still, he would have searched because not knowing where she was, if she was safe or maybe hurt or lost or God knew what else, was making him insane.
Looking at her now, though, he was torn between relief and fury. Mindless of the pouring rain, he left the barn, stalked across the ranch yard and didn’t stop until he reached her side. He snatched her off the back of her mare and held her shoulders in a death grip while he looked down into her eyes and shouted, “Where the hell have you been? You’ve been gone for hours.”
“Riding,” she said and pulled out of his grasp. She stumbled a little, caught her balance and looked around herself as if trying to remember where she was and how she’d gotten there. “I was riding. Storm came …”
Her voice drifted off and whatever else she said was lost in the pummeling thunder of the falling rain and the slam of the wind. She looked down at herself as if surprised to find she was completely drenched. The heavens were still torn open, with rain coming down in thick sheets that made it almost impossible to see clearly more than a few feet.
Adam’s insides were still rattled even as he fought for the legendary calm that was normally such a huge part of his life. Damn it, he’d been going nuts wondering where she was. If she was safe. He’d spent the last two hours alternately watching the storm roll in and searching the horizon for a sign of her returning. He felt as if he’d been running all day. Exhausted and pushed to the edge of his limits.