In her unguarded state that night came back to her so vividly. She remembered the sick cold feeling in her chest and belly, the trembling weakness in her legs as she’d walked away from him down that rainy Georgetown street.
She remembered how she’d held her head high as she walked and stared at the streetlamps through a blur of tears and rain. How she’d listened until it seemed as if her whole head was vibrating. Hoping.
Moisture pooled in the corners of her eyes, made tiny puddles beneath her lashes. Just moisture-not tears, she told herself.
But…his touch was so gentle…so soothing. With her eyes closed, lashes floating gently on the cushion of tears, she felt his long, sensitive fingers comb the hair back from her temple…tuck a strand behind her ear. It felt so good. She gave a small, shuddering sigh. Safety and contentment settled over her. Twilight drifted down…
Then, from somewhere far above her she heard his voice, a familiar and comforting murmur, like a lullaby…
“What happened here, Sam? This little scar behind your ear?”
Chapter 6
Awareness and adrenaline stabbed through her with the same brutal stroke, like a lance of double-edged steel. The bubble of safety and comfort and sleep that had briefly cocooned her shattered and vanished as if it had never been. Her body twitched and quivered; her hand jerked protectively to the tender place behind her ear, displacing his. Her mind snapped into focus, sharp and crystal clear.
“I can feel a bump there. It’s still tender, isn’t it? You flinched when I touched it earlier.”
She coughed and mumbled, “I had a few stitches-nothing serious.” Vibrating inside, she sat up and moved away from him, swiveling her body around so her back was against the wall and there was a buffer zone of space between her arm and his. She had to force herself to make the movements slowly, making it seem a casual thing rather than the panicked retreat it was.
“Is that why you cut your hair?”
She gave him a look and a short laugh, surprised because, under the influence of her own guilt, it was the last thing she’d expected him to ask. She looked away again and touched her hair with a self-conscious hand. “Yeah…it looked kind of weird with a chunk cut out of it, so I figured, you know, why not. That was a few months ago-it’s grown out quite a bit, actually.”
“I like it. Looks good on you.”
“Thanks.” Even as she accepted the compliment she could feel his eyes on her…hear his mind humming away, thinking up new questions to ask. To distract him, she nodded toward Tony’s corner, from which the snoring continued unabated. “How can he sleep like that under these conditions? I wish I had the knack.”
“I think it’s something you develop in childhood. In his case, it’s what comes of being one of eleven kids.”
“Wow. Really?” Sam leaned her head back against the wall. “Well, that’s something us only children aren’t ever gonna know about, isn’t it?” Then she checked herself and glanced over at him. “But I forgot-I guess it was different for you, wasn’t it? In foster homes.” She paused, but as usual he didn’t answer. Why had she imagined this might be any different from all the other times she’d tried to ask about his past…his childhood?
She studied his profile…like a menswear ad in a glossy magazine, she thought, with his eyes fixed intently on some far-off place, muscles visible in a jaw too square and uncompromising for the rest of his face. It was an interesting face rather than handsome-she’d always thought so, from the first moment she’d laid eyes on it that long-ago afternoon in the White House rose garden-long and angular, with hollows and creases that made it seem scholarly even without glasses. Without the shield of his glasses, which at the moment were tucked in the pocket of his shirt, his eyes seemed even gentler, somehow, the intensity of their gaze veiled by thick lashes, the fan of creases at their corners more suggestive of humor than that laserlike focus that could be so unnerving.
Maybe it was because of that that she pushed bravely on now, when normally such stubborn and intimidating silence would have caused her to abandon the field like a craven coward.
“What was it like for you? In those foster homes. Were they…good to you?”
Still he didn’t reply, and she felt the familiar hollowness inside…the terrible deadness of futility. Then he shifted in a restless way, and when he spoke, in a gravelly voice that didn’t sound like him, it wasn’t what she’d expected.
“What makes you think I’m an only child?”
For a moment she could only stare at him, unable to make sense of the words, as if he’d spoken in a foreign language. “But you’re-I thought-” She stopped, as the meaning of what he’d said rolled over her like the delayed winds from an explosion. Breathless with shock, she said, “Wow. You mean you-I didn’t know you had siblings. Is it-are they-I mean, my God…”
“Four,” he said, and his voice and eyes seemed almost regretful. But oddly, his body, close to hers but not touching, seemed to hum with tension. “Two of each.”
“My God.” She said it again, dazed.
“Younger. All of them. I was the oldest.”
It was anger that finally squeezed past the immobilizing shock, both of body and mind. And she was too upset herself, then, to notice the tense he’d used, or heed the quality of his voice-a certain carefulness, as if the slightest puff of breath might scatter memories too fragile to hold up to examination. She plunged on, her outrage building with every word, fighting to keep her voice under control, to keep him from knowing how devastated she was.
“You never told me you have brothers and sisters. I mean-when you said you grew up in foster care, I just assumed…how could you not have told me?”
The better question, Cory thought, wasn’t why he’d never told her before, but what had possessed him to tell her
He hadn’t meant to. The words had suddenly appeared, his mind playing a trick like a magician plucking a coin from thin air. And, as it usually was with magicians’ tricks, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how it had happened.
She’d drawn her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, as a barricade against him, he thought, and her eyes, gazing at him across the tops of her knees, were dark with reproach and betrayal. He stared at her, appalled at the pain he’d caused her, unable to think of an explanation that would be enough for her. She’d always wanted brothers and sisters, he knew that. She’d been born two months early, had spent weeks fighting for her life in a NICU, and for her parents, Tris and Jessie Bauer, one million-dollar-miracle baby had been enough. To think, in all the years they’d known each other, after all they’d been to each other, that he had siblings he’d never spoken of, never shared with her…he couldn’t blame her for being angry. One more thing he was never going to be able to make right.
How could he make her understand that some secrets were too shameful to share? That some wounds were endurable only if undisturbed? That sometimes guilt was a hornets’ nest to be tiptoed around and left alone?
“So,” she said in a blunt voice, with a defiant little toss of her head, “Where are they now? Do you see them often?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t seen them in…years,” he said, and saw a spark of new outrage flare in her eyes. In Sam’s extended family, any kinfolk-brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins-were a taken-for-granted part of everyday life. Even the ones who lived far away from the old home place in Oglethorp County, Georgia, managed to
