Eventually, she pulled back. “There’s more champagne,” she said, gesturing toward the kitchen.
Rourke felt as if he was on fire as he went to the pantry, found another bottle and popped the cork. It seemed like a lousy thing to do, inappropriately celebratory, but he did it anyway. He knew this particular bottle came from the case his parents had sent to Joey to congratulate him on his engagement. A Krug Blanc de Blanc, one of only a few thousand bottles produced. Rourke drank the champagne at room temperature straight out of the bottle. Lowering it, he looked across the room at Jenny. Snow White, he thought. She was so pale, her hair and eyes so dark. And haunted now, with a sadness so deep he could feel it in his chest.
“Your grandmother…?” Rourke asked.
“She’s already asleep. She was sound asleep when Bruno called. She doesn’t know anything about this yet, and I might as well let her have one more night before telling her.” Jenny glanced at the hallway leading to her grandmother’s room. “Let’s go upstairs to talk. I don’t want to wake Gram.”
Rourke felt as though he was made of wood as he followed her. When Jenny’s grandmother got sick, she couldn’t negotiate stairs anymore, so Jenny had turned a downstairs room into a bedroom for Helen. She’d transformed the upstairs into a private haven where she could spend her time writing and waiting for Joey. After they were married, they planned to live here. After they were married… With a shaking hand, Rourke took a long drink of champagne.
When Jenny finally started to talk, her voice sounded soft and slurred with disbelief. She recited the news as though she’d been saying it over and over in her head, memorizing the horror—There was a mishap with a transport helicopter, no survivors from Joey’s Ranger battalion.
Rourke felt no shock, just a bleak and terrible sense of destiny. As she told him the few details she knew, they finished the bottle of Krug and opened another. “He and sixteen others were in a Chinook helicopter somewhere in Kosovo. It went down in a ravine, and there were no survivors. The names won’t be released officially for several days but Bruno heard right away. He got a call by satellite phone from someone in the battalion,” she said in a broken voice. “It’s not official, there hasn’t been a formal casualty report yet. But…no survivors.”
Icy pain howled through Rourke. Joey. His best friend. His blood brother. The best guy in the world. For a few moments, Rourke couldn’t breathe.
Jenny looked up at him, her face reflecting his agony.
Rourke hated it that she had been alone when the call came in. “Joey’s dad—”
“He’s with his sisters in New York. I guess I’ll—we’ll—see him at the…oh, my God. Will there be a funeral? A memorial?”
“I don’t know. Who knows about these things?” He kept seeing images of Joey, a goofy, big-eared kid who had grown into the kind of man everybody liked. They had shared all the important moments of their lives, from lost teeth to lost kittens, sports victories and defeats, graduation and of course, summer camp. Rourke felt as if a limb had just been lopped off.
And yet, pushing through the empty whistle of grief inside him was something else. Something…guilt and sadness, tenderness and rage.
He studied Jenny’s face for a long time. Found a Kleenex and dried her face. Then he leaned closer and held her in a way he never had before, not even when he wanted to, not even when she’d practically begged him to. His arms encircled her as though sheltering her from a bomb attack. He held her so that he felt the entire length of her body against his, could even feel her heartbeat, and still it wasn’t close enough. He touched her in a way he’d thought about a thousand times, tracing his thumb along the line of her jaw, tilting her face up to his, and he wanted to kiss her, to drown in her and forget.
Somehow, the way they both loved Joey became tangled up with the way they felt about each other, and they were kissing, and it was crazy but they were kissing and moving toward the bedroom, desperate to escape the truth but trapped there, together, with the darkness closing around them. Their clothes made a trail down the hall to her room and by the time they reached the bed, there was nothing between them, nothing at all. She tasted of champagne and tears, and she wound her arms around his neck and kept kissing him and wouldn’t let go. It was crazy, she was crazy, they were both crazy, but she wouldn’t let go.
She kept hold of him, but pulled back so her mouth was just a whisper away. “He told you to take care of me,” she said. “How are you going to do that, Rourke?”
* * *
The phone rang, piercing knife-sharp through Jenny’s alcohol-fogged sleep. She stirred, moaning as she tried to hide from the noise, but it kept flaying at her. Her head felt like a rock, impossible to lift. Finally, mercifully, the shrill ringing stopped and across the room, the answering machine clicked on and she could hear the sound of her own voice picking up. She stretched—and encountered a warm, naked body under the covers. Strong arms slid around her and tucked her close, and a sleepy sigh gusted against her neck. God, oh, God. Rourke. She had slept with Rourke. Joey was dead and she’d had drunken, mind-blowing sex with Rourke.
She was going to burn in hell.
The caller started speaking into the machine, and it sounded uncannily like Joey. Which meant she was probably
