His Darling Bride (Echoes of the Heart #3) (28 page)

She smiled, hoping her mother would ignore her unshed tears.

“My art’s never felt more alive.” Her first love was back. “Mike made that possible. Why won’t he let me help him the same way?”

“Why are you waiting for him to
let
you?” a man’s voice asked from the doorway leading to the family room.

“Grammy!” Camille flew around her dad and straight for Marsha. “I made a picture book for show-and-tell at school. It’s a whole story about me and Bud and Grammy Belinda and Mommy and Daddy and you and Grandpa. Mommy helped me add the words on her computer and print it out. And my teacher says it’s great. Wanna see?”

“Of course I do.” Marsha took the stapled-together booklet of eight-by-ten paper. She took Camille’s hand and led her away from Bethany and Oliver, toward the dining room. “You take the most beautiful pictures. Come tell me your story from page one.”

Oliver’s attention shifted to Bethany once they were gone. “Mike’s shutting you out?”

Bethany nodded. “It’s how he deals with things.”

Alone.

Something Bethany couldn’t stand the thought of Mike resigning himself to.

“Then kick the door down,” her brother said. “Show him how our family deals with things when we know someone’s in trouble.”

“We?” Bethany scoffed.

She knew she’d heard her brother right. But what self-respecting kid sister would pass up the chance to rub it in? She crossed the kitchen and punched him in the arm.

“Don’t tell me you like the guy now,” she said.

“You love the guy.” Oliver, dressed in his business suit from working downtown, teasingly punched her back. Then he pulled her close. “And I love you. And I don’t want you to have any regrets about how you played this.”

Bethany jerked away, confused and angry at Mike, annoyed at the endless advice swirling around her. “Mom was just telling me to give him time. That I can’t change his mind.”

“You can’t. Not about staying there or coming back here or going somewhere else where no one knows him. Trust me, I’ve been there. I couldn’t keep Selena from leaving when we were kids.”

“So what’s the point?” Why did people do this to themselves? Falling in love. Giving someone else their heart to keep safe—knowing full well how much it was going to hurt if things wound up broken instead.

“The point is,” her brother said, “that I should have made damn sure I knew what I really wanted—and what Selena wanted—before I let her go.”

“Mike knows that I want to be there for him.”

“He knows you
said
you wanted to be there. There’s a difference. For Selena and me, that difference was the seven years it took me to show her that I would always be there for her and our daughter, no matter what.”

Like Mike and Jeremy had been there for each other until the very end. Just as Mike was determined to be there for his difficult, disapproving, controlling parents. Because
that’s
the kind of man he was. When someone really needed him, the Mike she loved couldn’t turn away. No matter what it cost him.

Bethany shook her head at her brother, her tears finally falling. Oliver wiped them away, worried but confident, calmly waiting for her to work through what she had to.

“I love him so much,” she said. “What if I go after him, fight for him, and lose it all anyway?”

“What if you go after him and end up with the love of your life, just like I have?”

Bethany stared at Oliver, her old doubts swarming, biting, and stinging away at her terrified heart.

What if she wasn’t enough for Mike? What if no woman ever would be? What if they weren’t as connected as they’d thought, outside the dreamlike bubble of Chandlerville and the few precious weeks they’d had together here?

“What if he’ll never let me all the way in?” she asked her brother.

Oliver shook his head.

“I don’t believe in never anymore, Bethie. There’s always another chance to live life the way you want it. That’s what Marsha and Joe are about. Look at Dad out there, fighting for whatever he can still have. Look at the way you’re painting again, and back with us again, and loving again no matter what happened with your first family, or how many guys like Benjie haven’t been there for you. You don’t believe in never anymore, either. Is Mike what you really want?”

Bethany nodded.

Her brother held up his smartphone. “Then there’s a flight to Manhattan at seven. I’ve booked you a seat with my miles, and a car service to take care of you on the other end. Go after your heart, Bethany. Give Mike what you know he needs, even if he’s not ready to accept it. Don’t ever stop fighting for love.”

Chapter Nineteen

Bethany stepped off the ninth-floor elevator of Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Memorial Hospital.

She’d waited until she was at the gate for her flight leaving Atlanta, to call George and tell her what she was doing. She’d made it clear she was hunting Mike down, whether George helped her or not. Not that she’d needed to worry about having the other woman in her corner. A text had been waiting for Bethany when she landed at La Guardia, telling her where to go, that Olivia Taylor was with her oncologist for the day having tests run, and that Mike would be expecting Bethany.

George had signed off, saying simply,
“Go get ’im, girl!”

An older gentleman met Bethany outside the hospital room the volunteer downstairs had directed her to. He looked like a more distinguished, more buttoned-down version of Mike. He wore a suit that appeared to be even more expensive than Oliver’s finest. Bracketing the man’s mouth were lines Bethany couldn’t imagine had been forged by smiling.

But his eyes were the same brown as his son’s. And there
was
a sadness softening Harrison Taylor’s forbidding features. A
weariness, too, that would have told Bethany he’d been in this very
place before, even if she hadn’t already known how he’d lost his son.

“You must be Mr. Taylor,” she said, offering him her hand.

“Please call me Harrison.” He shook politely, his tone formal. “My son’s told his mother and me about you, Ms. Darling. May I call you Bethany?”

“Of course.” She smiled, even though his greeting had sounded more practiced than friendly.

Bethany doubted he approved of her relationship with Mike any more than Mike’s mother had.

“Georgina alerted us that you were on the way.” A glimmer of suspicion shadowed Harrison’s expression. “She failed to mention why.”

“I hope I’m not imposing,” Bethany said, sidestepping his question and wondering if the man had purposely intercepted her before she and Mike could speak.

“Of course you’re not imposing,” Mike’s father assured her. “Although this is a private matter for my family, and I must ask that you not upset my wife or son any further.”

She cleared her throat. “I’m not here to cause trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about. How is your wife?”

“She’s dying. Not today, perhaps not even this year. But we have our second and third opinions and recommendations for invasive treatments. And Livy’s decided not to put herself through the torture of any of them. She’d rather make the most of the time she has left. Plan her last gala. Make it a bigger success than all the others, with her son by her side. I hope you can understand what a comfort that will be for her.”

“I do.” Bethany shivered.

Did Mike’s parents understand how difficult it was going to be for him to do what they were asking of him?

“I hope you can also understand how vital it is that Michael take his place now where he’s always belonged.”

Bethany blinked. “And that place would be?”

The door opened to the hospital room Harrison had been waiting beside. Mike emerged looking as different as he could from the easy-smiling man she knew.

“Bethany,” he said. The grim set of his unsmiling mouth—so similar to his father’s—softened at the sight of her.

He was dressed in a tailored golf shirt and ruthlessly pressed khakis, with polished brown loafers on his feet. He’d found the time to cut his hair. His hat was gone. He was cleanly shaven. He looked so conservative, so pulled together, Bethany wanted to muss up his hair, just to have a taste of her cowboy back. She gently wrapped her arms around him instead, wishing she’d come sooner.

“I’m so sorry,” she told him.

His body, stiff for several seconds, melted into her, his arms snagging her closer.

“Bethany,” he repeated. The love in his voice beat back against her worries.

“I’ll check on your mother.” Harrison stepped away and entered the hospital room to Mike’s right.

Mike held Bethany long after they were alone in the hallway, rocking with her as if they were slow dancing. He took a deep breath and exhaled, his hand cupping her head to his chest.

“I couldn’t stay away,” she said.

“I’ve missed you every second I’ve been back.” He rested his forehead against hers.

The gesture was so familiar amid the other crazy changes she couldn’t process, her eyes filled with tears. “Then why did you tell me not to come?”

He led her to the cluster of chairs grouped several feet away, an arrangement around a table boasting a single lamp.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I already have, and I’ve been home less than a week. And I have to do this for my parents.”

“Of course you do.” He was a healer. A deeply feeling man with a bottomless heart. “You love them. You wouldn’t have stayed in touch with them at all if you didn’t. There’s nowhere else you could be now, if there’s a chance you can help.”

“My mother doesn’t want my help.” He laughed, harsh, brittle, and dropped his head into his hands, his elbows braced on his knees.

“All I can think about, sitting in this hospital where we lost Jeremy, is watching my brother suffer. And not wanting my mother to . . .” Mike inhaled against a sob. “Meanwhile, all
she
can think about is me promising to take over the family legacy after she’s gone.”

Mike swallowed, sucking the emotion down while Bethany pulled his hands away from his face.

“Is that what you want?” she asked him, sounding hurt and worried—for both of them.

Instead of answering, he took her in his arms again.

God, he’d needed her. He’d needed to breathe, and he couldn’t anymore—with his parents carrying on, business as usual, no one dealing with the emotional reality of his mother’s condition and the aggressive cancer that had already spread to her bones and several organs.

“George said you were doing okay,” he found enough of his voice to say to Bethany. “Tell me you’re doing okay.”

She shrugged. “I finished my painting. I wish you could have been there for it.”

Mike lost himself in the love looking back at him from Bethany’s crystal-gray eyes. She’d finished her foster parents’ anniversary present. Her art was back. Stronger and more beautiful than ever, he’d bet. And he was missing it.

“Your mother wants you to take over at the foundation for her?” Bethany asked.

He nodded. “She’s already bullied the other directors into letting me serve on the JHTF board, taking her seat alongside my father’s.”

Mike felt it consume him once more, the desperation to be gone once his mother was, and to never look back. Just as Bethany had predicted.

“Do the other directors know you’re HMT?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“But your mother wants them to.”

Mike stared at the floor. “It would make her so proud, she told me. To finally be able to let people know that I haven’t been wasting my life all these years.”

“You haven’t been.” Bethany took his hand. “You should be proud of everything you’ve done with your life.”

But Livy wasn’t, and now she was dying.

He couldn’t process it. There was only numbness, while jagged emotion seethed just below the surface, ready to rip him apart with guilt and the compulsion to destroy.

He looked down at Bethany’s hand in his. He was holding on tighter than he should, their fingers linked, his grip crushing. But she didn’t seem to care, and he couldn’t turn her loose.

“You need to go home,” he told her. “I want to cover your flight. You shouldn’t have to pay for—”

Bethany stood, pulling away from him.

“That’s what you have to say to me?” she demanded. “Your heart is breaking because you love your mother and she’s still being horrible to you. Your parents are asking you to make decisions about the rest of your life, and trying to use your mother’s cancer to guilt you into doing what they want. And all you’re worried about is me not having to pay for my return flight, while I race back to Chandlerville to get away from you and your family?”

She rummaged in her backpack and pulled out her phone, pointing it at him.

“I had George email this from your computer.” Bethany had accessed a photo from her gallery app. “Look at it and tell me I should go away.”

Mike studied the exposure he’d taken of their sunset at the meadow pond. But his capture was only part of the image. Overlaid with it was a digital photo of one of Bethany’s newer landscape attempts. She’d done more work with the painting, adding shading and shadow, better reflecting the sky and clouds in the water, matching her brushstrokes to what his lens had seen—the remainder of the sundown effect coming from his photo.

Like two matching pieces—half her, half him—the collaborative result was an ethereal reflection of Bethany’s favorite place in the world. And now Mike’s.

“It’s amazing.” He shook his head, losing his heart to her all over again.

“You and I.” Bethany knelt in front of him, her own eyes damp, her feelings open to him, honest and loving, when she’d so carefully protected her heart for years. “
We’re
amazing. Together. Apart, we’d both get by. But life will never be what it should have been for either of us if you keep pushing me away. Don’t you see? You’ve shown me how to create—to be free and fearlessly follow my dreams the way you have.”

“Bethany—”

“Now you need to let me show you what I know. And I can show you how to stay, Mike. How to come home. You didn’t have anyone here for you when you lost Jeremy, and it nearly destroyed you. You’re back in New York now for your mother anyway. That’s how deeply you know how to love. But I bet you’re already thinking about where you’ll go next. And it’s somewhere new and different that won’t tempt you to stay the way coming to Chandlerville did. I know you’re in pain, and that’s bringing out parts of you that you don’t want me to see. And you’re thinking you have to protect both of us from that. But—”

“I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have.” He brushed the backs of his fingers across her cheek.

“Then don’t.” She dropped her phone into her backpack and stood. “I’m going home. You need to decide what’s best for you and your family—without worrying about me. Just know that I’m going to be okay now, no matter what. You helped me realize that. Now it’s your turn to believe that I’ll be there for you. Whatever you want to do with your life, Mike, I’ll be right there, wanting to do it with you. To explore and paint and create, and to face times like this, no matter how hard they are. Being afraid is no way to live my art, remember? Or your life. You taught me that. Don’t keep hurting
yourself
, thinking you have to keep going through this alone.”

“It’s good to see you in here finally,” Mike’s mother said a week later from the doorway of Jeremy’s room.

Mike looked up from sitting on the edge of his brother’s bed, at the beautiful woman who’d brought them both into the world.

She looked more tired by the day; meanwhile, she insisted on going in to her office at the foundation. It was more obvious how much weight she’d lost when she was in her silk nightgown and robe instead of the heavier clothes she hid in when she was outside of the house. The blue of the expensive material made her skin appear even more pale. She was in full makeup, when the hour was well past midnight. He was pretty sure she’d had her eyes and cheekbones done at some point in the last year. She’d always been determined to stay fresh, despite the passage of time.