Rumor Has It (20 page)

Unless she'd been saying good- bye to him. Unless she'd been making memories to store against a future without him.

I'm doing what's best: I'm letting you go.

Anger surfaced over his surprise. “Who the hell is that supposed to be best for?”

It cut deep to see the hurt and confusion on his face. Katie would have done anything to spare him pain. But a little hurt now was nothing compared to ruining his life, she reminded herself. It was better to force him out of her life now than see him miserable, staying with her out of loyalty later on. Nick deserved to get everything he wanted out of life. If that meant she had to leave him now, she would do it. She had known it wouldn't be easy, but she would survive. Loving Nick had been like a glimpse of heaven, beautiful and unexpected.
She was glad for it, even if it had been only a glimpse.

“It's best for you,” she said. Oh, how she wanted to reach out and touch him, to try to ease the hurt, but she forced herself to hold back. “Nick, you deserve more than I can give you. You deserve someone who's strong and whole, someone like Jayne Sutton.”

The only defense he could muster was sarcasm. He laughed without a trace of humor. “You got somebody all picked out for me. That's big of you, Kathryn.”

“I didn't say it had to be Jayne,” she clarified with a calm that antagonized his temper. “Just someone like Jayne, someone who can dance with you and play with you and give you the family you've always wanted.”

“I've told you dancing isn't important to me, Katie. I love the things we do together, the quiet things. And if I feel the need to do something more physical, I can do it on my own. It's not as if we're joined at the hip. And what makes you think I have to have a family?” he asked, knowing it was a stupid question but being too desperate
to care. “I'm thirty- two. I sure as hell could've started one by now.”

“That first day you came to the Drewes mansion you said so. You said you loved kids and that someday you'd have a dozen.”

He swore at her excellent memory and the fact that he had apparently cut his own throat with a casual remark. Yes, he wanted a family, but he wanted Katie first. “You should have read me my rights at the beginning: Anything I say can and will be used against me in the court of Quaid.”

Katie stubbornly ignored his anger. She wasn't intimidated by him even if his expression was close to savage. His dark brows slashed down over brown eyes burning with pent- up fury. The mouth that could so easily lift into a boyish grin was twisted into a thin, cynical line. He felt helpless, he was lashing out—she understood the combination well. “I know you want children, Nick, and there's no reason you shouldn't have them. I certainly don't intend to stand in your way.”

“No, you intend to push me out of yours. Get me out of your way so you can go back to feeling sorry for yourself.”

He could have slapped her and it would have
hurt less. She didn't try to deny his words, though, even if she didn't feel she deserved them. It was better to have him angry with her. The break would be easier.

Nick swore silently and the words were directed at himself. He had never meant to be vindictive. He didn't mean it, but there was no taking the words back now. If he was lucky, they would rouse a spark of anger in Katie and burn through her resolve to let him go.

But she didn't snap back at him. She looked as if she were simply waiting for him to step off the path so she could go home. She looked sad. She looked resigned. For the first time he felt a stab of real fear that he was going to lose her.

“So what happens,” he asked, “when I find the perfect woman you want for me and it turns out I'm sterile? Can I have you back then? Is infertility the one thing we need to have in common for me to keep you in my life?”

She wouldn't have guessed he considered it a small victory that she both sounded and looked annoyed when she answered him. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous? You think it couldn't happen?
You think you're the only person on earth who can't have children?”

“Of course not,” she said, trying to rein in her frustration. Why couldn't he see she was doing him a favor? “But chances are you're perfectly able. You deserve—”

“I deserve to have the woman I love,” he said. If she understood nothing else, she had to know he loved her. His love had to count for something. “Maybe I have always wanted a family. That's not a crime. But the first thing I need is the woman I love. Katie, if I don't have you, I'll never have anything. I've never felt the way you make me feel. You think I should give that up and go looking for something else?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. Her mind was made up. She wasn't going to let him talk her out of it with words of love and the sincere expression in his dark eyes.

“Shouldn't it be my decision to make?”

She felt the need again, the need to reach out to him. If she could touch him, perhaps she could make him understand. But if she touched him, she would be lost. So she tried to touch him, to convince him, with her expression, with her heart in
her eyes. “Maybe, but I think you're too good a man to make it.”

“Oh, Katie…” he said on a long sigh, shaking his head. He dragged a hand back through his hair. She wasn't going to listen to reason. He may as well have been talking to the statue of the unknown Confederate war dead. “Why does it have to be all or nothing with you? There are compromises. If you'd stop being so pigheaded, we could work this out—”

“You think I don't know about compromises?” she asked. “That's all my life has been for the last five years. All I've done is make compromises.”

“And you've made all the wrong ones. Letting go of all your dreams isn't a compromise, it's giving up. We can work this through together, honey. You just have to be willing to try. You thought your scars made you undesirable. You were wrong. You thought you couldn't even try to dance with me. You were wrong. You think you can't have a family. You could be wrong about that too.”

“I'm not.”

“You are so damn stubborn!” He slammed his fist against the rough trunk of a persimmon tree
and welcomed the distraction of the brief explosion of pain.

Katie didn't need to strike anything to feel pain. What she was feeling inside was bad enough. “I'm realistic,” she said. “Do you think I haven't considered the options? Do you really think I haven't gone over them, that I just blindly decided adoption isn't for me?”

“I think you've probably exhausted all arguments on the topic. I think you've been over it until you've blinded yourself to everything but your own fears.”

Ignoring the ring of truth in his statement she closed her eyes and muttered to herself, “This is pointless.” She looked up at him. “Nick, you're just proving me right. I can't give you what you want.”

This was it. This was going to be the end. He could see it in her pewter- colored eyes. It was there right beside regret. Wearily he fought against his own sense of resignation. He didn't want to give her up, but the choice didn't seem to be his to make. He reached out a hand to touch her cheek with the very tips of his fingers.

“Katie,” he asked. He pulled his lower lip between his teeth for an instant. One last try. “Do you love me?”

“Yes.” She whispered because she didn't trust her voice not to break. Oh, yes, she loved him. She loved him more than she had ever dreamed possible. She loved him wholly. She loved him unselfishly. And because her love had deepened from possessive to unselfish, she had to let him go.

A cold wave washed over Nick, defying the heat of the afternoon. Tears pressed against the backs of his eyes with an unfamiliar pressure. He had to talk around a knot of them in his throat. “Katie, if you love me, you won't go.”

Finally she gave in to the need to touch him— just once, just one last time. Echoing his gesture, she lifted a hand and pressed her fingertips against his lean cheek. His skin was smooth in spite of the shadow of his beard. She caught a lone tear on the tip of her finger and drew back from him.

“Because I love you, I have to do this.”

She stepped around him and started down the worn dirt path. Panic washed through Nick as he watched his future and his happiness walk
away. It roughened his voice as he called out after her, “I dare you to come back here and work things out!”

Katie kept on walking, tears stinging her eyes. “Not this time, Nick.”

“M
R. LEONE?”

Nick spun around and glared at the sweating deliveryman who had stuck his head inside the screen door of the kitchen. As if Nick didn't have enough on his mind already—a heat wave, a temperamental new air conditioner, advertising, the health inspector, the sign maker, Katie dumping him. Katie. Pain spurred his anger. He vented it on the deliveryman. “What the hell do you want?”

“To deliver your veal,” the man said in a slow, steady drawl that suddenly got on Nick's nerves. Didn't people in the South ever get rattled? Didn't
they ever want to scream and throw things? The man held out a clipboard of receipts and a ballpoint pen. “You planning on cooking this meat, or do y'all just eat it raw where you're from?”

“Smart-ass,” Nick grumbled as he went to open the walk- in freezer.

He knew he was supposed to be building a rapport with his delivery people. Every friendly connection was helpful in the restaurant business. Under normal circumstances he would have been cracking jokes and offering the man a cold drink. But circumstances hadn't been normal for four days.

Never in his worst nightmares had Nick imagined he could hurt so badly. Losing Katie had been like losing a vital part of himself. It was like having his heart ripped right out of his chest. He'd never been so miserable or cared less about what was going on around him. The opening of his restaurant was only days away. It was a dream coming true. It meant nothing to him if he couldn't share it with Katie.

He slumped down on a stool at the worktable and rested his elbows on the smooth new butcher block, his fingers ravaging his black hair. Couldn't
she see she'd done the worst possible thing for both of them? Didn't she understand the kind of love they shared was so rare, so precious, most people went through their entire lives only dreaming about it?

Yes, he thought, she did know, and it was part of the problem. If she had loved him less, she wouldn't have felt the need to let him go.

Restless, he got up to pace around the kitchen. Love wasn't the problem. The real problem was Katie's fear of the unknown, her unwillingness to compromise, and her unwillingness to see he could compromise. Hell, he had to lay some of the blame at his own feet as well. Maybe he was at fault for his stubborn insistence on compromise. Maybe he'd pushed her too hard. He had wanted Katie and a family. Now he would have neither.

Anger and frustration rolled and built inside him until he felt as if he were a pot about to boil over. Snarling a curse he snatched up the first handy thing he could find—a copper saucepan— and hurled it across the room with all his might.

Maggie walked in as the pan crashed against the stainless- steel door of the freezer, the iron handle
creasing a sharp dent in the door before the pot clattered to the linoleum.

“It's too hot for a suit of armor, Nick. Tell me I'm not going to need one.”

“Come on in, Maggie,” he said, going to the refrigerator. He refused to feel embarrassed for venting his emotions, especially in front of a friend. “You want a spritzer or a beer or something?”

Waving a cheap palmetto- leaf fan in her face, Maggie planted herself on the stool he'd abandoned earlier. “Anything, as long as it's tall and cold.”

When he'd poured Maggie's wine cooler into an ice- filled glass and helped himself to a beer, he pulled up another stool across the worktable from her and straddled it. He raised his gold can in a brief salute before pouring a long drink down his throat.

Maggie sipped her drink and nibbled on a piece of ice, her eyes taking in every aspect of Nick's appearance. “I'd ask how you're doing, but the answer is self- evident.”

It would have been pointless to deny he felt as
bad as he looked. His eyes were as bloodshot as if a night's sleep were completely foreign to him.

“I'd say Katie is about as bad off as you are,” Maggie said. “It's hard to tell with her though. She's had too much practice covering up what she feels.”

The mere thought that Katie was suffering tore at his gut. It brought on another surge of anger as well. “Yeah, so we're both miserable and all for no reason.”

“Katie believes there's a reason.”

“Well, I've got a news flash for her: She's wrong. The infallible Katie Quaid is wrong, and she's too damn stubborn to see it.”

“Is she wrong, Nick?” Maggie asked gently. “You asked her to compromise. What if she can't? Do you love her enough to accept that?”

He'd asked himself the same hard question every long, lonely night since their breakup. His answer was always the same: He wanted children, but he wanted Katie more. “Yes,” he answered softly.

Taking a last sip of her drink, Maggie slid off the stool and took up her fan again. She fanned herself lazily, giving Nick a long, considering look
with her head tipped and her lips pursed. “Then you'd just better convince her, Yankee.”

“How?” he asked as if her order were as ludicrous as telling him to try to ride to Venus on the back of a donkey.

Maggie tapped her fan against his shoulder on her way to the door. “By being just as damn stubborn as she is. Katie loves you, Nick. Don't give up on her. All the things she's wanted most in life have slipped out of her reach. Make her believe that won't happen with you.”

“I'm not going.”

“You're going if I have to toss you over my shoulder and carry you.”

“My brother, the caveman,” Katie said with a sharp edge of sarcasm in her voice. “This is the twentieth century, Rylan. You can't force a woman to go to the opening of a restaurant.”

His smoky eyes narrowed and glittered. His threat was silky- soft, which made it all the more dangerous. “Watch me.”

Katie's gaze roamed restlessly around her room as she reined in the urge to scream in frustration.
She crossed her arms to keep from pounding her fists against her brother's massive chest.