The Edge of Heaven (32 page)

"Nothing from Mark?"

She shook her head. "I think it's really over. I don't wake up shaking anymore."

"And you feel safe there?" That was important.

"Yes. I've been taking some psych courses, figuring some things out. It's helping," she said. "Rachel said she manages to drag you over here every now and then."

"Her and Grace."

"Grace can't stop talking about you."

"She's amazing," he said.

"I know. Always has been."

"Emma, they all miss you. Don't stay away on my account, okay?"

"I've just been busy," she insisted, smiling when for a moment she'd looked so sad.

He reached out, grazing his fingertips to the bottom of her chin, just for a second. Her gaze shot up to his, and she went still, not even breathing, it seemed. His heart was hammering out her name.
Emma, Emma, Emma.

Nineteen now. Not nearly enough.

Damn. He'd gotten too close. Even after more than three months, he couldn't be this close to her for five minutes without those old feelings rearing up and making him do things he regretted.

"I've missed you," she said softly, sadly.

"Emma." He stepped back, his hand falling to his side.

Yeah, he'd gotten way too close.

* * *

Emma declared a major that spring—counseling—thinking she could help people whose lives were as screwed up as hers. How could people with really together lives ever understand half-crazy people, anyway? She figured they needed someone like her, and she needed them.

She made it through the summer mostly by staying away from home, trying to shore up her resolve and soothe her hurt feelings. She couldn't decide if she was being foolish or whether she was truly in love with Rye, but she just couldn't forget about him.

Girls did this, didn't they? Little girls. They took the smallest hint of interest from a man and blew it all out of proportion. They replayed every word, every look, every touch. They daydreamed. They fantasized. They held on, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the man in question scarcely knew they existed.

It seemed as mature as she might be in most ways, she was woefully inexperienced when it came to relationships. She worried she was acting like the child Rye had accused her of being.

He'd been seen all over town with half a dozen women in the past few months. Grace, who was insanely jealous of anyone who took his attention away from her, told Emma all about it. Grace didn't care if she was only eight, she thought he was hers, just like Emma didn't care that she was only nineteen.

Was she any less foolish than her baby sister when it came to Rye?

Maybe not, but surely she could hide her feelings a little better than Grace, who pouted prettily and batted her eyelashes at him. She grabbed him by the arm and tugged him away from his current woman—Janeen Wilkes—something Emma would really like to do herself.

She couldn't believe she was standing here at her grandfather's annual Labor Day cookout shooting daggers at a woman whose kids she used to baby-sit, because Rye happened to bring the woman to a family party. She could just picture Janeen turning around and seeing Emma and going,
Oh, yes. What a sweet kid. She used to baby-sit for my children.

Rye would just love hearing that.

Emma, Grace, and Janeen could fight over him.

"Oh, that is a wicked look," her roommate Melanie said. "You're not going to hurt someone, are you?"

"I hope not."

"So..." Melanie moved in closer as they stood beside the picnic table laden with food and nodded in Rye's direction. "That's him?"

"Yes."

"God, he's gorgeous. Did I really tell you to give up on him?"

"Yes, you did."

"Well, I take it all back. I never knew men could look like that in their thirties. That nice, tight little butt and those dimples. You think he might take his shirt off later, if they play ball?"

Emma had seen him without his shirt on. She knew just how impressive a sight it was. "I don't think we could take it if he did. Not with it being so hot already. We'd get dizzy and fall down."

Melanie pointed to Janeen. "And who is he with?"

"A different woman every few weeks, from what I hear."

"Oh, Em, I'm sorry."

"It's not getting any better," she confessed. "I'm trying. I'm trying so hard to forget about him."

"I know."

"Do me a favor, Mel. Don't let me make a fool of myself with him today. I did on his birthday, and I really don't want to do that again."

* * *

Sam asked Rye to meet him at an old house on Front Street a few weeks before Christmas, his second here. He liked this place. Amazingly, he felt at home here.

Sam was probably going to throw some more work his way. He hadn't figured out a way to tell his brother he really didn't need any help staying busy, and it sounded ungrateful, too, which he really didn't want to do.

Their relationship was... Hell, he didn't know what it was.

He loved Grace, shooting hoops and playing football with Zach, who worked with Rye sometimes on the weekends and after school. He adored Rachel, and he got along okay with Sam. They didn't really growl at each other anymore. There was still that thing with Emma, which he mostly tried not to think about.

He parked in front of a sadly neglected Victorian, porch sagging, a couple of the front windows broken, weeds all over the yard. Sam was standing on the sidewalk staring up at it.

Rye got out of his truck and walked to Sam's side. "Man, you've got your work cut out for you here."

"Somebody does," Sam said. "What do you think?"

Rye shrugged. "I guess if they've got the money and know what they're getting into... Who are you to try to talk 'em out of it?"

"I'm not. I was wondering if you were interested in it."

"Working here? Sam, I—"

"No, buying it. I know it's a mess, but for somebody who had the time and knew what to do with it... I could help you. Zach's always available, and he works cheap. What do you think?"

He thought with enough time and effort, it could be a great house. That's what he thought. What he asked was, "Why?"

"You don't really want to live over Rick's garage forever, do you?"

"I hadn't really thought about it." He wasn't there much, and he couldn't say he'd cared that much about where he lived. After years spent in a cell, a man developed very simple needs.

"It's time to start living, don't you think?" Sam said.

Maybe it was. Maybe he had been living for the last nine years like he might well get thrown back in jail at anytime. He'd caught himself lately, when he was working on a house, glancing at this and that, thinking about what he would have done with the hallway or the banister or the mantel, if it were his place.

"This little old lady named Marge lived here for about seventy years," Sam said. "She went into a nursing home fifteen years ago and refused to let anybody do anything with her house. Even though she knew she'd never be able to live here again, she just wanted to know it was still here. Made the kids absolutely crazy, and they refused to spend a dime on upkeep. She died last week, and they can't wait to put it on the market."

"Like this?" Rye asked.

"Maybe. One of them asked me to work up an estimate on repairs, which they didn't like at all. I told them they'd get a lot more out of it by getting some basic work done, but they're not inclined to wait. Then I thought about you." Sam turned and looked at him, looking uneasy and maybe hopeful at the same time. "Your year's almost up. You weren't planning on leaving, were you?"

It was probably as close as Sam would come to out-and-out asking him to stay. Rye grinned. "Hadn't planned on going anywhere."

"Good. Grace would cry for a month if you did, and then she'd probably blame me."

"You're just jealous 'cause she likes me more than you," Rye said.

"You spoil her rotten," Sam protested.

"And you don't?"

Sam couldn't say anything to that. Everybody spoiled Grace rotten, and yet she didn't seem spoiled at all. Just happy.

Which made him think about Emma. Was Emma happy yet?

No way he could ask Sam.

"So, what do you think about the house? You could buy it cheap, do the work as you could get to it. I could help you with the down payment—"

"I don't need any help with the down payment." Rye hadn't done much of anything but work for the last nine years, and he hadn't had anything he really wanted to spend his money on. He could have this,
if
he wanted it.

It meant staying here, making a life here. How did he feel about that?

"I guess we might as well take a look since we're here," he said. "If the ceiling won't cave in on us or anything like that."

They walked through the house. It really was a mess, would need practically everything. A new roof, new electrical system, new plumbing, new heating system. The works. But what he didn't know how to do, Sam did.

A house, he thought.

It had four bedrooms, a fireplace in nearly every room, and a big yard.

What was he supposed to do with a house?

* * *

"Heard you bought a house," Emma said to him, as they helped pull down the Christmas decorations that year.

He was up on a ladder, pulling strands of lights off the second story, handing them down to her. "More like buying a headache," he said. "But yeah, I bought the place."

"So, you're not going anywhere?"

Rye came to the end of what he hoped was the last strand and climbed down. It was bitterly cold, the wind howling, and she was shivering. "No," he said, when they were face-to-face. "I'm not going anywhere."

"I guess Meg Reynolds is happy."

Meg Reynolds was the woman he'd been dating for about six weeks. "I didn't buy this house for Meg Reynolds."

"Does she know that?" Emma asked, rolling up a strand of lights.

That stopped him. Truthfully, he'd never thought about Meg when he decided to buy the house. She was a perfectly nice woman, late twenties, divorced with a couple of kids. He tried not to see them, because he didn't want them to get ideas. He'd never said anything to Meg to indicate that he was interested in any more than a little bit of fun on a Saturday night. Rye was careful to never promise a woman more than he was willing to give. Not that they always listened. That baffled him. You tell them one thing, they start thinking another. He thought sometimes he must be speaking a foreign language, when he could have sworn it was plain old English.

"I heard she's picking out wallpaper and studying paint chips," Emma said.

"Not for me and her, she's not."

Emma shrugged. "You might want to make sure she understands that."

Dammit. He would.

"Rye?" she said, putting her hand on his arm to stop him when he would have walked away. "I just wanted to say... I'm glad you're staying."

"Me, too," he said. "Come on. Let's get inside."

Get back into the middle of the crowd. Keep his hands off her. Just try to think about anything but her.

* * *

Emma walked inside and headed upstairs. She stripped off her coat and her gloves, planning to hide in her room if it came down to that. But she ran into Rachel in the hall.

"What's wrong?" Rachel asked.

Emma heard someone else coming upstairs. Rachel's sister Ann and her husband and children—including one adorable, perfectly healthy baby Ann had managed to carry nearly to full term—were here for another two days. The house was full of people. She headed into her room and Rachel followed her.

"He didn't buy the house for Meg Reynolds, after all." Emma sat down on the bed, trembling and so relieved. "When he bought that big old house, I thought that was it. He must have found someone he wanted to share it with. What does he need with a house that has four bedrooms?"

The only thing she could think of was that he intended to fill them up with Meg's boys and then children the two of them would have together.

"He didn't go looking for that house," Rachel said. "Sam found it for him. I think he wanted something to tie Rye to this area, and the house did it."

Emma had been afraid to ask if he was leaving, now that he could. Then she heard about the house. "I'm doing a lousy job of forgetting about him," she admitted. "And it's not that I haven't tried."

"I know you have."

"I thought he really cared about me. I know it made him uncomfortable, even before he knew about the age difference. But I thought he just never let anyone get that close, and he was worried about what Sam would think."

"Are you sure he doesn't care about you?"

"I want to believe he does. I told myself we'd get past the age thing. That Sam would get to know Rye, and then he wouldn't object. And I thought Rye wouldn't be able to stay away from me. Isn't that the stupidest thing? He's been out with most of the women in town between twenty-five and thirty-five."