Tying the Knot (32 page)

She shook her head. Then nodded, then shook her head again. She looked so wretched he couldn’t help but smile.

“Please. You can trust me.” He cupped her chin in his hands and lifted her face to his. “Am I that scary?”

Her eyes widened, and to his horror she nodded. His breath stilled. She was serious. She was afraid of him. His ex-con status not only repulsed her—it
terrified
her. He felt as if she’d kicked him—hard—right in the heart.

As he let her go, he took her hand and helped her up to the shore. As she stood shivering, he wrapped his towel around her. She clutched it to her chest, looking bereft, dripping river water onto the ground.

Twilight encircled them, sending droplets of lavender into the fine spray. The music of the evening had started a symphony.

Her teeth began to chatter. He fought the impulse to envelop her in his arms.

Because . . . she was afraid of him.

Then she looked at him, her gorgeous eyes full of misery. She traced his face with her gaze, glanced at the tattoo on his arm, then bit her lip. He felt sick and wanted to race for his sweatshirt. At least then he could pretend he was someone else.

“Noah, I owe you an explanation.”

He blinked at her, managed to shake his head. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m the one who owes you. I dragged you into this mess—”

“No, that’s not what this is about.” She propped precariously onto a boulder and motioned for him to join her. He gulped, reached for his sweatshirt, and wrestled it over his head. It pasted to his wet skin as he sat next to her, feeling somewhat less naked . . . as least on the outside. Their shoulders and knees bumped together, but he resisted the desire to put his arm around her.

Because . . . she was afraid of him.

“Noah, I’m so in love with you it hurts.” She blurted it, hard and fast.

He opened his mouth, but no words came out. What? He didn’t know whether to gather her in his arms and dance or weep. “Huh?” With that intelligent reply he wanted to crawl under the rock from where he hailed.

“I am.” Her voice turned soft. She looked at him, her eyes brimming with everything she’d just said, and he believed her to the marrow of his soul. She loved him.

And she was afraid of him?

He couldn’t get past the knot of confusion in his chest to reply. He managed another endearing, “Huh?”
Way to charm her, Noah.

She smiled, as if touched by his oh-so-witty charisma. “I’ve been fighting it since the day I met you. You are everything I hoped for and more, Noah. The man I wanted to build a life with.”

Hoped. Wanted.
His heart felt like it had been tossed in the air, then speared. His eyes must have betrayed his total lack of understanding because she smiled again, and this time she touched his cheek.

He leaned into her touch. “Wanted? As in past tense?”
Please, don’t say yes. Tell me you meant something else. Certainly God wouldn’t answer my prayers, then yank them away the next second?

She nodded. “It won’t work. I should have told you that a week ago when you said that you lived and worked in Minneapolis.” Her eyes filled and she looked away.

He stared at her, grasping for comprehension. “What does this have to do with where I work? I don’t understand.”

But suddenly he did, and he wanted to groan. Oh no. Of course. The Phillips neighborhood, 2135 Franklin Avenue.

“I can’t go back there, Noah.” Her voice was so small he had to strain to hear it. “Not even for you.”

This wasn’t about
his
past . . . it was about
hers.
Her fear didn’t have anything to do with who he’d been but who he was now. His job, his future . . . her past.

“Anne.” He curled his arm around her despite the fact that she sat as if frozen. She was probably turning into an iceberg under all those sopping clothes. “Anne, I know.”

She looked at him then, her eyes big, round, and full of disbelief. “No, Noah, you don’t understand. It’s not about my life here or my job or my plans . . . it’s something that happened.”

“I know.” He nodded, wishing he didn’t have to tell her, wishing he had nothing to do with her fears. If she was afraid of him now when she thought him only a man who happened to have a burden for the lost street children, what would she think when she realized he’d been there, unable to stop the moment her life hung in the balance? Guilt felt like a ten-ton anvil in his chest. He fingered her wet hair, summoning his courage.

“Noah, about a year ago, I was . . .” Her voice trembled.

“Shot.” He flinched when he said it, remembering every ugly, deadly nanosecond. Her scream echoing off the walls of his heart, the shot that shattered so many lives, her eyes holding on to his gaze for dear life.

“How did you know?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Did Katie tell you?”

He lowered his forehead to hers, wondering if she could feel him shudder or hear the sorrow in his voice. “No.” He swallowed a ball of sheer grief. “I was there.”

23

God wasn’t fair.

Anne stared at Noah, the living proof that miracles happened, and knew that God had played upon them a horrible joke. Didn’t He have a heart?

She should have seen it. What kind of blinders had she donned to convince herself that Noah wasn’t exactly the man for whom she’d hoped, wanted, prayed?

Here he sat, a flesh-and-blood, dream-come-true apparition from the past. It seemed too wonderful, too awful, to be true.

Anne closed her eyes as memory swept through her. The soft touch of a stranger, the haunting melody of “It Is Well with My Soul.” She opened her eyes and studied Noah: the worry knitting his beautiful face; the small, round scar on his cheek; his incredible honey brown eyes, so warm, so riveting . . .

2135 Franklin Avenue.

She tried to breathe through her vise-gripped chest.
No. God, don’t do this to me.
How cruel was He to give her the very materialization of her dreams—then wrench it away by giving her a man sold out to God and to the lost souls of the street? Not. Fair.

God should have warned her He was going to start answering prayers like manna from heaven. Then she might have qualified her request for a man with a passion for the hurting and lost with a specific location.

She clenched her jaw, but tears burned her eyes. Noah was her nightmare, in devastating proportions. A heartbreaking, impossibly gorgeous dream man she couldn’t have.

Shaking, she turned her tearstained face away from Noah and everything he symbolized. “No, Noah. Please don’t say that to me. I don’t want you to be him.”

Her voice seemed pinched. As the waterfall hissed in the growing darkness, horror spiraled out of her thoughts. She began to shiver from the inside out.

If God had heard her prayers about her hero and answered, then what did that mean? Had God also heard her petition for peace and safety from the far reaches of her childhood? Could it be that He’d sent her to 2135 Franklin Avenue for a reason?

To teach her, exactly . . . what? That peace and safety weren’t in the ingredients of this mortal world? Ouch. The sheer devastation of that thought and the harsh lessons of God made her press her hands to her trembling lips. She felt the fabric of her flimsily reconstructed faith begin to rip.

Noah’s close presence raised the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. She wanted to turn toward his strong, solid chest, dig her hands into his T-shirt, and force him to deny it for the sake of her shattering soul.

“You weren’t there. You couldn’t have been there. Katie told you, didn’t she?” She stared hard into his eyes. The sadness in them confirmed the heartrending truth.

“You were shot while answering a call for my foster mother. Anthony Debries was strung out on drugs and had taken us both hostage. You and your partner walked into it.” His quiet, clinical explanation made her wince. His voice dropped so that every word seemed a groan. “Tony shot you from five feet away.”

She closed her eyes, wishing the words away, aching with the assault of memories.

“I was there. I tried to stop him but I couldn’t.” His voice broke. She opened her eyes and saw he’d covered his face with his hands. Then the big, tough street punk began to tremble, his grief so palpable it plunged right through Anne’s frozen body to her heart.

Noah was crying . . . for her. She stared at him, stunned. Her throat tightened. She couldn’t believe she’d actually said the three little words aloud, bared her heart to him, knowing he wouldn’t echo her words. But now her street-tough warrior was suffering because of her pain, broken over the fact that he hadn’t protected her. Something thick and warm filled her chest. He wept for her. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—dare to think that it might be because . . . he loved her too.

As she watched him, something inside ripped; then in a rush, a year of grief burst free. Fear, agony, even self-pity spilled out, like the lancing of an infection. Anne moaned with the enormity of the emotions.

In a movement that they both needed, Anne wrapped her arms around Noah.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, not surrendering to her embrace. “I should have stopped him. Then you came in and I tried to warn you, but . . .”

“I didn’t understand your warning.” She nudged closer. When he finally settled his arm around her, she nestled into his wide chest. “Noah, it’s okay.” He continued to weep as if he had been the one shot, the one whose life had been crushed. “I’m okay.”

Her own words startled her. Since when was she okay? Thirty minutes ago, her hideous scars had made her bathe in her clothes rather than her swimsuit. Ten minutes ago, her traumatic memories jerked her out of the embrace of the man she loved. Suddenly now, seeing his tears, she was okay?

Oh yes. A divine breath filled her chest, one that should have been accompanied by angels singing and heavenly trumpets, and she realized why God had brought her to this moment, this hero. No one in the entire world could understand her pain, her grief, better than Noah Standing Bear, the man who’d seen its inception.

God hadn’t been cruel.

He’d been merciful.

He’d been gentle.

He’d touched her battered soul by delivering to her the one man with whom she didn’t have to be afraid. The one man who cried for her scars.

And just maybe, yes, God had heard her prayers for peace and safety, the exact emotions she felt when enfolded in Noah’s arms. Who better to keep her safe than the one man, the very man, who had risked his life to save hers? If he’d nearly sacrificed himself to save her before, he’d do it again.

Certainly, Noah, better than anyone, would understand why she could never return to the inner city. He’d even admitted it.
I know,
he’d said, when she opened up her black soul.
I was there.

He had been there, had tried to stop it, and now he grieved for her pain. This man who trembled in her arms would cut out his own heart before he’d drag her back to her fears. She felt it to the core of her heart.

A wave of pure delight filled her chest, and she spread her hands on his wide back. “Noah, it wasn’t your fault.” She leaned back, willing him to meet her gaze. “You saved my life. Don’t you know that?”

He shook his head. “Because of me, you were nearly killed. I should have stopped him, but I was waiting, trying to figure out a way to disarm him when you walked in. If I had been faster . . . or smarter . . .” Tears continued to etch trails down his handsome face.

“No. You’re not to blame for that kid’s actions.” Anne wiped a tear off his cheek. “You tried to stop him. If you hadn’t jumped him, he would have shot me in the face.” The memory of that moment, of Noah flying across the room in a full-out tackle, came back vividly. “You saved me, Noah, more than you could ever know.”

He studied her, his sweet brown eyes full, glistening, unbelieving.

“You sang to me, remember? You sang ‘It Is Well with My Soul,’ and I never forgot it. You were with me during my rehab, during all the pain. God used that song you gave to me to hold me up. I’ve never forgotten you, Noah. I’ve been dreaming about you for a year.”

His mouth moved as if trying to find words. They came out in a whisper. “Oh, Anne. I . . .” His words stopped, as if caught in his throat.

His eyes roamed her face with a longing so vivid it made her heart gallop through her chest. He touched her face gently with the tips of his fingers. A glorious, delicious smile broke out, as if he realized for the first time the meaning of her words. “Anne.”

She lifted her face for his kiss, relishing it. His lips trembled as he kissed her with such tenderness, such thoughtfulness. While his arm curled around her, the other hand cupped her face and he ran his thumb along her cheek.

The moment was so beautiful she wanted to cry all over again.

“Noah,” she murmured, finally putting a name to the man of her dreams.

Softly, his breath a whisper on her skin, he asked, “Are you still afraid of me?”

He felt her stiffen in his arms.
Please, no.

“Noah!” The sound of panic laced the voice. As if slapped, Noah released his hold and searched the forest.