Heartbreaker (40 page)
“Just down to the second floor,” he said, and smiled. It was a kindly smile, and it reassured her a little. “It’s okay.”
Theresa got in.
Once on the second floor he ushered her down a hallway and stopped outside a room. Opening the door for her, he gestured for her to go inside.
A young man in a long white coat was leaning over a patient, who was lying in bed.
The man looked up as she entered.
“I’m Dr. Silva,” he said. “I think you may know this woman.”
Only then did Theresa look down at the patient.
“Mother!” she gasped, almost dropping Elijah. The room seemed to spin. Her heart pounded. Her knees shook.
“Mother?” she whispered again, walking to the bedside on unsteady legs. Eyes closed, face turned away, Sally Stewart did not respond. But there was no doubt it was she.
“Is she alive?” Theresa could scarcely bear to hope, even now. It seemed impossible. It was impossible.
“Very much so.” The doctor, who’d been writing something on the chart he held, smiled at her. “She ingested a large amount of a very strong sedative. And she’s suffering a little from exposure. But she’ll be fine.”
“But I thought she was dead!” Theresa burst out, looking from the doctor to the policeman, who had entered the room behind her. She had never actually
seen
her mother dead. She had just assumed.… “I thought … I thought they had murdered her!”
The policeman glanced at the doctor, then cleared his throat. His eyes were compassionate as they met hers. “When we reached the mining-camp site we found numerous people laid out on the ground. The majority of the victims were arranged around a single central victim, who I understand was your father and who was—ahem!—in a different position. All the victims on the ground had been heavily sedated. Five had had their throats slit, and were dead. We suspect the plan was to murder the others too, but something interrupted the perpetrators before they could finish the job. However it happened, this lady and five of her children survived. Two more were listed as missing. I believe you and the baby here may be those two.”
Theresa simply stared at him for a long moment without speaking. His words percolated slowly through the shock that had insulated her from her emotions since the nightmare began. When at last she realized the truth of what he said, she broke down and cried bitterly, sinking into a chair they pushed out for her.
She clutched Elijah and cried, her tears soaking the baby’s golden head.
“Theresa?” It was a weak whisper, so weak Theresa could scarcely hear it. Something touched her head.
Theresa looked up. Her mother’s eyes were open and she was looking at her. The touch she had felt on her head was her mother’s hand.
“Mother.” Theresa almost choked on her tears. “Oh, Mother, I thought you were dead!”
Her mother smiled. “I see you took care of Elijah for me,” she said, her hand moving to caress the baby’s cheek.
“Yes, Mother, I did.”
“Don’t cry. Everything’s going to be all right.” With that Sally closed her eyes.
Theresa looked up at the doctor in alarm.
“She’s going to be all right,” he said. “It’ll just take a little time.”
Theresa closed her eyes and thanked God, who she was now sure existed by whatever name.
Because He had given her a miracle. Though He had taken her father, He had given the rest of her family back.
August 1, 1996
L
YNN WAS JUST FINISHING
the last story of the day when she saw him. She continued to smile and talk into the camera, even though her heart was racing.
She was seated at the anchor desk at WMAQ in Chicago. Behind the lights and camera, Jess watched her.
When they’d parted after their vacation fling—those five days they’d had together after he was released from the hospital—she had told herself it was over.
That was the trouble with vacation flings, she kept reminding herself. They ended with the vacation.
Only her longing for him hadn’t. If anything it had increased. Lynn hadn’t realized quite how much she wanted to see him again until now.
And she realized something else too, as she smiled through the closing credits while trying not to shoot little sideways glances at Jess: Somewhere, in the course of their vacation fling, she had fallen in love with her rhinestone cowboy.
When the cameras stopped rolling she stood up, unhooking her mike from her elegant navy blue blazer. Her coanchor, Mike Knox, said something to her, to which she must have replied with a modicum of sense, because he nodded.
Then she walked over to Jess.
He was leaning against the wall, wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and cowboy boots. His tawny hair was a little shorter than it had been when she’d last seen it, but it still brushed his shoulders. His eyes gleamed at her as she approached, sliding down her body and over her legs before moving back up.
When those to-die-for baby blues met hers, he grinned. Lynn knew he was remembering the first time he had stared at her legs like that, when she had done her best to slay him with a look.
This time she smiled at him.
“Hi, hero,” she said as he straightened away from the wall.
“I could have done without that.” He grimaced wryly.
Thanks to Lynn’s reporting, Jess had found his fifteen minutes of fame in the aftermath of the farmhouse explosion. He hadn’t enjoyed the experience, she knew.
Since in the end only a few people had died and only one house was blown up by a very small bomb, the story hadn’t stayed in the news for long—though it had been long enough to win Lynn a very lucrative job offer from CNN. She had even been approached with an offer to write a book about her experience, though the amount of money mentioned had been minuscule.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, curling her hand around Jess’s arm and leading him away from the interested eyes of her colleagues.
“I came to take you out to dinner,” he said. “If you’re free.”
“You came all the way from Utah just to take me out to dinner?” She wrinkled her nose at him.
“Among other things.”
“ ’Night, Lynn!”
“See you tomorrow, Lynn!”
Two of her coworkers walked past, heading out the door. Lynn answered them absently, not even registering who they were. She had eyes for no one but Jess.
“Like what kind of other things?”
He shrugged. “Oh, this and that. You coming to dinner with me or not?”
“All right. Let me wash my hands.”
At Lynn’s suggestion they headed for da Vinci’s, a little out-of-the-way Italian place with the best fettuccine Lynn had ever eaten. They never made it.
They ended up in Jess’s hotel room instead.
Later, Jess flipped on the lamp and looked down at Lynn. She lay with her head on his chest, threading her fingers through the crisp brown curls that grew there. The wound in his shoulder, she saw, was mending nicely. It had healed until it was no more than a puckered red scar.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you too.” She slanted a quick smile up at him and tweaked a curl on his chest. They were stretched out side by side, naked, with her leg thrown over his and his arm around her shoulders as he idly stroked the skin of her throat. The bedclothes had been kicked to the floor, and Lynn, at least, was too lazy to retrieve them.
Besides, with Jess’s arms around her she certainly wasn’t cold.
“Did you? How much?”
There was something about his tone that made her look up again. She was trying to avoid meeting his eyes, because she was afraid of what he might read in hers.
“More than I miss cigarettes.” Having managed not to smoke for the duration of their adventure, Lynn had vowed to quit. It was one of the hardest things she had ever done. If she ever took those publishers up on their offer, maybe she’d turn her experience into kind of a self-help tome. She could just picutre the title: How to Stop Smoking and Save the World.
“Is that a lot or a little?”
Lynn laughed. “Only a lifelong nonsmoker would ask that.”
“A lot, huh?”
“Don’t get cocky.”
“In that case, how do you feel about commuter relationships?”
“Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.”
Jess sighed. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you? Open that drawer by the bed.”
He indicated the nightstand. Wriggling onto her stomach, Lynn did as he said.
In the drawer, on top of the room-service menu and various advertising circulars, was a small square box wrapped up in silver paper with a big white bow.
Looking at it, Lynn felt her heart start to pound.
“What is it?” she said, glancing up at him.
“Open it.” He wasn’t smiling now, and the look in his eyes was both wary and, she thought, eager.
Lynn picked up the package and slowly removed the wrappings. As she had part hoped, part feared, a red jeweler’s box was revealed.
She stared at it for a long moment before flipping back the lid.
A diamond solitaire twinkled up at her. It wasn’t large, but it was perfect.
“I think we could make it work,” he said. “Think of the great vacations we could take with all our frequent-flyer miles.”
Lynn looked up at him, at the baby-blue eyes, the handsome face, the long, faintly smiling mouth.
“Do you think you could say something? The suspense is killing me.” He hitched himself higher on the pillows, pulling her up with him.
Lynn decided to throw her cap, her heart, and everything else over the windmill.
“I’m in love with you,” she said.
“Well, that’s nice to hear.” A slow smile stretched his mouth, warmed his eyes. “Because I’m in love with you too.”
Then he kissed her.
A long time later, when they were wrapped in each other’s arms and so sated that Lynn for one thought she would never move again, he spoke out of the darkness: “I take it that means yes?”
“Yes,” Lynn said.
E
PILOGUE
December 15, 1996
T
HE NIGHTMARE WOKE
J
ESS
with a start. He lay in the darkness, his heart gradually regaining its normal rhythm. In his arms, Lynn stirred, muttering. She didn’t wake.
They were in a hotel room in Bermuda. On their honeymoon. He’d just enjoyed three days of the hottest sex he had ever experienced in his life. With a woman he admired, desired—and loved.
Life doesn’t get much better than this, he thought.
Except for the nightmare. He hadn’t had it for a long time now. He had thought it was a thing of the past.
Lying in the dark, staring up at a ceiling he couldn’t see, Jess realized something: It was the same nightmare he always had.
Only this time there was something different about it. Pondering, Jess finally figured out what it was.
In this nightmare the raid still went awry, agents who were his friends still died, the complex still burned.
But he hadn’t felt to blame.
Because in some weird way what he had done in Provo had been an act of atonement.
It had allowed him to accept a bitter fact: In life, when a man does battle with a dragon, sometimes the dragon is going to win.
But not in Provo.
The dragon had been slain.
Chalk one up for the good guys, Jess thought. Wrapping his arms around Lynn, he rolled over and went back to sleep.
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