red, she felt her eyes begin to smart.
She brushed a hot tear from her cheek. All she managed to do was clear the path for another to come rolling down in its wake. It sped faster because of the trail that had been forged.
Hormones, she thought. Just hormones making her feel sorry for herself. Right now, her emotions were stretched out like a giant rubber band and some unseen hand was mercilessly plucking at it, making it twang first one way, then the other.
The feeling was driving her crazy.
This just wasn’t like her. She wasn’t the type to sit around and wallow in self-pity like some indulgent, self-centered, pampered brat. She was the one who always fought back. The one who stood up for herself. The one who took risks in order to make her point. She had refused to allow her father to relegate her into a neat little niche the way he had tried to do with her sister. And when James Bailey had seemed to have gone out of his way to ignore Marlene and her after he had divorced their mother, Nicole hadn’t begged for his favor. Instead, she had dug in and stood up to him.
And gotten slapped down and then disowned for her trouble.
The kettle screeched, steam billowing out of two tiny holes like smoke emerging from a fire-breathing dragon. She poured water over the waiting tea bag, then dunked it mechanically, her mind skirting the past.
Her father hadn’t liked her spunk, he had been annoyed by it.
But Craig had admired it.
A bittersweet smile played on Nicole’s lips. Or, at least Craig had said he’d admired her spirit. She tossed away the tea bag, then picked up the mug, cradling it in both hands. The apartment felt cold. She husbanded the bit of warmth she was holding.
Nicole looked down at the dark liquid in her mug and thought of Craig’s eyes. They’d been brown like that. Brown and warm and heart melting. Set off by a sexy smile that had broken down all her defenses and clouded her judgment.
How could she have known that it had all been a big act just to get his way? That someone who she had thought was a freewheeling rebel was really just as self-serving as her father had been? Coming from completely opposite directions, Craig Logan and James Bailey managed somehow to walk down exactly the same road.
A road that ran right over her heart.
Needing to feel loved, craving it with every fiber of her being, she’d finally let her guard down and allowed herself to be vulnerable. Or maybe Craig had managed to seep through the walls she had set up around herself. However it had happened, she had fallen blindly in love with him. So blindly that she didn’t realize that Craig was in love with the idea of marrying a rich girl and not in love with Nicole.
The word blind seemed appropriate. He’d been a blind date, arranged by her roommate. She’d gone on the date reluctantly. Three dates later, Craig had deftly utilized her dissatisfaction with school to get her to drop out of college and run off with him.
A month after she’d met him, Nicole had become Mrs. Craig Logan, convinced that the rest of her life was going to be wonderful. Craig was exciting, a risk taker, someone who wasn’t afraid to live on the edge. He was everything her father was not, flamboyant, entertaining, attentive. Any way she looked at it, Craig Logan was just too good to be true.
That should have warned her from the start. But she had been too wrapped up in him and their life together to realize that.
Craig wanted to be a race car driver, setting his sights on becoming the next king of the raceways. The inheritance she’d gotten from her paternal grandmother helped fuel that dream for Craig. It had paid the bills as well as bought the car that he needed to race. She’d been frugal with the money and there was still some left. It was part of what she was living on now.
At first, life with Craig on the road had been very exciting. They went from town to town, following the circuit, making love in dozens of different hotel rooms. It was exhilarating. And so different from the life she had led as James Bailey’s rebellious daughter.
Cynicism curved Nicole’s mouth as she sipped her tea. Yes, it had been exciting. For about three years. And then it started getting old. Very old. The excitement eventually petered out. The very things that had made it all seem so spontaneous, so glamorous, began to tarnish it. She never had a place to call her home. Never felt settled.
But she tried to tough it out and kept her feelings to herself because Craig seemed so happy. He thrived on the circuit and he was good at racing. If he gambled a little too much, well, that was just his way of letting off steam, he had said.
But one day, sitting alone in a hotel room in Nevada, Nicole took a good look at her life and realized that she didn’t have one. Not one of her own at any rate. She had Craig’s life and that wasn’t enough. She needed something to do besides cheering him on, besides watching the racing groupies bat adoring eyes at him.
When she talked Craig into putting down roots, at least part of the time, near her old home, she had hoped that they had hit upon the perfect compromise.
Fool, she mused now.
But at the time it seemed all right. While Craig continued on the racing circuit, she had remained behind and gone back to college to get the degree she had abandoned for him. She went to classes and attempted to ignore the rumors that returned to her with unsettling regularity. Rumors of Craig and his women.
She’d done what she could to hang on. For a while, she’d even talked herself into believing that it was all hype and that Craig couldn’t help it if women threw themselves at him.
It was never the throwing she minded, Nicole thought now. Men like Craig always attracted women and it was to be expected. That went with the territory. It was the catching that bothered her.
It became clearer and clearer to her that Craig was doing his very best to catch every single pass thrown his way. And the money, there always seemed to be huge sums of money going out, more than she thought there should have been. More, she felt, than was coming in. It went to support his lavish lifestyle. She never saw any of it beyond the diamond ring on her hand. As time went on, Nicole became torn between attempting to ride it out and leaving him.
And then, one quarter away from graduating, she’d found out that she was pregnant. It would mean putting her life on hold again, but the thought of a baby excited her and calmed her at the same time. She was going to be a mother, someone’s mother. It meant the world to her.
When she told him, Craig had been far from elated about the prospect of becoming a father. That had hurt her more than she’d thought possible. But, with Marlene’s support, she had tried to bear it, secretly hoping that once the baby was actually part of their lives, Craig would settle down a little.
Nicole pressed her hand against the huge mound before her as fresh tears followed in the trail left by the others. All that was in the past. A spinout six weeks ago had made the rumors and their future together all moot. Craig was gone. The car had caught fire and there hadn’t even been anything to bury. She’d held a memorial service for him and gone on with her life.
She supposed, a lump growing to insurmountable proportions in her throat, that nothing had really changed. She was still here, in this apartment, where she has been during Craig’s times on the road. Her plans for her own future hadn’t changed. She still intended to be a teacher once the baby was born.
It was just that…
Just…
