he said softly.
He was so warm, and his arms felt so solid around her. He smelled like soap and shampoo, fresh and innocently clean, like a child.
This was absolutely absurd. She was not a weeper. In fact, she’d held herself together completely over the past week. There had been no time to fall apart. She’d been far too busy scheduling all those second opinions and additional tests, and cancelling an entire three-week Southwestern book-signing tour. Cancelling—not postponing. God, that had been hard. Nell had spent hours on the phone with Dexter Lancaster, Jake and Daisy’s lawyer, dealing with the legal ramifications of the cancelled tour. Nothing about that had been easy.
The truth was, Daisy was more than just Nell’s employer. Daisy was her friend. She was barely forty-five years old. She should have another solid forty years of life ahead of her. It was so damned unfair.
Nell took a deep breath. “I have some bad news to tell you.”
Crash became very still. He stopped running his fingers through her hair. It was entirely possible that he stopped breathing.
But then he spoke. “Is someone dead? Jake or Daisy?”
Nell closed her eyes. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
He pushed her up, away from him, lifting her chin so that she had to look directly into his eyes. He had eyes that some people might have found scary—eyes that could seem too burningly intense, eyes that were almost inhumanly pale. As he looked at her searchingly, she felt nearly seared, but at the same time, she could see beneath to his all-too-human vulnerability.
“Just say it,” he said. “Just tell me. Come on, Nell. Point-blank.”
She opened her mouth and it all came spilling out. “Daisy’s been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. It’s malignant, it’s metastasized. The doctors have given her two months, absolute tops. It’s more likely that it will be less. Weeks. Maybe even days.”
She’d thought he’d become still before, but that was nothing compared to the absolute silence that seemed to surround him now. She could read nothing on his face, nothing in his eyes, nothing. It was as if he’d temporarily vacated his body.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, reaching out to touch his face.
Her words, or maybe her touch, seemed to bring him back from wherever it was that he’d gone.
“I missed Thanksgiving dinner,” he said, talking more to himself than to her. “I got back into town that morning, and there was a message from Jake on my machine asking me to come out to the farm, but I hadn’t slept in four days, so I crashed instead. I figured there was always next year.” Tears welled suddenly in his eyes and pain twisted his face.
“Oh, my God. Oh, God, how’s Jake taking this? He can’t be taking this well….”
Crash stood up abruptly, nearly dumping her onto the floor.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to…I need to…” He turned to look at her. “Are they sure?”
Nell nodded, biting her lip. “They’re sure.”
It was amazing. He took a deep breath and ran his hands down his face, and just like that he was back in control. “Are you going out to the farm right now?”
Nell wiped her own eyes. “Yeah.”
“Maybe I better take my own car, in case I need to get back to the base later on. Are you okay to drive?”
“Yeah. Are you?”
Crash didn’t answer her question. “I’ll need to pack a few things and make a quick phone call, but then I’ll be right behind you.”
Nell stood up. “Why don’t you take your time, plan to come out a few hours before dinner? That’ll give you a chance to—”
Again, he ignored her. “I know how hard this must’ve been for you.” He opened the door to the hallway, holding her jacket out for her. “Thank you for coming here.”
He was standing there, so distant, so unapproachable and so achingly alone. Nell couldn’t stand it. She put her jacket down and reached for him, pulling him close in a hug. He was so stiff and unyielding, but she closed her eyes, refusing to be intimidated. He needed this. Hell, she needed this. “It’s okay if you cry,” she whispered.
His voice was hoarse. “Crying won’t change anything. Crying won’t keep Daisy alive.”
“You don’t cry for her,” Nell told him. “You cry for you. So that when you see her, you’ll be able to smile.”
“I don’t smile enough. She’s always on my case because I don’t smile enough.” His arms suddenly tightened around her, nearly taking her breath away.
Nell held him just as tightly, wishing that he was crying, knowing that he wasn’t. Those tears she’d seen in his eyes, the pain that had been etched across his face had been a slip, a fluke. She knew without a doubt that he normally kept such emotions under careful control.
She would have held him all afternoon if he’d let her, but he stepped back far too soon, his face expressionless, stiff and unapproachable once again.
“I’ll see you back there,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes.
Nell nodded, slipping into her raincoat. He closed the door quietly behind her, and she took the elevator down to the lobby. As she stepped out into the grayness of the early afternoon, the rain turned to sleet.
Winter was coming, but for the first time Nell could remember, she was in no real hurry to rush the days to spring.
Chapter 2
“What you want to do,” Daisy was saying, “is not so much draw an exact picture of the puppy—what a camera lens might see—but rather to draw what you see, what you feel.”
Nell looked over Jake’s shoulder and giggled. “Jake feels an aardvark.”
“That’s not an aardvark, that’s a dog.” Jake looked plaintively at Daisy. “I thought I did okay, don’t you think, babe?”
Daisy kissed the top of his head. “It’s a beautiful, wonderful…aardvark.”
As Crash watched from the doorway of Daisy’s studio, Jake grabbed her and pulled her onto his lap, tickling her. The puppy started barking, adding canine chaos to Daisy’s shouts of laughter.
Nothing had changed.
Three days had passed since Nell had told Crash about Daisy’s illness and he’d gone out to the farm, dreading facing both Daisy and Jake. They’d both cried when they saw him, and he’d asked a million questions, trying to find what they might have missed, trying to turn it all into one giant mistake.
How could Daisy be dying? She looked almost exactly the same as she ever had. Despite being given a virtual death sentence by her doctors, Daisy was still Daisy—colorful, outspoken, passionately enthusiastic.
Crash
