off at the gate,” Michael said as he closed the trunk, hefted his flight bag over his shoulder and set his Pullman on the curb by the car.
Around them horns honked, hotel shuttles jockeyed for parking. Travelers hunched their shoulders against the cold, struggled with their luggage, rushed to make their flights.
It was so cold. Cold outside. Cold inside. The bite of it stung her cheeks as she stood there, the collar of her red wool coat turned up against the wind, the air as heavy as the lead-gray sky. Stray snowflakes taunted, promising the bitter Chicago winter to come.
Michael’s eyes were troubled as he watched her face. He knew something was wrong. Finally, he knew. After months of combative silences and fractured truths, he finally understood. Finally. Too late.
“We’ll talk,” he promised as he gripped her shoulders and turned her to face him. “You know I have to go on this trip. It could make or break my promotion, babe.” He rocked her gently, lifted one corner of his mouth in that crooked smile she’d never been able to resist.
When she didn’t react, he bent his knees, met her at eye level. “When I get back, we will talk.”
“It’s too late, Michael. It’s too late to talk.” Her words sounded as frigid as the wind that whipped off Lake Michigan and picked up speed and force as it funneled through the city and cut its way to O’Hare. “It’s been too late for a long time now.”
He straightened, his hands tightening on her shoulders. He drew her toward him protectively when a woman sprinting for the terminal doors bumped against them with a mumbled apology. His breath puffed out in smoky white clouds of frost that crystallized on the brittle air.
“It didn’t feel like it was too late last night.”
Last night when they’d made love.
Against all odds, when they could no longer communicate on a verbal level, they’d never lost their ability to communicate in bed.
As she stood there, feeling the heat of his strong hands through her winter coat, seeing the passion in his eyes, she knew that sex had been the only thing keeping them together for some time now.
“Michael…this is hard.” She worked up her courage to say the words but she couldn’t look at him. “I…I want a divorce.”
She felt his shock like the blow that it was. For a moment he was utterly still. Then his hands loosened their hold on her shoulders, dropped to his side.
“You don’t mean that,” he said after a moment in which they both felt the truth and the finality of her decision like the cut of the wind against their faces.
“Look at me,” he demanded, each word a command, each breath an effort. “I deserve to have you look at me when you tell me you want to rip my life apart.”
“Our life.” She raised her head, felt her heart beating with anger and hurt and utter helplessness. “It’s our life that’s being ripped apart, and I’m not the only one responsible. This didn’t start here, Michael. Not today.”
She felt the tears and couldn’t blink them back. “I—I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to.”
“I don’t accept that.” His words were as clipped as the wind.
She lifted her chin, looked past him at the glut of humanity crowding toward the terminal doors.
“I’m sorry. But your acceptance doesn’t change things. I want a divorce,” she repeated, meeting the bleakness and the anger in his gray eyes one last time. Then she turned away.
Like an automaton, she walked around the front of the car, opened the door and slid behind the wheel. She wasn’t aware that she’d fastened the seat belt, turned the key and slipped the car in gear. But as she checked the rearview mirror, she was very aware of him standing there. The wind tugged and whipped his dark hair around his beautiful face; his strong cheeks were red from the cold, his gray eyes were set with defiance and denial.
It wasn’t until after she’d parked in front of their apartment that she’d realized she was still crying, that she couldn’t stop crying.
Tara blinked herself away from a moment that even now, two years later, remained as vivid as Lake Michigan in the swell of a storm. She looked toward the floor-to-ceiling windows of her parents’ manor house and felt like crying now.
She still missed what she and Michael had once had. The passion, the hopes, the dreams, the defiance that had them eloping on prom night simply because they were in love. They were in love, but he was the boy from the wrong side of the tracks and she was the princess her wealthy parents wanted to exile to an exclusive girls school to get her away from him. Away from Michael, who hadn’t been good enough for her, who could never provide for her by Connelly standards.
“John won’t wait forever, Tara.”
Her father’s voice broke through the years, through the tears she hadn’t been able to shed for some time now. The accuracy of his statement undercut all the might-have-beens and should-have-beens, and relayed the truth.
“I know.” She laid a gentle hand on Brandon’s bottom, needing to feel his sturdy little bulk, to touch what was real when the surreal threatened to outdistance it.
The door to the den opened with a subtle creak.
“Mr. Connelly, I’m sorry to intrude.”
Ruby, dressed in her starched black uniform even at this late hour, stood in the doorway. Her hands clenched the doorknob so hard her knuckles had turned white. Her eyes were as round as the buttons on her blouse, her cheeks as gray as her apron.
Her father realized that something was wrong at the same moment Tara did. The unflappable Ruby, who had been their head housekeeper, a fixture and a friend for all of Tara’s memories, was far from the composed manager of Lake Shore Manor.
“Ruby?” Grant’s brows knit together with concern. “What is it?”
“Mr. Connelly,” Ruby repeated, clearly struggling for control. “There…there’s a gentleman here. He wishes to…he wishes to see Miss Tara.”
“At this hour?” Grant snorted. “And does this gentleman—who has the audacity to come to my home at—” he raised his arm, shoved back the cuff of his custom tailored white shirt and checked his watch “—just after nine o’clock in the evening—have a name?”
A preemptive anticipation had Tara’s heart suddenly pounding. Her breath inexplicably clogged in her throat as she rose jerkily to her feet.
If possible, Ruby turned a whiter shade of pale. Her gaze shot to Tara, apologetic, even a little alarmed, and yet guardedly hopeful as she opened the great oak door wider.
A man stepped into the room, a shadow in the doorway, a ghost from the past.
“Good Lord,” Tara heard her father murmur in shock and incredulity as Michael Paige’s lean, athletic frame filled the doorway.
Tara shook her head, disbelieving, yet wanting, with everything that was in her, to believe. She touched her fingers to her lips, tears brimming as the man’s somber gray gaze sought and found hers.
“Michael.”
