Once and Again

“Well, you should have saved yourself the trip,” Nick said coldly. “Kristin doesn’t need you here.”

“I want to help.”

“She has her family if she needs anything. Me, Brian, and Jake and Katie.”

“I can help with Jake and Katie. I can get them ready for school and—”

He laughed, shortly, derisively. “They’re teenagers,” he told her. “They don’t need any help getting dressed in the morning. They can make their own breakfast if they want it. And they know how to tell time to be outside waiting when the bus comes.”

His scornful dismissal was another well-aimed blow, but Jessica wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it. She tilted her chin. “I’m not going to leave.”

The elevator signaled its arrival.

Nick stepped through the open doors. “Yes, you will.”

It wasn’t just the words, but the smug arrogance of his tone. She resented the accusation. More, she resented the truth in it. Her fingers gripped her purse strap tighter as she followed him into the car, moving to the opposite side.

“I have a life in New York,” she reminded him coolly. “Am I supposed to apologize for that?”

“No.” He punched the button for the fourth floor. “So long as you go back to it.”

Jessica swallowed around the uncomfortable tightness in her throat. Dammit, she hadn’t come here for this. She didn’t need his antagonism, but maybe she deserved it. Maybe it was finally time to clear the air between them.

“Why does it matter to you, Nick? Why do you care whether I’m here or there or on the other side of the world?”

It was a challenge—an opportunity for them to finally talk about what had happened the night Kristin and Brian got married, and what had happened after.

But he didn’t respond to her challenge. He didn’t say anything about their tumultuous history or what—if anything—that night had meant to him. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all for a long moment.

“Why do I care?” He repeated her question, considered.

She held her breath, waiting for his response.

The elevator doors slid open.

He shrugged. “I guess I don’t.”

Nick saw the flicker of hurt in her eyes, the hint of sadness in the whiskey-colored depths, before she turned away and stepped out of the elevator.

He bit back a sigh of regret, knowing his response had been unnecessarily harsh, needlessly cruel. It had also been untrue.

The truth was, he cared a whole hell of a lot.

Maybe too much.

And seeing Jessica again, after so many years, with so many things still unsettled between them, made him a little irrational. There was something about Jessica that had always made him crazy.

He sighed inwardly. The fact that she still did was his own problem, and one he would need to deal with so long as she was in Pinehurst. Which, he reassured himself, wouldn’t be very long.

Seeing Jessica had distracted him from his original purpose—to check on Caleb. Then again, Jessica had always been something of a distraction.

As a kid, he’d thought of her as Kristin’s pesky friend, a solemn child who’d followed him around asking questions about anything and everything. By the time she was fourteen, she’d become a distraction of an entirely different kind, with curves that other girls envied and teenage boys lusted for. He’d been a perfectly normal teenage boy, which created something of a moral dilemma for Nick and made him all the more anxious to go off to architectural college and escape his prurient desires.

And it had worked—at least for a while.

But he was an adult now, not a hormonal teenager, and while there was still something about Jessica that got to him on a basic level, he wasn’t about to let it distract him.

Jess stopped in the middle of the hallway, so abruptly he nearly ran into her. He wasn’t sure if her hesitation was because she didn’t know where she was going or because she was unsure what she would find when she walked into Caleb’s hospital room.

Or maybe she was just having second thoughts about being anywhere in his company.

It had been that way for the past eighteen years—as soon as one of them entered a room, the other would leave. He didn’t think it was obvious to anyone else, especially since their paths had crossed only a half dozen times during that period. But it was obvious to him, and he knew it was his fault.

Maybe if he’d been able to get past his own hurt and anger to let her explain why she’d made the choices she had, there wouldn’t be this painful awkwardness between them now. Or maybe he was deluding himself. Maybe there was simply no way to get back to that place where they could be friends, not after they’d been lovers.

“Room 426,” he said gruffly.

“I know.” She turned to him with obvious reluctance, her even white teeth sinking into the soft fullness of her bottom lip. His gaze dipped automatically, lingered.

So much for not letting her distract him.

“I just wanted to know…” She hesitated. “Jake wasn’t able to tell me much about…Caleb’s condition. He only said that he’d been hit…by a car.”

Her golden eyes pleaded softly.

He felt his resolve weaken.

“He was knocked out initially but regained consciousness by the time the paramedics arrived. At first he was lucid, but they admitted him as a precaution, to continue to observe his condition.

“Late last night he had a seizure, and then another one this morning. Now he’s lapsed into a coma.”

She flinched.

He’d had the same reaction when he’d first heard the news. One little word—four seemingly innocuous letters—that had the power to destroy his sister’s family.

“He rode off the end of the driveway, into the street, right in front of Harold Lansky’s car. Mr. Lansky wasn’t driving very fast, and the doctors say that, along with the fact that Caleb was wearing a helmet, probably saved his life.”

She drew in a deep breath and nodded for him to continue.

“Still, they suspect that the force of the impact when he hit the windshield bruised his brain.”

“Have they considered sending him to Midtown Children’s Hospital?”

He bristled at the question. “This is one of the best hospitals in the country—even if it isn’t in New York City.”

“But Dr. Reid—one of the best neurosurgeons in the world—is at MCH. I had a client whose ten-year-old daughter had a brain aneurysm,” she explained. “He did the surgery.”

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t mention that to Kristin.”