Escape with Me

Dr. Khan laughed, too. “Butter and lobster, no wonder your cholesterol’s high. I want you on olive oil and good omega-3 seafood like salmon.”

“I hate the taste of both,” Aaron complained.

“You’ll just have to get used to them,” Lana spoke up as she entered the room.

She walked straight over to her father, and kissed him on the cheek, then greeted Dr. Khan with a warm smile and a hearty hello.

Dr. Khan, in his late forties, was about her height and looked fit in his white physician’s coat with a white shirt and black tie underneath, black slacks and sturdy black oxfords. His dark liquid eyes lit up at her hello. “You must be Lana,” he said. “Your father has been expecting you.”

“Yes,” said Lana, smiling warmly. She lovingly gazed at Aaron. “How is he, Doctor?”

Aaron started to say something, and Lana shushed him. He fell quiet, his face a mass of grins. He was so delighted to have her home, he didn’t care that she was being bossy, as usual.

Dr. Khan patiently went over Aaron’s condition with Lana. She asked questions and he answered them to her satisfaction. When she felt there was no more to learn on the subject, she thanked Dr. Khan who told them he had to go but he would be back in the morning at which time he would let Aaron know if he could go home. The doctor advised that there were still test results that hadn’t come in yet.

Alone with her father, Lana fell on him and hugged him tightly. Then she rose and peered into his beloved face, a face that was a pleasant reminder of their shared genetics. He also had a dash of freckles across the bridge of his nose. And if not for his sixty-two years his hair would have been the same red-brown. Today, it was pure white. His skin was a deep golden-brown due to the sun, wind and salt air that he lived in every day. She loved the crinkles around his brown eyes and the bushy white eyebrows above them.

“I’ve missed you,” she said. Tears came to her eyes in spite of her attempt to keep them at bay.

Aaron squeezed her hand. “I’m fine, sweetheart. You know nothing gets me down for long.”

“I do,” she said, trying to sound upbeat. “But the older I get the more I realize that you’re not getting any younger, either. That’s a scary thought. What would I do if anything ever happened to you? It’s not like I have a huge family to fall back on.”

Her mother, Mariette, had a sister, Dorothy—Aunt Dottie to Lana—who lived in Florida. However her father was the last of the Braithwaites in North Carolina. There were some distant cousins in Massachusetts whom he never heard from. He and Mariette had wanted to have more children but they’d only been blessed with Lana.

Lana wanted to have children with Jeremy but he had convinced her to wait a few more years. He said he wanted to enjoy their time as a couple for the first five years of their marriage. Then he said they could have a child or two. If given the choice of having Jeremy’s child with her now or him, Lana would have chosen the child. Just because Jeremy had proven unreliable and less than honest didn’t mean his child would have been tainted. The child would have been loved by her beyond measure.

“You’re only thirty-two. There’s still time to have children and make me a granddaddy,” Aaron reminded her, his eyes twinkling with merriment.

Lana laughed. “In case you haven’t heard, my husband’s a fugitive and I’m in the process of divorcing him.”

“A wise decision, as I told you over the phone,” her father said. He patted the side of the bed and Lana sat down. He hugged her close. “Lana, there’s only one way to get on with your life when something as devastating as what happened to you occurs. You have to keep moving forward. You had plans before you met Jeremy. Some of them you put on hold for him. Becoming a mother was one of them. Jeremy’s not in the picture anymore. You have the reins. Don’t allow his behavior to define the rest of your life. We can’t control other people’s behavior. All we can do is control how we react to it.”

“And even that’s hard to do,” Lana said.

“Have you ever noticed how the important things in life are always difficult to accomplish? That’s because God wants you to recognize the blessings in life when you’re presented with them, and appreciate them.”

Lana looked at her father with a deadpan expression. “Are you saying my experience has been a blessing?”

“Now you know what kind of man you married. It would have been worse if you had been with him twenty years instead of five and all of this happened,” Aaron said reasonably.

“It stings pretty badly right now,” Lana asserted.

“Of course it does, but eventually they will find him, and you’ll be able to face him and tell him to go to hell and you’ll live through it. You’re tougher than you think.”

Lana knew her father was right. After she had admitted to herself that Jeremy had faked his death and run away, she had spent weeks beating up on herself for being so gullible and allowing herself to love a man like him. Now, if she ever saw him again she believed she would stomp on him. She was that angry with him.

She smiled at her dad. “What about your health and you being in the hospital for the first time in your life. Is that a blessing?”

Aaron’s smile grew wider. “It got you home, didn’t it?”

Lana rolled her eyes. “You never quit.”

“Never, baby girl.”

Lana stood up. She looked around the room. Flowers were on every available surface. “Your women?” she joked, referring to the number of bouquets.

“Well, you know...” he said with no modesty whatsoever. “What can I say? There are more women than men in our age group. Somebody has to take up the slack.”

Lana went to read a few of the cards attached to the bouquets. Sure enough, they were from females. Some names she recognized, some she didn’t. One in particular was of interest to her. It was her high school English teacher, Miss Ellen Newman.

“Miss Newman, Daddy? You’re seeing Miss Newman?” She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

“She’s an attractive woman,” Aaron said. “And we share certain interests.” He raised his eyebrows in a lascivious manner, which made Lana guffaw.

“I don’t want to hear anything about Miss Newman’s certain interests,” Lana hurriedly told him.

“I was just going to say she likes going fishing, too,” Aaron said innocently.

“I’ll bet,” Lana said dryly. She turned to face him again after reading the message on another card: Get well soon, Tiger! It had been signed by another female admirer whose name she didn’t recognize.

“Maybe giving up butter and lobster aren’t the only things you should think about letting go,” she said with a laugh.

“I’d give up the shellfish before I gave up the ladies,” vowed Aaron through a smile.

Chapter 4

Ten was waiting when Lana exited her father’s hospital room. She looked up, and he was there as if out of nowhere. She smiled at him, and was reminded of the fact that she hadn’t gotten the chance to question her father about this good-looking man. She’d wanted to know his opinion of him.

“Oh, Mr. West,” she said, “there you are. Look, really, I can get home from here. Don’t trouble yourself any longer.”

“Are we going to go over that again?” Ten asked with a smile that brought out the dimples in both cheeks. Lana’s heart did a little flip-flop. Oh, calm down, she told the out-of-control muscle. But then, it wasn’t as if it’d gotten much exercise lately. Not since she’d relegated the male species to a genus lower than an earthworm.

It was unkind to be rude, though, so she tolerated his enthusiasm.

She began walking toward the bank of elevators here on the fourth floor. Ten fell into step beside her. “How’s your dad?”

“Cracking jokes with the best of them,” she said. “If I didn’t know better I’d think this is some ruse just to get me home. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Ten squirmed a little when she said that. Guilt wasn’t an emotion that he had time for though. Lana’s presence could very well flush out that rat Jeremy Corday.

He grimaced. Okay, where had the name-calling come from? Formerly, he had thought of Jeremy Corday only as the subject of an FBI dragnet. No personal feelings had entered into it. Now all of a sudden he was attaching derogatory labels to him? Maybe it was because he had not before been so close to someone Corday had damaged with his underhanded behavior. His sympathy for Lana was growing by leaps and bounds.

He regarded Lana with a quizzical look in his eyes. “You’re joking, right? Would it take something as elaborate as that to get you to come home?”

For a moment he thought he’d overstepped his bounds because Lana simply stared up at him without saying a word for quite some time, even though it was probably only a few seconds. Then she sighed and said, “I don’t know you. You’re doing a story on my dad and I don’t want to say anything that might end up in that story. I’m sure you understand.”

The elevator doors opened and he and Lana watched as several people got off the conveyance. He was now alone with her and he pressed the call button for the lobby. “I’m off the clock,” he said. “I promise you as a journalist and, better yet, as an honorable human being, that anything you say will go no further than right here, right now.”