This Time For Keeps

Russell Montgomery stood on the edge of the field of blue, as much an outsider as the night he’d walked out the front door of the house that had quit being a home. He’d told himself not to look back. It wasn’t healthy. Life was ahead of you, not behind.

His eyes had shifted to the rearview mirror anyway, for one last look. Of the cheery blue century-old house. Of the yard that sloped down to the lazy creek, the row of willows, weeping. Of her.

Instead, he’d found clay pots with wilted flowers, a swing in need of repair, an empty porch and the truth.

There was nothing to look back at.

But forward… Forward had taken him far, given him much. In the primitive villages of Mozambique, the tight, poisonous coil inside him had loosened. There, he’d been able to breathe. With the passing of each day, all those dark, festering emotions that had chased him from Pecan Creek faded a little more, until all that remained was the clinical realization that the life he and Meg had been creating had been an illusion.

He’d never planned to come back.

Hell, who was he kidding? He’d never planned anything that had happened since the day Meg first walked into his world.

Africa was a continent of extremes, breathtaking beauty and mind-numbing depravity, lush jungles and barren deserts, kindness and cruelty.

Innocence.

Savagery.

Being back in America…in Pecan Creek…

It was like stepping back into an old, faded dream, familiar but fuzzy, fleeting but somehow ever seductive. You knew you were going to wake up, but for that briefest of moments, you wanted to just…linger.

She sat there among the army of bluebonnets, the warm April wind whipping wheat-colored hair against an oval face that had once dominated his dreams. The angles were the same, the wide cheekbones and tilted eyes. The mouth that had once been so quick to—

She wasn’t smiling now. Her hair was longer than before, looser. The shield of flowers hid her clothes, but he could make out a trace of something dark—and a whole lot of skin.

And the baby…

Something hard and sharp sliced through him. He’d seen a lot during his time away. He’d seen mothers and children, birth and death. But the sight of that chubby-cheeked little girl in Meg’s lap, the frilly white dress and shot of bright red hair…

His bad leg throbbed. And for one brutal moment, everything between them fell away, the flowers and the years, the tears and the broken promises, leaving only him and Meg…and the baby they’d lost.

With eyes of blue like her mum’s, he’d predicted.

Even now, the urge to pound his fist into something hard and unmovable ripped through him.

Slowly she rose from the bed of bluebonnets, easing the child to her chest. Sleeping, he realized. His sister’s baby was sleeping.

Ainsley.

He still couldn’t believe she was gone.

And that he was here.

And Meg was walking toward him. Meg of the pretty floral dresses, now wearing camouflage cargo pants and a black top that left little to his imagination.

Or his memory.

The urge to reach for his camera was pure instinct, the desire to capture the vivid contrast between innocence and—

He didn’t know what. Typical Meg, she kept that all shuttered away, locked deep, deep inside, where no one could reach her.

No one could touch her.

Especially not him.

He didn’t have his camera, but knew he didn’t need it. Some images had a way of lasting all by themselves.

In the distance, old man Ray Blunt shuffled back into view. He paused and lifted a hand to his brow, watched.

The automatic wave surprised Russell. He’d always liked Ray, had learned a lot about the world from a man who’d never left Texas.

Ray returned the gesture, even though Russell was pretty sure the old man had no idea who he was.

But Meg did. She moved toward him, her stride strong and confident, her chin high, allowing the breeze to keep playing with the tangled strands of her hair. The longer length made her look younger than the last time he’d seen her.

Or maybe that was the baby sprawled all over her chest.

He was a man used to watching, to standing on the sidelines and documenting. Never get involved. That was how you stayed intact. But he started toward her anyway, acutely aware that he was not in Pecan Creek as a journalist.

Narrow trails of mutilated bluebonnets wound through the flowers. Once he’d chosen his steps carefully. Now he let instinct guide him—and kept his eyes trained forward.

On the woman he left behind.

IN THE BEGINNING, she’d imagined this. During those first few weeks and months, she’d closed her eyes and seen him walking toward her, that pure, undiluted focus in the bottomless green of his eyes, the…longing. Sometimes he would walk in through the back door. Sometimes he would find her sitting by the young willow they’d planted near the creek bed.

Once she’d seen him at the edge of the cemetery.

It was always the same. She would stand. He would approach. Arms were opened. She stepped in. Words weren’t spoken.

Words weren’t needed.

Only Russell.

Now…God…now. Her chest tightened. Her throat burned. Beyond him she saw her car, but knew there was no way to reach the Lexus without getting by him.

Russell Montgomery was back in Pecan Creek.

“Meggie,” he said as the distance between them narrowed, and something inside her screamed. The last fringes of the dream shattered, even as the whisper of a different dream echoed through her.

Two years. Two years since she’d heard the rolling lilt of her own husband’s voice.

“And this must be little Charlotte,” he commented with the polite formality of a complete stranger. “She looks—”

“Don’t.” The word burned on the way out. Meg stopped and looked up at him, could do nothing about the hot boil moving through her. “You don’t get to say that.”

Russell stopped moving. “Meggie, look, I understand—”