The Road to Bayou Bridge

Realizing he wasn’t going to leave without her actually calling the sheriff, she slammed the door. “Fine. You want to talk. Bring it on. I’ll get the damn bottle opener.”

Renny moved toward the kitchen, more aware of her limp than normal. She didn’t want him to watch her. Didn’t want his pity or his guilt, but even so, she felt it with every step. “Stop looking at me.”

She swallowed unshed emotion that had appeared out of nowhere and entered the kitchen, yanking open a drawer and ignoring the fact her cat, Chauncey, had leaped onto the counter and drank milk from the cereal bowl she’d left in the sink that morning.

She turned and jabbed the opener toward the man who’d followed her into the kitchen. “Here.”

“Why wouldn’t I look at you? You’re still so beautiful it takes my breath away.”

His words slammed her and she flinched. “Oh, God, Darby. Are you serious? That’s what you’re going to say. I’m beautiful?”

He shrugged in a matter-of-fact manner that was so achingly familiar it made her heart hurt.

“Look, I know what I am, so don’t give me your pity. At least show me that courtesy.” She waggled the opener before thrusting it at him once again.

His blue eyes darkened and his mouth softened. She wished she hadn’t noticed, but she had. The man was abnormally good-looking with that golden hair and tan skin. Probably had a six-pack, too. He was too good to be true...like most things were. She wasn’t biting whatever worm he wriggled at her. She knew what trusting Darby had gotten her. “Lord, Renny, I don’t pity you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, sure. No one pities me. I don’t have a complex. I swear. Something about you here in my kitchen, in my space, freaks me out. Let’s go back into the living room.”

He reached out and brushed a piece of hair from her cheek and she flinched again. Not because she didn’t want his touch, but because the heat in that simple gesture seared her. It was as if a match had been struck and the air thickened with something dangerous. “I don’t want to freak you out. I’m sorry about that, but don’t ever think I would pity something as rare as you.”

His words plucked a chord in her and she didn’t like where her heart and head were sliding. She needed to get it together. Fast. “Lay that manure on someone else, Darby.”

She jerked away from him and headed back to the dining room. As she pulled out a chair, she begged her body to obey the dictates of her mind. Stay away. Keep the wall up. Don’t allow Darby access to anything he could use to drag the past forward. Be polite and aloof. Be the woman you are today, Renny. “So, you brought dinner. At least I’ll get something out of this.”

“Your cat is drinking something out of your sink. Is that okay?”

“You implying that I’m a lonely cat woman?”

The sound of the wine bottle being uncorked accompanied his question. “Well, if you’re a cat woman, I wanna see you in that black leather costume and not that weird white furniture cover.”

Renny stifled a smile. Here was the charm that bled out of Darby as easily as the sun shone. It played havoc with a girl’s intent. “In your dreams, Officer.”

He emerged from around the corner. “How did you know one of my fantasies is you in a catsuit?”

“You were always a degenerate.”

At that, his eyes shuttered and she felt his mood shift. “I was many things, wasn’t I?”

She didn’t answer because suddenly it felt a little like swimming into the unknown, so she stalled by prying open the nearest take-out box. Steam rose off the crawfish fettuccini inside and made her mouth water.

He set the bottle on the table. “I know you get lots of home cooking, but it’s been a while for me, so I stopped at Jacqueline’s.”

“Good choice. Her food’s the best, so I guess I’ll have to force myself.” She tempered her words with a small smile, determined to throw a speed bump in front of their forthcoming conversation so she could enjoy the meal. No sense in letting good food go to waste, even if it was with a man she’d hoped never to lay eyes on again. Darby had obviously snagged two wineglasses from her cabinet while in the kitchen. He poured a healthy portion into each glass and handed one to her.

“Please don’t toast,” she warned, taking the glass from him, careful not to touch his hand. She wanted no more flares of awareness. Couldn’t handle them.

“I wouldn’t dare,” he muttered, taking a big gulp of the chardonnay. He opened his own box, revealing another serving of crawfish pasta, and dug in. A semi-comfortable silence settled in as they ate.

After several minutes, Renny looked up. “I don’t like being forced into something, but I do appreciate dinner. The wine’s not bad, either.”

He wiped his mouth. “I’m not real comfortable being here myself, but it’s got to be done.”

Renny cocked her head. “Why? It’s been years and we’re both different people. Is there really a need to drag up old feelings? I’ve moved on. You’ve moved on. Can’t we let it be what it was—two crazy kids looking to thumb their noses at authority then learning they weren’t as smart as they thought they were? We were both to blame for what happened, so we don’t need apologies.”

Darby took another swallow of the crisp wine and leveled his blue eyes at her. “It’s not about apologies though I do think I owe you one. I had no idea you were injured so severely.”

The sorrow in his gaze melted something and for the first time in a long time a familiar longing wormed its way along the tunnels of her soul, convincing her the misery she’d suffered after the accident hadn’t been so awful after all. She dashed that devil of a feeling against the stone-hard resolve built long ago in the recesses of her heart. “You wouldn’t have, because you never bothered to come see me.”

“What are you talking about? You refused to see me.” Truth sat in his gaze. He wasn’t jerking her chain. The reaction was honest.

“I never refused you anything. Ever. That was the problem.”

For a moment, they held each other’s gaze. Dawning descended and in that moment, they both seemed to understand something—they had not been the only players that moonlit night. There had been others involved, each with his or her own motives.

“No, you never did, did you?” His words were almost a whisper and the tone in those words made Renny swallow hard.

“But that’s the past,” she muttered, reaching for her wineglass so quickly she knocked it over. The liquid splashed across the buffed cypress table she’d found in an old warehouse outside Lake Charles and ran off onto the carpet.

“I’ll get it,” Darby said, leaping to his feet, jogging toward the kitchen and reemerging with a dish towel. Chauncey shot out behind him as he knelt to wipe up the spill. Renny sat glued to her chair, mostly because she didn’t trust her legs, especially the one that had been broken in several places and gouged by the splintered fence...but that wasn’t the true reason she couldn’t manage to rise. No, the true reason hummed inside her.

Most of what she’d believed about the man stooping at her feet had been a lie—a lie perpetuated by her mother. The Dufrenes. Hell, even the hospital staff.

He hadn’t denied her.

Why hadn’t she known that?

Darby tossed the cloth on the table and looked up. His eyes were so blue and the chin that had once been smooth to the touch was scruffy and manly.

It was a face she knew well.

It was a stranger’s face.

“You know why I came tonight?”

She licked her lips and shook her head. “I guess I don’t.”

He eased forward and lifted one of the hands she’d curled in her lap. The warmth of his touch and the heady smell of the spilled wine kick-started something slithery and dangerous in her belly.

“It’s not about apologies.” He shook his head. “Man, this isn’t easy. I don’t know how to do this.”

“What?” She looked down at him on his knees and for an instant her mind flitted back to an eighteen-year-old Darby on his knees outside the Bayou Bridge high school football stadium. The flash of a simple gold band—one still lying at the bottom of her jewelry box. The flash of his smile. The hope and possibility of young love under a February moon.

“Renny, I’d like to ask you to unmarry me.”

She pulled her hand away. “What? Unmarry you? We’re not—”

“You remember what happened that afternoon before we guzzled two bottles of champagne?” Darby interrupted, wiping his hand on the thigh of his jeans. Now her mind flashed to champagne dripping down her neck and Darby licking it off before his head went lower and lower still. Before they spread the blanket he’d packed in the back of his pickup and made love beneath the arms of the live oak in the center of the property his grandfather had left him. “Before the car accident?”