Chapter 19
Nineteen
Carol pressed a cup of hot tea into Carly’s cold hands. “I added a shot of whiskey to warm you up.”
“Thanks, Mom.” She took a tentative sip of the hot brew and felt the whiskey burn its way through the numbness. “Where’s Brian?”
“In a huddle on the back deck with his father, Matt Collins, and the FBI agent, Nathan someone.”
“Barclay,” Carly said as she took another sip of tea. “Nathan Barclay. Is Brian still bleeding?”
She nodded. “His mother’s after him to have it looked at, but he’s keeping the towel on it and brushing off her attempts to hover.”
“We were coming to tell you we’re engaged.” Carly’s eyes filled, and she blinked back the tears. She refused to give in to the overwhelming desire to weep. “We just wanted to tell you.”
Carol took hold of Carly’s left hand. “Your ring is beautiful, honey. You must be thrilled.”
“I’m so far beyond thrilled, I don’t even know what the word is,” Carly admitted. “He wants to do it in three weeks. Do you think we can get it together that fast? Nothing fancy, just something small.”
“Of course we can.” Carol eased her daughter’s head onto her shoulder and stroked a loving hand over Carly’s hair.
“Did Cate and Caren leave?”
Carol nodded. “They took the kids home to bed.”
“Where was Zoe?”
“A group of her friends got together to spend the night at someone’s house. They figured they’d do better together than they were doing alone.”
“Cate took her there, right?” Carly raised her head to look at her mother. “You’re sure she’s safe?”
“Of course, honey. Don’t worry.”
Carly put down the teacup and stood. “I need to see Brian.” With an odd feeling of detachment, she walked through her parents’ house, aware of worried glances from her father and Brian’s mother, who were talking quietly at the kitchen table.
She slid open the screen door and stepped onto the deck.
“There’s no way,” Brian was saying. His back was to her, but she could see him dabbing at his face with a paper towel.
A branch had caught him just under the eye, cutting open his cheek.
One glimpse at his bloody, furious, frustrated face emerging from the woods after an interminable wait had caused Carly to faint in the road next to his mother’s convertible.
A day that had begun with such promise had ended with fear and pain.
“You are not using her as bait. I don’t want to hear another word about that, Dad. Think of something else.”
“I’ll do it,” Carly said, startling them.
Dropping his hand from his face, Brian spun around.
She winced at the angry cut beneath his eye, which had swollen shut. That he had come so close to losing his eye . . . A quarter of an inch higher and he would be in the hospital.
He reached out to her. “Are you all right, honey?”
“You want to use me to lure him out of hiding,” she said to Michael as she took Brian’s hand. “I’ll do it.”
“The hell you will!” Brian said. “No fucking way!”
“It’s me he’s after,” Carly argued. “Let me do this before he hurts someone else.”
Brian’s angry outburst had caused the wound to reopen. “It’s not an option,” he said, wiping the fresh blood from his face.
Carly took the paper towel and gently tended to him. “This seems to have begun with me, so doesn’t it seem fitting it should end with me, too?”
“No, it does not seem fitting. It seems stupid and risky. Call me crazy for not wanting to dangle my fiancée in front of a psychopath.”
“Your fiancée?” Michael asked, the delight all but radiating from him.
“That’s what we were coming to tell you,” Brian mumbled.
Michael put his arms around them both and simply held them.
Nathan Barclay cleared his throat. “Well, it seems you all have other fish to fry tonight. We can discuss this in the morning.” To Brian, he added, “Get that looked at. You might need stitches.”
After congratulating Brian and Carly, Matt left, too.
“I found a couple of butterfly bandages,” Carol said.
“Let’s see if we can get one on without getting too close to your eye.” Mary Ann took Brian by the hand to lead him inside. “Come in here under the light.”
Carly watched Brian work at standing still while his mother fussed with the bandage.
“There,” Mary Ann said. “That ought to do it. If it’s still bleeding in an hour, I’m taking you in.”
“I don’t have to do what you tell me anymore,” he reminded her in a teasing tone.
“Where’d you get that misguided idea?”
The others laughed, and the tension that had filled the air suddenly lifted.
“What we need is some champagne,” Steve Holbrook declared.
He rummaged around in a kitchen cabinet, returning a moment later with a bottle he held up with a smile.
“The good stuff left over from my retirement party. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, and I can’t think of one more special than this. ”
He popped the cork and poured it into the glasses Carol had gotten out. When everyone had one, Steve raised his glass. “To Brian and Carly, may your future be bright and full of all the happiness you so richly deserve. Congratulations.”
“Hear, hear,” Michael said, touching his glass to Mary Ann’s.
After they polished off the first bottle, Steve went looking for another.
As she listened to their mothers discuss what needed to be done to throw together a wedding in three weeks, Carly began to believe for the first time that it might actually be possible. Caught up in their excitement, she almost didn’t notice when Michael stepped out on the deck.
He rested his hands on the rail and hung his head, rolling it back and forth in an effort to relieve some of the tension that had gathered at the base of his neck. Better there, he had discovered, than in his chest.
“Dad?”
Turning, Michael could have swooned once again with relief at the sight of his boy, even with the nasty cut on his face.
He was safe, he was alive, and that was all that mattered to Michael.
When he considered what could have happened earlier, in the very same place as before . . . It didn’t bear thinking about.
“How’s the cut, son?”
“Hurts like a bastard.”
“Maybe you should get to the E.R. You’ll have a scar if it doesn’t heal right.”
“A scar would add to my rakish good looks.”
Michael smiled. “What kind of B.S. has that lady of yours been filling your head with?”
“The very best kind,” Brian said. “The kind I somehow managed to live without for far too long.”
“I’m happy for you, Bri. You can’t know just how happy.”
“Then what’re you doing out here by yourself when there’s a wedding to be planned?”
“I’ll leave that to the ladies.”
Brian snickered. “I’m told I have no place in the process.”
“You know what I did for my wedding?” Michael asked, resting back against the rail.
“What’s that?”
“Got married.”
Brian laughed. “Sounds like the wisest course of action.” A moment of quiet passed between them before Brian said, “Why didn’t you collapse or do something equally dramatic to force me home sooner?”
“Because it wouldn’t have been time.”
“You could’ve saved me—hell, all of us—a lot of aggravation if you’d come up with something, anything, to get me back with her again.”
“You wouldn’t have wanted to hear it, especially from your old man, even if he’s all-knowing and filled with wisdom.”
Amused, Brian said, “You’ll be my best man again, won’t you?”
The burst of pleasure in the midst of mayhem surprised Michael. “Of course,” he said, touched to be asked and at the same time oddly saddened, as he’d been twice before, to know there was no one else his son could ask. “We should have it down to a science by now.”
Brian hooted with laughter. “You had to say that, didn’t you?”
Michael shrugged. “In this case, the third time will definitely be the charm.”
“Yes, it will. Do something for me?”
“Anything.”
“Let go of this idea of using Carly as bait. It’s not going to happen. I can’t believe you’d even consider it.”
“She’d be surrounded by cops and FBI. She’d be safe.”
“You can’t guarantee that.”
“Don’t you want to nail this guy, Bri?” Michael pleaded. “For Sam, for the others?”
Brian shook his head. “Don’t play that card with me, Dad,” he fumed.
“Don’t make this a ‘who do you love more’ thing, because the answer is Carly.
She’ll always be the answer. I want to clear Sam’s name as badly as you do, but he’s not here anymore and she is.
I plan to keep it that way, so think of a plan B. ”
“What if this guy gets to her before we get to him?”
“He’d have to kill me to get her.”
“You underestimate him at your peril and Carly’s. For whatever reason, you seem to have what he wants. Do you honestly think he’d hesitate to kill you?”
Brian looked down at the deck, a tick of tension pulsing in his injured cheek.
“You’d better be thinking of your mother, and you’d better be thinking of me,” Michael said softly. “We’ve already buried one son. Don’t you dare get yourself killed by thinking you can outsmart and outmaneuver a madman, Brian Westbury. Do you hear me?” His voice broke. “Don’t you dare.”
Brian took a step to close the space between them and put his arms around his father. “I won’t.”
Michael drove Brian and Carly to her apartment in downtown Granville. After ensuring the officers positioned at the bottom of her stairs and across the street at the town common understood they were guarding his son and future daughter-in-law, Michael left them for the night.
When they were alone, Brian rested his hands on Carly’s shoulders. “How’re you doing, hon?”
She shrugged him off. “Don’t.”
Surprised, Brian followed her into her yellow and white bedroom. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t treat me like I’m fragile and might break under the strain.” She took off her sandals and flung them into the closet. “I can handle that kind of mollycoddling from my mother and yours but not from you, too. That’s not what I need from you right now.”