SAM CAUGHT UP with Kate at her apartment early that evening. She was wearing a pretty blue dress but her hair was rumpled and her eyes, empty. When Sam started to hug her, she turned her glance away and remained rigid and unyielding in his arms.
Realizing he’d been right to think something was very wrong, and had been getting more so ever since her father’s funeral, Sam dropped his hold on her and stepped away. Wondering what was making her so tense and ill-at-ease in his presence, wondering what he had done to make her pull away from him this way, he leaned against the wall. “Will said you stopped by the house today to give him a book that belonged to your dad.” Sam figured they had to start somewhere and it might as well be with that. He looked at Kate steadily, taking in the blue-gray shadows of fatigue beneath her eyes, the vulnerable set of her mouth. “From what I gathered, he appreciated both the gift and your concern for him.”
Looking ready to flee at the first available opportunity, Kate perched on the edge of the armchair. She folded her arms tightly in front of her and continued to regard Sam warily. “Good, because I do care about him, Sam,” she said gently but impersonally. “I care about all your kids.”
Sam tensed at the cool civility in her low tone. She was treating him as though he was someone she barely knew. As though they’d never made love or spent the night together, wrapped in each other’s arms. “And they care about you, too,” he said quietly. He paused, then continued seriously. “So do I.”
Silence fell between them, more awkward than before. Sam wished he could do something to extinguish her hurt. He wished he could hold her in his arms. Hold her while she cried. But she didn’t want him touching her and she didn’t want to confide in him. She wanted him to keep his physical distance, just as she was keeping hers. All he could do was coax her to tell him whatever the problem was, and go from there. “I know it’s been a rough time for you,” he said after a moment.
Kate looked at him, curious now. “Is that why you didn’t tell me what had happened to Will?” Her voice was flat, expressionless.
Sam had known excluding her that way was a risk, given all they had been through together, but at the time he’d had no other choice. She’d had all she could do, just coping with her father’s death. “You’ve been handling a lot,” he said gently. “I didn’t want to lay anything else on you. I figured it could wait until you were feeling better.”
Kate sent him an angry, impatient glance. “I don’t need you to protect me, Sam.”
Sam didn’t need a crystal ball to see she was spoiling for a fight. Anything that would give her a chance to push him away from her and out of her life. He knew, because he’d been where she was, and felt what she was feeling, in the weeks and months after Ellie died. He hadn’t wanted anyone to understand him. He hadn’t wanted anyone to get close to him or to pull him out of his misery and grief. When that was exactly what he had needed. “I can still be here for you,” he told her calmly, remembering the way she had barged into his life and kept at him until he’d begun to live again, his feelings about the matter be damned.
Kate turned away from him, but not before he saw the tears in her eyes.
“No, Sam,” she told him in a low choked voice as she stood and began to restlessly move around the room. “You can’t. Not after the pain and heartbreak our being together has caused others.”
As he heard the guilt in her voice, fear stabbed at him, sharp and real. “What are you talking about?”
Her eyes filled with tears and she spoke with such sadness and self-condemnation it broke his heart. “Like it or not, we have to face the facts and own up to what happened and why. If I hadn’t insisted on moving in with you, over my parents’ objections…if I had just listened to them…my dad might be alive today.”
“You didn’t cause your father’s heart disease, Kate.”
“But my relationship with you did cause him enormous stress, and that stress precipitated his heart attack.” Kate’s voice broke and the tears she’d been holding back streamed down her face. “Don’t you see, Sam? If his heart hadn’t suffered so much damage in the heart attack he had the night Craig came home…if he’d been able to have the surgery before it got to that point, then he might have lived.”
Sam didn’t want to hurt her, but the alternative was to let her sink deeper into despair. “Then again,” he countered bluntly as he took her by the arms and held her in front of him, “your dad might have gone on ignoring his symptoms, refusing to get medical treatment, and then had a massive coronary during a particularly exciting football game. There’s just no way to tell, Kate. No way to change fate. It just can’t happen. We don’t have that kind of power. No one does. Things like this are out of our hands. The most we can do—the best we can do—is accept it and go on treasuring each other and living each day to the fullest. Looking back, wishing things had turned out differently, is futile.” Sam’s voice broke and he had to force himself to go on. “I know. Because I spent damn near six months doing just that, and all I did was hurt everyone close to me. Don’t make my mistakes, Kate,” he told her urgently. “Don’t shut me out.”
“And don’t you ask me to give you what I can’t,” Kate retorted with a numbness that was painful to see.
“So what’s the solution?” Sam said, angry at how she was pushing him away after all they had been through together. “You shut yourself off from the world? Refuse to accept any comfort anyone might offer?”
“I’m not doing that,” Kate retorted stiffly. Her blue eyes were filled with anger. “I’m going to work. I’ve been spending time with my mom and family friends.”
“Just not me,” Sam concluded, hurt. Not anymore.
Kate swallowed and there was no pretending for either of them that she hadn’t been holding him at arm’s length since her father’s funeral, because she had. Now he finally knew why she had seemed to drift further and further away. She was hellbent on punishing herself for her father’s death, and that punishment primarily included cutting herself off from him and the love they had discovered. But that wasn’t what Mike Marten would have wanted. Sam was sure of that. Mike had wanted Kate to be happy, cared for, loved.
“I need time alone, Sam,” she said evenly, looking as if she were struggling to not cry. “Time to figure things out. Time to recover. You can’t help me do this.”
Yes, Sam thought fiercely, he could, if only she would let him. Once again, he tried to get through to her. He stepped closer then watched in frustration as she backed away. “I understand how overwhelming your grief is,” he said gently, “and I know you need your space to work through it. But you need to understand something, too, Kate.” He waited until she looked him in the eye before he continued sternly. “My feelings for you are not going to change. I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care how you test me or what you put me through. I’m going to be right here waiting for you,” he promised. “And when you’re ready, I’m going to marry you, and give you the kind of life you’ve always wanted, and certainly deserve.”
“You can’t wait for something that might never happen,” Kate told him sadly.
And right now, Sam thought with equal parts helplessness and resentment, she didn’t see how they could, or would, ever get past this. For the first time Sam knew how Kate must have felt when she had confronted him that night in his study weeks ago, when he was so mired in grief he’d lost all hope of ever being happy again. He hadn’t given her a single indication that her efforts to help him were anything but futile, but she hadn’t given up on him then. And he wasn’t giving up on her now, he vowed. Kate needed him. He wasn’t walking away.
AS SOON AS SAM LEFT Kate cried until she had no more tears. Kate fell into bed, still telling herself it was for the best. They couldn’t turn back the clock and redo the events that had led to such disaster, and they couldn’t build their happiness on someone else’s suffering. Sam was better off without her. And certainly the boys didn’t need to be around her, with her falling apart the way she was, from the inside out. Life would go on. Somehow she would survive this. They all would.
The next day a beautiful sterling-silver clock was delivered to Kate’s office with a cryptic message from Sam. “Time is on our side.” Wednesday, she received a calendar of all the McCabe family events for the next year filled in, and a beautiful bouquet of yellow roses. Thursday, Lacey Buchanon McCabe popped in, needing to know her ring size, and then popped right back out again. And sometime during the day a framed photo of Sam and the boys appeared on her desk.
Friday, Kate received a beautiful teakettle with the name Kate Marten McCabe engraved on it, and a dozen misshapen but delicious cookies baked by Sam and his boys. The moment she tasted one, she began to cry, but to her surprise they were sentimental tears, tears of gratitude, not grief. Saturday morning, she woke to find a thermos of her favorite fruit juice on her doorstep, and an invitation to Sunday dinner at Sam’s tucked inside her newspaper.
The message was clear. Sam knew what he wanted and he wasn’t giving up. Your heart will steer you in the right direction, her dad had said.
There was only one place Kate’s heart wanted her to be.
And that meant there was only one thing to do. So Kate showered and put on her shorts, sneakers and a pretty cotton sweater perfect for a sunny late-summer day, and drove over to Sam’s. She had no idea what she was going to say or do, she just knew she had to see him. And the boys, too.
To her surprise, a furniture store van was parked in front of the house. Workers were unloading a rolltop desk and swivel chair of the highest quality. Though where Sam was going to put that, Kate didn’t know. He already had a fine desk in his study and there was one in every bedroom, including his. Figuring that little mystery was the least of her problems, Kate headed for the door.
Brad was first to catch sight of her coming up the front steps, onto the porch. He about broke his neck leaping over the sofa in the living room to greet her. “Oh, man. You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, looking very worried.
Will shouldered his way through the front door. He squinted at her thoughtfully, then picked up where Brad had left off, demanding suspiciously, “Or are you?”
Lewis shoved his scrawny shoulders through the well-muscled frames of his older brothers. Pushing his glasses up on his nose, he said, “You know what the deal was. Dad said Kate wasn’t supposed to find out any—”
Brad clamped a hand over Lewis’s mouth, cutting him off in midsentence, and gave him a warning look not to be argued with. “Why don’t you come inside, Kate?”
“But…” Lewis sputtered anxiously, shooting a nervous glance behind him.
“Never mind what Dad said before, Lewis. I’m sure he can handle this,” Brad said in a voice laced with double meaning.
Beside him, Will and Riley remained skeptical.
Unable to contain either her curiosity or her eagerness to see Sam and make amends with him a second longer, Kate stepped inside the house and saw the disaster zone it had become. She knew Mrs. Roundtree was away for the weekend—Lilah had said something about it at the hospital—but this was ridiculous. The interior of the house looked like a college dorm on move-in day.
“Hey, Kate’s here!” Kevin dodged the clothes and books and toys all over the front hall and ran up and gave her a hug. “I missed you.”
Kate hugged him back, loving the feel of his small sturdy body in her arms. “I missed you, too,” she said thickly. In fact, even though it had only been a week since she’d seen them, she had missed them all tremendously.
Sam’s voice thundered from up above. It was more than a little irritated. “Guys, I told you not to disappear before the job was done!”
Kate turned her glance to the furniture piled up in the hall on the second floor. It looked as if the boys’ rooms had exploded, their toys, games and athletic gear landing at random places all over the house.
“We’re never going to get finished,” Sam continued grumpily, threading his way down the stairs, “unless you—” Sam broke off at the sight of her, then continued his descent, his eyes locked with hers, not stopping until they stood toe to toe. Kate felt her breath catch in her chest.
Clearly, Sam had been working very hard at whatever he was doing here. Sweat dotted his dark brow and clung to the roots of his hair. His T-shirt was damp with sweat. It molded to his taut, strong body as well as his tight, worn jeans. Clearly, he hadn’t shaved for at least a day. The stubble lining his face added a dark, dangerous aura to his handsome profile. Just being near him again made Kate’s spirits rise and her heart take on a slow, thudding beat.
Before either of them could say anything else, the guys with the furniture store logo on their shirts tromped down the stairs. The one who looked to be in charge handed Sam a piece of paper and a pen. “You’re all set up there, Mr. McCabe.”
“Thanks, guys. I appreciate the quick work.” Sam scrawled his signature. When they’d gone, Sam took Kate’s hand and led her through the front door and around to the side of the house, to a deserted corner of the wraparound porch. He guided her into a wicker chair and pulled one up next to her, so they were sitting knee-to-knee, face-to-face. “I wasn’t expecting to see you today,” he said.