Abiding Love (17 page)

Her fathe sighed. “Oh, bless you.”

She ended the call and put down the phone as she started for the door.

“Ms. Lexington, where are you going?” Mark asked.

The concern in his voice stopped her. She took a moment to explain the situation, then ran next door and had to explain all over again, knowing the clock was ticking. A.J. was more than happy to lend her his car as long as she understood it wasn’t in the best of shape. She ran back to her office moments later, keys in hand, and grabbed her purse.

“You can’t go alone!” Mark declared mutinously. “She isn’t worth the risk.”

“Mark, I have to go now. I know you don’t think much of her, but she is my mother. And Father asked
for my help. He needs me. He’s trying to change, and I have to be there for him. I have to go.”

Xandra ran out, hearing Mark shout his objections after her, and rushed to A.J.’s little rust bucket. She all but dove behind the wheel, but there her rapid forward progress slowed to a standstill. The stubborn car refused to start. Just when she was beginning to worry she’d have to give up, the engine finally turned over.

With a sigh of relief she put the car in drive, wondering frantically, what was her mother thinking to refuse medical help? Goodness, she was on the ladies’ auxiliary of two hospitals!

Mark frowned and sealed the box of books. Ms. Lexington had been so upset, she’d never answered how she wanted the books packed, so he’d decided on using more boxes and packing them in alphabetical order. Just as he finished taping the box, the cell phone on her desk rang. He hesitated but decided he’d better answer it in case it was his dad.

“Hello?” he said.

“I thought this was Alexandra Lexington’s number,” an older man said.

“It is, sir. I was helping her here in her office. She was so upset, I guess she left without her phone. Are you Ms. Lexington’s father?”

“Yes, I am. I’d hoped to catch her. Her mother’s finally agreed to go to the hospital. We’re en route now. Perhaps you could catch her? Alexandra could meet us there.” Mark could hear Mrs. Lexington in the background objecting to her husband’s call.

“I can try to catch her. But she’s been gone a while.”

“Try, please,” Mr. Lexington said. “I’d feel so much better having her support once we get there. Our house is in the opposite direction. It’s going to take her so much longer if she gets there and finds we’ve left.”

“Okay,” Mark agreed, then couldn’t resist adding, “This wasn’t a good idea, you know. My dad didn’t want her alone.”

Mark hung up without waiting for Mr. Lexington’s reply. He ran through the hall, down the steps, then up another ground-floor hall toward the teachers’ parking lot. Just as he burst out the side door, Mark saw Ms. Lexington pull out onto Indian Creek Road. He stopped, frustrated, leaning his hands on his thighs to catch his breath. Then he saw a long luxury car pull away from the curb. The man behind the wheel looked an awful lot like the man his father had shown him a picture of—Michael Balfour, Ms. Lexington’s ex-husband. The big car made a U-turn and followed her. It had a California license plate.

Michael Balfour came from California.

Mark tightened his hand into a fist and realized he still held the cell phone. His dad would know what to do. Fumbling with the key pad, he misdialed, then finally got it right and hit the call button for his dad’s cell.

“Boyer,” his dad answered in that no-nonsense military way he’d yet to lose.

“Dad, it’s Mark. Ms. Lexington left the school.
She’s driving Mr. Charles’s car. Her mom got sick and her dad called because Mrs. Lexington wouldn’t go to the hospital. So Ms. Lexington went to their house to convince her mother she needed a doctor. Ms. Lexington must have accidently left her cell phone behind, so when her dad called back to say her mother had agreed to go, I answered it. I ran down to try catching her, but she pulled out of the lot just as I got outside.”

“Calm down, son. It’s okay,” Adam said. “I’ll just—”

“No, it isn’t! A car followed her. A big black car with California plates, and the guy looked like her ex-husband!”

“Mark, I want you to call Jim Lovell. That way I can concentrate on driving. His number is stored in her phone’s memory. Just press the six and hold it. Tell him all this and tell him I’m headed to her parents’ house. Then call Sully to come get you. You did good, Mark. Try not to worry.”

Mark stared at the cell phone after his dad hung up the phone. “Try not to worry? Fat chance.”

X
andra drove as fast as A.J.’s rattletrap would let her. She saw the iron gates to her parents’ Greco-Roman house slide open when she got to the end of the drive. Her father must have been watching for her arrival. That surprised her. He hadn’t sounded capable of such calm thought.

As she drove through the gates, she remembered with weighty clarity standing on the street outside the locked gates, begging her mother for help through the intercom. And she remembered being turned away. Xandra honestly didn’t know what she was doing there, but there was no time to analyze why she kept trying to reach out to Mitzy Lexington.

Resolute and knowing she faced almost certain rejection once again, Xandra zoomed up the driveway and screeched to a stop just past the front entrance. She leaped out of the car, ran up the three wide marble steps and tried the knob. It turned. Again her fa
ther’s forethought surprised her. He had sounded so terribly rattled. Of course, “rattled” didn’t exactly describe the cool and in control Geoffrey Lexington she’d thought she knew for years either.

Expecting either to have her father meet her at the door or to hear some sort of commotion from inside over her arrival, she was disquieted to be met by utter silence. The house was so silent she could hear the six-foot-long antique German regulator clock ticking where it hung on a wall just off the foyer. She called out but got no response.

Then it occurred to her that perhaps her father had at last convinced his stubborn wife to go to the hospital. He couldn’t have called, since she’d left her cell phone on her desk.

Shrugging and much calmer knowing that her mother must be on her way to the hospital, she shook her head and moved back to the front door. Her poor father was at the hospital alone. He would be so out of his element he wouldn’t know what to do. She reached for the door knob and turned, then paused, her mind racing.

Who had opened the gates?

Jerking open the door, Xandra gasped when she saw the man standing beyond it. Her worst nightmare had come to life.

“Michael. What are you doing here?” she demanded, reaching desperately for control.

“I’ve come for you.” His tone said she was a fool if she even had to ask.

No! He was going to succeed in making her feel
stupid again! “Come for me? Go away, Michael,” she snapped. “There’s nothing left between us. You destroyed anything I ever felt for you,”

She started to swing the door closed, but Michael lunged and drove his shoulder into it, pushing the door inward, tearing it from her hand. Her fingers stung and she grabbed them with her other hand as she quickly backed away from him. But he followed, close enough for her to catch a whiff of his cologne, a heavy oppressive scent that turned her stomach with memories. What she’d once thought to be baby-blue eyes were every bit as hard and icy cold as she remembered.

“I never gave you permission to leave me,” he said, his mouth pulled grotesquely into a sneer.

Xandra stiffened her back. She wouldn’t cower. She wouldn’t buckle. She was a coward no longer. Adam had called him a bully, and her advice to any student facing a bully was to stand up to him.

“I didn’t need your permission. You married me. You didn’t buy me. Then you destroyed the marriage. I merely had the contract voided. You tried to destroy me and all that I was, too, but you failed. You’re nothing to me but a pathetic piece of my past. Now, get out, Michael. Go home to your little fiefdom and rule those poor migrant workers, because you’re done ruling me.”

Michael’s face twisted farther, making his handsome face ugly and repulsive. “It’s him, isn’t it. That man your mother told me about? You can’t want some washed-up soldier who has to live in his par
ents’ home because he has nowhere else to go. Look at what you come from.”

Xandra couldn’t help it. She laughed. “Is that what my mother told you? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but your information is wrong, not that I care how much money Adam has in the bank. A bank account isn’t the measure of a man, Michael. But it happens that Adam could probably buy and sell his parents. In fact, he did. Adam
bought
Willow Haven. And he wasn’t just in the military. He was a lieutenant commander, and a Navy SEAL. So you see, he won’t let your threats scare him. He’s faced enemies far more dangerous than you.”

“Let me tell you something now, Alexandra,” he said suddenly deadly calm. “You’re coming home with me whether you want to or not.”

Too late she remembered Adam’s warning about the reality of bravery. There was danger in goading a bully. Especially when she wasn’t as physically strong as he was and didn’t know his rules of engagement. There was something more than anger in Michael’s eyes. There was purpose. And no one else knew she was in danger.

He reached for her.

Xandra screamed “No!” Then she ran.

Adam took the turn onto Ithan Creek Road on two wheels. He jerked the wheel left and the SUV fell back onto all four. His heart pounding, he told himself that if he drove too aggressively he’d have an accident and never reach her in time.

“Please, God. Keep her safe. She’s so important to me. I never thought I could feel like this. Please. I can’t believe You’d bring her into my life to love and make me so happy, only to let me lose her.”

Adam felt his head go just a little light for a split second. He got it. Everything Xandra had said about putting his life in God’s hands made perfect sense. It was as if blinders had been on his eyes and now they were gone. His heartbeat slowed, and calm descended on him. It was going to be fine. He knew it with a certainty that was mind boggling.

“Okay, Lord. I get it. Mark’s life. Xandra’s life. My life. They’re all in your hands. I can’t see the future, so I can’t plan for it in every detail. But You can. I give up. I just can’t do this on my own anymore. Be my Lord. My partner. Guide my life. Please take care of her till I get there. I promise I’m going to tell her I love her, first thing.”

Adam drove fast but with every needed restraint until he saw the address numbers on the white stucco pillar at the foot of the drive to the Lexingtons’ luxurious gated home. The ornate wrought-iron gates at the entrance of the long drive were closed. The entire house appeared to be surrounded by an eight-foot-high iron fence topped in potentially deadly spikes. He threw open the car door and jumped out, but when he got to the gates he found them locked.

Beyond, up near the house, he could see a rusty red car he had to assume belonged to A.J. Charles. And halfway up the quarter-mile-long drive, between the gates and the house, sat the long black car Mark
had described right down to its California plates. There was no question, Xandra was in there with her ex-husband.

And then he heard her scream.

Xandra heard her own scream bounce off the marble walls and floor. It echoed in her mind, heightening her fear. She ran toward the door. Michael lunged, caught her by the hair and dragged her to the floor with him. She pushed him away and scrambled to her feet. Half crawling, half running, she struggled to the front door. She’d just begun to pull it open when his arm shot forward over her shoulder and slammed it shut.

She whirled away, but he grabbed her hair again. More determined than ever that this time he wouldn’t defeat her, she fought, but nothing she did seemed to loosen his hold on her hair. Then he got one of his hands past her defenses and grasped her by the throat. He pushed her back against the wall and in the next millisecond, his second hand joined the first. He shoved his thumbs under her jaw, forcing her to look at him. It was humiliating to be so in his power, but she glared at him, refusing to be cowed.

His eyes held the hatred that had so shocked her the first time she’d seen it. What had she ever done but fall in love with him? Maybe that had been the problem all along. She’d loved a man that had never existed—and he’d known it. “Let me go, Michael,” she ordered, refusing to show fear, trying to treat him
like any other schoolyard bully. “This isn’t going to change anything.”

He shook his head wildly. “Shut up! You made me the laughingstock of Summit Falls. I know what they’re saying now. ‘With all the Balfour money,
Mikey
still couldn’t keep a wife. He hasn’t changed a bit. He’s still a loser. A runty, little loser just like back in school.’
Mikey!
One of them called me
Mikey.
Do you remember how much I hate being called that?”

Xandra could see that facing him down wasn’t helping. She decided to humor him. “Yes, I remember. But I never called you that.”

His eyes narrowed. “You were clever. Right to the end, you were so clever. I never saw how little you respected me. Then you ran off and I knew.”

“I had to leave. You left me no choice, Michael. Can’t you see that?” Xandra began to feel dizzy and thought perhaps his fingers had cut off some of the blood supply to her brain. She tried to push him away but he tightened his hold on her neck. The dizziness grew, though she could breathe just fine.

“They respected me until you,” he droned on as if she hadn’t spoken or struggled to get free. “I have to bring you back to show them you’re still mine.”

She tried to fight the leaden feeling dragging at her limbs, knowing if she passed out, he could take her anywhere without worry of her struggling. But no matter how hard she fought him and the approaching darkness, it rolled over her, engulfing her in an over-
whelming weakness. She remembered to pray for help just as lights exploded like fireworks behind her eyes.

It took Adam only seconds to scale the iron gates. And he set a personal record at a full run to get to the front door. When he was about to give the door a good hard kick in the vicinity of the lock, he realized it hung open. He kicked it anyway and the door burst inward, hitting the wall. He followed in the wake of the sound, which crackled like an explosion through the foyer.

The next seconds were reflex. He grabbed the guy who had Xandra by the throat, spun him around and caught him with a good solid uppercut. Balfour dropped like a rock, and didn’t move.

He turned back to find Xandra in a still, crumpled heap on the hard marble floor. He dropped to her side, his heart scarcely beating in his chest, his mind screaming desperate prayers as he rolled her over into his arms. Supporting her back with his forearm he cradled her against his chest. She was alive! He’d made it just as the Lord had made him feel he would. He’d been on time, but he’d never been as terrified in his life as when he’d seen Balfour with his hands around her throat.

He checked her pulse. It was strong and steady. “Xandra, love. Open your eyes. You’re safe,” he said, surprised by the raw sound of his own voice. Then a tear he hadn’t realized he’d shed dropped onto her cheek, and her eyelids fluttered.

Joy burst through him. He forced himself to look
past the beauty of her soft blue eyes; the pupils looked even and responded quickly to the light pouring in the open front door, but there was confusion there as well. Frowning, she raised a shaky hand to his cheek. When it came away wet she drew her eyebrows together as if she was trying to think but with difficulty. Then he saw reality dawn in her eyes. She teared up.

“Michael was here.”

“It’s okay. I handled him.”

“How did you know?”

“Mark saw him follow you. Mark’s with Sully. Now shh, shh.” Adam stared down at her, tenderness and love overwhelming him, and he dipped his head to kiss her. Breaking the kiss a moment later, he caressed her cheek. “Okay now?” he asked, his voice still rough with emotion.

She made a face. “Actually, the floor’s kind of hard.”

Her eyes were a little unfocused, but her look was more dreamy than confused. Exactly the way he felt every time they kissed.

“Think you can stand?”

She gave him a brave little smile. “Help me up and we’ll see.”

Before he could, a groan from behind Adam wiped away any lighthearted thoughts along with his smile. He looked toward Balfour and felt his gut tighten. This animal had put his hands on Xandra. He’d terrorized her for two years and now he’d crawled back to do it again. He wouldn’t be showing up again. Adam intended to see to it.

Resolute, Adam helped her to her feet. Once he got her tucked somewhere safe, he and Balfour were going to have a long hard talk. By the time Xandra’s ex-husband made it back to California, he was going to understand the meaning of living in fear.

Xandra lay her hand on his chest. “Don’t. He isn’t worth you facing an assault and battery charge.”

Adam put his hands up in a hands-off gesture. “I won’t touch him, but he won’t know that. When I’m through with him, I’m betting he’ll keep the entire country between himself and you,” he promised.

A memory surfaced. One he really wished he didn’t have. It was of Xandra on the way back from Maryland with her back pressed against the car door, clearly wary of him and his anger. Balfour had taught her that fear. Maybe Adam wouldn’t stash her after all.

He grinned and asked, “Want to watch?”

She shrugged and looked a little unsure, but she didn’t move. Balfour started to push himself onto his knees then, and Adam put his foot on the prone man’s back and shoved him back down.

“Not so fast, little man. We’re going to have a talk, you and I.”

“You can’t kill me! You’ll get caught!”

Adam could feel his grin widen of its own accord. Oh, that was just too pretty a line to pass up. “Of course I can,” he quipped.

“Please. Please. I’ll go away and leave her alone. I’ll never see her again.”

“Too late. You already put your hands on her. No
body knows you’re here, so I can do what I like. The gates are locked. There’s nobody to stop me. How’s it feel to be powerless?”

“Her mother knows I’m here. She helped arrange the whole thing. If I disappear, she’ll know,” he whined.

Xandra’s agonized gasp had Adam pushing down on Balfour’s back with his heel just a little harder. Police sirens shrieked in the distance, growing closer by the second.

“Honey, can you open the gate for the police?”

She sniffled. “Only if they haven’t changed the codes. I’ll try.” She turned and walked across the wide foyer to the keypad, her emotions clearly at a low ebb. Her mother had once again betrayed her, and maybe her father had been in on it, too!