All or Nothing (20 page)

And that’s when it happened. The haze dissipated. Suddenly the lights burned, the flashing bulbs stung Belinda’s eyes and shock like she’d never known slammed sensation into her.

She stared up at the dais, to the animated 3D computer representation of her fountain—with its smooth steel curves and carved glass bricks and balls forming its joints—and realized it wasn’t a dream. She’d achieved something.

But Lucas wasn’t here to see it.

Just that quickly came the pain. Blinding, crushing pain. Behind her eyes, in her chest, in her middle. Kyle pulled her to her feet, his anger put aside by his concern. He walked her up to the stage steps as he would lead a child on its way to bed while she clung to his arm and shook her head wildly. This was wrong. It shouldn’t be him there, holding her hand. It should have been Lucas.

But she’d destroyed that. She’d ripped out her own heart because she’d been too afraid of his kindness. Too afraid of her love for him. But it was there anyway, with or without him. And it ached for him.

Kyle extended his arm, guiding her up the three steps to where a stunned-looking Yvonne held the crystal award with both hands. Not that the woman was looking at her. No, she was staring at Kyle, her mouth pinched and twisted. Like a woman rejected.

Belinda nearly ran back down the stairs.

Yvonne stepped forward and shoved the heavy thing into Belinda’s hands with a fake hug. “Enjoy it while you can,” the woman sneered in her ear. “Your fountain will never get built. It was a mistake to let someone like you in this contest but it
will
be corrected. When I’m done with you, you’ll wish you were never born.”

Belinda nodded automatically. She
was
a mistake. She’d heard it all her life. It stood to reason someone like Yvonne would notice as well. Like a familiar old coat, the weight of the acknowledgment clasped her shoulders and weighed them into a slump. She stepped past the woman to the podium where she was being directed. Unfortunately, the lights were brighter there. It was difficult to see past them to the crowd beyond, even when the clapping stopped and they waited silently—but for that person coughing roughly in the back of the room—for her to say something.

All she could do was frown down at the crystal. It had her name on it, same as the medal she’d pulled from Lucas’s pocket.
You
earned
something
, Lucas had said, wanting to make sure she made the distinction.
You and your design. You should be proudest of that.

Tears stung her eyes and slid down her cheeks as she remembered the look on his face, his gentle smile, the kindness of his touch as he’d given her a gift no one else ever had.
I’m proud of you.

A sob broke through her thoughts, echoing through the silent hall. There was more rough coughing in the now far-too-extended quiet, but she couldn’t quite speak.

This really was hers. Lucas had said her designs were worth being proud of. That
she
was worth being proud of. She hadn’t believed him. He might be gone, but somewhere under all her heartache, the faith he’d planted tried to shine…and finally caught flame.

“I never thought anyone would see anything worthwhile in me.” She choked, pushing the words past the bottleneck that tried to form. “In my work.” Tears slipped over her cheeks onto the fine, clear stone in her grip. She wanted Lucas there. Wanted him to see she wasn’t a complete waste of his time. But those were selfish wants. Lucas deserved to be free of her and all the pain she brought into his life. Still…

“Someone did once. And I’m so grateful to him. For always seeing something worthwhile. He’ll never know how many times he saved me, no matter what I said afterward.” She heard the cough again, wracking and forceful enough to be heard over the loudspeakers. Squinting to see past the light, she finally made out the familiar shape of a tall man near the exit. But it couldn’t be. Why would he be there? How would he even know to come?

“Lucas?”

The figure turned and left the room.

“Lucas!”

She rushed past Yvonne to the steps where Kyle waited, calling her name, trying to grab her arm. She shoved the award into his hands and kept going.

It
was
Lucas. She knew every line of his body, every shade of his motion. He was there. Sick, too, by the sound of that cough. If she were the right woman, if she were the kind who could stick to doing what was right instead of allowing her emotions to lead her, she would have stayed and let him get away. But her heart had her sprinting after him, desperate to apologize, to have one more chance to be better than what she was. She ran past the tables and out the doors to the main hallway. She didn’t stop until she found herself outside the hotel, looking around wildly. But there was no one to find. Nowhere to go.

Nowhere but home.

Without Lucas, she had no idea where home was supposed to be.

“What’s that?” Lucas asked when he found Kyle and Jessica at his front door holding what looked like some kind of space-age lump of glass.

“It’s an award, brain child.” Kyle shoved it into his stomach, starting off another round of coughing Lucas needed like he needed mold on his ass. Jessica followed his brother into the apartment with a shrug, closing the front door and making herself right at home by heading off to the kitchen.

“Isn’t she here?” Kyle asked, looking down the hallway toward the dark bedroom.

“Isn’t who?” Lucas wheezed. Like he didn’t know. To hell with Jessica in his kitchen. She and Kyle had been there off and on for a week. No doubt she’d make him a pot of tea and try to push some soup on him. For such a brisk woman, she had a strange strain of caretaker in her. He made his way over to his couch and collapsed on it, pretending he wasn’t in a cold, dripping sweat.

“You suck at undercover work, buddy. Everyone at the banquet could hear the asthmatic in the back of the room hacking through the speeches. I thought you were just going to talk her parents into going.”

Lucas closed his eyes and willed his brother to go away. “They didn’t feel like listening to me. Someone had to be there for her.”

“She saw you,” Kyle added like an accusation.

“No, she didn’t.” Not for sure. For all she knew, her mind had been playing with her.

“She ran after you.”

“In this condition, she’d have caught me.” Which was why he’d taken his death rattle into the nearest other event he could get into.

“In that condition, you shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Didn’t the doctor say something about bed rest?”

So what if he had? Doctors didn’t understand needing to know she was all right. His doctor, in particular, would never understand needing to be there when Belinda finally discovered a trace of her own worth. That man only understood syringes and melodramatic diagnoses. “It’s pneumonia, Kyle, not emphysema. Go away, I’m fine.”

He didn’t care if it put him in his bed for another month, being there for that moment was worth it.

“Sure, just like
she’s
fine. Did you get a good look at her?”

Of course he did. Once they’d called her name and she stepped into the lights, he hadn’t been able to see anything else. That was his Belle, her hair tied back, in her chunky boots and singed overalls, not a trace of make up on her face or crap in her hair. She was ridiculously out of place and absolutely perfect just the way she was. Aside from the gauntness on her too-pale face, but surely it was the lights making her look haunted and lost.

“She looked only marginally better than you and you look dead.” Kyle sounded disgusted, pacing in front of Lucas’s purported deathbed. “Why won’t you let me talk to her for you?”

“Because you were right,” Lucas finally sighed. Maybe he
was
dying. He certainly never expected to say that out loud. On the other hand, if he survived, he could blame the fever.

Kyle’s frown only deepened, but at least his thumping feet stopped moving. “What?”

“You were right,” Lucas repeated. The words tasted no better a second time. “No matter what I do, we don’t have a chance until she accepts I’m not like her father and she’s not like her mother.”

Kyle didn’t seem to have a response for that, ill-prepared as he had to be for the possibility of being agreed with. Lucas closed his eyes and tried to breathe. That was work enough.

“Here’s some tea.” He felt Jessica’s cool hands on his brow. “Oh, Lucas, when’s the last time you checked your temperature?”

It took effort to raise an eyelid to glare at her. “You come anywhere near me with a thermometer and I’ll ruin his taxes for the next five years.”

“I’m a finance lawyer, Lucas,” she replied without batting an eye. “I’ll just have you thrown in jail. Now where is it? And don’t make me look because you won’t like where I stick it.”

“Bedroom bathroom,” he snapped, too tired to fight with her. Jessica could argue a snake out of its rattle when in a mood. Made her perfect for his brother, but it sucked for damn near everyone else. She left and he groaned. “Can you please get her out of here?”

“You willing to let me take you back to the doctor?” Great, now Kyle sounded concerned again.

“No.”

“Then I suggest you let her take care of you.” For a second, there was the feel of another hand on his forehead, then another bout of swearing. Lucas decided he probably drifted off right then because when next he heard anything it was Jessica on his phone.

“Hundred and four point seven. I don’t know if he’s still passing water, he’s asleep. Do we need to bring him in?”

“Go away,” he tried to yell at them. They didn’t seem to hear.

“All right, I’ll call if it comes to that,” she said distantly. “Since we don’t know his intimate details, they want us to bring him in if he hits a hundred and five, but we should try to cool him down.”

There was a pause before he realized Kyle was lifting limbs that felt like cement and hefting him on his own back. “Don’t say I never did anything for you, buddy.” Kyle grunted, half dragging Lucas through the hallway to the bedroom and into the private bath. Then, thankfully, Lucas drifted away again as his buttons started slipping. Drifted to visions of Belle, black ribbons and moonlight on the glades…

“Why are you coddling her?” Adam Riggs’s deep voice drifted past Belinda’s dreams and roped her back to reality. Reality, where Lucas was out of her reach and far safer there. “She’s in the way.”

“She’s never in our way, Adam. Besides, she won that fountain thingy. You should be proud of her.”

“Yeah, whatever. Where’s my Coke?”

“Second shelf.” The bustling sounds of people moving around in the kitchen cleared Belinda’s head a little more. She scrubbed at her cheek, which was still textured from the couch pillow she’d been sprawled on.

A chill made her lift her head to see her father towering over her, eyes thin and mouth twisted. She hated the part of herself that shrank back. “What do
you
want?” she asked instead.

“Get your feet off my couch.”

She was tempted to leave them exactly where they were, but in deference to her mother—arriving behind him with a tray of breakfast and coffee—she slipped them to the ground. Adam stepped around her to his recliner and immediately turned on the television to some sports preshow.

To Belinda’s surprise her mother put the tray over Belinda’s lap. “What’s this?”

“Breakfast,” Amanda answered as she sat on the edge of the coffee table in front of the couch. “You look like you haven’t eaten in weeks.”

“What about
my
breakfast?” Adam demanded.

“It’s in the kitchen,” Amanda answered, not even looking at him. Her light blue eyes were trained on Belinda, eager and pleased somehow at the same time. Adam grouched a little, then got up and stomped into the kitchen.

Belinda watched him go with wide eyes. “Mom, are you okay?”

“Sure, honey. Why?”

Why?
She pointed after her father by hooking her thumb over her shoulder. “Adam is getting his own food.”

Her mother’s happiness dimmed a little because of her usual refusal to call Adam “Dad”, but not much. Belinda wondered if she’d crossed into the Twilight Zone when she’d knocked on the door the night before. Maybe it had happened when she fell asleep on her parents’ couch.

“If you came around more often, you’d know things have changed a lot around here.” Her mother raised her hand at Belinda’s automatic eye roll. “That’s not an exaggeration, I swear. Just the truth. He’s a different man, honey.”

Yeah, Belinda would believe that when he stopped hoping she would drop dead with every glare.

At the loud complaints coming from the kitchen, Belinda set the tray aside, trying to remember what had brought her here.

Amanda watched the plate of food go untouched, her eyes registering another degree of disappointment, then she grasped Belinda’s hand and pulled her to her feet. Together, they left the living room and headed through the hall to the bedrooms at the back of the house. Familiar worn carpet led the way to Belinda’s room, once shared with two of her sisters. Last night, Amanda offered the room, but Belinda had refused. Now, there was no choice.

The old twin beds were still in place, three of them equidistant from one another, still covered with pink, frilly bedspreads. Belinda smiled down at them, remembering how out of place she’d felt under those frou-frou pieces of pink lace. At least, that’s what she’d resentfully told herself while swimming in her mother’s joy of having daughters. Some of it must have stuck, though, because even now her room felt wrong without something lacy. Something pretty.