Heartbreak, Tennessee (14 page)

“I’ve heard of it,” he
finally said.

“Well, I think you
might find what you’re looking for there. It’s been a pleasure,” Gray added
before delivering a final thump on Mac’s shoulder with his meaty hand. “Best of
luck, friend. Next time I see you, I’m afraid we may be sitting on opposite
sides of the table. Now I got a ton of work to do. Never should have let that
woman out of my sight in the first place.”

Amber sighed and set
down the stack of papers she’d been staring at for the last half hour. She was
flattered that Gray had asked her to take a look at the annual reports and
budget projections, but at the moment the columns of numbers were just swimming
before her eyes, making no sense at all. She’d just have to take another stab
at them later.

It
was
her lunch hour, she rationalized, as
she leaned back on the soft bed of grass and wildflowers. This ridge,
overlooking Bear Creek way down below, caught the breeze like nowhere else in
town, and the leafy tree above her provided a shady canopy. Sighing
contentedly, she shut her eyes and stretched her limbs luxuriously.

She hadn’t had a lot
of sleep last night. To say the least. The few hours she’d managed after
returning to her room had left her a little groggy. In fact, the night before
had taken on a dreamlike quality, as though she’d imagined the entire thing.

But the tender spots
on her body were proof that it had been no dream. She could trace the path of
their ardor by the places that were chafed, sore, throbbing. As though she had
run a race, her arms and legs were weak with a pleasant exhaustion.

But instead of being
utterly spent, her body hummed with electricity, with expectation, with desire.
Even if her mind was a tumble of doubt and regret, her body, at least, yearned
for another chance to love Mac.

A crunch of brush down
the path broke the quiet stillness. Footsteps. Someone was coming up the path.

No, Amber groaned
inwardly. Judging from how overgrown the trail had become, most of the few
remaining markers bent and broken, not too many folks came up this way any
more.

Obviously, however, at
least one other person remembered the way.

“Hello, Mac,” Amber
called without opening her eyes. “I see you’re too smart for me. Let me guess. You
ran into Gray?”

“He seems like a nice
man.” The footsteps, sure and steady, reached her, and Amber finally opened her
eyes as Mac sat down next to her, leaning back on his elbows.

They gazed at the view
together, the creek bed giving way to a field and then a cluster of buildings,
a farm at the edge of town. Further on, they could make out the town, spread
out like toys on a child’s carpet, the sun glinting off of cars and buildings
and sending splinters of brilliant light their way.

It was a stunning
view, one that made her heart hum in response. On a day like today, she could
almost imagine that she’d never left, that she’d never stopped breathing the
sweet air of Heartbreak.

“He
is
a nice man...oh Mac, why did you have
to come up here? You aren’t very good at taking a hint.” Amber sighed heavily
and sat up, hugging her arms around her knees. The crumpled moss-green linen of
her dress had picked up bits of grass and bracken, and she carefully flicked
them away.

And kept her eyes off
him.

“Tell me something,”
Mac said, his voice measured and careful. “Do you always do a disappearing act
after spending the night with a guy?”

Amber froze. “You make
it sound as if I make a habit of sharing other people’s beds.”

Mac said nothing,
letting her comment lie between them like a lit fuse. Well, fine. If he wanted
to believe that, let him. He thought he knew her so well, but clearly he knew
nothing.
Nothing
.

Still, it might be
easier this way. Easier to end something she’d had no business starting.

“I’m sorry,” she said,
her tone gentler. “I shouldn’t have left that note for you, instead of talking
to you myself. It was cowardly. I just - I got scared. What happened last night
was wonderful. But that doesn’t change the fact that it shouldn’t have
happened.

“I should have had the
courage to tell you this then,” Amber continued, lifting her head and looking
Mac in the eye. “But at least I’m telling you now. We can’t make a mistake like
that again.”

“Mistake. That word
again.” Mac made a sound, deep in his throat, half a choked laugh, half something
else.

Something angry.

“So you’re just going
to walk away again,” he said.

Amber picked up a
short stick and traced lines in the fabric of her skirt.

“Don’t say it like
that,” she said. “I’m not walking away. There is nothing to walk away from. It
was just one night together—it’s not like we were...” Her voice trailed
off as her hand stilled, the stick falling from her fingers.

Not like they were
what? Engaged? But they had been, once. And Amber wasn’t sure she’d be able to
keep pretending she’d forgotten all about that other time.

“All right,” Mac said
tightly. “I won’t use those words, if they offend you. Anyway, I suppose I don’t
blame you. I imagine you can’t wait to get out of this pathetic little
backwater, back to your bright lights and high living. Don’t worry, Amber—Heartbreak’ll
wash off you right quick. In a few days you will have forgotten all about us.”

Mac’s sarcastic tone,
the way he lapsed into a parody of local speech patterns, made his words all
the harsher, and Amber bit her lip to keep it from quivering. “That’s not fair.”

“Not fair? You want to
talk about fair? You come to me, talking about some damned terrible event in
our past, and you won’t even give me the whole story? Last I checked, a guy’s
got a right to know what crime he’s been accused of.”

Mac’s anger was
well-contained, but Amber could see it in the way his fists clenched handfuls
of grass. In the tendons which stood out from his chiseled jaw. In his eyes,
which smoldered a green that was nearly black, the color of a storm at sea.

“What happened didn’t
have anything to do with you,” Amber breathed, feeling tears sting the corners
of her eyes. How easy it would be to lay a hand on his arm, the way she did so
many times when he was a much younger man. Her touch had once calmed and
soothed him, helped him back away from his anger.

Today, though, it
might send him over the top.

“Nothing to do with
me?” Mac was incredulous. “How can you even
say
that?

“All right,” Amber bit
her lip, willing the tears back. She could not cry, not now. “I know my
decision affected you. Hurt you. But remember, I did give you a chance. I
begged you to leave Heartbreak, and you said no. After that...well, my reasons
were something you wouldn’t have understood.”

“Try me.”

“Don’t you get it?” Losing
her battle, Amber brushed angrily at the corners of her eyes. She turned her
body so that she was facing Mac, inches away from the danger and the fury
written in his face. “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing between us. I don’t
want you. I don’t care about you.”

“You lie.” Mac’s hands
shot out and took her forearms in a grip that was hard as iron. She twisted her
shoulders but he didn’t budge. “Say what you will to me, Amber, but don’t
ever
lie to me again.”

Seconds ticked by, and
then slowly Mac took his hands off her arms, though his gaze never left her
face. Amber rubbed the places where his fingers had gripped her, as though she
were cold, hugging her arms to her body.

“I just want you to
leave me alone.”

“You never even came
back after your mother’s accident,” Mac said softly, ignoring her words. “I
couldn’t believe it. Nobody could. How could you stay away? She was your
mother
, Amber, for God’s sake.”

“I know that,” Amber
said hoarsely. “I loved my mother with all my heart. It nearly killed me too
when she died.”

“Yeah. So much so that
you didn’t even come to her funeral.” The sarcasm in Mac’s voice cut to her
heart. “I think right up until they lowered the coffin into the ground everyone
was convinced you’d come running up, that you were just delayed somehow. No one
wanted to believe you’d miss it.”

“Why should I have
been there?” Amber said. “There was almost nothing to bury. You must know that.
The car was burned so badly they couldn’t even identify her remains until
they...until they—” Amber stopped, swallowing hard, unable to finish.

She would never forget
the call when they finally confirmed through dental records that it had been
her mother whose car careened off the cliff, tumbling over and over to burst
into flames on a rocky ledge. Amber squeezed her eyes tightly shut for a
moment, regaining her composure before she continued.

“Whatever they buried
that day, that wasn’t my mother. Her spirit was long gone before that funeral. And
I wasn’t about to listen to some pious sermon from someone who never really
knew her.”

“You still should have
been there,” Mac accused.

“No,” Amber said,
shaking her head. “No. She wouldn’t have wanted that. When she took her life—”

“What did you say?”
Amber
glanced at Mac, surprised by his sharp tone. The shock on his face was real.

“My mother’s death was
a suicide, Mac.”

“Why would you even
think that? That turn’s treacherous. There’s been dozens of accidents there
over the years. It was night, and there was fog—”

Amber shook her head
again. “Don’t argue with me, Mac. And don’t ask me to explain it. But my mother
killed herself.”

Mac stared back, his
brows knit together, his jaw slowly relaxing. “Even if what you say is true,”
he said finally, “you needed to be there when they buried her. I think it would
have surprised you, Amber, to see who was at her service.”

“I heard,” Amber said
dully. “Funny how the whole town showed up to mourn her passing when most of
them never even offered her so much as a cup of tea when she was alive.”

“People cared about
her, Amber. In their own way.”

Amber was silent,
thinking of all the women who’d brought armloads of clothes to the door for her
mother to mend and tailor. Of her mother’s unfailing cheerfulness, asking after
their families, their husbands, their health. How she chatted during fittings,
complimenting the way they wore their hair, remembering all the significant
events in their lives.

Even when they never
asked after her own life, or that of the slender girl with the wild hair who
silently held the pincushion at their feet.

“That would have to be
a pretty unusual way of caring,” she finally said, her voice ice.

Mac shrugged. “I can’t
make you believe something you don’t want to. But Amber, you forget that I knew
your mother too. I
loved
her. She was
more mother to me than my own mother.”

“Yes.” Amber looked
down at her lap. That was undeniably true. Her mother had adored Mac, relishing
his visits, fixing him meals. She carried his picture in her wallet next to Amber’s.
“I suppose I should thank you for...filling in for me, at her funeral.”

“We should have been
there together.”

“You just can’t let it
drop! Damn it, can’t you leave these things buried? My mother couldn’t get off
this earth quick enough. She’d had enough pain to last several lifetimes!”

“I know it must have been tough to raise you alone—”

“No, Mac, there was
more to it than that. Mom was always stronger than anyone I knew until—”
Amber stopped abruptly, covering her face with her hands.

“Is this another one
of your damn secrets? Come on, Amber, tell me what was going on!”

The urgency in Mac’s
voice was real, Amber knew, and yet she couldn’t stop feeling as though he were
hammering at her relentlessly. She wanted to cover her ears with her hands, block
him out, block out all the thoughts and memories of that terrible time.

Shuddering, tears
half-blinding her, she turned and began to make her way down the path.

“Amber! Come back
here, damn it!”

Ignoring him, Amber
wiped tears furiously away and increased her pace, her feet in their strappy
sandals slipping dangerously on loose pebbles and exposed tree roots.

“Amber!” The anger in
his voice was unmistakable. “You’re running away again! Running from things
never solves anything. Just think about your mother if you doubt me!”

Amber stopped, the
full impact of his words settling like ice in her heart. How dare he compare
her decisions to her mother’s choice, escaping unbearable pain the only way she
knew how?

Slowly, her eyes
narrowed to furious slits, her fists clenched at her side, she turned and
glared up the steep incline at Mac, who stood with arms folded across his chest
where she’d left him.

“You want answers,
Mac? You want to know why my mother killed herself? Why I left town? Why you
and I never ended up with the happily-ever-after? Well, it’s too bad you never
had a chance to ask your father!”