Reckless in Moonlight (16 page)

What the hell
. She laced her fingers in her lap. “You want to hear something funny?”

Roger swept his gaze over the IV in his arm and the blipping monitors. “Sure, I could use a laugh about now.”

“You probably will laugh.” Dana filled her chest with air, trying to decide whether to plunge into the confession or wade in. “Lon, the man I’m seeing, is younger than me.” She eased into the pool.

“I’m missing the punch line.”

She dove headfirst. “He’s twenty-eight.”

Roger blinked in surprise, then chuckled. “Who would have thought?” The mirth in his eyes brought a touch of boyishness to his aged features, and Dana caught a glimpse of the man she’d married eons ago.

“Well, not me,” Dana said drily.

They laughed together, and a pallet of emotional bricks toppled from her shoulders. In that moment, she realized she had forgiven not only Roger, but also herself, for all the real and imagined transgressions she feared she must have committed for her husband to have cheated.

Roger reached out with his IV hand and covered hers. Once, they’d linked fingers as easily as they would breathe, but now his touch, while not uncomfortable, seemed foreign, as if they’d never held hands before. After today, they would not do so again.

“You’re a good person, Dana,” Roger said. “It sounds trite, but I mean it. I hope we can be friends.”

They would never be
best
friends. Too much had changed. But their shared history and daughter would keep the bond from withering. Dealing with the milestones that would occur in Katie’s life would be easier if she and Roger were amicable.

“Can we make it work?” Roger asked

“I would like that,” Dana answered.

* * * *

Lon had brushed aside his father’s warning.

He had rejected Katie’s announcement.

He had disbelieved his own ears when he’d entered the cardiac unit and heard Dana’s giggles mingling with a man’s laughter. Hilarity wasn’t something you encountered in the CCU, but the sound led him to Roger Markus’s room. Lon parted the drape and prepared to enter.

He froze and zoomed his gaze in on the sight of Dana holding Roger’s hand as they pledged to make a go of their marriage.

Can we make it work?

I would like that.

Pain bowled into him like a linebacker’s tackle, nearly dropping him to his knees. So involved in each other, Roger and Dana didn’t notice him.

He released the curtain before Dana spotted him, before he ripped it off the sliding rings. He clenched a fist, needing to pound something to ease the pressure threatening to explode in his chest like an alien in a sci-fi movie. Instead, he backed out of the room and fled the scene.

Once free of the CCU, he stormed into the stairwell and flew down the steps to the ground floor and burst out of the hospital through a staff-only door, charging past surprised smokers enveloped in a cancerous cloud.

He paced the sidewalk and punched the air, a boxer mime sparring against an invisible opponent.
Fuck, fuck, fuck
! He punctuated each jab with a silent curse. Passersby and visitors eyed him warily, and Lon tore off his ID badge and shoved it into his coat pocket. Hospital administration frowned on its residents going postal in public view.

Times like this, it sucked to be a physician. When you hurt so bad you wanted to crawl into the nearest bar and drown yourself in a glass, and you couldn’t because people’s lives depended on you. It sucked worse than a moldy lime in a vodka tonic.

Lon decided he was like one of those people who got flattened by trains each year. How could you not notice a whistling, screeching train barreling down the track? Even his father had tried to warn him, but he’d blown it off because he’d been so frickin’ sure of Dana. He had believed she was falling in love with him the way he was with her. And now, she had cracked open his rib cage and cut out his heart without any anesthesia at all.

His cell vibrated in his pocket. “Fuck!” he swore aloud at the intrusion. He wanted to ignore the electronic summons but couldn’t. It was likely hospital business, could even be an emergency. He grabbed the phone and flipped it open.

Dana’s number on the display pounded a new spike of pain through his chest. He knew with the certainty of the damned she was calling to officially break off their relationship. If he had any hope of surviving his shift, he couldn’t face her. With a violent snap, he closed his cell and restrained himself from pitching it into the street.

He headed back to work.

* * * *

Dana normally avoided interrupting Lon during the day. But she’d served as everybody’s rock, and after what she’d been through, she needed a solid shoulder and reassurance.
Reassurance
? She pondered the significance of the word her mind had conjured. What did she need to be reassured of?

Lon didn’t answer his cell, and although Dana told herself he was busy and tried not to feel disappointed, she was. Talking with Roger about Lon had given her all sorts of warm, fuzzy feelings, the conversation further cementing her relationship with Lon in her mind. As Lon’s phone rang, her fading warm fuzzies morphed into serious foreboding cold stickies, but she dismissed her anxiety as an aftereffect of the emotional stew that had brewed all afternoon.

Lon’s voice mail intercepted her call.

“Hi, Lon.” Dana swallowed and strove for a normal tone. “Why don’t you stop by tonight? I need—”
A hug. To hear your voice
. She
needed
not to burden him when he was working. “We’ll talk when I see you.” Dana flipped her cell shut. Don’t make something out of nothing, she chided herself.

Chapter Twelve

Despondency settled like an eighty-pound sack of cement on Lon’s shoulders as he trudged out of the hospital for the evening. He’d lugged it throughout his fourteen-hour ER shift. It had become part of his normal work attire ever since he’d learned Dana and Roger had gotten back together. Dana had left him three messages in four days, but he had yet to return any of them.

He couldn’t bear to hear the consoling words that weren’t:
I never meant to hurt you.

Dodging her afforded him a coward’s way out, but Lon feared what he might say, worried the emotional toll of a confrontation would impair his ability to function. Expressing his churning emotions would be tantamount to shaking the bottle and releasing a very angry genie. His best recourse was to hammer in the cork and pray the genie settled down.

His strategy failed. His pain grew larger and more searing with each passing day. He should lance the abscess, face Dana, and deal with the breakup head-on. But knowing it and doing it were two different things.

Head and shoulders slumped, he lumbered across the asphalted parking area interspersed with islands of trees and shrubbery. He fished his keys from his pocket and unlocked his Hyundai from across the lot with a chirp of the attached remote. He looked up at the flash of his car’s headlights. The train that had flattened him four days ago backed up and plowed into him again. Dana’s Lexus stood alongside his compact, and parked against her car was Dana herself.

Lon raised his gaze skyward to glare at the universe. The stars smirked, shimmering with laughter over a private joke at his expense, while a gibbous moon turned a cold shoulder to his pain. He would never be able to look at the moon without remembering making love with Dana under its light.

Dana pushed off from her car and waited. As he approached on leaden feet, a hesitant smile trembled on her lips. Shadows smudged the pale skin under her eyes, which bore little of their usual sparkle, an indication of the effect her husband’s illness had had on her. No doubt their reunion had been bittersweet. For Lon, it was merely bitter.

“Hi,” she said. “I tried to call you.” The quaver in her voice further betrayed her uncertainty. Being the dumper carried its measure of discomfort. No doubt confronting him was difficult for her, but he had little sympathy.

He forced his hands into his pockets to refrain from beating the hood of his car. “I know why you’re here,” he said before she could launch into her it’s-not-you-it’s-me speech. “We had fun, a pleasant interlude.” He nearly gagged on the words. It had been so much more to him.

“A pleasant interlude?” She stared, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. He feared he’d lose his nerve, would resort to begging for another chance to prove to her they had something special. But his head told him if she didn’t realize it on her own, then nothing he could do or say would change anything. His conscience told him he had no right to hammer a wedge through a twenty-plus-year marriage.

“You have to do what’s right for you.” He focused on his car’s tires. “Both of us need to get on with our lives. What we had was good, but it wasn’t meant to last.”

He thought he heard Dana gasp in surprise that he’d beaten her to the punch, but his heartbeat drummed so loudly in his ears he couldn’t be sure.

“So this is it?” Her voice sounded as stiff as her posture, which he viewed in his peripheral vision, since he still couldn’t bring himself to look at her.

“This is it.” A lump lodged in his throat. “Be happy, Dana.” Lon threw himself into his car and peeled out of the parking lot.

Three. Two. One
. In her head, Dana counted down the seconds until she burst into sobs, her eyes springing as if a geyser had erupted. Lon’s taillights blurred to a red haze through the sheen of her tears as he sped away after blowing a hole in her chest.

Over? How could it be over? How the hell could their relationship have ended when everything was going so well? She’d been so certain Lon had feelings for her. How could he do this? It wasn’t fucking possible.

But her sob-wracked body and the silence of the past few days insisted it was. In the past, they had spoken every evening, if only for a few minutes. But he hadn’t called her in four days, hadn’t returned any of her phone messages.

She’d told herself the lack of communication was nothing to be concerned about, but when days passed without even a text message, her nagging intuition insisted something was amiss, and she’d decided she needed to confront her fears head-on. If her marriage had taught her anything, it had hammered that home. Unfortunately, Roger had had his open-heart surgery today, requiring her to spend the evening at the hospital—not so much for him, but for Katie. With an inkling of Lon’s schedule, after Katie had departed for the evening, she’d waited to catch Lon at his car when he got off work.

Now she had an explanation to assign to the unease that had dogged her for days. She’d been dumped. When had Lon intended to tell her? The flash of anger his cavalier behavior ignited did little to alleviate the bone-deep pain.

She wasn’t Roger’s soul mate, and she wasn’t Lon’s either. He didn’t even want her as a part-time fuck buddy.

Realizing she was standing in a public parking lot wailing, Dana crawled into her car. She tried to fit the key in the ignition, but her hands shook so badly, she dropped the key ring, and it disappeared somewhere on the floor. Hugging the steering wheel, Dana buried her face in the crook of her arm and cried.

She sobbed until she ran the well dry and littered the floor of her Lexus with soggy tissues. As she picked them up, she located her car key and started the ignition. Her eyes and face were swollen and blotchy, and a deep indentation from the steering wheel cut into her cheek.

This is what you got when you ignored good sense.
No fool like an old fool
. It had been folly to date a man so young. She could blame no one but herself for her poor judgment. At the start of a demanding career, Lon didn’t have time for the commitment of a full-time relationship or even a part-time one. And why would he want to saddle himself with a woman nearly his mother’s age?

But as Dana exited the hospital parking lot, she couldn’t forget how Lon’s eyes would soften when he looked at her. Had that expression been a mere manifestation of physical desire? Dana hadn’t dated in more than twenty-five years. Were her courtship skills so rusty she would confuse horniness for affection?

Thank God she hadn’t told him she loved him. Her humiliation ran deep enough as it was.

Or maybe Lon
had
sensed her growing feelings, and that scared him off. He’d said in the beginning he was only interested in “now.” Somehow she’d expected “now” to last a little longer. She could only guess as to why Lon had ended their relationship, since he hadn’t been forthcoming about his reasons.

Dana drove on automatic pilot and managed to stop when the lights turned red, although twice motorists honked at her to go when the signals turned green. By the time she crept into her driveway, exhaustion had claimed her body. She eyed the Corbin house next door and dreaded the day she would bump into Lon. Dana grimaced at how she’d battled with Roger to keep her house; now she wished she lived anyplace but here.

She ached more than when her twenty-three-year marriage had died. When Roger had announced he wanted a divorce, she’d been hurt and angered, but deep down, not surprised. In her postmortem, when she’d plumbed the depths of her marriage for answers, she’d drawn up the suspicions that Roger had been cheating for years, along with an awareness that the estrangement had begun long before the infidelity.

But she’d been oblivious to the signs with Lon. How could a relationship transform from sparkling new and perfect to a heap of nothing overnight? She couldn’t figure out what she’d missed. Why had the plane crashed when the skies were clear and all systems had appeared operational?

Dana tore her gaze from the Corbin house and focused on her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. She forced her fingers open to release the stiffness in her joints. She would drive herself insane searching for clues in the wreckage, parsing and analyzing every nuance of the past month. And in the end, the conclusion mattered not. What was done was done.

She recalled an inspirational quotation that said the difference between success and failure was getting up one more time than you got knocked down. She
would
get up again. If only she had the energy to get out of the car.