But now, he considered another option. Maybe she’d live to be well into her eighties like his grandparents. Maybe they’d grow old and gray and hard of hearing together. They could retire to the cabin in Tennessee, be surrounded each holiday by a dozen grandkids. And their children didn’t have to be scarred and distant. Maybe they’d be impressive adults, with his mind for success and Crickitt’s unshakable character.
What if a long, abundant life stretched out ahead of them? Another fifty-plus years filled with amazing memories… How many days was that? How many hours? How many minutes?
Minutes like the ones when he’d last lain across from Crickitt in his bed. Minutes that lingered, endured, stretched out seemingly endlessly before him.
It was a future that could’ve gone down in a ball of flames. He dropped his hand, felt an unsteady smile spread across his face. But it didn’t. Because he was still alive. Still breathing.
And he was going to put every next breath to good use.
Chapter 39
Shane slid the divider in the limo to the side and addressed Thomas with an impatient, “Well?”
Thomas, weaving in and out of traffic on the highway, the needle hovering fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit, addressed him with a quick glance to the rearview mirror. “No answer on Crickitt’s office line, sir.”
Shane knew it was a long shot to try the office on a Sunday, but when he didn’t get an answer on her cell phone, he had to try.
“What now?” Thomas asked.
Find her, that’s what. Find her and tell her everything.
An idea that scared him so much, his voice came out as taut as piano wire. “Do you remember how to get to her apartment?”
Thomas’s eyes crinkled as he smiled back at him in a gesture that was almost fatherly pride, or what Shane imagined fatherly pride might look like. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Half an hour later, Thomas pulled into Crickitt’s apartment complex, and Shane pressed a button to slide the tinted window down. Like that would make her car magically appear in the empty parking space.
Shane scrubbed his face, swore into his hand. He’d pictured a big Hollywood finish, him telling her how he felt, her throwing herself into his arms.
Where is she?
With any luck, she’d run a quick errand and would be back any minute. Another call to her phone went to voice mail without ringing, which meant her phone was off or the battery was dead.
It also means she’s not avoiding you.
Was it completely pathetic that made him feel better?
“Sir?” Thomas interrupted, apology in his dark eyes.
“Home,” Shane said. “I’ll get the car and come back.” And then he’d wait for her.
He pulled a small wrapped box from his pocket and turned it over between his fingers.
He’d wait as long as it took.
* * *
After a day of shopping, dinner, and an evening movie, Crickitt dropped Sadie at her apartment, watching as Sadie wrestled her multitude of purchases through her front door. Crickitt stayed long enough to wave good-bye before heading for her own apartment.
Crickitt glanced to the backseat at her own pile of shopping bags. She’d purchased four new pairs of pajamas today since, by her calculations, she’d be spending every nonworking moment in them. Sadie tried to convince her that a date would fix her, but Crickitt assured her she was done dating. Maybe not for forever, but for a good long while.
“You should quit,” Sadie had said on the drive home. “Go back to Celebration, rebuild your team.”
It was a thought Crickitt had recently entertained. Particularly during the extended, uncomfortable hours spent across the hall from the man she loved.
“That would take a lot of committed effort,” Crickitt mumbled.
“And seeing Shane doesn’t?”
Touché.
But her excuse for not going back to Celebration was just that, an excuse. Crickitt wasn’t afraid of hard work, of concerted effort. But she was afraid of moving backward. The pages of the previous chapter of her life were bookmarked by her direct sales career and dog-eared by an unsuccessful marriage to Ronald Wachowski.
“I’m finished with that part of my life,” she’d told Sadie.
“Well, you can’t continue to see him at work every day.”
But that was just it, she could. As much as it hurt to be near him, she couldn’t imagine walking away. Even if Shane continued to ignore her, or went from harboring ambivalence to contempt, she still wanted him. She realized that made her one sick puppy, afflicted with a warped version of Stockholm syndrome, but she couldn’t help it.