“There’s no point in looking back,” she said. Especially not when all that did was stir up a sense of loss and frustration and pain. A sense of being so wrong.
“You’re right, Samantha. The future is where your life is going. You’re young and have your whole life ahead of you. And you know, dear, you can never go back.”
She wouldn’t want to. “Thanks for the message, Mrs. Douglas. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Have a safe trip, dear, and come by the house to let me know when you’re home.”
“Yes, I will,” she said, and hung up.
The divorce was a formality. A legality. Nothing more. But that logic couldn’t shut out memories of that horrible conversation she’d overheard the night her marriage had ended. Nick and his partner and friend, Greg O’Neill, had been out on the deck of the house in Malibu, drinking in the darkness. She’d heard their loud conversation all the way from the living room.
“My God, Greg,” she’d heard Nick say, “I’ve gotten myself in a real mess. This marriage…” She’d heard the clink of glass on glass and looked through the doorway out to the deck. She’d barely been able to make Nick out as he stood with his back to the house, staring at the ocean. “I don’t even know how it happened,” he’d said to Greg. “I’d only known her two weeks.” She tried to stop the memory but it kept going.
“You bribed a judge, didn’t you?” Greg had replied with a burst of laughter. She’d stopped a few feet from the door and waited for Nick to join in, to make it all a joke.
But that hadn’t happened. “‘Bribe’ isn’t the word, but he owed me a favor. If I’d had to wait three days, who knows?”
“You wouldn’t have done it?” Greg had asked.
“I would have come to my senses,” he’d said after a long, painful pause. That had been the truth. She’d heard it in his voice. There was a blur of hurtful words, then Nick saying, “Marriage isn’t a normal state. Who ever thought up this concept of ‘forever’ with one person?”
Sam had known things were bad between them, that they were strangers in so many ways. As much as she’d craved a family, a connection that she’d never had from her life growing up in foster homes, she’d known at that moment that happily-ever-after was never going to happen with Nick.
Pain and sorrow had filled her and she’d known what she had to do then. As she knew what she had to do now. Once she signed the divorce papers, she could go back to her real life and start forgetting Nick…again.
Chapter Two
Late that afternoon, when Nick got to Danforth’s plush offices he was beyond sick. He had aches where he’d never felt aches before, and there was an unwelcome sense of his world not being right. He had to make a conscious effort to walk into the beige-on-beige reception area and get the day over with.
A simple nod to the receptionist who sat behind an intricate marble desk cost him dearly when a throbbing headache materialized behind his eyes. He grimaced. “Marge. I just need a minute of his time,” he said.
“I’m not sure he’s free to—”
“I won’t take a minute,” he said as he kept going, unnerved by a wave of weakness that washed over him.
God, he hated weakness of all kinds, especially in himself. He dealt with it all too often with his clients, and the only concession he’d made to being sick today was to take his medication.
But the medicine was hardly helping at all. And it hadn’t helped earlier when he’d had three cases on the docket and had to deal with one client who had been a no-show at a bail hearing. And he’d been trying to figure out for the past hour why a case he should have been able to plea-bargain had gone to trial. Now he had to sign the divorce papers.
He rapped on the door and flinched slightly from the headache that had just kicked up a notch and from Danforth’s booming greeting as the man opened the door. Danforth looked a little surprised to see him.
“Wasn’t expecting you,” he said in a baritone that served the man well in court but seemed brutally loud at that moment. “You never called back so I didn’t know if you’d picked up the message.” He moved back a bit. “But come on in.”
“I got your message first thing this morning,” Nick muttered as he entered the office. “So I came by after—”
His words stopped dead as the dream from the night before materialized not more than ten feet from him. A couple of long strides and he could have touched Sam, a Sam in a clinging blue sundress. Her blond curls had been all but banished by a short wedge cut that made her face all the more delicate-looking and her eyes all the more green.
A dream? A hallucination induced by the medication? He instinctively took a step forward but stopped as the image took one sharp breath and whispered his name.
“Nicholas.”
He heard it, really heard it, a voice that he’d almost forgotten existed until that moment. A voice that belonged to the only person he didn’t want to see right then. This was no dream, no illusion or hallucination, but reality. Samantha was real, so painfully real that he longed for the dream. Something he could vanquish simply by waking up.
He regrouped, more shaken then he could comprehend, and gasped for control. He took a breath of his own, then was able to speak in a remarkably normal voice. “Sam. I had no idea you were in Los Angeles.”
“I…I’m just in town for a few days. I’m going back tomorrow.”
He tried to remember where Danforth had said she’d gone, what her mailing address had been. Jensen Pass. That was it—a tiny coastal village north of San Francisco. That’s where she was supposed to be, not standing motionless by a massive cherry desk, with papers in her hands, staring at him as if he were an alien life-form. She was making him feel even more disoriented than he had been.
As Sam stood a bit straighter, Danforth spoke quickly. “This situation might be rather awkward for the two of you,” he said. “Tell you what, Nick. I can have the papers messengered over to your office tomorrow.”
Nick needed air, but he didn’t leave. Instead, he pushed aside everything that seemed to be bombarding him and took control. He wasn’t about to have this hanging over his head for one more day. “No reason to put it off,” Nick said. “Let’s get it over with.”
The words came out with an edge he hadn’t intended, and he didn’t miss the way Sam’s expression tightened. Or the fact that he had to narrow his eyes to dull the sharp vividness of her being. But narrowed eyes couldn’t stop the unsteadiness that persisted inside him or the way his head continued pounding.
“Actually, I was ready to leave,” Sam said, and her lashes lowered just enough to shadow her eyes and guard her emotions. She was putting the papers in a large envelope, talking as she slid them inside, her voice in some way filtering into his consciousness. “I’m finished here. I just came…” She exhaled , and the sound echoed through Nick. Not that there was an echo in the luxurious office. The echo was inside him, another extra from being sick that he didn’t welcome. Her gaze went to Danforth. “I’ll read them, then get them back to you as soon as I can.”
“I can send a messenger to your hotel for them if you just call the office when they’re ready.”
“I won’t be there. I’m leaving first thing tomorrow, so I’ll get them back to you.”
“You’ve got Express Mail in—what’s it called, Jensen Pass?” Nick asked with no idea why he would say something that sounded so sarcastic.
She turned to him, holding the envelope in one hand, her other hand nervously