Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [91]
Steve took her hand. “What happened to Frank and Billy wasn’t your fault, no matter how hard you try to take responsibility.”
“Get back on that horse?”
“Right.”
Sick and tired of hearing that, she withdrew her hand and lashed out. “That’s great advice, but do you practice what you preach? Did you book an airline flight after your crash? Have you given any thought to remarrying?”
Steve levered off the couch and stood with his back to the piano, his gray eyes bleak.
Her ears got hot. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business . . . especially the part about marriage.”
For a long moment, they faced off. Then Steve nodded with a gentleness that said he accepted her apology.
Clare wished he were still sitting next to her, but the distance of the room separated them.
Steve glanced over his shoulder toward the rest of the house. “There’s only the one bedroom.” A catch in his voice suggested he might be thinking of those brief moments when their bodies had pressed together in the fire shelter.
A pulse began to pound in her. “I don’t want to put you out.”
Extending his un-bandaged right hand, he reached to help her up. “You won’t.”
His palm was dry, reassuring, and strong against hers. She remembered him holding her in the truck, his heart beating beneath her ear. Someone else’s strength was what she craved tonight, to set aside the burden of training young men and women too briefly, before sending them to what today had been death.
She stood. Steve released her hand, but warmth lingered. They went into the hall, leaving the light from the living room behind. His touch on the small of her back almost made her turn, thinking of going into his arms.
She waited. At the archway that led into a darkened room, he left her, padding across the hardwood floor.
When he turned on the bedside lamp, it shone full force onto a picture of a blonde in a black formal dress, smiling lovingly at her photographer. She sat at the keyboard of a grand piano, her hands poised to play.
“Your wife?” Clare asked quietly. The wild pulse in her still pounded, incongruous against the feeling of being dashed with cold water.
“That’s Susan,” Steve agreed. He sank onto the bed with a dejected look.
Clare folded down beside him. “Why don’t you tell me about her?”
“Fasten your seat belt.” The pert Triworld Air attendant couldn’t hold a candle to the incandescent beauty of Steve’s wife, made ripe by her recent pregnancy. Susan held three-month-old Christa against her breast while he secured her seatbelt.
He’d wondered at the wisdom of traveling with Christa so young and fragile, but Susan had been off the circuit for six months. She’d badly wanted to make the concert engagement in Anchorage.
At last night’s performance, she’d been at the top of her form, gracefully introducing three compositions she’d written while on sabbatical. “I call this the Suite of Life. The first movement speaks of the passionate glory of conception, the second of the still fullness of waiting. The last celebrates birth, both as completion and a promise that is just beginning.”
Steve had heard Susan play it a hundred times in the studio overlooking the Potomac, first a halting, intermittent progression of notes. Gradually, a theme emerged that was day-by-day embellished. Never had it flowed as it did in answer to the questing hush of the Anchorage audience. During the standing ovation, he’d blinked back tears.
In the morning, Susan’s agent had telephoned their room at the Captain Cook Hotel. Steve took Christa and walked to the window overlooking Cook Inlet. The tide was out, exposing a half-mile of chocolate mud flat that would be covered again within hours. Ever since Susan had told him she was expecting he’d felt differently, as though he were not just a scientist observing the cycles, but finally part of life’s ebb and flow.
Christa’s rosebud mouth nudged his shirt. Her tiny face began to screw up as she gathered energy for a squall that would keep Susan from hearing the news from New York. Steve