The Return of Caine O'Halloran Read online

  "As for the spaniel, that was the photographer's idea. She said something about a cute dog making me look both tough and soft at the same time.

  "Besides, at least the calendar and all the press it generated was a helluva lot better than all those stories the sports reporters are writing about me being a washed-up, out-of-shape old wreck."

  "It's fortunate you didn't get yourself beaten up before that photo shoot," Nora said. "Because right now you are anything but photogenic."

  She finished the last three stitches, then pulled off the gloves and tossed them into the white enamel trash can.

  "That's it?" Caine asked, not quite able to conceal his relief. Although she'd done a pretty good job of killing the pain, the sound of the silk thread pulling through his numb flesh had made him queasy.

  "That's it." When she turned around, Nora caught him surreptitiously rubbing his hand. "Let me see that." She took hold of the hand that had always been so much larger and darker than her own. "Dammit, Caine, your knuckles look worse than Tom's."

  "I was just grateful your brothers were there to help me."

  "They always were." His knuckles were badly bruised, and skinned, but nothing was broken, Nora determined.

  "The Three Musketeers," Caine remembered fondly.

  She turned his hand over, "^(bu're still shaving your fingers."

  "Hey, as a doctor, you use your best tools. Well, my fingers are my tools and shaving a layer of skin off my fingertips gives me an ultrasensitive touch."

  She'd been three months pregnant, and a reluctant new bride, when she'd first found him using a surgical scalpel on his fingertips. She'd accused him of barbaric behavior, but months later, when they'd finally consummated the marriage neither of them had wanted, she'd been unwillingly stimulated by the idea of his heightened tactile sensitivity.

  Memories, painful and evocative, hovered between them. Caine's eyes moved to the front of her white lab coat, remembering how her breasts felt like ripe plums in his hands.

  Nora remembered the way his compelling midnight blue eyes seemed to darken from the pupils out when he was aroused.

  Caine wondered if there was a man in Nora's life now. And if so, if they did all those things together that he'd taught her to do with him.

  "I read that you've lost the feelings in your fingers," Nora ventured finally, seeking something—anything— to say.

  "The feeling's come back," Caine insisted, not quite truthfully. "I just have a little control problem."

  "Well, I wish you luck. Sensor-motor injuries are unpredictable. Who knows, you may actually prove all the naysayers wrong and be back on the mound by the All-Star break."

  Which would, of course, result in yet another injury. Although Nora had never been a baseball fan, one of the few things she'd learned about the sport was the tradition of wearing out relief pitchers rather than starters.

  The better a relief pitcher was—and Caine was undeniably one of the best—the more often a manager used him. Add to that the mental stress that came with pitching when the game was on the line, and it was no wonder relief pitchers tended to be men capable of living for the moment.

  Needless to say, Nora had never been able to understand the appeal of such a life.

  "I want to tape that rib. Then we'll be done." She wrapped a wide flesh-colored tape around his torso, tugging it so tightly he was forced to suck in a painful breath. "You can get dressed now," she said in the brisk, professional tone he was beginning to hate.

  Without giving him a chance to answer, she left the room, dosing the door behind her.

  Caine braced his elbow on his bare thigh and lowered his head to his palm. The beer buzz was beginning to wear off and now, along with the pounding in his head, the ache surrounding his swollen eye, the crushing feeling in his chest and a grinding nausea, he was experiencing another all-too-familiar, almost-visceral pain.

  "Damn," he muttered. "Maybe I shouldn't have come home, after all."

  But he had, and now it was too late to get back in the Ferrari and drive away. One reason he couldn't leave Tribulation was that having already cracked open Pandora' s box, Caine knew that all the old hurts, ancient resentments and lingering guilt would eventually have to be dealt with.

  The other and more pressing reason was that as much as he hated to admit it, Caine O'Halloran, hotshot baseball star and national sports hero, had absolutely nowhere else to go.

  He dressed with uncharacteristic slowness, every movement giving birth to a new pain.

  Nora was standing behind the oak counter she'd had built in the foyer, waiting for him.

  "You'll need another appointment." She began leafing through the open appointment book. "If you're still in town two weeks from today, you can come in around four-thirty. Otherwise, you'll need to find another doctor to take out those stitches." "Sorry to disappoint you, Doc, but I'm going to stick around for a while."

  "And exactly how long is 'a while'?'

  "You asking for professional reasons? Or personal ones?"

  "Professional." She practically flung the word in his face.

  Caine started to shrug, experienced another sharp stab of pain and decided against it. "Just wondering. And to answer your solely professional question, I'm sticking around for as long as it takes."

  Nora didn't quite trust the look in his eyes. "For the feeling to come back in your fingertips?"

  "Yeah." Caine nodded, his gaze on hers. "That, too."

  When the mood threatened to become dangerously intimate once again, Nora became briskly professional, which was no less than Caine expected. "That'll be thirty-five dollars."

  "Not exacdy city rates."

  "Tribulation is not exactly the dty."

  "Point taken."

  It took a mighty effort, but he managed to pull his wallet out of his back pocket without flinching and withdrew a ten, a twenty and a five-dollar bill.

  "You're in a hurry." He remembered this as she began filling out an insurance form. "I don't need a receipt."

  "My accountant yd Is bloody murder if I don't keep accurate records," she said, signing her name to the form with a silver ballpoint pen. Her penmanship, Caine noted, was as precise as everything else about the woman. And even as he reminded himself that such painstaking attention to detail was simply Nora's nature, there was something about the meticulous cursive script that provoked the hell out of him.

  She ripped the form apart, handed him the yellow and pink copies and kept the white one for herself. "Where are you staying?"

  "At the cabin."

  "All alone?"

  "That's the plan."

  "You might have a concussion. It'd be better if someone kept an eye on you."

  "I don't have a concussion, Nora."

  Her brow arched in the frostiest look she'd given him thus far. "Now you're a doctor?"

  "No. But I've had concussions before, and I think I'd recognize one."

  "You've drunk a lot today," she reminded. "All the alcohol is probably numbing the pain. You really should spend the night at your folks' house."

  "I'm staying at the cabin. Alone."

  "Still as hardheaded as ever, I see."

  "Not hard enough," he countered.

  "You'll have pain."

  "I'm used to that."

  "I'm sure you are. However, I'm still going to prescribe something to help get you through the night and the next few days."

  "I can think of something a lot better than pills to help me get through the night."

  The seductive suggestion tingled in the air between them.

  Nora reached for the prescription pad. "Take one tablet, with food or a glass of water, every six hours as needed."

  Her voice, Caine noted; had turned cold enough to freeze the leafy green Boston fern hanging in the front window. "Needless to say, you shouldn't drink and I

  wouldn't advise driving or operating heavy machin-ery.

  "Damn. Does that mean I can't down the pills with a six-pack, then go to the mi
ll and play Russian roulette with the ripsaw?"

  She absolutely refused to smile. "Not if you want to keep that hand." She glanced at her watch as she tore off the prescription and handed it to him. "Nelson's Pharmacy should be open for another five minutes. I'll call ahead just in case his clock and mine aren't in sync."

  Caine plucked the piece of white paper from her fingers and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans without looking at it. "Thanks. I appreciate everything you've done."

  "I'm a doctor, Caine. It's my job."

  "True enough- But I've become painfully familiar with doctors, Nora, and believe me, none of them have as nice a touch as yours." He flashed her the bold, rakish grin that had added just the right touch to his calendar portrayal of Mr. April.

  "If you don't behave, I'm going to call your mother to take you home."

  "Why do I get the feeling you still refuse to put athletes in the same category as adults?"

  "If the jockstrap fits..

  Her smile was patently false as she picked up the telephone receiver and began to dial. "You'd better get going, Caine. Ed Nelson isn't going to keep his pharmacy open all night. Even for the great local hero, Caine O'Halloran.

  "Oh, hi, Ed, this is Nora. Just fine, thanks. And how are you? And Mavis? Another grandchild? Twins? You and Mavis must be thrilled. What does that make now, six? Eight? Really? Well, that's wonderful____

  "The reason I called, Ed," Nora said, breaking into the pharmacist's in-degth description of the newest additions to the Nelson family, "is that I know it's near your closing time, but I'm sending a patient over."

  She turned her back, studiously ignoring Caine.

  Frustrated and aching practically everywhere in his body, Caine stalked to the door, then slammed it behind him with such vehemence that one of her diplomas fell off the wall in the adjoining room.

  4

  Caine picked up THE prescription at Nelson's Pharmacy and endured a lengthy conversation with die elderly druggist, who wanted to know all the particulars of Caine's career-threatening injury.

  After finally escaping the medical interrogation, he stopped at the market, picked up cold cuts for dinner and, ignoring Nora's medical advice, purchased a couple of six-packs of Rainier beer. Just to take the edge off.

  Then he drove out to the cabin—a cabin that, despite his avowal never to return to Tribulation, he'd never quite gotten around to selling.

  Although he'd hired a woman from town to clean the place occasionally, the air was musty and a layer of dust covered everything. Caine neither noticed nor cared.

  He turned on the television and tuned in to a game between Kansas City and Toronto on ESPN, threw himself down on the sofa, creating a dusty doud, and pulled the tab on one of the blue metallic cans of beer. Foam spewed across the back of his hand; Caine licked it off his skin and settled back, stretching his legs out in front of him.

  After swallowing two pink pills, he downed the entire can of beer in long thirsty chugs, tossed the can onto the pine coffee table, and opened another.

  Three hours later, he'd made inroads on the beer and the Royals had shut out the Blue Jays at home, winning with a George Brett home run. And although the combination of pain medication and beer had created a pleasant, rather hazy buzz, he hadn t enjoyed the game.

  The televised broadcast had driven home, all too painfully, the unpalatable fact that for the first time since his fourteenth summer, a new baseball season had begun without Caine OTialloran on the mound.

  That unpleasant thought kept him awake long into the night until, finally, the combination of drugs and alcohol allowed him to slip into a restless sleep.

  Caine WASN'T THEONIY one who had difficulty sleeping. The following morning, Nora awoke more tired than she'd been when she went to bed and irritated with herself for letting Caine get under her skin. She'd tried to put him out of her mind, but ten-year-old memories, as vivid as if they'd occurred yesterday, had proved to be thieves of sleep.

  She showered, blow-dried her hair and kept her makeup to a minimum of pink lipstick and mascara. Her clothing—pearl-gray skirt, matching blouse and low-heeled, comfortable shoes—was as subdued as her cosmetics. Although it was spring, mornings were chilly enough to require her wool coat.

  As she gathered up her driving gloves, Nora cast a glance at the dock. If she left now, she could still make a stop before driving to Port Angeles.

  The clouds were faint pink streaks in a pearly gray sky when Nora parked in front of the Tribulation Pioneer Cemetery. The small iron gate creaked as Nora pushed it open. The front rows of headstones, dating back to the founding of the town, were chipped and weather-pitted. An archangel guarding one resting place had been missing a wing for as long as she could remember.

  Family plots were separated from the others by short white picket fences; the older stones, made of marble or granite, were elaborately carved, the words chiseled into their surfaces lengthy tributes to the deceased. The newer graves were marked by slabs laid flat on the ground with only the name, dates, and a single line to denote a life now gone.

  The white picket fence surrounding the Anderson family plot was kept gleaming by a fresh coat of paint applied by her father every June. This year the task would be passed on to Tom or Dana. The names on the stones went back five generations, to her Great-great-grandfather Olaf.

  Nora could have made her way to the grave blindfolded.

  Dylan Kirk Anderson O'Halloran, the simple marker stated. Beloved son. The inscribed dates told of a young life cut tragically short.

  Each time she came to the grave, Nora hoped to find peace. The fact that she never found it never stopped her from coming.

  Wildflowers were arranged in a metal cup buried in the ground beside the stone. The casual bouquet consisted of dainty purplish brown mission bells, lacy white yarrow, deep purple larkspur and cheery, nodding yellow fawn lilies. The flower petals glistened with dew.

  The bouquet was silent testimony to the fact that Ellen O'Halloran had made her weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery. There were times—and this was one of them— when Nora felt slightly guilty that she'd insisted her son be buried in the Anderson family plot, especially since no one could have loved Dylan more than his paternal grandmother.

  But then she would remember how Caine had arrived at the cemetery obviously drunk and had humiliated both families by punching out the workman whose job it had been to lower the small, white, flower-draped coffin into the ground.

  Nora pulled off her gloves, then knelt and ran a hand over the brown grass that covered her son.

  Her worst fear, after they'd put her child into that cold ground, was that she'd forget his round pink face, the sound of his bubbly laugh, his bright blue eyes, his wide, melon-slice baby smile.

  But that hadn't happened.

  Nine years after his death, she could see Dylan as if he were sitting right here, propped up in the maple high chair etched with teeth marks from two generations of O'Halloran boys, his bowl of oatmeal overturned on his head, laughing uproariously at this new way to win his mother's attention.

  Bittersweet memories whirled through her mind—the hours spent walking the floor with Dylan at night, an anatomy text in hand, naming aloud the names of the endocrine glands.

  How many babies, she'd wondered at the time, were put to sleep with an original lullaby incorporating the two hundred and six bones of the skeletal system?

  Nora knelt there for a long, silent time, tasting the scent of spring in the air. The morning light was a muted rosy glow. Delicate limbs of peaceful trees, wearing their new bright green leaves, arched over the grave.

  In the distance, the sawtooth peaks of the Olympic Mountains emerged from a lifting blanket of fog; the upper snowfields caught the rose light of the sky and held it.

  Somewhere not far away, Nora heard the sweet morning songs of thrush and meadowlark, then the chime of the clock tower, reminding her of other responsibilities, other children who might need her.

  "Mama has
to goShe traced her son's name with her fingertip. The bronze marker was morning-damp and cold, but Nora imagined it was Dylan's velvety cheek she was touching. "But I'll be back, Dylan, baby. I promise."

  After placing a small white pebble beside the one undoubtedly left by Dylan's paternal grandmother, Nora left the grave site. The cold ache in her heart was familiar; she always experienced it whenever she visited the cemetery. But she could no more stay away than she could stop breathing.

  So immersed was she in her own thoughts, Nora failed to notice the man who'd been watching her the entire time she'd been in the cemetery.

  Caine leaned against the trunk of a tree, his arms crossed, silently observing his former wife.

  A hangover was splitting his head in two, his body ached and the stitches in the back of his head had already begun to pull uncomfortably. But since he knew that he deserved the crushing pain, he wasn't about to complain.

  He hadn't wanted to come to the cemetery today; indeed, he hadn't entered those gates since the day of the funeral. A day when he'd shown up drunk, causing Nora, in an uncharacteristic public display of temper, to screech at him like a banshee. Her black-gloved fists had pounded at his chest with surprising strength until her father and brothers had managed to pull her away.

  It wasn't that Caine hadn't loved Dylan; on the contrary, the little boy had been the sun around which Caine's entire universe had revolved.

  Which was one of the reasons he had never returned to the spot where they'd insisted on putting his son into the ground, never minding the fact that Dylan was afraid of the dark.

  Caine had come to the cemetery this morning in an attempt to expunge the lingering pain, and was unsurprised when it hadn't worked. He'd been about to leave when, as if conjured up from his dark and guilty thoughts, Nora had appeared out of the morning mists, looking strangely small and heartbreakingly frail.

  She WAS ON HERw back to her car when she saw Caine. He was standing half-hidden in the shadows. She stopped, but refused to approach him. If he wanted to talk, let him come to her.