“YOU NEED TO stop these visits to the hospital,” Leah said, grabbing Taylor’s arm to keep her from heading out the kitchen door.
“Brian needs me.”
“You need to take care of yourself. You wake up in the middle of the night whimpering and wander the halls until dawn. You aren’t eating.”
“I have to go, Leah.”
“Brian Flynn has been in a coma for the past ten days. He won’t even know you’re there.”
“I’ll know.”
“I realize you’ve been through a lot together—”
Taylor gave her sister a look that shut her up. But only for a moment.
“Whatever feelings you might have had for each other were a result of the situation you were in,” Leah persisted. “When Brian wakes up—if he wakes up—he’s going to be concentrating on getting his life back together. He isn’t going to be thinking about you.”
Taylor’s chin lifted, but she felt a spurt of fear that her sister was right. “You weren’t there, Leah. You don’t know what it was like. You don’t know anything.”
“I know enough to warn you to protect your heart,” she said in a voice so gentle it made Taylor’s throat ache. “Whatever promises Brian made will be forgotten, I promise you. The Flynns, one and all, have grown up as cold and callous and uncaring as the bastard who raised them.”
“You’re wrong about Brian, Leah.”
Leah’s eyes looked both wounded and worried. “I know what I’m talking about.”
“You weren’t there,” Taylor repeated.
“Have you spoken to Vick about this?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“She didn’t change my mind.” Taylor had gotten pretty much the same speech from her twin that she was getting from Leah, but she refused to be swayed. She’d allowed Vick to talk her into walking away from Brian when she was a teenager. She wasn’t going to let it happen again.
“We spoke,” Vick said, entering the kitchen still dressed in her cotton nightgown, yawning and ruffling her blond curls. “Argued half the night and into the wee hours this morning. I couldn’t make her see reason, either.”
“The Flynns can’t all be as bad as you say,” Taylor argued. “Look at Eve. She seems happy married to Connor.”
“They haven’t been together long enough for us to know whether their marriage is going to survive,” Leah said.
“Well, so far, it’s working,” Taylor replied, undeterred.
“What do the Flynns say when you show up at Brian’s room?” Leah asked.
“Nothing.” Aiden had made it clear to his brothers that she was welcome at Brian’s bedside whenever she chose to come. So far, she hadn’t run into Angus, but she was even willing to beard the lion, if necessary.
She spent her days sitting in a plastic chair beside Brian’s bed, talking to him and holding his hand. His brothers showed up in shifts, but because they had ranch animals—and in Connor’s case family—that had to be fed and cared for, they weren’t able to stay for long. She left the room while they were visiting Brian and waited in the cafeteria.
“I have to be there, Leah,” she said. “When he wakes up, I mean. Brian’s going to need—”
“His family,” Vick interrupted. “Not one of King’s Brats. Wake up and smell the coffee, Taylor. The Flynns—father and sons—want nothing to do with us. If you’re well enough to hang out at the hospital making a nuisance of yourself, you’re well enough to go back to work—” Vick cut herself off and looked abashed.
Taylor huffed out a disgusted breath. “Dropping smoke jumpers? Flying over forest fires? I don’t think the National Transportation Safety Board is going to let me do that until I’ve explained what I did to flame out both engines of my Twin Otter. I’ll be lucky if they don’t take away my pilot’s license.”
“You could…” Vick’s voice trailed away.
Taylor couldn’t work as a corporate pilot, either, until she’d been cleared by the NTSB. “Besides, I’m not ready to fly again. I need some time to cope with…everything.”
Taylor wasn’t sure she had the nerve to fly smoke jumpers again. She knew having both engines flame out had to be a one in a million incident, but she didn’t think she’d ever again be so blithe about the dangers of dropping smoke jumpers on a hellish forest fire.
“Seems to me you’ve got enough to handle, without adding Brian’s problems to your own,” Leah said. “From what Aiden told me—”
“You’ve been talking to Aiden?” Taylor said. “What does he say? What’s Brian’s prognosis? The doctor won’t tell me anything.” She’d been unwilling to ask Brian’s brothers for information they didn’t freely offer.
They hadn’t offered anything, which lent credence to Vick’s suggestion that they’d just as soon she stayed away.
“Never mind what Aiden said,” Vick interjected. “I want to know why you’ve been spending time with the enemy, Leah. I’ve never in my life heard you say a good thing about a Flynn, and suddenly you’re best friends with Aiden?”
Taylor watched a rosy flush rise on Leah’s face. Guilt? Embarrassment? Taylor knew far more than Leah realized about her relationship with Aiden. She hadn’t used her knowledge against Leah in their argument, because it felt wrong, hurtful somehow, to expose Leah’s secret.
She hadn’t shared Leah’s secret with Vick, either, which was surprising, because she and Vick used to share everything, no matter how unimportant. And Leah’s relationship with Aiden was far from unimportant. Something had been different between her and her twin over the past few years, pushing them apart, making it more difficult to share.
Taylor felt sure Vick was keeping a secret from her, something to do with that home she owned in Montana. She could have just shown up at what Vick had described as her “remote cabin in the woods,” but she’d wanted Vick to invite her.
The invitation had never come.
Vick hadn’t been as outgoing or seemed as happy as she once had. Taylor was afraid her twin was in some kind of trouble, but whenever she asked about anything to do with Montana, Vick shut her down. Taylor wanted to help, but Vick wasn’t giving her the chance.
Taylor felt more worried and disappointed than resentful at being shut out. More than anything, she missed having her sister living in the next room, where they could share everything all the time.
Skyping wasn’t always possible, and too many nuances were lost texting and talking on the phone. Maybe that wretched feeling of disconnectedness was why Taylor hadn’t told Vick the story of Brian’s bet with Aiden. Or maybe it was more in the nature of payback: Let’s see how she likes it when I start keeping secrets from her.
Taylor was curious to hear Leah’s answer to the question Vick had raised about their elder sister’s relationship with Aiden. Had Leah forgiven him for the trick he’d played on her? Was something more than information passing between the two of them? “What is going on between you and Aiden?” she asked.
“We spent a lot of time together worrying about you and Brian,” Leah explained. “So Aiden’s been keeping me in the loop about his brother’s situation.”
“Why is it okay for you to talk to Aiden but not okay for me to spend time with Brian?” Taylor asked.
Vick threw up her hands. “I give up. Why would either one of you want to spend time with either one of them? You’re both crazy as loons.” She grabbed some Cheerios from the cupboard, and set a bowl and spoon on the breakfast bar, before striding to the refrigerator for milk. She wet down the cereal, then stopped before taking a bite to shoot her twin a perturbed look. “I still don’t get it. What’s the point of spending time with an unconscious man?”
“You’ve got plenty of sympathy for wolves and grizzlies. How about a little compassion for someone I care about?”
Vick stopped with a spoonful of Cheerios halfway to her mouth. She dropped it back in the bowl with a clatter and a splash of milk. “That’s a low blow! You can’t expect me to care about Flynns.”
“What happened to caring about me?” That was as close as Taylor could come to saying that she missed the tight bond between them that appeared to have frayed over the past few years.
Vick shoved her bowl aside and hurried across the room to fold Taylor in her arms. “I do care. I do! I just don’t understand this sudden need to forgive the Flynns all transgressions. You might as well be standing defenseless with a thousand-pound grizzly in your path. I’m frightened for you. I don’t want your belly ripped out. All I see ahead is suffering, if you continue in the direction you’re going.”
Taylor stuck her nose against Vick’s throat and blinked at the tears that threatened. How long had it been since they’d hugged like this? They said the words “I love you” all the time. But somewhere along the way, they’d stopped embracing when they met or when one of them went away.
Both sisters had held her close at the hospital. She’d cut their embraces short, because her feelings had been so near the surface, and she’d been afraid she would fall apart if she let down her guard. She hadn’t realized how much she needed to be held, to be demonstrably loved. In Brian’s absence, the constant fear she lived with, the knowledge of how unworthy, how undeserving of love she was, had crept back.
In truth, Taylor hadn’t shared everything with her twin in the past. She’d never told Vick how empty she felt inside. Or just how unlovable she’d felt, until Brian Flynn had admitted to loving her. Vick had no way of knowing how Brian’s love had filled that hole inside her, satisfying her need to feel valued in a way nothing and no one else ever had.
If she had known, Vick would’ve understood why Taylor sat by Brian’s bedside praying that he would not only recover, but still feel the same way about her. Because Vick was ignorant of all the facts, Taylor had no one with whom to share the constant fear she felt that, when Brian was well, he would simply walk away.
Was it any wonder she didn’t want to give up on that promise of love? She had a vested interest in seeing that Brian Flynn recovered. Until he was back on his feet, they couldn’t move forward with their lives together.
It looked like Brian was going to keep his right leg, but a lot of the muscle had been cut away and wasn’t coming back. Smoke jumping was out of the question, but depending on how well he rehabbed his right leg, he might be able to requalify as a firefighter with the Jackson Hole fire department.
Taylor didn’t intend to let Brian fail, because her future happiness depended on his being a whole, healthy, happy person, ready to pursue a romantic relationship…with her.
“I’m leaving now,” she said, pushing past Leah.
When Leah took a step forward to stand in her way, Vick said, “Let her go. If she’s determined to jump into deep water without checking for unseen hazards, there’s nothing either of us can do about it, except be there to fish her out.”
Taylor saw that Leah’s inclination was to physically restrain her from taking that dangerous—perhaps fatal—leap, but at last, she stepped aside and gestured toward the door.
“Go. Just be careful, Taylor. Be very careful.”
Taylor didn’t acknowledge Leah’s warning. She couldn’t afford to be careful. If she wanted to be safe, she’d keep her distance from Brian. She’d guard her heart and not take the chance of having it broken.
Being safe wasn’t going to get her where she wanted to go. She had to be fearless. She had to take chances. She had to do whatever was necessary to get Brian Flynn back on his feet. Because she wasn’t going to settle for less than happily ever after.