Just Another Day in Paradise Page 7

  Shell-shocked was the phrase that came to Paige’s mind. He looked shell-shocked. Deciding her point was made, she headed back to her room to gather up papers for the school day and left him there.

  He never looked at her the entire day in school, but Paige was grateful he’d shown up at all. He left the moment class was over, and she saw he was headed for the bungalow. She purposely didn’t hurry. She’d laid down the rules, it was up to him now. It had hurt her to do it, more than Kyle would ever know, but they simply couldn’t go on the way they had been. He’d been headed nowhere good, and it had to be stopped.

  And Noah had given her the strength to do it. The strength and the direction. She didn’t know if he’d intended to, but she did sense it wasn’t like him to pour out his past to a near stranger like that.

  Even if it was a stranger he’d once kissed like a long-lost lover.

  She shivered inwardly at the memory that never seemed to lose any of its power, no matter how long it had been or how much she tried to stifle it.

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Cooper?”

  She looked up to see Lani DeSouza standing before her. “I’m fine, Lani. What did you need?”

  “I wanted to give you my extra-credit history paper.”

  Paige smiled as she took the pages from the girl. “I’m going to have to invent something higher than an A-plus for you.”

  Lani giggled. “I love the way you teach it, especially when you translate it into modern speech.”

  It was one of her favorite things to do, to translate what was usually a stuffy or dry historical event into modern-day terms; it seemed to get through to the kids in a way nothing else did.

  Lani, she thought as the girl left, was a beautiful girl now; as a woman she would be beyond stunning. Paige finished gathering her papers and headed out of the now empty schoolhouse. But she stopped in the doorway when she heard Kyle’s voice. She couldn’t tell what he’d said, but Lani’s voice was quite clear.

  “You Americans, you think you’re better then everybody.”

  Kyle said something else she still couldn’t hear.

  “No, you’re not bad, you’re just like…like a big puppy, good in your heart but clumsy, and sometimes hurting people when you don’t mean to.”

  She wished she could have heard what had started that conversation, Paige thought. Perhaps Kyle had again let slip his opinion of Lani’s home. She’d heard the girl once telling him he was foolish for preferring “silly video games” to a good life here on her island. It made her glad she’d made him leave the video games behind.

  The voices got fainter as the two moved away and she headed back to the bungalow. But once she’d arrived and changed clothes, she felt too restless to stay there. She grabbed her wide-brimmed hat and started out on a walk, choosing a direction she’d not taken before, up the slope away from the resort. The path wasn’t as well delineated as the ones on the resort grounds, but it was clear enough as it wound through the trees and bushes. She saw the occasional lizard and several darting crested hummingbirds. And every few feet she caught a glimpse of the water, each time from a different angle.

  At the top of the slope the path became more difficult and overgrown than she wanted to tackle, and she needed to see that Kyle was following the new rules, so she turned to go back. Something caught her eye out in the water, and she leaned forward to look. Three small boats sat in the distance, one of them larger than the other two. It wasn’t unusual to see a boat out there, but she’d never seen three together before. The larger one appeared to be a fishing boat, and she wondered what they were catching. Marlin, perhaps? That’s what she always thought of, films of the huge, graceful fish leaping its length and more out of aqua-marine water. But for all she knew, they didn’t even live around here.

  She should send for some books on the local wildlife and plant life, she thought as she headed back. It would be good for her own sake to know, and also in case the kids who weren’t native to the island wanted to know. She’d go online tonight and see what was available.

  She was lost in thought as she walked back across the resort courtyard, until for the second time she heard Kyle’s voice. Snapping back to herself, she looked around and saw him sitting on a bench with his back to her. Next to him sat Noah.

  Another conversation I’d love to hear, she thought. She wouldn’t stoop to eavesdropping, but there was, she decided, no reason she couldn’t just keep walking as she had been. So she did, and as she got closer she began to hear bits and pieces.

  “—go places, like my dad,” Kyle was saying. “I’m not going to be afraid to go anywhere, like my mother.”

  Paige winced, but Noah pointed out reasonably, “She came here.”

  She didn’t hear what Kyle said then, and it was probably just as well.

  “Did you ever stop to think that maybe she didn’t want to leave, either? That she gave up her own life for your sake?”

  She wanted to hug him for his support.

  Kyle snorted. “Yeah, right.” Brushing off the possibility he asked, “So, when you were in Egypt, did you see the pyramids? And the sphinx?”

  Noah grinned. “I don’t think they let you out of the country until you do.”

  “Someday I’m going to see them. I’m going to see everything, as soon as I get out of school. And my mom can’t stop me. I’m going around the world, just like my dad!”

  Paige felt something cramp up inside her. For years she’d fought through the shambles of the life left her by her globe-trotting husband, and now here was her son wanting to do the same thing. She didn’t think she’d made a sound, but Noah looked up. When he did, so did Kyle, and the boy’s exuberance vanished.

  “I suppose you came to tell me I’m late and in violation?” he said with a sneer.

  She sensed Noah stiffen, but didn’t look at him. She glanced at her watch and said, her voice as calm as she could manage, “Actually, you have three minutes left. However, since you’ve just been extremely rude, yes, you’re in violation. You’ll go home and stay there until school tomorrow.”

  Kyle turned to Noah, disbelief clear in his face. “Can you believe that?”

  “I can,” Noah said, his voice cold. “If I’d ever spoken to my mother in that tone of voice, I’d have been grounded until I was forty. And I probably wouldn’t have been able to sit for most of it.”

  Looking as if an idol had betrayed him, Kyle threw a last angry glare at Paige and then took off toward the bungalow at a run. Once he was out of sight, Paige sank down onto the bench, her knees a little wobbly after this first test of the new management.

  “Thanks,” she said after a moment.

  “I gather you laid down the law?”

  She nodded. “And as you can see, it didn’t go particularly well.”

  “He’ll come around. He’s not a bad kid, he’s just a little screwed up right now.”

  “I hope so.” Her mouth twisted. “But I don’t like hearing him talk about taking off like that.”

  “It’s natural for a kid to want to see the world.”

  “Globe-trotting,” she said grimly.

  “We don’t all have horns and a pitchfork,” he said mildly.

  Embarrassed, Paige quickly apologized. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little touchy. Having your son declare he hates you and always will at every opportunity isn’t the easiest thing to live with.”

  “I imagine not.” He looked at her consideringly for a moment. Then very evenly he said, “He seems to still have a great love for his father.”

  Paige sighed. “Yes, he does.”

  “You don’t sound particularly happy about that.”

  Paige looked at him then, seeing in his eyes the same gentle warmth that had been there the night he’d shown up on her doorstep. And suddenly the past was alive and beating at her, as strong as it had been the day of Phil’s funeral, when the farce had been revealed.

  “Paige?”

  She didn’t know what must have shown in her face. S
he only knew she had to let out the emotion that was boiling up inside.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, “but Phil’s endless traveling was a real sore spot. We argued about it constantly.”

  She half expected him to defend Phil. He was a globe-trotter himself, after all. But he said nothing. After a moment she went on.

  “It wasn’t even the frequency, it was that he never made an effort to come home in between. If he had less than two weeks between jaunts, he just stayed away. Kyle really didn’t know his father at all.”

  Noah shook his head. “Shouldn’t be that way. You have a kid, you make some changes.”

  She gave him a sideways look. “Would you have made changes?”

  He didn’t toss off a glib answer, which she appreciated. After a moment he said, “Yes. There are ways to work around it. No matter if you’re in the Aviation Division, or Tech, or resorts, Redstone’s always willing to schedule so you have time to come home in between trips. It’s tougher, but it can be done.”

  “Not according to Phil. The only thing he did was be gone more.”

  “Did you ever travel with him? Before Kyle?”

  “No. I was working then, and I couldn’t get away for those lengths of time.” Her mouth twisted. “Besides, he never asked.”

  “His loss,” Noah said softly.

  Something in his tone broke the barrier she’d managed to keep in place until now. The words, words she’d never spoken to anyone, came out in a rush.

  “He didn’t think so. And when he got on that plane that last time? He had no intention of ever coming back.”

  Noah went very still. She kept going, needing to share this with somebody, needing to vent the pain she’d kept bottled up for five years. At the same time, she couldn’t quite believe she was telling him what she had told no one, speaking the words she had never, ever said to another human being.

  “He had finally decided he no longer wanted either of us. He didn’t want to be my husband and certainly not a father. He wanted his complete freedom, and he was leaving the country to be sure he got it.”

  “Paige—”

  “You know how I found out?”

  Her voice was sharp, abrupt, but she couldn’t help it. She’d spent five years being grateful no one else knew, five years telling herself that at least her humiliation was private, that Phil had died before it became known that he didn’t love her or even his son enough to stay, and now she was blurting it out to this man, of all people.

  “Go ahead,” Noah said, not really answering her question but sounding as if her pain was somehow stabbing at him.

  “I got served with divorce papers. Certified mail, delivered the day of his funeral, can you believe that?” He visibly winced. “Lovely, huh? And with them was a letter saying he’d left us the house and would provide child support for Kyle from a trust he’d set up, but we were never to try and find him. That he never wanted to see me, or even his son, again.”

  “Paige, he was an idiot.”

  “No, he was cruel,” she countered. “Why else would he spend a page of that letter telling me about the wonderful new woman he’d found in London, how much smarter, prettier and more sophisticated she was than me, and how he couldn’t wait to be free to start his new life with her? Me, I was so pitiful I went back through his records to try to find out how long it had been going on.”

  “Did it matter?”

  She met his gaze then, aware of something niggling away at the edge of her consciousness, but not sure what it was. She answered him. “To me it did. At least, it did then. Later I started wondering if she was the only one, if there had been more. A girl in every port, as they say.”

  “What was the use?”

  “Maybe I wanted to know just how big a fool I’d been.”

  “Because you trusted? Because you expected the man you’d married to be honest, and worthy of that trust? You had a right to that expectation, Paige. It wasn’t your fault he couldn’t live up to it.”

  “According to Phil it was.”

  “Some men just don’t deserve a woman like you, or a family. Phil was one of them.”

  There it was again, something she should be noticing, something she should see.

  “You know what’s really crazy? After I found out, after I got over the first hurt, I wondered about her.” She shook her head. “Can you believe I actually felt bad for her?”

  “Yes,” Noah said, his voice so soft she could barely hear him. “I can believe that of you.”

  “I wondered if she was sitting alone somewhere, waiting for this man who’d promised to leave his wife for her. Maybe she even thought he was just one of those married men who always made the promise but never kept it. Maybe she never knew he was really coming for her.”

  “She knew.”

  “You think so? Do you think she was waiting at the airport for him, for the plane that would never come?”

  “No.”

  He was sounding hoarse now, as if each word was being ripped out of him.

  “Noah?”

  “She knew,” he said in that awful voice, “because she was on that plane with him.”

  Paige stared at him. She opened her mouth to say “What?” but the word never came out. It hit her then, with the force of a blow, what had been bothering her during her outpouring. There had been many things in Noah’s eyes: sympathy, support, reassurance, even anger.

  What there hadn’t been was surprise.

  She couldn’t seem to breathe. She also couldn’t deny what was now so clear. His last words proved it.

  He knew. He’d sat here listening to her sad story, her pitiful secret, and the whole time he’d already known.

  Chapter 6

  “Paige—”

  “You knew,” she said, her eyes wide with shock as she stared at him.

  Rider shifted uncomfortably. “Yes.”

  “You knew about the woman, about the divorce? Both?”

  “It came out during the Redstone post-crash investigation,” he said, hating the way she was looking at him, as if he’d just shattered her world all over again. “And he had copies of the papers in his desk. We found them three days after the crash.”

  She went even paler, so pale he thought she might faint, and he wondered what he’d said now. But Paige didn’t faint. She simply sat there, reminding him too painfully of how she had looked the first time he’d gone to her house after Redstone had confirmed her husband had been on that plane.

  “We? You mean all of Redstone knew? And—” she stopped for a gasping breath “—you all knew even before I did?”

  He realized then what he’d done. The funeral, the day she said she’d gotten the papers, had been five days after the crash. “Paige, I’m sorry—”

  “Sorry?”

  She leaped to her feet. She swayed slightly, but steadied herself before he could reach out to do it. He stood up slowly, wishing now he’d just kept his mouth shut. But the image of her, freshly widowed and newly betrayed, still having the compassion to worry about the other woman, had been too much for him.

  “You’re sorry? You knew, days before, and you didn’t warn me? That I was about to be served divorce papers from beyond the grave?”

  “We tried to stop it altogether. Or at least delay it on the grounds of changed circumstances.” He rubbed at his eyes; the tropical sun suddenly seemed painfully bright. “But his lawyer was out of town, and by the time we tracked him down, it was too late. They’d already been sent.”

  When he looked at her again, there was no doubting that the betrayal shadowing her eyes this time was aimed at him. “Why didn’t you tell me? You were supposedly there to help.”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t find out they’d already been sent until I checked with the office that night. I didn’t realize you’d gotten the papers that day, or…I never would have left you alone to deal with it. I was planning to delay my trip and stay until they did arrive, but then…”

  He let his voice trail off and sa
w by the tightening of her lips that she realized what had changed his plans.

  “It was all just rotten timing, that’s all,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck where a nasty tightness had settled in.

  A flicker of realization showed in her face. “That’s why somebody from Redstone kept calling, and checking on me, after you left, isn’t it? Because they knew.”

  He nodded. “I had to be in Tokyo, so they followed up.”

  “You could have told me. You knew about the papers—you could have at least told me that much.”

  “I was hoping they could stop it, that you’d never have to know at all.”

  She shivered visibly. “All this time I thought my humiliation was at least private. And now…”

  “Paige, everybody at Redstone felt awful about the whole situation. And most of them were really mad at Phil.”

  “And you, what did you feel? Sympathy? Pity?”

  He reached out and put a hand on her arm. “Paige, please, don’t do this. You have no reason to feel humiliated.”

  She yanked free of him and stood there trembling. “You don’t get it, do you? I have every reason to feel humiliated! Because if I hadn’t gotten those damned papers, on that day, do you think I’d have thrown myself at you like the proverbial love-starved widow?”

  Rider gaped at her, suddenly realizing that she wasn’t on the verge of tears, she was on the verge of exploding. With anger. “What?” he said, wondering if it sounded half as stupid as he felt just now.

  “If it hadn’t been for those papers, on that day, I never would have made such a fool of myself. I never would have taken your…help as something else.” She stood there, her quickened breathing audible, the eyes he’d always thought so warm, icy now with rage. “You should have told me. You could have saved yourself the embarrassment of getting mauled, and me five years of sleepless nights.”

  She turned on her heel and walked away, each step rigid with a control that bit into him as deeply as her words had. He started after her, then stopped himself. He was probably the last person she wanted to see right now. And he wasn’t sure he could blame her. He’d been trying to help, but it had well and truly backfired on him. And, more important, on Paige. So he stood there, feeling helpless and hating the feeling, staring after her.