Reunited with the Billionaire Page 5

“I’m talking about you and the Mom-Mother thing.” Gina took the cake from the oven and put it on the table, then closed the door with her hip. “`Why must I wear my galoshes, Mother?’“ she said in a little-girl voice. “`Why must I do my homework now, Mother?’“ She laughed at the perplexed expression on Wendy’s face. “Ever since you were tiny, I was `Mom’ when you were happy with me and `Mother’ when you weren’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I didn’t know I was that transparent.” Wendy hesitated, watching as Gina sliced the cake. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap just now.”

  “I know you didn’t, sweetie.” Gina looked at her daughter. “And I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. You just need to remember that I haven’t had the chance to fuss over you in a very long time.”

  “I know. And I really love having you fuss. I just…I guess I confused it with you thinking I wasn’t up to doing things for myself, and I’m not very good at letting people help me.”

  “Not good? Dear, you bristle like a porcupine, but I’m not surprised. You always were so fiercely independent. It’s what got you into trouble your very first day in kindergarten.”

  Wendy smiled. “Seriously?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll never forget it. Your teacher cornered me when I came to pick you up.” Gina’s expression softened at the memory. “I’d just gone back to teaching. I was doing half days, paired with a new teacher. She took mornings so I could be home with you in the afternoons.”

  “Uh-huh. I remember.”

  “Anyway, I came to get you. And your teacher—”

  “Mrs. Barrett.”

  “Right. Sally Barrett said she hated having to tell me, but you’d walloped some little boy.”

  “I didn’t!” Wendy laughed. “I don’t remember that at all.”

  “Well, it’s true. Seems he’d been crying. Lots of the kids were. First day away from home and all that… Anyway, this poor little guy wanted his mother. You were sitting next to him and you were crying, too.”

  “I definitely don’t remember that! I loved kindergarten.”

  “Yes, you did. But that very first day, you were teary-eyed, the same as the other children. Sally said the little boy looked at you—for comfort, maybe—and you said, `What are you looking at?’ or words to that effect, and he said he was looking at you because you were crying, and you said—”

  “Oh, wow.” Wendy giggled and covered her face with her hands. “It’s coming back to me. I said he was a baby and he said if he was a baby, so was I, and—”

  “And,” Gina said, putting slices of cake on their plates, “you hauled off and hit him.” She grinned. “Then he really had something to cry about, poor kid. Anyway, Sally Barrett read you the riot act. So did I. And when your father came home and I told him what had happened…”

  “He said I’d done a bad thing.” Wendy’s lips twitched. “Then he picked me up, lifted me high in the air and said I was some piece of work.”

  “He was right. You were.” Gina smiled. “You still are. Soft as velvet most of the time, but tough as nails when you have to be.” Her smile tilted. “Which brings us to this operation.”

  Here we go, Wendy thought. She’d broken the news to her mother her first evening home. Gina had blanched, but she hadn’t said much.

  “Mom took it well,” she’d whispered to her father when she kissed him good-night, but Howard had shaken his head and reminded her that that was her mother’s way. When Gina learned something that upset her, she’d keep it to herself, turn it over and over in her mind, then talk about it when she was ready.

  From the look in her eyes, she was ready right now.

  Wendy caught hold of her hand. “Mom, I know the news that I want to have this surgery came as a surprise—”

  “Surprise? Shock is a better word. Why did you tell your father and not me?”

  “Because I knew you’d be upset,” Wendy said gently. “And I was right.”

  “Of course I’m upset! I thought all those things—the hospital stays, the surgeries—were behind us.”

  “Yeah. Well, so did I. But this new technique—”

  “Is unproven.”

  “It’s not unproven, Mom. Dr. Pommier’s performed this procedure on a lot of people.”

  “If he’s the only one doing it, it’s unproven and experimental.”

  “Any new technique is experimental. The bottom line is that what he does works.”

  Gina stood up, dumped the pancake griddle into the sink and ran the hot water. “It works for certain people, Wendy, and for only certain types of injuries. You and your father admit that.”

  “That’s right. And as far as I can tell, I’m a perfect candidate.” Wendy stood up and reached for a dish towel. “Look, I know you’re worried, but—”

  “You had the very best surgeons in Norway, and the best doctors at the French rehab clinic.” Gina shut off the water, wiped her hands on her apron and turned around. “If any of them had thought there was more they could do, they’d have done it.”

  “Exactly. They did everything they could, but things have changed. This technique didn’t exist back then.”

  “And what about the fact that this doctor says he’s not taking on new patients? That you phoned him, sent him a letter, and he won’t even discuss your case?”

  Wendy tossed the towel on the back of a chair. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you that!”

  “You’re probably right. You kept everything else from me, letting me think you were coming home—really coming home—when all the time—”

  “I never said that, Mother. Never!”

  “No. You didn’t. But I thought…I thought—” Gina turned away, wrapped her hands around the rim of the sink as if that might help steady the turmoil inside her. “Aside from anything else,” she said quietly, “you’re not facing reality. Do you really believe you can change Dr. Pommier’s mind simply by meeting him?”

  “Of course not. But if I can talk to him, show him my records, explain how desperately I want to try this—”

  “Why `desperately’? That’s what I don’t understand. They said you’d never walk again but you did. You are. I mean, just look at you. You’re on your feet, getting around on your own—”

  “I limp. I can’t ski—”

  “For heaven’s sake!” Gina’s face flushed. “You’re my daughter. I can’t believe you’re so…so foolish that you’d think people would judge you by the way you walk, or by what you can or can’t do!”

  “How about the way I judge me?” Wendy’s voice trembled. She felt her eyes fill with tears and she swiped her hand across them, hating herself for letting her emotions show again. “Do you know what it’s like to be reminded, every single day of your life, of what happened to you one morning a long time ago?”

  “Oh, sweetie.” Gina clasped her daughter’s shoulders. “Is that what it’s all about?”

  Wendy shut her eyes. The scene in her head was as real as if it had happened yesterday. She saw herself early that fateful day, dragging out of bed. Tired, exhausted, muscles aching, barely making it to the bathroom before her stomach rose in her throat as it had done every morning since the ski team arrived in Lillehammer…

  “Wendy.” Gina cupped Wendy’s face. “Darling, you can’t possibly think you were responsible for the accident. The run was icy. Other skiers had wiped out before you in that very same place. You caught some ice, lost control….”

  Gina couldn’t bring herself to describe the rest. Wendy sighed and put her arm around her.

  “I’ve gone over it a million times,” she said softly.

  “Then you know that it wasn’t your fault.”

  Wendy nodded. She did, sometimes, when she was being logical. There were inherent dangers in racing down a snow-covered mountain at eighty or ninety miles an hour. When you stepped into your skis, you accepted that as a fact of life.

  But…but maybe if she hadn’t been so determined to win a medal, she’d have
faced the truth that day—that she didn’t feel well, hadn’t felt well for a while. Maybe she should have told her coach the truth when he looked at her, frowned and said, “You okay, Monroe? You look kind of green around the edges.”

  “I’m fine,” she’d answered. She wasn’t. She’d felt rotten, but so what? If you wanted to win, you had to tough it out. She’d skied with aches and pains before. Everyone on the team did. She’d suspected she was coming down with the flu, like a couple of the men already had. She had all the symptoms. If she’d said, “You’re right, coach, I feel awful,” what then? He’d have sidelined her, and with the start of the Olympics just days away, she’d needed all the practice she could get….

  So she’d lied. And she’d skied. And now, for the rest of her life, that quick, selfish decision would haunt her each morning when she limped from the bed to the bathroom. When she saw a snow-covered mountain and knew she couldn’t ski it. She’d remember not just who she’d once been but what she’d once been. What she’d had, and could never have again.

  “Wendy? Sweetie?”

  Her mother’s eyes were dark with worry. Wendy fought back the desire to fling herself into Gina’s arms and pour out her heart. What would that accomplish? Then the pain would be her mother’s, as well as hers, and she loved Gina too much to do that.

  No. This was her problem. Hers alone. She would deal with it.

  “Wendy?” Gina moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I just want you to know that—that I don’t agree with what you want to do.” She held out her hands and Wendy took them. “But I’ll stand by you, every inch of the way.”

  Wendy smiled. “I love you, Mom,” she said softly.

  “I know. And I love you, too.” Gina gave her daughter a quick hug. Then she stepped back and smiled, even though her eyes were suspiciously damp. “Well,” she said briskly, “that’s that, my bristly, stubborn daughter. I have the feeling that doctor’s in for a big surprise.”

  “Me, too,” Wendy said, and her smile broadened.

  “Did Daddy say when he’d set up a meeting for you with this Dr. Pommier?”

  “He doesn’t know, exactly. He’ll have to wait for the right moment.”

  “Well, until that moment comes, I’m going to make the most of having you here.” Gina brushed a curl from Wendy’s brow. “What would you like to do today? How about driving down to Lee? Did you know they built a mall there?”

  “A mall?” Wendy said, grasping eagerly at the lifeline her mother had tossed. “A real mall? With real department stores?”

  “Better than that. Discount stores.” Gina rolled her eyes. “Veddy, veddy upscale, my deah. Wait until you see. Tell you what. I’ll clean up here while you get dressed.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “I thought we’d settled all that. You’re my baby, you’re home and I’m going to do my very best to spoil you rotten.”

  “Sentenced to spoiling,” Wendy said, and grinned. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

  Gina watched her daughter start from the room. In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought, and took a deep breath.

  “Wendy?”

  Wendy turned and looked at her. “Yes?”

  “I know you told me that you didn’t want anyone to know you were going to be here, but…are you going to see Seth while you’re home?”

  Wendy’s face paled. “Did you tell him I was coming back? Oh, Mother! I specifically asked you—”

  “I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “You just said—”

  “All I said was, are you going to see him while you’re here?”

  “No,” Wendy said sharply. “Why would I?”

  “Well, I just thought…” Gina hesitated. “As a courtesy, I thought you might at least call him. He still asks about you, you know.”

  Wendy dug her hands into the pockets of her robe. Her fingers closed around a loose thread and she worried it between her thumb and forefinger. “Does he?”

  “He used to call to see how you were. Even now, if we run into each other, he asks about you.”

  “That’s very nice of him,” Wendy said stiffly, “but Seth and I have nothing to say to each other. I’m a different person now, and so is he.”

  Gina gave a resigned sigh. “Okay.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to see him. And if you should run into him—”

  “Wendy.” Gina put her hand on her daughter’s arm. “Forget I mentioned it.”

  “We were kids, that’s all. Two silly kids. The accident helped me realize that.”

  Wendy’s eyes darkened. She looked down, and Gina held her breath. Her daughter seemed on the verge of saying something that would explain the change of heart that had taken place in her, but when Wendy raised her head, Gina knew the moment had slipped by.

  “Let’s not talk about the past,” she said softly. “Okay?”

  Gina nodded. She wanted to fling her arms around Wendy and tell her she’d make whatever was troubling her go away, just as she had when Wendy was little. But the bittersweet truth was that mothers lost that magical talent when children grew up.

  “Okay.” She smiled brightly and looked at the kitchen clock. “Hey, if we want to be the first ones there and pick up some real bargains, we’d better get moving.”

  “Right.” Wendy smiled back, although her smile looked as phony as Gina’s felt. “Give me ten minutes to shower and dress.”

  “You’re on,” Gina said.

  She held her smile until Wendy left the kitchen. Then she sighed and began stacking the dishes in the dishwasher.

  Her little girl—and that was what Wendy would always be, no matter how the years slipped by—her little girl was badly troubled. Gina kept looking for an explanation. Howard kept saying it was her leg, as if it was foolish to wonder about any other reason.

  Maybe he was right, but Wendy had beat the odds. Wasn’t that all that mattered? She was out of a wheelchair and walking, after most of the doctors had said she’d be an invalid for life.

  Still, Gina supposed she could understand that Wendy would feel differently. People tended to define themselves by the things they did. She’d taken enough silly pop quizzes to know that. Who was Gina Monroe, if anyone asked? How would Gina Monroe describe herself? As a wife. A mother. A teacher.

  Wendy would have defined herself as a champion skier. But was that all? It didn’t seem possible that her daughter’s self-image could be so one-dimensional. Wendy had loved to ski from the time she was a child, but there’d been more in her life than skiing.

  At least, there had been after Seth Castleman came along.

  Gina untied her apron, hung it on the back of the pantry door, then sat down at the table to finish her lukewarm tea.

  Howard had bought their daughter her first pair of skis the Christmas she was, what? Four? Five?

  “She’s just a baby,” Gina had said warily. “She could get hurt.”

  Her husband had smiled proudly as they watched their little girl stomp around the snowy yard. “She’ll be fine. She can’t possibly get hurt on the Ski Wee hills. You know that, darling. Those slopes are nothing more than bumps in the snow. Besides, our girl’s a natural. Just look at her. She’s got the makings of a champion.”

  He was right. Wendy had been born to ski. She was quick, graceful, a joy to watch. At eight, she’d won her first junior medal. At ten, she was taking winter vacation trips with Howard to Aspen. By the time she was twelve, skiing was all she lived for.

  She was bright, thank goodness, so she did well in school, even though she didn’t pay much attention to her studies. As for dances and parties and the sweet silliness young girls enjoy—those things didn’t interest her. Gina closed her eyes, remembering how she used to long to be able to make the same complaints as other mothers of teenage girls, but Wendy didn’t spend hours tying up the phone, or plaster her room with posters of rock idols and giggle over boys.

  And then, when Wendy was seventeen, she’d met a b
oy on the slopes. She was practicing; Seth was running the lift. Gina didn’t know what had happened that day, except that her daughter came home with high color in her cheeks and excitement in her eyes.

  “A good day at Brodie, huh, punkin?” Howard said at dinner.

  Wendy nodded. “Yes…terrific.”

  Something in the way she said it, or maybe in the quick rush of color that climbed into her face again, told Gina the truth.

  Wendy had met a boy.

  Gina kept her thoughts to herself. The phone began to ring with calls for Wendy, all of them from the same polite young man. Sometimes she came home a little late from school, and in the evenings, when she sat at the kitchen table doing her homework, Gina caught her staring into space with a dreamy look in her eyes.

  Gina was glad. It had begun to trouble her, seeing Wendy lock everything but skiing out of her life. Her daughter still loved to ski, still skied almost all weekend, but for the first time, she balked at Howard’s rigorous practice schedule.

  Howard was perplexed.

  “What’s gotten into her?” he mumbled one evening when Wendy said she wasn’t in the mood for a drive to Brodie for an hour’s work.

  “She’s a teenage girl,” Gina answered. “She just needs time for other things.”

  “Not if she wants to make it to the Olympics, she doesn’t,” Howard said, and not for the first time, Gina wondered whose goal that really was, his or Wendy’s.

  One evening at dinner, Wendy asked to be excused before dessert.

  “Apple pie,” Gina said. “Your favorite.”

  “I know, Mom, but…” She blushed. “I have a date.”

  Gina smiled. Howard stared.

  “A date? With a boy?” Howard spoke in the same tone he’d have used if Wendy had announced she had a date with a Klingon warrior.

  “Yes.” Wendy’s blush deepened. “His name is Seth Castleman.”

  From that night on, everything revolved around what Seth said or did. Gina thought she’d never seen her little girl so happy. Howard thought he’d never seen her so distracted.

  “She’s going to lose her edge,” he grumbled late one Friday night when he and Gina lay in bed, listening to the clock chime eleven and knowing Wendy had yet to come home.