The One Who Changed Everything. Lilian Darcy

he did, damn it, he still remembered it.

      Abandoning the crooked paving stones, he went out the side entrance to his car, parked in its designated space at the front of the private parking lot, while Daisy began to browse the display areas. He could see her as he sat in the vehicle waiting for the engine to warm, in her bright blue biker-style jacket and black pants. She walked slowly, pausing every time something caught her attention.

      She stepped back to appreciate the effect of the morning sun on the splashing water of a fountain, stepped forward again to run her hand across a piece of blue-gray slate. She picked up a glazed black pot planted with miniature bamboo and set it on the slate as if testing the blend of colors, and then she put it carefully back exactly where she’d found it.

      This was what had drawn him so strongly ten years ago—the intensity of her response to beauty, the creative energy that ran through her, the bright light she seemed to give off, when the darkness of his father’s illness and its aftermath had still been hanging over him.

      The car engine was warm. He had no reason to still be sitting here. He had to take himself off before she noticed...except that her browsing made her oblivious, the way she’d been oblivious that very first day.

      The one thing he could be proud of, possibly. He’d kept his cataclysmic thunderclap of feeling to himself.

      Lee hadn’t guessed. Marshall and Denise had had no idea. They’d gotten it all wrong. Marshall had accosted him in the privacy of the resort office after all the phone calls had been made—canceling the reception, the photographer, the flowers, the guests.

      “I cannot believe you’re doing this, Tucker. My incredibly brave, beautiful girl is pretending she wants it, too, but I’m not fooled. This is coming from you. Maybe she doesn’t even know that. Maybe she genuinely thinks this is a mutual decision, but I’ve seen you withdrawing over the past few weeks. You’ve frozen her out until she thinks it’s coming from her, as well. I know what a man looks like when he’s truly in love with the woman he’s going to marry. You haven’t looked that way, and if it’s because my girl is disfigured after the—”

      “Marshall, she’s not—” He hadn’t been able to say it. Disfigured. He’d never said that in his head, never felt that way.

      “You don’t want that word? It’s too blunt for you?” Marshall had used it as a punishment and an accusation. “You don’t like facing the truth about your own motivations?”

      It hadn’t been a pleasant conversation, and Tucker had come dangerously close to saying Daisy’s name but he’d managed to stop himself, and if that meant that Marshall went on thinking that it was Lee’s accident at the heart of the problem, then this was collateral damage that he couldn’t avoid.

      He didn’t want Daisy dragged into this. He didn’t want any additional hurt to Lee, or a mess worse than the mess they had already.

      He would wait, he had decided. He would just lay low and do nothing, and in a few months when things had died down and when he had some perspective, he would take action, seek Daisy out, see if he still felt...and if she felt...and if there was any way they could possibly...

      Hadn’t happened.

      He drove out of the lot, remembering the shock he’d felt when he’d run into a very bubbly Daisy at a local convenience store just a few days after the canceled wedding. Hiding his pleasure behind dark sunglasses, he’d drawled, “You’re looking happy today.”

      She’d told him, “Happy and really thrilled. I’m flying out to California tomorrow to start an internship with an amazing pastry chef. The opportunity came up so fast, I haven’t had time to breathe! Someone else canceled, and it turned out I was second on the list. I can’t believe it! Um...it’s good to see you, Tucker, but I have to run.”

      And that was that.

      Gone.

      He’d never pursued it. Why would he trust in signs that pointed in two different directions at once, when he didn’t believe in signs in the first place? Why would he chase after something his head didn’t even want? Something that might only ever have been a symptom of the deeper problem between himself and Lee? Something nobody in either family would want? Something that fate had chosen to take out of his hands?

      “Ten years later...” he muttered to himself as he drove.

      Ten years later, incredibly, he’d felt exactly the same. Thunderclap. Across a crowded landscape display. Changing everything.

      Magic.

      Chemistry.

      Whatever you wanted to call it.

      It was just as strong, and he distrusted it just as much. He’d hidden it manfully during their brief meeting today, and he didn’t think she’d guessed. He hoped she hadn’t, because his beliefs and his morals were still the same, and this feeling about Daisy wasn’t something he believed in or wanted to pursue.

      Not with his legacy of experience, and not with his current situation the way it was.

      You see, there was a little thing called a marriage certificate, and call him old-fashioned, but, no matter what the circumstances, he didn’t think a man should go after one woman when he was already legally wed to someone else.

      Chapter Four

      “So I saw your half brother today,” Tucker’s mother, Nancy, told him that night.

      She’d called him to see if he could come over and fix a leak in the U-bend pipe beneath the kitchen sink and change the lightbulb at the top of the stairs. At sixty-one years old, she was pretty good about most of that stuff.

      He was proud of her, actually. She mowed her own lawn, changed all the lightbulbs she could reach, paid her bills on time. He’d in fact forbidden her to change the one at the top of the stairs, since it involved climbing onto a chair and leaning precariously into space.

      With a trim, energetic figure and hair she’d allowed to remain its natural silvery gray, she could have married again if she’d wanted to, Tucker was certain, and yet to his knowledge she’d never come close. A couple times he’d almost asked her about it—“Did you love Dad that much?” Or maybe, “Did Dad scar you that badly?” But in the end he’d stayed silent.

      “Oh, you did?” he said to her carefully now, about Jonah.

      “He’s working at Third Central, the branch on the corner of Maple and Twenty-second Street, and I had checks to deposit,” Mom explained. “I don’t usually go to that branch, but I had a delivery down that way.” She had her own business as a florist now, having started in that field as a sales assistant after his dad became ill. “He’s looking so grown-up, I guess he’d be twenty-one by now.”

      “About that, I think.”

      “He didn’t recognize me.” She added, “Or if he did, he was pretending, the same way I was.”

      There wasn’t much else to say. Jonah had been three years old at their dad’s funeral, a difficult imp of a kid who didn’t understand what was happening. Tucker’s mom had been horrified that Andrea would bring him. How could she do this? she’d said over and over. How could she do this?

      She’d been devastated at Andrea’s presence, exhausted by the effort of dealing with it. Jonah crying and struggling in his mother’s arms had been the last straw on top of more previous last straws than Tucker could count.

      His mom had found out about his dad’s affair three months after she’d learned about his cancer. Three months after that, she’d found out that the woman involved was eight months pregnant with Dad’s child.

      But the order she’d found out about it wasn’t the order in which it had all happened. Dad had known he was ill months before he’d told his family, and he’d started the affair almost immediately “as a reaction.” The justification he’d used still made Tucker queasy with anger. I had to follow