The Promise - By Danielle Steel Page 0,48

him?” There was such pain in Peter's eyes when he asked that she wanted to put her arms around him and tell him it was all right. But she couldn't lie to him either. She was surprised to find that the question brought tears to her eyes as she shrugged and then nodded.

“Sometimes. Not always.” It was an honest answer.

“Do you still love him?”

She looked very hard into his eyes before answering. “I don't know. I remember him as he was, and us as we were, but none of that is real anymore. I'm not the same person, and he can't be either. The accident must have left a mark on him. Maybe if we saw each other again we'd both find that we had nothing left together. Like this, it's hard to say. You're left with only dreams of the past. Sometimes I wish I could see him just to get it over with. But I … I've come to understand that I never will … see him again.” She said it with difficulty but finality. “So I just have to put the dreams away.”

“That's not so easily done.” There was pain in his own eyes as he spoke to her. And suddenly she began to wonder if he had been through something similar. Perhaps that was why he always understood what she felt.

“Peter, how come you've never married?” They walked slowly toward the beach, with Fred at their heels, all but forgotten now. “Or shouldn't I ask?”

“No, you can ask. A lot of sensible reasons, I suppose. I'm too selfish. I've been too busy. My work has swallowed up my life. All of that. Also, I move too fast, I'm not really the sort to settle down.”

“Somehow I don't believe that.” She looked at him closely, and he smiled.

“Neither do I. But there's some truth in all those reasons.” He seemed to pause for a long time, and then he sighed. “There are other reasons too. I was in love with someone for twelve years. She was a patient when we met, and I was very taken with her, but I avoided getting involved. She never knew how I felt until … until much later. We seemed destined to be constantly thrown together. At every party, every dinner, every social or professional function. Her husband was a doctor, too. You see, she was married. I resisted 'temptation,' as it were, for a year. And then I couldn't anymore. We fell in love, and we had a beautiful time together.

“We talked about getting married, running off together, having a child. But we never did. We simply went on as we were—for twelve years. I can't understand how we did it for so long, but I suppose things happen that way. They just go on and on and on, and one day you wake up and ten years have gone by, or eleven, or twelve. We kept finding reasons not to get married, for her not to get divorced—because of her husband, my career, her family. There were always reasons. Perhaps we preferred it the way it was. I don't know.” He had never admitted that before, and Nancy watched him as he spoke. He was looking out at the horizon, and he seemed a thousand miles away even as he talked to her.

“Why did you stop seeing each other? Or—” Maybe they hadn't. As the thought came to her, she blushed. Maybe she was prying. It was possible that there was a great deal about Peter's life that she didn't know, and had no right to know. She had never thought of that before. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked.”

“Don't be ridiculous.” His eyes and his thoughts came back to her with their usual gentleness. “There's nothing you can't ask me. No, she died. Four years ago, of cancer. I was with her most of the time, except on the last day. I think …. I Richard knew at the end. It didn't matter anymore. We had both lost her, and I think he was grateful that she didn't leave him in the years before. We mourned her together. She was an incredible woman. She was … very much like you.” There were tears in his eyes when he looked at her, and Nancy felt tears come to her own eyes. Without thinking, she reached up with a careful hand and wiped the tears softly from his cheeks, and then without taking her hand away from his cheek she