Sandra Brown - Play Dirty

Their marriage was covered extensively in the press, although there were no pictures accompanying the stories. They kept the wedding itself private, inviting only their most intimate friends to the chapel service and the dinner following it.

Foster paid lip service to moving from his family estate, but Laura realized what a sacrifice that would be for him. He loved his family home and hugged her tightly when she told him she loved it, too, and that that was where they would stay and make their life together.

She moved in, changing very little of Elaine’s decor. Like his wealth, his love for Elaine was only another aspect of him. Laura didn’t feel threatened by his late wife’s memory, any more than she was intimidated by his fortune.

Foster would have preferred her to be pregnant by the time they returned from their honeymoon in Fiji. When she demurred, he had teased her about her biological clock. “I’m thirty-one!” she exclaimed.

He placed his ear against her lower body. “But I can hear it ticking.”

Even so, she had begged for time to be a bride before she became a mother. It was a decision that later seemed terribly selfish, and one she would always regret.

That first year they were kept busy with the burgeoning airline and settling into married life. Although Laura was to learn that “settling” was a foreign concept to her husband. The man never rested. The more he had to do, the more he got done. He was a tireless, incessant generator of energy. He had the work ethic of a Trojan but was also a proponent of la dolce vita. His enthusiasm for life and living was contagious. Laura reveled in the whirlwind of their life.

Foster used the media to his advantage, regularly feeding them tidbits of information about his airline even when there was no actual news to report, so that SunSouth was kept constantly in the minds of the public. His name, along with Laura’s, appeared frequently in the business sections of the newspapers.

They received national magazine coverage, once pictured playing doubles tennis with the president and first lady. The television newsmagazine 20/20 did a segment on them, touting them as the team that had, despite industry naysayers, resurrected a failed airline. They appeared on Good Morning America to talk about the Elaine Speakman Foundation and the medical research it was funding.

The gossip columnists who had snidely implied that Laura was a gold digger were soon extolling her intelligence, business acumen, impeccable taste, and unaffected charm. The Speakmans became the darlings of the local society pages, and their photographs began appearing regularly as hosts, guests, or sponsors of one event or another.

As they were leaving one such event, a decision was made that would change the course of their lives forever.

It was a Tuesday night. They had attended a retirement dinner for a notable Dallasite. The hotel where the dinner had been held and the Speakman estate were separated by only three miles of city streets.

When the parking valet brought up Foster’s car, Laura went around to the driver’s side. “You toasted him more times than I did,” she said.

“I’m fine to drive.”

“Why chance it?”

She got behind the wheel. He sat in the passenger seat. They were talking about the next day’s agenda. She had just reminded him of a meeting the following afternoon. “I have a busy day,” he remarked. “Any chance we could change that?”

Then everything changed.

The driver of a delivery truck ran a red light, an error that cost him his life. Opposed to wearing a seat belt, he was ejected from his truck through the windshield.

Otherwise he might have had to be cut from the mishmash of metal caused by the collision, as Foster had been. The cab of the truck fused with the passenger side of Foster’s sedan. It took rescue workers over four hours to extricate him from the wreckage.

Laura was rendered unconscious by the impact. She came to in the ambulance, and her first thought was of her husband. Her rising hysteria concerned the paramedics treating her. They answered honestly, “We don’t know about your husband, ma’am.”

It was agonizing hours before she was told that he was alive but that his condition was critical. She learned later that he underwent emergency surgery to repair extensive internal injuries causing life-threatening hemorrhage. Because she had sustained only a concussion, a broken arm, some scrapes and bruising, she was finally permitted into the ICU, where Foster struggled to survive. Specialists came and went. In hushed voices they conferred. None looked optimistic.

Days passed; Foster clung to life. Laura kept vigil at his bedside while monitors telegraphed in blips and beeps his extraordinary will to live.

In all, he had six operations. From the outset, she realized that the orthopedists knew he would never walk again, but they performed the surgeries as though there was hope. They used pins and screws to reattach bones that would never move unless someone moved them for him. Other specialists spliced blood vessels to provide better circulation. He underwent a second abdominal surgery to repair a tear in his colon that had gone undetected during the first.

She couldn’t remember what the other surgeries were for.

It wasn’t until weeks after the accident that Foster was fully apprised of his condition and prognosis. He took the news with remarkable aplomb, courage, and confidence.

When they were alone, he reached for Laura’s hand, pressed it between his, and reassured her that everything would be all right. He looked at her with unqualified love and repeatedly expressed his gratitude to God that she had escaped the accident without serious injury.

He never implied that she was responsible. But as she gazed down at him through her tears that day, she said what she knew must have crossed his mind, as it had hers a thousand times. “I should have let you drive.”

Two years later, staring sightlessly through the window in SunSouth’s conference room, she was still anguishing over her decision to drive that night. Would Foster have driven a bit faster, a bit slower, preventing them from being in the center of the intersection when the truck failed to stop? Would he have seen it ahead of time and swerved to avoid the collision? Would he have done something she hadn’t?

Or, if fate had dictated that they were in that spot at that precise moment, she should have been the one sitting in the passenger seat.

Foster had never suggested she was to blame. He had never even referenced their brief conversation about how much each had had to drink and who should drive. But, although it remained unspoken, the question was always there between them: Would this have happened if he’d been behind the wheel?

Laura acknowledged how pointless it was to ask. Even so, the suppositions tortured her, as she knew they must Foster. They would go to their graves asking, What if?

Griff Burkett had somehow learned about the accident. She hadn’t stayed to have a conversation with him about it, but if he knew the details of why Foster was in his wheelchair, he surely understood why she would go along with this or any plan Foster devised.

Foster hadn’t died, but his previous life had ended the night of the wreck. And Laura was left guilt-ridden.

Having a child, conceiving it in the way Foster wished, demanded very little of her, considering everything he’d had to give up. A child and heir was one of the dreams that had been snatched from him that night. Maybe by granting him that dream, she would relieve her guilt and, by doing so, get back a portion of her former life.

Impatient with her self-pity, she turned away from the window. As she did so, a pinching sensation between her legs caused her to wince, as much from the memory it evoked as from the physical discomfort.