Текст книги "The Good Father"

Автор книги: Taylor Quinn Tara

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“What?” If he’d told her he was a Martian she couldn’t have been more surprised.

“I told you I struggled with the very real possibility that I could be like my father.”

He had. Several times. “In the beginning, yes, you did. You were completely honest with me way before you even asked me to marry you. But that was it, Brett. I assured you that I wasn’t afraid. That your fears were just that—fears. Not reality. And our years together proved me right. Even in the worst times, you never once showed any sign of violence.”

“Why do you think I grew more and more distant?”

Confused, Ella stared toward his shadow in the moonlight. Was this really happening?

“You want me to believe that you were struggling with anger issues?”

She sat. Welcomed the air cooling her hot skin.

“The first time I noticed a burning need to lash out was your freshman year in college when we were all at the homecoming party at the Delta house and that lecher, Danny Simpson, had you up against the wall, pawing you...”

She’d forgotten all about that. Danny, while pretty much a loser slob, hadn’t been a mean guy. He’d been attempting to come on to her and had been too drunk, falling against her and trapping her against the wall. He’d also apologized a thousand times over the next day and had appointed himself her silent slave for the rest of their years in college.

“I didn’t even know you saw that,” she said now. She’d been at the party as Brett’s date. From the moment she’d stepped foot on campus as a freshman, in his and Jeff’s sophomore year, she’d been Brett’s date.

“I was heading over to save you from him, but you disentangled yourself and led him to a couch before I could get to you.”

She wished she could see Brett’s face. It sounded as though he might be grinning.

And her belly flip-flopped. She’d given him a memory that made him smile.

“I’m not seeing where the anger issue was in all that,” she said. She knew for certain he hadn’t gone after Danny. The guy had passed out minutes later and hadn’t come to until the next day.

“Inside me,” Brett said. “It’s not what I did. It’s what I felt.”

Light flashed behind her eyes. Almost as though the sun had suddenly started shining through the night sky, and then was gone again. Leaving her sitting beneath the canopy in the dark.

“You saw an injustice. You saw me at risk of getting hurt, and you got mad.”

That thing with Danny had been before they’d ever made love. Long before he’d asked her to marry him.

“You’re doing it again.”

Another jolt. Her stomach turned, and nausea was there. “Doing what?”

“Making light of what I’m trying to tell you.”

“I’m not...” Ella replayed his words in her mind. Brett saw himself as someone he wasn’t. His inability to trust himself came from his youth. Her job was to help him see himself as she saw him. Right?

But... “Why do you say that?”

“Ah, El, this isn’t worth going into. You were a great wife. I failed. Can’t we just leave it at that?”

In some ways she really wanted to.

“I don’t think so.” Because his words, if he didn’t explain them, were going to give her sleepless nights she couldn’t afford. She’d already had more than her share. And she told him so.

“In the first couple years of our marriage, during those first fertility treatments, I’d tell you about my fears. You’d basically pat me on the head. You didn’t believe me when I told you I was struggling.”

Well, of course she hadn’t believed him. If he’d told her he was afraid he was going to fly to the moon in the morning, she wouldn’t believe him about that, either. But...

“All you ever told me was that you were afraid of becoming like your father, Brett. You never once told me that you were struggling with anger...”

“I feared being like my father for a reason, El. You should know me well enough to know that.”

“Yeah, the reason was that you grew up in an abusive home and your fear was left over from that...”

“No, I struggled because you brought out the most intense emotion in me. A love that was bigger than I was. More than I could control. And for every good emotion, there’s a shadow side. I came face-to-face with that over the incident in college, but didn’t think much of it at the time. As you say, most guys would have been pissed enough to get violent in that situation.”

Understanding teased at her in a horrifying sort of way. She had made light of Brett’s fears. Because to do otherwise would have given them a weight they didn’t deserve. She’d been trying to help him.

But in the end, would it have made any difference? Whether the fears were based in reality, or simply imagined, they’d still come between them.

“The longer we tried and failed to get pregnant, the more tense I grew,” he was saying. “Not because of my need to have a child. Exactly the opposite. Each time, I’d feel more relieved. But you...you got more and more depressed, took longer to bounce back each time. I was losing you to your need to have a child. At the same time, I was growing more and more certain that I wasn’t meant to be a father. But I loved you so much and didn’t want to be without you. I just kept hoping the treatments wouldn’t work, and you’d eventually see that we could be happy just the two of us. But that wasn’t right, either, because I knew, deep down, that you needed more than I’d ever be able to give you. Before I could figure out what to do about any of it, you got pregnant...I felt like I was being crushed between steel walls with no way out. I saw the attorney because I had to be prepared in case I got to the point where I couldn’t handle things. And then later, after you lost the baby...”

That was the one that hurt too much for her to handle alone. She’d needed someone who could share her grief, not someone who’d made it clear that having their baby wasn’t what he’d wanted. When she’d started bleeding after her eighth week, she’d called Chloe long distance in Palm Desert, not Brett, who’d been forty-five minutes away. And then she’d called an ambulance to take her to the hospital in Santa Barbara.

“When I got the call...when I got to the hospital...”

It had been too late. He’d been in LA, at a board meeting. By the time he’d made it up the coast, she’d already lost the baby.

Brett had come to her room. She’d woken long enough to see him sitting there. And remembered hurting because he’d been in a chair along the wall, watching her. Not close. Not holding her hand.

She’d needed so badly to feel his touch. To know that he was hurting for their lost child. To know that he felt anything at all for her. And hadn’t been able to ask him anything before losing consciousness again.

She found out later that they’d given her high doses of sedative that first day because she’d been so inconsolable.

“I couldn’t help you,” Brett said. “You knew by that point that I hadn’t wanted us to get pregnant. I blamed myself, like I’d somehow tempted fate by not appreciating the gift we’d been given...”

Sad thing was, she understood. Brett couldn’t help how he felt. Any more than she could help how she felt. Her heart ached for him.

She tried to stay on that road again, now, with Brett. He was finally talking to her. But she couldn’t travel with him. He’d arrived too late. Living in the moment was how she’d learned to cope.

“I left before the love you felt for me turned to hate.”

His words called her back.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BRETT SAW ELLA slide forward on her chair—to reach out to him? Or go in?—and panicked.

He blurted what was on the tip of his tongue before she did, either. “If you wanted so much more than I had to give, why did you stick with me all through college?”

He was curious. And curiosity killed the cat. Much better to have understanding and move on.

“I don’t know.” She gave the nothing answer, but she sat back again. So he waited.

“You exude.” She’d gone back to sipping from her beer. And he was glad.

“There’s an energy about you, Brett. A goodness that permeates the air around you.”

He should have asked the question long ago.

“And, as we’ve already said, before we were married, and for the first year or two afterward, you shared more. You used to talk to me.”

They used to discuss the world’s problems. And find solutions for a lot of them, too. He remembered the conversations. Missed them.

“I never quit talking to you,” he said. But he had, of course. In the way she meant.

Until the last horrible few months of their marriage they’d had great discussions about anything and everything that didn’t pertain to intimate, personal emotions.

And they were back where they’d started. He was a man who could be a potential domestic abuser. As his dad had been.

“My dad was a great guy once. I told you that.” The boat swayed, and he shifted. Unbuttoned the top of his shirt as he started to sweat in the cool night air.

“Yeah.” The man was a first-class dick, and Ella knew it. She also knew that discussion of him was off-limits. Even in college, he’d refused to talk to her about his old man. What she knew, she’d learned from Jeff, and he had it on good authority that Jeff had told her very little.

His beer was more than half gone, and he wasn’t tired.

But maybe he could talk himself to sleep. Maybe he owed Ella this—understanding. A way to set her free.

“He and my mom, they were high school sweethearts.” He’d never told her that, either, though he knew that Jeff had done so.

“Both of them products of abusive homes.”

He drank. “Time out of time,” she’d called their weekend. He damned sure hoped she was right. That he’d be himself when he got home the next day.

Himself with one hell of a headache—not from three beers, but from the tension climbing up the back of his neck.

“That’s what brought them together.” He wasn’t as careful about his word choice as usual. “The dark secret they shared. The shame.”

Shame. Brett could feel it, even now, descending upon him. Like humidity from the air, it clung to him. Making him sticky. Heavy.

“They promised each other that they’d never have an angry word in their home. Because they both knew the cost, the pain, they trusted each other like neither of them would ever have trusted anyone else, to keep the violence away.”

He heard an intake of breath. And knew that he was giving Ella something she’d deserved long ago.

“It worked right up until I was ten years old.”

There were so many ways that it had worked right. Little League. Summers at the beach. Dinners at Uncle Bob’s. His father had taught him how to in-line skate. And let him ride behind him on the back of his motorcycle...

“What happened when you were ten?”

He knew she already knew the answer to that question.

But he didn’t want her to go up to the cabin. To leave him out there all alone.

He did, of course. But he didn’t.

“My little sister was diagnosed with leukemia. And because my dad was spending so much time with Mom and us, while they figured everything out, he lost his job.”

“What about the Family Medical Leave Act?”

He forgot. He was talking to a nurse.

“It had just been signed into law a couple years prior to that, and I don’t know what happened. I was only ten.

“The story’s a classic from there,” he said. “Dear old Dad started drinking, and anytime he found out Mom had another bill to pay or Livia needed another test, he’d hit something. Started out with the wall. Then Mom.”

And eventually him.

But never Livia. That was the only hope the old man had of ever meeting up with a saving grace. He’d always been good to Livia.

“I thought he just started getting physically violent when you were in high school.”

He’d forgotten that she just knew basic facts.

“After a couple years of tests and treatments, Livia went into remission. And Dad found another job. A guy we met, whose kid was going through the same treatment as Livia, offered him a job. It lasted as long as her remission did.”

And the second time around, life had been pure hell. For all of them. Ending with Livia’s death. His mother’s unbearable grief. Her anger. His father a drunk who eventually ended up in jail.

An imploded family.

* * *

ELLA COULDN’T SPEAK. Her throat was choked up with an effort not to cry, even as her eyes filled with tears.

“Without help, boys who witness domestic violence in their homes growing up are far more likely to become abusers.” Brett’s quote was uttered without inflection of any kind.

That’s when she found her voice. “You had help.”

She wasn’t ready for his fountain of words to dry up. Not by a long shot. He owed her a good ten years’ worth of them. At the very least, another ten minutes.

“So what you’re saying, then, is that every boy who grows up in an abusive home is destined to live life alone, or become an abuser?”

“Of course not.” She heard the disdain that time.

“So why are you putting that on yourself?”

He didn’t respond. Typical. But disappointment filled her anyway.

Along with a load of compassion she couldn’t afford to carry.

If Brett had talked to her about this even a little bit years ago, so many things would have been different.

Not everything, but maybe the process of splitting up wouldn’t have been as hard.

Maybe she’d still be married, or married again, instead of on her way to spinsterhood.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to live with the fact that your husband didn’t trust you enough to be completely open with you?”

The pain that filled the darkness scared her. She hadn’t known there was so much of it left.

“Do you think I wanted to hurt you? That I felt good about it?” Brett sat forward. Lifted his beer and set it back down again without drinking.

She wanted to drink. Seemed to be the way of dealing with the darkness. Which was why she put her bottle in a cup holder on the next chair.

“I saw what I was doing to you, and the sadness in your eyes ate away at me until I couldn’t stand to live with myself anymore. I had to do something...”

His hands were inches from her knees. She stared at them. With very little effort, even a rocking of the boat, she could be touching him.

“You could at least have told me before you talked to a divorce attorney.”

“You’re right, of course.” Not the answer she’d been expecting.

“So why didn’t you?” Not a question she should have asked.

“Because you would have understood and loved me anyway,” he said, his voice raw with honesty. “I couldn’t trust myself not to be as selfish as my old man and let you talk me into staying.”

She’d asked. Maybe forgetting that nothing with him had been easy.

“You knew I loved you enough to do that, and then turned your back anyway. Why throw it all away when there was as much chance that it would be good as that it could go bad?”

“Because it was already bad, El. I had a knot in my stomach every single morning. I couldn’t be the man you wanted me to be and the more I tried, the more tense I got. And with the baby coming... It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time an abusive situation started when a pregnancy was thrown into the mix.”

She’d read about triggers. Some men with control issues—and out-of-control jealousy issues—sometimes felt threatened by the introduction of a child into the relationship. This could trigger the start of a domestic-violence situation. And didn’t describe Brett or their relationship at all.

“The tenser I got, the more chance there was that the tension would get the better of me someday,” Brett was saying.

“If you’d talked about it, we might have been able to work through it. Loving’s not easy.”

“No, and it’s not a guarantee of happy-ever-after, either.”

Had he just said what she thought he had? That he did love her? At least that he had?

Was it possible that someplace, locked away in that heart of his, he’d loved her the way that she’d once believed he had?

He’d asked her why she’d stuck with him through college.

A better question might have been why had she married him?

She knew the answer to that.

Ella had tied her life to Brett’s because his life was the only one that felt as though it was the other half of hers. She’d married him because she’d believed he loved her as much as she loved him.

It had taken years to crush that belief. Even after his initial rejection of their child. He’d been unprepared when he’d come home from work one day as usual to find her there, gushing happy tears, holding a home pregnancy kit result out to him. He’d seen her tears, not understanding they were happy tears at first, and then, in the confusion of her explanation, had been unable to mask the look of horror on his face. Still, she’d told herself that it was just the shock. That it was normal for a man to be nervous about being a father. It wasn’t until he’d told her he’d seen a divorce attorney, that he’d lost her.

Up until then, she’d believed that, deep down, her injured warrior needed her to believe in him.

You’d have thought that moment, the one when her husband had so backhandedly told her he wanted a divorce, would have been the one to sever all her faith in him.

But no, it had taken another couple years for that to happen.

She’d lost too many years of her life to this man. She couldn’t afford to go back. To care if he’d ever loved her.

She couldn’t afford to lose her heart to him ever again. He was who he was. A product of his childhood, just as he said. She was listening to him now. Believing him. Oh, not that he’d ever lift a hand to her, or would have to their child, but believing that he’d been irrevocably scarred by his father. Emotionally scarred. She might have continued trying to work on him the first time, if he’d given her a chance, but not now. Because she was older, wiser and knew that there were some battles she couldn’t win.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HE WASN’T GOING to sleep. And didn’t much want to spend the night sitting on the porch.

“Let’s take her out,” he said, standing.

“Take who out?”

Brett was already at the front of the boat, reaching for the key they’d left in the ignition.

“The boat?” Ella asked, joining him up front. “Are you kidding? It’s almost midnight. We’d wake up the neighborhood.”

He heard one thing. She hadn’t said no.

“It’s not the speed boat, El. It’s not going to be any louder than a car starting. We’re far enough away from the cabin that the noise won’t carry, and who else is in the neighborhood besides us? In case you hadn’t noticed this afternoon, most of the places around here are closed up.”

“It’s dark. We can’t go out on the ocean this late. Who knows what’s out there? And no one would know where to look for us if something went wrong.”

When had she become so cautious? The Ella he’d known had had a wild streak that he’d found captivating.

He suspected he was in large part to blame for its loss.

Which made it vitally important all of a sudden that he get her to agree to do something slightly crazy.

That and the fact that it seemed clear to him that neither of them was going to sleep, and the cabin was way too small for them to pretend the other wasn’t close by. Taking the boat out seemed the safest option.

“We’ll stay in the lagoon.”

She stood next to him by the driver’s seat, looking up at him. If they didn’t get going, he was going to kiss her.

“Move over, I’ll drive.” Ella touched him, but not in the way his mind had been imagining. She pushed him aside and sat down.

Standing behind her as she reached for the key, Brett waited until he heard the engine start before jumping onto the dock to free the pontoon of her restraints.

* * *

THE WIND CHILLED Ella’s face and fingers and blew softly through her hair, tossing it lightly around her arms and back. She’d had it tied back earlier in the day when they’d been out on the water, but had taken out the ponytail for bed. Brett stood wordlessly beside her, watching the front of the boat.

Her lookout, she assumed.

He gave no direction. No suggestion. Just rode where she took him.

The ocean beckoned. They’d taken the speed boat out earlier in the day, only for a few minutes and within sight of their alcove, but not the pontoon.

“It’s suicide, taking a pontoon on the ocean,” Brett said from above her. Before she’d even headed in that direction.

In some ways he knew her so well. There was comfort in that.

The lagoon was over a mile long. She had plenty of space to travel.

And knew that she would never have enough room on earth to get away from him. Brett Ackerman was her one and only.

She’d known so. Had spent years convincing herself she’d been wrong. But now, after seeing him again, she could no longer doubt herself. Or the truth her heart had made clear that day on her college’s campus when Brett met up with her and Jeff as they arrived with a carload of stuff, and helped unload Ella’s in her dorm room before heading off to the apartment they’d agreed to rent with two other guys.

She understood something else, too. Just because she’d found her one and only didn’t mean that she had a happily-ever-after in her future.

Brett was damaged goods. He’d never convince Ella he was as damaged as he believed he was, but that wasn’t the point. He believed it. And so, in any way that it counted, that made it true.

It didn’t change the fact that just being near him made her want to be connected to him in every way possible. She drove. He watched. So close if she leaned her head back, it would rest against his thigh...

Eventually he took the seat next to her, his unfinished beer left behind in the back of the boat as he looked out into the night.

Tears sprang to Ella’s eyes, seeing him there. Farther away from her.

He was such a good man. Deserving of love. Needing love.

And alone.

No. She swiped an arm across her face, getting hair out of her way—and tears—at the same time. She couldn’t help loving him, but she could control where she let her thoughts take her.

She could control the choices she made.

For his sake, as well as hers, she had to let him go. To block any empathy she might feel. Any desire to help.

All hope.

Hurting her hurt him. She understood that now.

And somewhere in that knowledge, she’d have to find some peace.

* * *

BRETT TOLD HIMSELF the boat ride was doing the trick. He was relaxing. Having a seat, he wanted to think he could just fall asleep out there.

Anything was better than going up to the cabin.

Where his best friend was having sex with his wife. And then sleeping cuddled up naked beside her.

Where his own wife—ex-wife—was lying in bed just feet away from him. They had never, not once, spent the night in the same place without spending it in the same bed together.

He’d barely slept the night before, and he’d been shut in a room with Jeff. But tonight? With Ella sleeping all alone? He was supposed to just curl up on the couch and relax? He couldn’t do it.

The boat had stopped.

He sat up. Glanced around. They were in the middle of the lagoon.

“I’m sorry.” Ella was standing by the crank that would lower the anchor. “I thought you were asleep and was just going to let you rest.”

She stood there, her hands raised as though she didn’t know what to do with them. Lower the crank. Drive.

Touch him?

God help him, he’d been reliving the touch of her fingers on his skin since they’d arrived at the cabin last night.

Hell, who was he kidding? He’d never stopped having fantasies about the woman.

He’d known he couldn’t be married to her. Had no doubts on that one. Even now his resolve didn’t waver.

But making love had never even come close to bringing out violence in him...

“I’ll just get us going again and head to shore,” she said, leaving the anchor. She turned, and the light of the moon gave him a bounteous gift.

A clear view of two things. Ella’s lips. And her nipples showing against her sweater where her wrap had dropped open.

She was chewing on her lower lip. All the sign he really needed.

But the hard points of her nipples were added fuel for his raging fire.

“Don’t do that with your lips. It makes me want to kiss you.” She’d wanted openness.

“Brett.” She chewed again, staring at him. Ella never had played coy with him. She knew he knew she wanted him.

Just as he knew she now knew about him, too.

“Would it be so awful, El?” He heard the craziness come out of his mouth. She was still standing closer to the crank than the steering wheel. She hadn’t made up her mind to go back, or she’d have walked away from that crank.

“It would just make it that much harder to get over you a second time.”

“Unless you don’t have to.” He was known for his instant solutions. But why in the hell hadn’t he thought of this one before?

With a stumble, Ella fell into one of the back seats. “What do you mean by that?”

He heard the hope in her voice. And rushed to quell it before this got out of hand, and everything was ruined.

“We don’t have to be married, or live together, to have sex.”

She didn’t say anything for so long, he wasn’t sure what to think.

She’d changed. In some ways he didn’t like.

For instance, this ability she’d developed to close herself off from him. He wanted that for her. Understood that it was necessary. Didn’t mean he had to like it.

“You think you could be satisfied with that? Sex without commitment?”

He couldn’t tell a damn thing about what she was thinking.

“I think that sleeping with you would be better than not sleeping with you.”

His penis was hard. His heart pounding. “I’m not seeing anyone,” he continued when she remained silent. “Jeff tells me you aren’t, either. It’s not unheard of, you know. Two people who can’t live together, but still care about each other, being attracted to each other, seeking each other out for physical company now and then.”

Leaving her in the morning was a given. He had full confidence on that score. Had proved his resolve to himself—and to her—enough to know that it was rock solid. It was the next hour he was concerned about.

“I’m asking seriously, Brett. Can we really have sex and walk away without scalding ourselves?”

She wanted it as badly as he did. The fact that she wasn’t driving them the hell out of there was proof of that. That peculiar little tremor in her voice said so more quietly. It was that tremor that called him to his feet, to cross the carpeted expanse between them. Keeping his hands to his sides, he leaned over and placed his lips against hers. The choice was hers. She could grab hold. Or step back.

Ella opened her mouth. The boat lurched.

And Brett didn’t think of anything but getting them naked.

* * *

THE SPLASHING SOUND woke Ella from her doze. She hadn’t been deeply enough asleep to lose awareness of the fact that she only had a few hours left in Brett’s arms.

But the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

There it was again. That splash. She blinked against the darkness.

And that was when she remembered... “The crank!”

Jumping up from the bed of clothes on the floor of the boat, tripping over them, she rushed to lower the anchor. And saw that they’d docked against the edge of the lagoon that led into the ocean. A few feet more to the right and they’d have floated out to sea.

“I’d say fate was smiling on us tonight.” Brett’s low tones, soft and sexy and relaxed behind her, had her instantly wanting him all over again.

“Or you could say that we were just incredibly stupid,” she whispered, holding on to the crank for dear life.

She no longer felt like the Ella Ackerman she’d been before meeting Brett again. She was hot and desperate and willing to do anything to keep him with her.

In the dark.

As long as it stayed dark.

Which would only be another couple hours based on the moon’s position in the sky.

“Can you go again? Or are you too sore?” He was rubbing his penis between her legs from behind.

She couldn’t answer him. Because her mind was screaming no. So she nodded. Felt Brett nudge against her. His kisses on the back of her neck.

And when he offered himself to her, she took him.