Authors: Mary Campisi
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary, #General, #Family & Relationships, #Death; Grief; Bereavement, #Parenting, #Single Parent, #Dating
The Way They Were (19 page)
She squinted at him. “Take over?”
“Exactly.”
“You mean you destroy them? Deliberately?”
“No, I deliberately protect what’s mine. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“I guess. It seems rather harsh.”
“Maybe, but it’s a lesson that’s never repeated.”
“Only a fool would cross you again.” It was obvious there were dark pockets of Rourke Flannigan’s psyche that were foreign to her.
“Exactly. Now if I go to such lengths to protect my company from liars and cheats, imagine what I’d do to protect my own flesh and blood?”
His words sliced through her drug-addled brain. “What do you want?”
“Answers, Kate. Goddamn answers.”
She rubbed her temples and tried to clear her head. She had to think. “I was never supposed to see you again. The book was just a fantasy.”
“That’s sick.”
She shrugged. “I got bored. Everyone doesn’t jet set all over the world like you. I had a husband and a baby and I needed an escape.”
Make him believe it’s all a lie.
The left side of his jaw twitched. “You’re lying.”
“Why? Because it’s not the answer you want to hear?”
“No, because you kept it hidden in a shoe box in the back of your closet.”
“So? Clay wouldn’t have understood.”
His lip curled. “I doubt many men would, unless they were part of the fantasy.”
“Angie thought it would make a good story.”
“You told her about it?” He looked at her as though she’d just admitted to stripping in Church.
“Of course I did.” That was such a lie. “She thought it would make a great story.”
“You wrote in that journal once a year for fourteen years about how much you
loved
me because you were working on a
story
? Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“I wrote it last year, all of it. I just made it seem like it was a once-a-year entry.”
Lie, lie, lie.
“Angie thought it would be more effective that way, you know, touch the reader’s hearts.”
“Not really.”
“You can ask her.” She’d have to call Angie as soon as Rourke left. There’d be a mountain of questions but she’d rather confess to Angie than risk Rourke finding out the truth.
“I plan to speak with her.”
“Fine.”
“You might have fiction in those pages, but you’ve got a lot of truth in there, too.”
“Some truth,” she admitted.
“Right.” His silver eyes sparked with anger and something close to pain. Kate watched with growing uncertainty as a fine, white line creased the edges of his full lips. “You should have told me.”
The memory of discovering she was pregnant and had no idea where Rourke was, welled inside and exploded. “You deserted me!”
“I did not desert you.”
Those horrible weeks resurfaced, forcing her to relive the pain once again. “After the first week, I was sure you’d come back or at least call. Angie said you were gone for good, but I didn’t believe her. When the third week passed, I started to get nervous. Then I missed my period.”
“Christ.” He raked a hand through his hair and blew out a deep breath.
“Your aunt saw the problem the second she landed here, holding her nose so our little town wouldn’t contaminate her. She wanted you out.”
“She said I needed distance to sort things through.”
“Distance from the scandal is what she meant. It wouldn’t look good for an Ivy League boy to date a girl whose mother ran over his mother—even if the woman were walking down the middle of the road in the black of night.”
He eyed her with distaste. “Even if the girlfriend’s mother flees the scene and hides in her bedroom until she almost bleeds to death and is forced to go to the hospital?”
“She was scared. She said people would accuse her unjustly.”
“You mean of drinking and driving?”
“Yes.”
“We both know our mothers had faults. I blamed myself for the accident.” His expression darkened. “If I hadn’t been with you that night, she wouldn’t have been out on the street.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I knew my mother’s witching hour came every night around ten o’clock. Why do you think I always stopped home for a half hour when we were out?”
“You said she was lonely and you had to settle her in for the night.”
Pain laced his next words. “I had to settle her in with five milligrams of Valium and twenty minutes at her bedside. She couldn’t drift off if I wasn’t there. It was like that every night since my dad died.”
“I didn’t know.”
He lifted a large shoulder and shrugged. “I tortured myself for weeks.” He met her gaze, held it. “But the really sick truth was that I wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
Her heart tumbled back to the night on the lake…to him wrapped around her, over her, inside her…
“What kind of son admits something like that?”
“I’m so sorry.”
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “You didn’t trust me very much, did you?”
“I didn’t have the luxury of time to trust you.”
His voice dipped. “I wish I had known.”
“What were you going to do, drop out and play dad? Your aunt never would have stood for it.”
“I would have married you.”
His words stung her heart. “Do not say that.”
“I’m sorry you gave up on us so quickly.”
If only he knew the truth.
“It wasn’t just about us, there were other people to consider, especially Julia. I was not going to bring up an illegitimate child.”
“So Clay came barreling to the rescue in his pickup. If I’d returned before you married him, would you have married me?”
“You didn’t return, so what’s the point?”
“Humor me.”
Lie.
But she couldn’t. She opened her mouth and let this one speck of truth fall out. “Yes.” The tension on his face eased a fraction. Why did it matter now? Why did any of this matter now? “Face it, Rourke, you’re a bachelor leading a bachelor’s life. You don’t have room in your life for a child. Before Clay’s death, you didn’t even know Julia existed.”
“You’re right, but now I’ve seen her, now I know she has my eyes, and my smile. Do you really think I can just walk away from that?”
“You have to.”
“If you think that, then you’ve seriously underestimated me. I may have missed the first thirteen years of my daughter’s life, but I won’t miss the next sixty.”
Kate’s heart skipped two beats. “You’re moving to Montpelier?” she whispered.
“No. Julia’s moving to Chicago.”
Chapter 22
“
Speaking of marriage, do you love her?”—Julia Maden
Rourke tucked the button-down shirt inside his jeans and fastened his belt. He glanced at his watch and grabbed a jacket. He had a date in fifteen minutes and he hadn’t been this nervous since the first time he asked Kate out. Julia had called and invited him to Sophie’s Diner for hot fudge Sundaes. Not that he’d be able to eat anything, but food wasn’t the reason for the meeting.
He locked the door to his room and headed down the wide staircase to the parking lot and his rented Mercedes. He’d read Kate’s journal three times already and would read it at least twice more before bed, and still he couldn’t uncover the truth. What if it really had been just the fantasy of a lonely housewife? Then again, what if it had been the truth? A sick ache gripped his stomach and he unrolled the window to suck in several deep breaths.
When he reached Sophie’s, he parked the car and glanced through the large stenciled window of the diner. Julia sat in a booth, long hair pulled in a high pony tail that accentuated her cheekbones and reminded him of the way Kate used to wear her hair. He gulped another breath and opened the door. She spotted him as soon as he walked in. Her small lips turned up in a half-smile and he forced his own lips to stretch until they hurt. “Hello there.” He hesitated a half second wondering if he should kiss her cheek or hug her. He decided against both and slid into the booth opposite hers. “I like your shirt.”
She scrunched her nose. “You don’t think it makes me look like a candy cane?”
“No. And if it did, I like candy canes.”
“I wasn’t going to get it but Mom said,”—she faltered and cleared her voice—“she said it would look good on me.”
“She’s right.” Was this the beginning of the most awkward night of his life? Maybe he should have invited Abbie and Maxine. At least Abbie would have kept the conversation going with her never ending comments. “What do you want to eat?”
Julia shrugged. “I’m not really very hungry.”
So, she was nervous too. “Well, I remember Sophie used to have the best hot fudge sundaes around and I think the last time I had one was here.”
Her gray eyes filled with doubt. “When you lived here?”
He nodded. “Light years ago.”
“Okay, I’ll have one if you do.”
Rourke ordered their sundaes and turned to his daughter.
Calm, stay calm.
“Thank you for inviting me. I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”
“Yeah.”
“Shoot.”
“Did you used to live on Oliver Street?”
He blinked. “I did. How did you know?”
“
She
used to make me ride my bike down there with her all the time. I hated it because there were too many hills. I complained enough so she finally stopped.”
“
She
is your mother.” Kate said the journal was all a lie. Maybe
that
was the lie.
“And you’re my father, right? Only I had a father but he’s dead and now you’re here.”
“Sort of.” Rourke had no idea where this was going.
“It’s like a bad soap opera. A woman sleeps with one man but marries a different one. Then that man dies and the first one returns and the daughter finds out about them. So she goes to her real father and tells him. And then what?” She bit her lower lip and he swore the tears were going to pour out any second, but a few blinks later she said, “If she didn’t love my father, she shouldn’t have married him.”
“I think she loved him in her own way.” Now he was defending Kate’s feelings for Clay Maden.
“Why didn’t you come back?”
The sad longing in her voice pinged Rourke’s heart. “It was complicated back then, or at least I thought it was.” How could he make this child understand something he still didn’t? “My mother had just been in an accident, and my aunt, who I didn’t even really know, flew in and took me back to Chicago to live with her while my mother recovered.” Did she know about Georgeanne? If he were going to have a shot at making her understand, he had to tell her the truth. “Your grandmother was driving the car that hit my mother.” The shock on Julia’s face told him she hadn’t known. “She didn’t stop.”
“You mean like a hit and run?”
He nodded. Now Kate would really hate him but he would not lie to his daughter. “I was really messed up and angry. Then my aunt started dangling Princeton in front of me, and saying things that made me believe what your mother and I shared was just an infatuation and would pass.” He let out a sigh, wondering if the pain of recall would ever dull. “It took two months to realize she was wrong, but it was too late. Your mother was already married.”
“Because she was pregnant with me,” Julia said quietly.
“Yes.” She had his same quirky habit of moving her jaw from side to side when she was thinking.
“A few years ago, I figured out my birthday and their wedding day were off, that’s how I knew she was pregnant when she got married.”
“Your mother loves you very much.”
“She should have told me.”
“Maybe she was protecting your dad.”
“Then she should have told you and if she couldn’t find you, she should have waited longer than two months to marry somebody else.”
He didn’t disagree.
The waitress plopped their sundaes in front of them and Julie nibbled a hunk of chocolate fudge before asking, “Do you think, I mean is it even possible that someday,
maybe
, you could love my mother again?”
Bam
, straight to the heart. He dug around for a spoonful of ice cream, getting just the right mix of fudge and ice cream before he answered, “Anything’s possible.”
Chapter 23
“
If my daughter were traveling hundreds of miles with a stranger tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to think either.”—Angie Sorrento
“How could this happen?”
The high pitch in her mother’s voice, the glitter in her eyes, the red around her neck, all reminded Kate of Georgeanne’s drinking days, but that was ridiculous. She’d promised on Julia’s life that she would never take another drink.
“Kate? Answer me. How could this happen?”
There was no way around it but to tell the truth. She could hedge though. “Mom, you know I loved Clay, right? No matter what happened before or anything else, you know I loved him.”
Not a heart-stopping, once-in-a-lifetime love, but still, love.
