“What?” Bobby’s face crumbled and all the attitude left her features.
“I couldn’t give her what she wanted. What I wanted. One night we were lying in bed and she was whispering about our future. The house we’d live in, the family we’d make, the adventures we’d take our kids on and it hit me, I couldn’t give her that. There would be no family, no adventures, no kids.”
“Jesus, Holden, did it ever cross your mind the two of you could’ve adopted? You could’ve used a donor and had children that way?”
“No,” he admitted. “Nothing crossed my mind except I couldn’t give my woman what she wanted. I lay in that bed, next to the woman I loved more than anything, wanting nothing more than to be able to give her a family. And after she fell asleep in my arms my mind wouldn’t shut off. All I could think about were my shortcomings. All the pain she’d go through because of me. Adoption doesn’t always lead to a happy ending. Birth parents can change their minds and take the baby back. I didn’t want that for her. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to find a man who could give her everything I couldn’t. I didn’t want fertility doctors and disappointment. So I let her go. Only, I didn’t know how goddamned painful it would be.”
Never having admitted the truth, Holden felt like he’d run a marathon with a hundred-pound ruck on his back. His chest heaved and his muscles ached just from uttering the words. No one knew why he’d left Charleigh. No one knew he’d been exposed to radiation and he’d had to go to appointment after appointment to be tested and prodded.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up.” Bobby took a step in his direction, her face red with fury. “You didn’t get to make that decision for her.”
Suddenly facing the happy, smiling people at Alec’s Christmas brunch didn’t seem so bad. Actually, facing a firing squad would be preferable to discussing his sperm count with Bobby.
“We’re not—”
“You know what?” Bobby exploded. “You’re right, we’re not…I’m so unbelievably pissed at you right now. I cannot believe you made an important life-changing decision by yourself. I cannot believe you’re that guy. I love you, Holden, and once I’m over the shock of you being a total asshole, I’ll be back. And when I am, we’re finishing this conversation, so you’d better find a pair of big boy underwear, Holden, because I’m gonna make you fix this. If for no other reason so you both can move on.”
With that ass-reaming, Bobby turned and stomped to the door. Her hand arrested in mid-air as she reached to push open the door. Her neck craned, and her face was bleached when she asked, “Do you still love her?”
Fucking hell.
“I’ll love her until the day I die.”
“Holden,” she grumbled, but it sounded strangled and full of pity. “You need—”
“That’s a hard no. And I mean that, Bobby. You do not go there. Not with me, not with Evie, not with anyone. I’ve fucked Charleigh’s life enough, I will not do that to Faith, too.”
“You owe it to Charleigh to tell her the truth. After all these years you’re still hurting her. Think about that, while you’re sitting in here stewing and suffering.”
That was all he’d thought about for years. Wondering. Questioning. Doubting. Yearning. Aching.
He heard the metal door slam. His shoulders slumped forward and he hung his head in shame.
Holden was damn near rock bottom. There was no farther he could go in his humiliation. He’d disgraced himself, he degraded Charleigh, and he’d thrown his future away. All because he was an asshole.
He’d left Charleigh unprotected.
Paul Towler had known exactly what he was doing that night.
Fucking bastard.
It was time to pay the piper.
The truth needed to come out.
5
I was taking the last ornament off the tree when there was a knock at the door. I glanced at the clock and only twenty minutes had passed since Kennedy had come to pick up Faith. I pulled my cell out of my back pocket as I made my way down the stairs. No missed calls. Maybe Faith had forgotten something.
I opened the door and was met with the most dazzling pair of soulful eyes.
Then I remembered I’d turned over a new leaf and was actively, painstakingly, falling out of love with Holden. I’d even deleted his number from my phone. I hadn’t seen him since the Saturday before Christmas, and even then I hadn’t laid eyes on him. It was now a new year and I was determined to move on.
He also wasn’t going to run me off. Faith liked her school, liked her new friends, loved McKenna and Kennedy like crazy, enjoyed the music lessons from Genevieve, and when Silver wasn’t working, Faith liked to hear about all the “big boats” she got to pilot. And my daughter had bonded with Macy’s daughter, Rory.
If Holden wanted me gone, that was too damn bad. He could eat a bag of dicks and choke on them.
“I’m busy,” I said and started to shut the door.
Holden’s hand shot out, preventing me from closing it.
“No, you’re not. Kennedy picked up Faith and you’re home by yourself.”
I rocked back, wondering how he knew where my daughter was. Something I would contemplate further when I wasn’t face-to-face with the man who’d inflicted the most pain I’d ever felt in my life.
“Just because Faith’s not here doesn’t mean I’m not busy.”
“I need to talk to you.”
Hell. To. The. No.
“You’ve got some brass balls coming to my door telling me you need to talk to me when the last time we exchanged words I told you I still loved you and you told me you didn’t care. I heard you, Holden. You don’t care. I get it. I’ve kept my distance and I’ll continue to do so.”
“We can’t go on like this, Leigh-Leigh.”
Good gracious, that hurt.
“Don’t call me that. And we can go on like this. You ignore me, I ignore you, and everything will be fine.”
“And what about Faith?”
The day was sunny, albeit as cold as a witch’s tit, but at that moment when he uttered my child’s name, I could’ve sworn bolts of lightning sizzled across the sky and thunder crashed.
“Don’t you dare bring my daughter into this conversation. You pretend she doesn’t exist and—”
“But she does exist.” Holden pushed the door open wider, forcing me to take a step back. My heels hit the bottom step and I started slowly walking up them backward. “And the Towlers are pulling their bullshit. She needs to be protected.”
No freaking way.
Not now.
“I can’t believe you.” My statement was barely above a whisper. “After all this time. With everything going on, you’re gonna do this now?”
“You’re misunderstanding me.”
The hell I was.
He was gonna try to take her from me.
He was gonna…I couldn’t even think about what Holden was gonna do. My stomach bottomed out and I pitched forward. Before I could lose my balance, Holden was in front of me. His hand gripped my biceps and it felt like I’d been zapped. For years, I would’ve done anything to have him close. Now I didn’t want the reminder of how his hands used to feel. Holden had always been into PDA—both public and private displays of affection. If I’d been close, he was touching me in some way. I used to live for those touches. Now his hands on me felt tainted. Everything we once had was poisoned and diseased. Ruined.
But my daughter wasn’t. She was clean and bright and I wouldn’t let him infect her.
“Get your hands off me.” I jerked free and tromped up the stairs, resigning myself to the fact that if Holden wanted to have this particular talk, I wasn’t going to be able to stop him.
However, I could control the conversation.
When we both made it into the living room I stopped, gathered my thoughts, and turned to face him. Then I let ‘er rip. I should’ve taken more than a moment to think about what I wanted to say. I shouldn’t have allowed my emotions to get the better of me. I shouldn’t
have done what I always did.
Unfortunately, no matter how badly I tried to forget what Holden did—tried to stop loving him, and move on—I couldn’t.
“You know, you rolled out of our bed one morning and left me without an explanation. Yet, I was still stupid enough to let you come home, have sex with me, and spend the night holding me just to have you roll out and leave again. Over and over I let this happen, hoping—no, praying—you’d tell me what was wrong. That you’d let me help you. But you never did. Then when I begged you to stay, to stop leaving, to fix us, you told me I’d never see you again. You told me to forget you. And for days, I called you and fucking begged you to talk to me. You never, not one time, picked up or called me back. You did all of that and I still loved you. God, I’m stupid. Stupid and clueless.”
“Leigh-Leigh—”
“No, Holden. Hell no. Fuck no. I’ve spent ten years loving you. You don’t get anything else from me. Nothing. I don’t care why you’re here, what you need to talk to me about. You’ve ceased to exist for me and for Faith. You don’t get her. You don’t get to talk about her. You don’t deserve to know about her.”
Holden flinched and nodded. “You’re right. I don’t deserve her. Maybe if I hadn’t been a dick when you told me, we could’ve worked things out. But I’d lost everything—”
“You lost everything?” I cut him off. “You? Are you fucking kidding, Holden? I was pregnant, scared, and you turned…me…away.”
“I saw you with him!” Holden shouted. “I fucking saw you take him back to our house. You fucked him in our bed. Ours, Leigh-Leigh.” His deep voice had taken on a hard edge—fury had taken hold, making it rumble as he finished. “I sat outside and watched that motherfucker leave my house after fucking my woman.”
Fire hit my chest and my lungs singed as I inhaled.
“Oh, no, you’re not putting that on me. I’m done feeling guilty. I’m done wearing the big, huge scarlet letter, everyone thinking I did you wrong. The day you left me, that apartment stopped being our home. When you refused to tell me what was wrong, that bed stopped being yours. I was at that stupid bar because I was heartbroken. I was lost. I was sad. And I thought you were gone forever. I had way too much to drink and did something I’m not proud of. But I got Faith out of it so you’ll never hear me apologize.”
“You got everything you wanted that night and I lost the woman I loved forever.”
My vision blurred as every cell in my body turned to ice.
“Fuck you. You threw me away long before that night.”
“She’s not mine,” Holden whispered and I froze. “I wanted her to be. I wish she was. Every fucking night I go to bed and wonder what our lives would be like if she was. I wonder if she’d have brothers and sisters. I wonder what kind of dad I would’ve been. I wonder what it would feel like to hold my child, rock her to sleep, watch you love our child. But none of that matters because she’s not mine.”
“There you go, Holden, denying she could be yours. But you’re right. The only thing that matters right now is when I tracked you down and told you I was pregnant, you rejected us and told me to go find Paul and never bother you again. Which was what I did. And you know the shittiest part about that? Paul, a man who was merely a friend, not the man I loved and spent two years living with was excited I was pregnant. Over the moon happy. He knew the truth. I never lied to him. Yet, he still, claimed my child even though there was a possibility it wasn’t his. He insisted we get married.” A foreboding wave of violence was pulsing from Holden. I felt the cold seep into my bones but I ignored it and went on. “But, the man I loved, the man I wanted to marry, have a family with, spend my life with, turned me away.”
“She can’t be mine because I can’t have fucking kids, Charleigh.”
My world tilted and my legs turned to jelly. Holden couldn’t have kids?
But before I could recover from his soul-crushing blow, he angrily continued, “I bet the asshole couldn’t wait to marry you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means from the moment he met you, he was gagging to get in there. Everyone but you saw it.”
Why were we talking about Paul when he’d just dropped a life-shattering bomb?
“Let’s talk about—"
“No, Leigh-Leigh, he wasn’t a friend. Not to me, not to you. On more than one occasion, I had to have words with him, to tell him to keep his distance.”
“What?”
Paul had been friendly. He was always hugging, wrapping his arm around someone’s shoulder. He’d been a little touchier than I normally would’ve liked and had zero sense of personal space. But that didn’t mean…
“And not just me. Jameson straight out told him if he didn’t stop touching you, he’d break his hands.”
“What?”
I didn’t want to discuss Paul, I wanted to know why he thought he couldn’t have children. But he seemed hellbent on slandering my dead husband.
“Jesus Christ, really? Honest to God, Leigh-Leigh, he was always putting his arm around you.”
“So? He was friendly.”
“You ever see him do that to any other females that came around with one of the guys?”
Off of the top of my head I couldn’t, but I’d see him plenty of times in bars put his arm around women…before he took them home for the night.
Wait.
I didn’t like the insinuation that Paul had done anything wrong. He’d never tried anything inappropriate until that one night I was at the bar with Alison. By the time he showed up I was already three sheets to the wind.
I only vaguely remembered what happened that night.
“Paul’s gone and you’re trying to paint him as some sort of villain. He didn’t do anything wrong, either. We weren’t together. As a matter of fact, before we left the bar I remember him asking me if I was sure you were done with me.”
Wrong thing to say. Way wrong. The hostility rolling off Holden was so thick I was surprised I hadn’t choked. But when his face screwed up in disgust and his hate-filled words filled my ears, my world rocked.
“Don’t you ever defend that asshole to me. He’s gone so he can’t answer for what he did to you. But make no mistake, he did wrong. He’s not the villain in this story—that’s me. I fucked up. But he’s the fucking devil. He fucked you over so badly, you can’t even begin to dream of all the ways your perfect husband screwed you over. And I hope for your sake when he came home to you and took you to your marital bed he gloved up.”
“Are you saying—”
“I came here to make you an offer,” he cut me off. “Our investigator in Virginia Beach called and informed me Beatrice has taken a second mortgage out on her house. She’s prepared to fight to get Faith away from you. They’ve hired a PI in Virginia to try to dig up dirt on you, which they won’t find because I already dug and there’s nothing to find. Which means they’ll make shit up. Word is, he’s on his way to Maryland. Again, they won’t find jackshit. You’re a great mom, you have a good job, you give Faith a nice place to live.”
“What’s your offer?” I croaked, still stuck on the fact that Bitchface Bea had taken out a second mortgage on her house.
I couldn’t afford to fight them unless I used Paul’s money. I hadn’t used a dime of it since he died and I never wanted to, but I would to keep Faith safe.
“They don’t want Faith, they want Paul’s death benefits.”
“No shit, Sherlock. But they’re not getting the money. And before you say something shitty and insult me, I haven’t touched it. I never wanted it, but Paul would roll over in his grave if those bitches got it. He hated them. He never wanted them to have it.”
“You’re willing to risk Faith to protect a dead man’s money?”
“How dare you?” My temper flared. “How fucking dare you, Holden.”
“Give it to them and I’ll replace the money. I’ll make sure you and Faith are taken care of.”
“No way. I don’t want your money,
either.”
“Leigh-Leigh, think about Faith.”
“Don’t you dare tell me to think about Faith. She’s all I think about. Every decision I’ve made since I found out I was pregnant has been about her. What was best for her.”
“You’re making a mistake. Trust me when I tell you Paul’s not worth this. He’s not worth your loyalty. Faith is the only one who’s important. I can set the two of you up, you’d never have to worry about money. Just give them what they want and all of this can be over.”
“Sure. It will all be over. You’ll what, pay me off? Give me all your money so you can feel better about yourself? How you left me broken. Will trading money in a bank account erase the guilt? Because it sure as hell won’t help me. I don’t need Paul’s money and I don’t want yours. It won’t fix my broken heart. It won’t make me any less lonely. It won’t do jack squat for me except tie me to you. Why’d you leave me, Holden? Why’d you destroy us?”
“Because I loved you. I tried to let you go. I tried to do the right thing. But I loved you so much I’d only make it days before the ache was so bad I gave in and went to you. I wish like hell I could’ve given you everything you wanted. Goddamn, do I wish that when you came to me and told me you were pregnant that I could’ve pulled you into my arms and kissed you and been excited with you that we were getting everything we wanted. But instead, in that moment all I could see were my failures. Paul could give you something I never could. I know I fucked up. I know I can never make up for what I did to you. But think about Faith. I can free you from those assholes and there will be no strings attached.”
With that, Holden turned and jogged down the stairs, leaving me standing in my living room reeling.
It was too much.
Too much information. Too much hurt. Too many memories.
My heart sank and I dropped to the floor.
What the hell just happened?
6
Holden was walking back to the office when his cell rang. He didn’t bother to pull the vibrating device from his pocket. After the blow-out with Charleigh, he was in no mood to speak to anyone.
Holden's Resurrection (Gemini Group Book 6) Page 4