by Vi Keeland
Just this once, I kept telling myself. Never in my life had I wanted to weep into a vagina until now. Because the thought of never having this again was torture. This taste, this pussy, this woman . . . would be the end of me. In my bones, in my heart, I knew that Charlotte was made for me. And giving her up would be like a slap in the face of the very universe who’d sent her to me.
I had no idea how I was going to let her go.
“You taste better than I could have ever imagined.”
With her hands wrapped around my head, Charlotte pushed me deeper into her. This woman whom I’d lusted after for so long was suddenly coming against my mouth. It felt surreal. I hadn’t expected her to climax so soon. My dick was ready to explode.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t you apologize. That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“Well, then we do agree on some things,” Charlotte said as she got up and began to straddle me. “Your turn.”
“No.” Even though I was protesting, I gripped her hips and pushed her bare pussy over my rock-hard erection that was straining through my pants.
My mouth enveloped hers. Closing my eyes, I relished the feel of her heat as she ground over me. Kissing her harder, I threaded my fingers through her silky hair. Fuck if I knew how to stop this.
I spoke over her lips. “My dick stays in my pants. We can’t do anything more than this. Do you understand? This moment of vulnerability doesn’t change a goddamn thing.”
My words may have been defiant, but my actions were weak. I lifted her shirt over her head and pushed her bra up over her breasts. There were those beautiful tits I’d dreamed about since the Adirondacks. I wasted no time placing my mouth over her breast and sucking so hard one would have thought I was trying to expel nectar.
Who was I kidding? This wasn’t going to end in my favor.
My phone rang, but I ignored it.
“Do you need to get that?” she asked.
“No. Fuck it,” I growled, sucking on her breast harder.
When it continued to ring, despite several attempts to ignore it, I reluctantly pried myself away from Charlotte just long enough to check the caller ID to make sure it wasn’t an emergency.
It was Josh, the private investigator. Why would he be calling me repeatedly—unless something big was happening? That snapped me back to reality. Charlotte remained seated on my crotch as I picked up.
“Hello?”
His tone was serious. “Eastwood . . . you might want to pack your bags and head down here as soon as possible.”
CHAPTER 30
CHARLOTTE
Reed looked troubled as he listened to what the caller on the other end of the line was saying. His dick was still throbbing under me through his pants. I was still on cloud nine, despite the seemingly urgent nature of his phone call.
My heart started to pound rapidly once I began to really sense that something was wrong.
“What’s going on?” I interrupted.
He held his index finger up as he continued to concentrate hard on the information he was being given.
“You need to email me all of this information as soon as possible.” He paused. “Alright. Good work, Josh. Thank you.”
He tossed his phone aside and ran his fingers through his hair. “Get dressed, Charlotte. We need to talk.”
“What’s happening?”
Reed was flustered. “Please. Just get dressed.”
“Okay.”
After I put my clothes back on, he said, “I have to tell you something, and it’s going to upset you. But I want you to know I had the best of intentions.”
“Alright . . .”
“Charlotte, no matter what happens between us, I consider you one of the most important people in my life. I want you to have closure and peace when it comes to where you came from. I wanted to help you find your birth parents. I knew that if it were left up to you alone, it might take you years, if ever, to find them. I have a private investigator at my disposal, and I put him on the case full-time.”
“Oh my God. You what?”
“Josh has been on it for several weeks. He’s spent an extensive amount of time in both Poughkeepsie and Houston.”
“Houston?”
“Yes.”
“What did he find?”
“It seems that a week before you were born, there was a girl who gave birth to a baby that was never assigned a social security number. The teenage girl left the hospital before she applied for it. Josh got ahold of the girl’s medical intake form. She’d given a bogus name for herself, but she’d listed her nearest relative as a Brad Spears, and that name checked out. He located Brad, who told him the real name of his friend who had disappeared years earlier. Her name is Lydia Van der Kamp. She was from Texas and had apparently been hiding her pregnancy from her parents.”
My heartbeat began to accelerate. “Lydia is my mother?”
Reed nodded. “It looks like it. This guy Brad and Lydia were pen pals when she ran away from her religious family and came to New York. He wasn’t the baby’s father, but Brad had a thing for her. The plan was that she’d stay, have the baby, and then they’d run away together. That’s the part where things get a little fuzzy. For some reason, Lydia had a change of heart. She disappeared from the hospital and took the baby without telling Brad, and that’s as much as he knows. Shortly after, you were discovered at the church. Josh located a Lydia Van der Kamp in Houston. She was the only person with that name in the area. Around that time, you told me you were found wearing an Astros blanket. That corroborated the Texas connection.”
I covered my mouth. “Oh my God.”
“Since then, Josh has been in Texas and has spoken to Lydia’s children.”
“Children?”
I have siblings?
Reed half smiled. “Yeah. She has two sons. They confirmed that their mother recently confessed that she’d abandoned a child in a New York church as a teenager. We don’t have a blood test to confirm anything, but I think it’s safe to say we found your mother.”
I wanted to know what she looked like. “Do you have a photo of her?”
“No, unfortunately, I don’t. But I can get that for you.”
Nodding my head repeatedly to absorb all of this, I said, “Okay . . .”
I got the sense that he was hesitant to tell me something else.
“Is there more?”
Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes. “She’s dying, Charlotte.”
My heart felt like it was disintegrating. “What?”
“That phone call I just received brought some unsettling news. Apparently Lydia has been suffering from complications of Crohn’s disease, which hit her very hard and young. She got something called sclerosing cholangitis, which resulted in liver failure. She’s on life support at the moment and is not expected to survive.”
My mother is dying? She’s so young.
“Oh my God. What does this mean?”
He paused. “It means you and I are heading to Texas.”
CHAPTER 31
REED
I hated having put her in this situation, but what was the alternative? She’d have regretted it for the rest of her life if she hadn’t come to Texas.
As we stood in front of the hospital in the sweltering heat, an overcast sky was a fitting addition to this ominous day.
Charlotte stopped short of the entrance. “I’m not ready to go in yet.”
“We can stay out here as long as you need.” Placing my hand on her shoulder, I said, “Can I get you anything?”
“I need some water, I think.”
“Let’s go to the cafeteria.”
“No. I want to stay out here. Can you just get me a drink and bring it back here?”
“Of course.”
Charlotte definitely wasn’t in her right mind today. Who could blame her? That was further evidenced by what I witnessed upon returning outside.
The skies had opened up an
d it was pouring rain. I was walking back with two bottles of water when I noticed that Charlotte was dancing with the man who had been smoking a cigarette outside when I’d left her. They were smiling and laughing as they rocked back and forth with their hands intertwined.
What the fuck?
Then it hit me.
Dance with a Stranger in the Rain.
She’d decided to take this opportunity to knock an item off her Fuck-It List. Kind of an odd moment to choose to do that, but if you knew Charlotte, you knew to expect anything. She’d likely needed the distraction from the stress right at this moment and had taken it.
I was trying not to let my jealousy creep in.
Charlotte stopped dancing when she saw me approach. “This man was nice enough to humor me. I explained the Fuck-It List.”
“Don’t worry.” He smiled. “I’m happily married. Didn’t mean to offend.”
The look on my face must have been obvious. “No offense taken.”
She turned to him. “Thank you. I really needed that.”
“My pleasure.”
As we walked away, I spoke in her ear. “What’s his name?”
“I have no idea. That would have defeated the purpose.”
I shook my head and chuckled. “Here’s your water.”
“Thanks.” Charlotte opened the bottle and drank half of it down in one long gulp.
We lingered for a few minutes just outside the door and then I turned to her. “Ready?”
Expelling a long breath, she held on to her stomach. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
After we wrung out our clothes, we were given easy access to Lydia Van der Kamp’s room just by saying we were family. No one bothered to question anything. We weren’t sure if we were going to run into her children, but when we got to the room, she was alone with a nurse.
The woman flashed a friendly smile. “Hello.”
“Hi,” Charlotte said, her gaze fixed on the comatose woman with tubes sticking out of her mouth.
“Are you here to see Miss Lydia?”
“Yes.”
“You must be her daughter. You two look alike. I’m just changing out her bedsheets.”
“Can she hear what we say?” Charlotte asked.
“Well, she’s heavily sedated. It’s not really clear what she can and cannot hear.”
After the nurse left, I lingered in the corner of the room to give Charlotte space. She made her way over to Lydia’s bedside.
The woman looked old beyond her years, likely from the stress of her illness. She was connected to a bunch of tubes, looking like the life had been drained out of her. Despite everything, I could see a trace of resemblance to her daughter.
It took Charlotte a while to conjure up the courage to speak.
“Hi, Lydia . . . I don’t know if you can hear me. My name is Charlotte, and I’m . . . your daughter. I just found out about you, actually. I rushed here as soon as I found out you were sick. I’ve dreamed about meeting you under different circumstances. I’m sorry that this happened to you. You’re too young. It’s not fair. I can see how much we look like each other. Now I know where my icy-blonde hair came from.”
Charlotte looked over at me. Her eyes were glistening, and I took that as my cue to go stand next to her, figuring she needed me for comfort. I held her hand as she continued to speak to Lydia.
“Anyway, I’m here to tell you something. Whatever guilt you might have about leaving me at the church, let it go. Everything turned out the way it was supposed to. I have two wonderful parents whom I adore. So don’t feel like you did a bad thing. You were young, and you made the decision you thought was best. Thank you for choosing a church . . . and not like . . . I don’t know . . . a gas station or some other random place. They took good care of me there. I hope you can hear me. Everyone deserves peace, and I’m hoping to give that to you. Thank you for choosing to have me. I’ll always be grateful to you for that. And I’ll always love you for giving me life.”
Charlotte rested her head gently at the edge of the bed near Lydia’s nearly lifeless body. She took Lydia’s hand and held it.
A few moments later, Charlotte jumped. “Did you see that?”
“What?”
“She just squeezed my hand!”
“I didn’t see it. But if you felt it, that’s amazing.”
“I hope that means she heard me.”
I placed both hands on her shoulders. I hoped so, too. I really felt for Charlotte. I couldn’t imagine meeting my mother for the first time under these circumstances. She was being so strong, and I was really proud of her.
The smoker from outside who’d danced with Charlotte in the rain suddenly appeared in the doorway. Why was he here?
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Depends. Can you make my mother come back to life?” he said as he entered the room.
Charlotte froze.
“I just figured out who you are, Charlotte. We’ve been talking about you every day since that investigator left. I thought you looked familiar outside, but now I realize it was just because you look like a younger version of Mama. We’ve already met . . . but I’m Jason . . . your brother.”
Tears filled Charlotte’s eyes as she hugged him. “Oh my God. Hi.”
Jason’s hands were trembling a little as he wrapped them around Charlotte’s back. He smelled like a chimney, but on first impression, he seemed like a decent person.
This was pretty damn surreal. He must have looked like his father, because I would’ve never guessed that this dark-haired guy was Charlotte’s brother.
“How long has she been this bad?” she asked him.
“About a month.”
“Is there any hope?”
He frowned. “I’m afraid not. She’s dependent on the machines at this point. We’re in the midst of some tough decisions.”
Charlotte returned to her spot next to Lydia, then looked up at Jason. “I’m so sorry.”
“She loved you, Charlotte. She’d only recently told us about you. Mama was afraid to look for you because she thought maybe you’d hate her. But she carried you in her heart.”
The tears that had been threatening started to stream down Charlotte’s face as she stared at her newfound brother. “Can I stay? Until . . . I . . . I want to spend time with her. And with you. And my other brother. If that’s okay?”
He smiled. “Mama’d like that. In fact, I can’t think of anything else in this world that might bring her more peace than having you here today.”
“How long does she have?”
Jason walked to the other side of his mother’s—their mother’s—bed and covered the woman’s other hand with his. “Not long. Weeks . . . days . . . maybe even hours. We’ve been struggling to take her off life support. We all had this feeling that it wasn’t time yet.” He looked up at Charlotte. “Now it makes sense. We were all waiting for you. She was waiting for you.”
“Hey,” Charlotte whispered, blinking sleep from her eyes as she looked up at me. A few hours ago, she’d curled up in a ball on the chair next to her mother and fallen asleep. It was almost two in the morning, Texas time. She stretched her arms over her head and let out a big yawn. “How long did I sleep for?”
“Not long enough. A couple of hours.”
“Did Jason leave?”
My first impression of Jason had been right. He turned out to be a pretty decent guy. We’d spent the hours while Charlotte slept getting to know each other. At only twenty-two, he’d already served four years in the military and married his high school sweetheart. He’d also been the sole caregiver to Lydia the last few months since she’d taken a steep turn for the worse, and his mother clearly meant the world to him. I shook my head. “He went downstairs to get us some coffee. I didn’t want to go far in case you woke up and were confused.”
She gave me a sad smile. “Confused as to how I could be an only child pouring my boss coffee in New York yesterday, and tonight I’m halfway across the country and my brot
her is getting my boss coffee?”
I reached over and squeezed her knee. “Yeah, that, wiseass.”
“Did you get any sleep?”
“Not yet. But I booked us a hotel room nearby while you were snoring.”
Charlotte arched a brow. “A hotel room? As in one, not plural?”
“I booked a suite with two beds. I don’t want you to be alone.”
She leaned to me and whispered in my ear. “Or . . . maybe you were hoping I’d lift my dress for you again?”
Jason walked back into the room, saving me from having to answer that. I’d actually debated over how many rooms to book for an hour and a half. In the end, I figured I’d already seen her naked, tasted her pussy, and lost my mind over this woman. I’d crossed the line by a mile—comforting her and staying by her side as she struggled through this difficult time couldn’t dig me any deeper. Her brother handed me a coffee from the cardboard carrying container, then turned to Charlotte. “Got one with cream and sugar for you. Wasn’t sure how you took it. Me and Ma take it light and sweet, so I figured maybe the taste is hereditary or something.”
She smiled. “That’s perfect. Thank you.”
Jason took a seat on the other side of the bed. “Don’t know how long you’re planning on staying, but you should probably get some shut-eye. I don’t have much room in my little apartment. I live in a studio with my wife. But you’re welcome to stay at Ma’s place if you want. I have her keys, and it’s not too far from here. Maybe fifteen minutes up the road.”
“Thanks. But Reed booked us a hotel nearby already.”
“You have a good husband.” He looked at me. “Though I think he could use some sleep. He was watching you like a hawk while you slept and looked as stressed as you were when you were awake.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d never labeled our relationship. Considering I’d been next to Charlotte the entire time, his conclusion was logical.
“Oh. Reed’s not my husband. He’s my”—Charlotte struggled—“boss.”
Jason raised a brow and sipped his coffee. “Boss?”
“Yes, he’s my boss back in New York. I work at his company.”
“From the way he looked like he might murder me when he found us dancing outside, and the way he watched you sleep . . . I just assumed.”