by Kim Law
She stared at the closed door again, for five more seconds, then her shoulders slumped and she nodded in a way that reminded him of a child. Ben scooted over and brought her to his side—keeping that darned sheet modestly tucked around her—and wrapped her in his arms.
“She killed herself,” she stated softly.
He closed his eyes with the words. “They’re sure?”
He hadn’t stuck around long enough to hear Cord’s reasoning, but Ben couldn’t imagine that statement being made without certainty. Dani nodded again, her hair brushing against his shoulder, and the slight fragrance of her shampoo drifting to his nose. She was leaned into him so that her head rested on his chest, and she quietly began talking, filling him in on the facts of her mother’s death.
He caressed her arm as she told him the story, hoping the soothing motions would let her know she wasn’t alone in this. He would help her get through it. And when she ran out of words, Ben’s throat ached. For the first time in his adult life, he was on the verge of tears.
Dani sounded so alone, so hurt. And he had no idea how to help.
“Ever since they pointed out that I didn’t remember things right, I’ve been bombarded with memories I’d forgotten,” she said. “Some of them are horrible. And some just cruel.”
She looked up at him suddenly.
“Dad spent years sleeping in this room, did you know that?” She shook her head before he could answer. “Of course you wouldn’t know that. But he did. I’d hear him sneak down after everyone had gone to bed. That’s how he figured out that I was sneaking out myself.” Her words came out softer now and her gaze drifted away.
Ben didn’t say anything, because he thought she might be talking to herself as much as to him. Walking through the past now in her head.
“He was already down here, so he’d hear me going out the back door, heading to the beach. Both of us just wanted to be away from her. But she came after him sometimes.” She brought her eyes back to Ben’s. “She’d tell me about that. How he wasn’t a good man because she had to seduce him—her own husband—to get him to sleep with her.” Her body shivered under the sheet. “And what could I say in return? If I said anything . . .” She paused, her gaze searching his before shifting and focusing on the middle of his chest. “If I defended him,” she continued, her words now barely reaching his ears, “she got inflamed that I took ‘his side’ over hers. But if I agreed with her, she turned everything around. Suddenly he could do no wrong. How dare I say otherwise? I became the villain.”
“That was her intent.” He’d read that about narcissists. They needed to keep everyone off kilter, keep them confused. Dani’s mother had wanted the focus to be on her.
Dani simply stared at him when he spoke.
“I preferred him to be the bad guy instead of me,” she confessed, her words void of emotion. “So I kept my mouth shut, and I listened. Whenever she wanted to talk, whatever inappropriate thing she wanted to tell me. She told me about their sex life and the tricks she pulled. How she seduced him.” The corner of her mouth lifted in a sarcastic tilt. “No wonder I did the same thing to you.”
“You didn’t do anything to me.”
She rolled her eyes. “I did, and we both know it. Both times. But hey”—her tone turned mocking—“at least you didn’t seem to mind.”
In a quick move, Ben brought her mouth to his. He crushed her lips in a kiss filled with heat and misdirected anger. He needed her to see what was between them. To understand that it went beyond anything to do with her mother.
He needed to be able to fix this.
The kiss changed, though, turning slow and lingering, and he took his time tracing her mouth with his. He kept it going until they were both out of breath, both clutching at the other.
Only then did he pull back and look at her.
“You did nothing wrong,” he growled out. His voice was laced with both passion and lingering frustration, and he almost wished Dani’s mother were alive today so he could kill her himself. “She hurt you, and you needed me. That’s all. And that’s okay. It’ll always be okay.”
Dani didn’t respond and he found himself wanting to shake her.
“Believe it, Dani.”
“Ben, I’m too tired to—”
“You did nothing wrong.” Fear pulled at him for her to understand. “We all have baggage, sweetheart. We all have crap in our lives. And we deal with it the best we can.”
“You dealt with your baggage by avoiding your mother most of your life.”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s so much healthier than me.”
“Stop it,” he demanded. When she didn’t reply, he took her shoulders in his hands and got in her face. “You are not her. You are not like her. Say it to me.”
Stubbornness shone back at him.
“Say it, Dani.”
“What do you know about it? You haven’t even been here! I might be just like her.”
“You treat your niece better than her mother does. You treat my daughter better than her mother did. You run errands for anyone in town who needs it. You watch over your family like a hawk. You care about people, Dani. I hear you calling, checking up on others. I’ve seen you sad because someone is sick. I’ve seen you take them get-well baskets and balloons. Did your mother ever do any of that?”
His voice had climbed with his words, but he couldn’t change that now. He only hoped no one remained downstairs to hear them arguing. But at least Dani finally seemed to be hearing him. He could tell she was sorting through his words.
When she still didn’t answer, he did give her that shake. Just a small one, enough to bring her gaze back to his.
“No,” she finally spat out. “My mother never did anything for anybody. She pretended she did. She would tell whoever would listen what a great person she was. All the good that she did for the world. But she was evil, and she never really did anything nice. I hated her.”
Dani lowered her head with her last words, and wrapped her arms around his chest.
“And I was glad when she died,” she whispered brokenly.
His heart ached for her. “Oh, sweetheart.” He stroked her hair and held her close. “That’s okay. You had a right. And you probably aren’t the only one.”
“I’m not,” she cried. “But that doesn’t make it better.”
She clung to him then, letting hot tears fall from her eyes, and he simply held her.
After several minutes, when her sobs began to subside, he rocked them both back and forth. He wanted to do more, but also understood that this was going to be a process for her. It wouldn’t be fixed overnight, and according to what he’d read, it was something she and her entire family would deal with for the rest of their lives. All he could do was be there to help her through it.
When the last tear was shed and she lifted her face, he kissed her again. This time, there was no anger driving the move. No frustration. It was gentle and caring, and he knew that if she was paying the slightest bit of attention she would realize that it was more than a friend offering comfort. Because she was more than a friend.
But he didn’t think she could see that.
Her lips clung to his, and he let his hands slip down to her back. But the instant he touched skin, she pulled away.
“I think I’ll go to my room,” she muttered.
He could only nod and remove his hands.
He clicked on a lamp and helped her find her clothes, smoothing her hair for her when she didn’t do it herself, then walked with her to his door.
“We start picking at daylight,” she told him. The night was over.
“I’ll be ready. Haley’s looking forward to it.”
She nodded, then chewed on her lip, staring at the door instead of opening it.
“You okay?” he asked. He touched his fingers to the small of her
back.
“I think so.”
“Want me to walk you to your room?’
She peeked over at his teasing words, and a soft smile curved her lips. “Something tells me you’d try to stay.”
He wiggled his brows. “I do have more condoms.”
She laughed and patted his chest. “Thanks for tonight, Ben. But no.”
Ouch. He supposed he had been officially dismissed.
Dani opened his door and walked out of his room without looking back.
chapter sixteen
Dani took a sip of her bottled water as she stood camouflaged between two trees, watching Ben heft a lug of cherries and carry it to the nearest bin. She pictured the muscles in his arms and back as he worked. Pictured them unclothed, of course. And pictured them right there in front of her.
She’d touched those muscles. She’d licked those muscles.
Then she pretty much hadn’t spoken to Ben since.
In fact, she hadn’t spoken to a single one of the men over the past few days.
It was day three of picking, and everyone was in their routine, going hard until early afternoon when the heat of the day often called a stop to the action in order to protect the tender skin of the fruit. The migrant workers carried their buckets strapped to their sides, their movements fast and efficient, since they got paid by weight of cherries picked. Jaden, Nick, and Cord were on tractor duty. They drove the trailers from the fields, through the cooling system that would keep the fruit crisp and firm, before depositing them in the barn. Full bins would be stacked and set aside until there was enough to be sent to the packing plant.
It was a well-functioning system, and Dani couldn’t imagine not being a part of it.
She couldn’t imagine her family not running it. But so far, no one had volunteered for the job. She’d considered doing it herself. It’s not like she didn’t know the entire operation. But she couldn’t very well run the farm in Montana and live in New York.
Surely one of her brothers would decide to take it on. Because it was their farm.
She took another drink, and watched Ben as he went for another load. His job involved working directly in the fields, and Dani had been sneaking peeks at him all day. He emptied the cherries into waiting trailers, redistributed ladders from picked trees to unpicked ones, and generally did all kinds of heavy lifting.
And watching him wreaked all kinds of havoc on her tortured mind.
Because, though she knew she shouldn’t have gone to him the other night, the fact remained that she had gone to him. He had a fascinating ability to get her mind off the topics eating at her, and she couldn’t help but want to be distracted by him again.
And it only had a little to do with the fact that she was angry with her entire family.
Mostly, she just wanted to be with Ben.
But he fuzzed up her mind when she got too close to him, therefore she’d avoided him as rigorously as she’d steered clear of everyone else. She’d spent the past three days passing out cold bottles of water to workers, running fresh-picked cherries to the road stand that was being manned by Megan, or running cherries to The Cherry Basket for food to be made on-site.
The crowds up and down the road were heavy this time of year, and business was good.
Therefore she’d barely had time to work through the fact that her mother had devoted her life to making her kids’ lives miserable before ending it in a pathetic bid for yet more attention.
Or how she, herself, had managed to block every last bit of that for more than a decade.
It had occurred to her that she should look into the disorder. She knew nothing more about Narcissistic Personality Disorder today than what Jaden had explained during their family meeting the other night. Understanding what was behind her mother’s actions might help her to better deal with it, she got that. Possibly it could shed light on how to move on from this point in her life.
Only, she wasn’t yet ready to move on. She didn’t want to deal with more.
She was still processing the pain of her family leaving her in the dark.
Therefore, though she’d spent hours sitting alone at her laptop each of the past two evenings, she’d devoted that time to work. And she hadn’t once typed the name of the disorder into a search engine.
“Miss Dani.”
Dani jumped at the words, and forced her gaze from Ben’s strong back to his daughter’s sweet face.
Haley and Jenna stood just behind her, Mike at their side. A pink bunny rested in Haley’s arms, and Gloria waited a few feet beyond the girls. She’d been watching the kids since harvest began while everyone else worked, and Dani had caught all three of them more than once plucking fat cherries straight off the trees.
Dani had given the girls bottles of water and instructed them to thoroughly rinse the fruit before consuming it, but she also remembered doing the same as a kid. And she had never taken the time back then to clean a cherry before popping it into her mouth.
“What can I do for you, sweetie?” Dani asked. She took in the girls’ matching pink cowboy boots, Cinderella gracing the front of each.
“Will you be at dinner tonight? We’re helping Miss Gloria cook, but we wasn’t sure if you’d be there. We wanted to make your favorite food.”
Guilt heated Dani’s chest. She’d not only avoided talking to her family this week, but she’d avoided dinners, as well. Which meant, she’d barely spent any time with the girls at all.
“Do you happen to know what my favorite food is?” she teased instead of answering.
She really shouldn’t skip it. She’d barely seen any of her brothers since they’d been home.
Haley looped an arm through Jenna’s. “Grilled trout and baked beans,” she announced.
“And corn bread,” Jenna added.
Dani laughed. These two were so sweet.
If she stayed and ran the farm, she could see—
No, she couldn’t. Jenna would be in California, and Dani wasn’t sure where Ben and Haley would be, though she thought he might be seriously considering Montana.
But also, she couldn’t stay because she had a job waiting for her in New York. As if she could forget that. Her whole life had been leading up to this point, and she wouldn’t blow it now.
Only, she hadn’t signed the lease agreement yet.
Everything was a tangled mess, and she’d essentially shut down over the past few days.
She couldn’t stay that way for long, she knew. She got daily emails asking about the lease or if her broker needed to continue searching, and her new boss had already forwarded her background information on her first project. Everything was moving forward but her.
All she’d managed with any of it was to thank them and promise to reply soon.
Dragging her thoughts back from the deep trenches of her mind, she focused on Haley and Jenna standing in front of her with expectant expressions on their faces. She might be mixed up in a number of ways, but she couldn’t let these two down any more than she already had.
“I’ll be there,” she assured them, and they showered her with exuberant smiles.
The girls skipped back to Gloria, and Dani remained where she was, watching the three of them head the other way as her mind whirled on all the many things she’d been processing that week. She grasped a branch above her head as she fought with one thought that kept pushing to the front of her mind. She wanted to talk to Ben. Maybe he could help her sort through things.
But she was afraid that talking to Ben wouldn’t be talking at all.
And though not talking would be nice, it wasn’t what she needed at the moment.
“I see you’ve missed me.”
As if he’d read her mind, Ben spoke from directly behind her. Dani didn’t even startle. She somehow wasn’t surprised he’d come over. He would have heard his daughter’s high-
pitched voice. Thus, he would have seen Dani in the trees.
She lowered her arm and faced him. “You have quite the ego there, Mr. Denton. What would make you think that I’ve missed you?”
His gaze roamed over her face before shifting to the tree she stood under. “Because you’re hiding in the trees.”
“I am not hiding in the trees,” she protested.
“And you’ve been watching me.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
At his raised brows, she crossed her arms over her chest and shot him the same smug look. He just smiled.
“Fine,” she muttered. She lowered her arms. “I watched you a little. But I’ve been watching everyone. And I’m not hiding. I’m resting in the shade.”
“Then why not go to the barn? There’s plenty of shade in there. As well as a fan.”
“Because my dad’s in the barn,” she stated matter-of-factly.
And she was avoiding her dad.
His job this week was to oversee the loading of the trucks, but every time Dani had come within range, he’d turned to her with sympathy in his eyes. Which meant Gabe had told him about the conversation from the other night. If she got too near her dad, he would try to talk about it. And she most definitely wasn’t ready to talk.
Not to him.
Ben studied her without expression for a moment before putting a twinkle back in his eye. He shook his head in denial. “Not buying it, sweetheart. Admit it. You miss me.”
“Ben.”
He took her hand in his and leaned in, and when his mouth brushed against her ear she shivered down to her toes. “Say it,” he taunted. “I’ve missed you, Ben. I shouldn’t have been avoiding you, Ben. I’ll quit right now, and do whatever you want.”
“Ben,” she warned.
“I’ve missed you, too,” he said, his tone turning sincere, and she understood that he was no longer teasing.
She locked her eyes on his, his face only inches from her own, and she saw the honesty of his words. He’d missed her. She didn’t understand the connection between the two of them, but she did acknowledge it.