by Nora Roberts
He didn’t give a damn. So he poured another shot of Jameson and studied its deep amber glow in the single light he’d turned on in his studio.
His brothers had given him his first taste of whiskey on his twenty-first birthday. Just the four of them, Seth remembered, sitting around the kitchen table with the kids and the women gone.
It was one of those solid, rich-toned memories that he knew would never leave him. The sharp scent of the cigar smoke after Ethan had passed them around. The sting of the whiskey on his tongue, down his throat, mellowing out as it reached his belly. The sound of his brothers’ voices, their laughter, and the absolute certainty he’d felt of his own belonging.
He hadn’t cared much for the taste of the whiskey. Still didn’t. But it was what a man reached for when his single intention was oblivion.
He’d long since stopped questioning what Gloria DeLauter was, and how she became. Part of her was inside him, and he accepted that as he would a birthmark. He didn’t believe in the sins of the father—or mother. He didn’t believe in tainted blood. Each one of his brothers had come from some sort of horror, and they were the best men he knew.
Whatever there was of Gloria inside him had been drowned out by the decency and pride and compassion given to him by the Quinns.
Maybe that alone was part of the reason she hated him—hated all of them. It didn’t matter why. She was part of his life, and he had to deal with her.
One way or the other.
He sat drinking by that single light in a room filled with his paintings and the tools of the work he loved. He’d already made his decision, and he would live with it. But for tonight, he’d cloud his future with Irish whiskey and the throb of the mournful blues he’d chosen as his drinking music.
When his cell phone rang he ignored it. Picked up the bottle, poured another shot.
* * *
DRU hung up and paced her living room. She’d tried Seth’s number half a dozen times, had worn a path on the floor over the last two hours. Since Aubrey had called, looking for him.
He wasn’t with Aubrey, as he’d told Dru he would be that evening. Nor was he with Dru—as he’d told Aubrey and his family he would be.
So where the hell was he?
He’d been off. Something had been off, she decided, since the night before. Even before the party, she thought now. Before the drive. There’d been some kind of repressed violence in him—viciously repressed, she realized. It had, eventually, taken its form in rough sex.
And even then, after they’d exhausted each other, she’d sensed an underlying turbulence. She’d let it go, Dru admitted. It wasn’t in her nature to pry. She resented the way her parents questioned and picked apart her every mood. Moods, she liked to think, were often private matters.
Now he’d lied to her. That, she felt strongly, was not his nature.
If something was wrong, she needed to help. Wasn’t that part of the duty of love?
She checked her watch, barely stopped herself from wringing her hands. It was after midnight. What if he was hurt? What if he’d been in an accident?
And what if he’d simply wanted an evening to himself?
“If he did, he should have said so,” she mumbled and marched to the door.
There was one place she imagined he could be. She wasn’t going to rest until she checked.
On the drive into town she lectured herself. Her relationship with Seth didn’t mean he had to account to her for every minute of his time. They both had lives, interests, obligations of their own. She certainly wasn’t the sort of woman who couldn’t be content and productive with her own company.
But that didn’t give him the right to lie to her about his plans for the evening. If he’d just answer his goddamn phone, she wouldn’t be driving into town in the middle of the night to look for him like some clichéd, nagging sitcom wife.
And she was going to ream him inside out for making her feel like one.
She’d worked up a good head of steam by the time she turned toward the rear lot and saw his car parked. The insult of it nearly had her driving right past and back home again. He couldn’t have told her, and everyone else, that he’d wanted to work? He couldn’t just pick up the phone and . . .
She slammed on the brakes.
What if he couldn’t get to the phone? What if he was unable to answer because he was unconscious, or ill?
She whipped the car into the lot, leaped out and charged up the stairs.
The image of him lying helpless on the floor was so strong that when she burst in, saw him sitting on the bed pouring liquor from a bottle into a short glass, it didn’t register.
“You’re all right.” The relief came first, made her knees weak. “Oh, Seth, God! I was so worried.”
“What for?” He set the bottle down, studied her out of bleary eyes as he drank.
“Nobody knew where . . .” Realization came next, made her blood boil. “You’re drunk.”
“Working on it. Got a ways to go yet. What’re you doing here?”
“Aubrey called looking for you hours ago. Your stories got crossed. Since you didn’t answer your phone, I was foolish enough to worry about you.”
He was still much too sober. Sober enough to consider her mood could make it easier on both of them. “If you came running in here hoping to catch me in bed with another woman, I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“It never occurred to me that you would cheat.” Nearly as baffled as she was angry, she walked toward the bed, noted the level of whiskey in the bottle. “Then again, it never crossed my mind that you’d need to lie to me either. Or that you’d sit here alone drinking yourself drunk.”
“Told you there’s a lot you don’t know about me, sugar.” He jerked a thumb at the bottle. “Want one? Glasses in the kitchen.”
“No, thank you. Is there a reason you’re worrying your family and having a drinking marathon?”
“I’m a big boy, Dru, and I don’t need you crawling up my ass because I want a couple drinks. This is more my style than a couple polite belts of champagne at some boring political gala. You can’t deal with it, it’s not my problem.”
It stung, and had her chin lifting. “I was obliged to go. You weren’t. That choice was yours. You want to drown yourself in a whiskey bottle, that’s certainly your choice as well. But I won’t be lied to. I won’t be made a fool of.”
He gave a careless shrug and, riding on the whiskey, decided he knew what was best for her. A few more jabs to the pride, he thought, and she’d be gone.
“You know the problem with women? You sleep with them a few times, you tell them what they want to hear. You show them a good time. Right away, they start crowding you. Take a little breather, and they’re all over you like lice on a monkey. Jesus, I knew I should never’ve gone to that deal with you last night. Told myself it’d give you ideas.”
“Ideas?” she repeated. She felt her throat fill and burn. “Ideas?”
“Can’t just let things be, can you?” He shook his head, poured another drink. “Always got to be looking ahead. What’s the deal for tomorrow, what’s going to happen next week? You’re plotting out a future, sugar, and that’s just not what I’m about. You’re a hell of a lot of fun to be with once you loosen up, but we’d better quit while we’re ahead.”
“You—you’re dumping me?”
“Aw now, don’t put it like that, sweetheart. We just need to throttle back some.”
Grief rolled up, and numbed her. “All this, all this was just for, what, for sex and art? I don’t believe that. I don’t.”
“Let’s not make a big thing out of it.” He reached for the bottle again. Poured whiskey onto whiskey. Anything to keep from looking at her, at the tears swimming in her eyes.
“I trusted you, with my body and my heart. I never asked you for anything. You always gave it before I could. I
don’t deserve to be treated this way, discarded this way, only because I fell in love with you.”
He looked at her then, and the combination of pride and sadness on her face destroyed him. “Dru—”
“I love you.” She said it calmly, while she could still be calm. “But that’s my problem. I’ll leave you alone with yours, and your bottle.”
“Goddamn it. Goddamn it, don’t go,” he said when she spun toward the door. “Dru, don’t walk out. Please don’t.” He shoved the glass onto the table, dropped his head in his hands. “I can’t do this. I can’t let her steal this from me, too.”
“You think I’m going to stand here and cry in front of you? Even speak to you when you’re drunk and insulting?”
“I’m sorry. Christ, I’m sorry.”
“You are that. You’re very sorry.” The hand that gripped the doorknob trembled, and a tear spilled over. The combination infuriated her. “I don’t want your pathetic guilty male conscience because you hurt me enough to bring on a few tears. What I really want right now is for you to go straight to hell.”
“Please don’t walk out the door. I don’t think I could stand it.” Everything inside him—grief, guilt, loathing and love—clamped his throat like strangling hands. “I thought I should shove you out before you got pulled under. I can’t do it. I can’t stand it. I don’t know if it’s selfish or if it’s right, but I can’t let you go. For God’s sake, don’t walk on me.”
She stared at him, at the naked misery on his face. Her heart, already cracked, split in two. “Seth, please tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what’s hurting you.”
“I shouldn’t have said those things to you. It was stupid.”
“Tell me why you said them. Tell me why you’re sitting here alone, drinking yourself sick.”
“I was sick before I bought the bottle. I don’t know where to start.” He raked his hands through his hair. “The beginning, I guess.” He pressed his fingers to his lids. “I got about halfway drunk. I’m going to need some coffee.”
“I’ll make it.”
“Dru.” He lifted his hands again, then just let them fall. “Everything I said to you since you walked in the door was a lie.”
She took a deep breath. For now, she thought, she would tuck the anger and hurt away, and listen. “All right. I’ll make you coffee, then you can tell me the truth.”
* * *
“IT goes back a long time,” he began. “Back before my grandfather. Before Ray Quinn married Stella. Before he met her. Dru, I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“Just tell me. We’ll deal with that later.”
He drank coffee. “Ray met this woman, and they got involved. They had an affair,” he corrected. “They were both young and single, so why not? Anyway, he wasn’t the type she was looking for. You know, a teacher, one who leaned toward the left while she leaned right. She came from a family like yours. What I mean is—”
“I know what you mean. She had a certain social position, and certain social aspirations.”
“Yeah.” He let out a breath, drank more coffee. “Thanks. She broke it off, left. She was pregnant, and not too pleased about it from the way I’ve heard it. She met another guy, one she clicked with. So she decided to go through with the pregnancy, and she married him.”
“She never told your grandfather about the child.”
“No, she never told him. Little ways down the road, she had a second daughter. She had Sybill.”
“Sybill, but . . . oh.” Dru let it sift in her mind until it fell into place. “I see. Ray Quinn’s daughter, Sybill’s half sister. Your mother.”
“That cuts through it. She—Gloria. Her name’s Gloria. She’s not like Sybill. Gloria hated her. I think she must’ve been born hating everyone. Whatever she had growing up, it never seemed to be enough.”
He was pale, and looked so drawn and ill, Dru had to bank down on the urge to simply gather him close and comfort. “For some, nothing is ever enough.”
“Yeah. She took off with some guy at some point, got knocked up. That would be me. Turns out he married her. That’s not important. I’ve never met him. He doesn’t come into this.”
“Your father—”
“Sperm donor,” Seth corrected. “I don’t know what happened between them. I don’t lose sleep over it. When Gloria ran out of money, she went back home, took me with her. I don’t remember any of that. They didn’t kill the fatted calf for her. Gloria’s got an affection for the bottle, and various chemical enhancements. I think she came and went for a few years. I know when Sybill had a place of her own in New York, she dumped me there. I don’t remember much about it. Didn’t remember Sybill at all when I first met her again. I was a couple years old. Sybill gave me this stuffed dog. I called it Yours. You know, when I asked whose it was she said . . .”
“Yours,” Dru finished, and touched, brushed a hand over his hair. “She was kind to you.”
“She was great. Like I said, I don’t remember much, except feeling safe when I was with her. She took us in, bought us food, clothes, took care of me when Gloria didn’t show up for a few days. And Gloria paid her back by stealing everything she could fence when Sybill was out, and taking off with me.”
“You didn’t have a choice. Children don’t.”
“I’m not taking on responsibility for it. I’m just saying. I don’t know why she didn’t leave me and head out on her own. I can only figure it was because Sybill and I had made a connection, because we . . .”
“Because you’d started to love each other.” Dru took his hand, let his fingers grip tight on hers. “And she resented you both, so she couldn’t have that.”
He closed his eyes a moment. “It helps that you get it.”
“You didn’t think I would.”
“I don’t know what I thought. She fucks me up; that’s the only excuse I’ve got.”
“Save the excuses. Tell me the rest.”
He set the coffee aside. It wasn’t doing anything for his headache or queasy stomach but making him more awake and aware of them. “We lived a lot of different places, for short amounts of time. She had a lot of men. I knew about sex before I could write my own name. She’d get drunk or high, so I was on my own a lot. She ran low on money, couldn’t get high, she’d take it out on me.”
“She hit you.”
“Jesus, Dru. However perceptive you are, you don’t know that kind of world. Why should you? Why should anybody?” He pulled himself in. “She’d beat the shit out of me if she felt like it. I’d go hungry if she didn’t feel like feeding me. And if she paid for drugs with sex, I’d hear them going at it in the next room. There wasn’t much I hadn’t seen by the time I was six.”
It sickened her. It made her want to weep. But if Seth needed anything from her now, it was strength. “Why didn’t Social Services do something to help you?”
He just looked at her for a moment, as if she’d spoken in a language he didn’t recognize. “We didn’t hang around in places where concerned adults call the authorities on junkie mothers and their abused kids. She was mean, but she’s never been stupid. I thought about running away, started to save up for it. A nickel here, a quarter there. When I was old enough, she dumped me in school—gave her more time to cruise. I loved it. I loved school. Never admitted it, couldn’t be so uncool, but I loved it.”
“None of your teachers realized what was going on?”
“It never occurred to me to tell anybody.” He shrugged. “It was life, that’s all. And under it, I was just so fucking scared of her. Then . . . I guess I was about seven the first time. One of the men she brought back with her . . .”
He shook his head, pushed to his feet. Even after all the years between, the memories could slick his skin with sweat. “Some of them had a taste for young boys.”
Her heart simply stopped, then jolted again to pound in her throat. “No.
No.”
“I always got away. I was fast, and I was mean. I found places to hide. But I knew what it meant when one of them tried to put his hands on me. I knew what it meant. It was a long time before I could stand anyone touching me. I couldn’t stand being touched. I can’t get through this if you cry.”
She willed back the tears that threatened to overflow. But she rose, crossed to him. Without a word she wrapped her arms around him.
“Poor baby,” she crooned, rocking him. “Poor little boy.”
Undone, he pressed his face to her shoulder. The smell of her hair, of her skin was so clean. “I didn’t want you to know about this.”
“Did you think I would love you less?”
“I just didn’t want you to know.”
“I do know, and I’m so awed by who you are. You think this is beyond my scope, because of my background. But you’re wrong.” She held tight. “You’re wrong. She never broke you, Seth.”
“She might have, but for the Quinns. I have to finish.” He drew himself away. “Let me finish it.”
“Come sit down.”
He went with her, sat on the side of the bed again. “During one of her scenes with her mother, Gloria found out about Ray. It gave her someone else to hate, someone else to blame for all the injustices she liked to think were aimed at her. He was teaching at the university here when she found him. This was after Stella had died, after my brothers were adults and had moved out of the house. Cam was in Europe, Phil in Baltimore and Ethan had his own place in Saint Chris. She blackmailed Ray.”
“For what? He didn’t even know she existed.”
“Didn’t matter to her. She demanded money; he paid. She wanted more, went to the dean and spun some lie about sexual harassment. Tried to pass me off as Ray’s kid. It didn’t fly, but it started planting seeds here and there. He made a deal with her. He wanted to get me away from her. He wanted to take care of me.”