“Oh... She wasn’t expecting you?”
“She knew I was coming. She just wanted to rub my nose in the fact that she had someone else. She said it was what I deserved, that it was what it took to get me to notice her, to notice what was going on with her because I took her for granted.”
That did sound like Clairy’s complaint with her father, but it seemed as if Quinn was finding his way with this and she thought it might be better to just let that happen on its own rather than point out the similarity.
“I thought setting me up to walk in on her in bed with somebody else was taking it too far,” Quinn continued. “But thinking about it since Camp Lejeune and Mac... I don’t know... Rachel was right that she wasn’t uppermost in my mind at any point, that I wasn’t paying enough attention to anything she said or did or signaled for it to register. I did enjoy her company, but when I didn’t have it, it didn’t...bother me.”
“You could take her or leave her?” Clairy asked to put it in simpler terms.
He shrugged, and it seemed to have a tinge of guilt to it. “I could. And did,” he confessed. “After she’d had her say, I packed up and left without feeling anything but...mostly confusion at how I’d missed so much. But she was crying and throwing things—she said she wanted to hurt me the way I’d hurt her—”
“And that just shocked you,” Clairy said.
“That I’d hurt her? It did. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I definitely didn’t want to hurt her.”
And it was apparent that he was genuinely perplexed by the fact that he had.
“Then there was Laine,” he went on. “So-o-o much worse...”
Enough for him to need a drink of his wine before going on.
“I met her right after Rachel,” he began. “I was with her until just before going to Camp Lejeune to see Mac—twenty months of her life...” He seemed to be repeating what had been said to him.
“Almost two years,” Clairy observed.
“Again, I was in and out, so it didn’t seem like that and probably didn’t add up to that much actual time together. But Laine hadn’t seen anyone else, so—”
“Had you?”
“No. I liked her. I was fine seeing only her.”
Obviously without putting much thought into it...
“Were you fine seeing only her just because she always answered when hers was the first number you called when you got to town? So you didn’t have to bother with the next number on the list?”
“Don’t make me out to be a dog,” Quinn said defensively.
Okay, maybe there had been a bit of a bite to that. And it wasn’t really fair, she decided, because since his personal life took a back seat to his career, she had no doubt he didn’t devote enough time or energy to dating to juggle women.
But before Clairy could retract what she’d said, he went on.
“I didn’t mistreat anyone...intentionally, at least. I was just... Like I said, relationships weren’t my priority. But I liked Laine, and after a couple of months seeing only her and then having to be gone, if she hadn’t answered when I got back, I’d have called again and again until I got her. I wouldn’t have moved on to the next number.”
Clairy thought he likely saw that as the highest of regard when it came to women and relationships, but she didn’t say it. She could tell that he really was suffering remorse now for doing what he hadn’t seen as wrong at the time he was doing it.
“So the two of you were exclusive, too. For twenty months,” Clairy said to encourage him to go on.
“Without living together—I’d learned that lesson, at least. But Laine got pregnant.”
That was a bombshell Clairy hadn’t seen coming.
“Do you have a kid? Or is there someone out there pregnant with your baby?” she asked, in full-blown alarm.
“No! The pregnancy was an accident. She didn’t even know she was pregnant until pain sent her to the emergency room and they told her it was... I hope I have this word right—ectopic?”
“The embryo was in her fallopian tube,” Clairy said.
“She had to go into surgery right then and they had to take the whole deal—the tube and all. I was working, busy. I’d turned off my phone, left it in my desk drawer so she couldn’t reach me. I didn’t see her messages, her texts, until it was all over with. A friend of hers had taken her to the hospital...” he confessed ruefully.
Clairy couldn’t help feeling sympathy for these two women who had gotten in over their heads with him. After all the pain her father’s neglect and disregard of her had caused, she identified with them and understood what it was to be so let down by a man who was more intent on something other than them.
But she could also tell that Quinn was agonizing over what he was just realizing about himself and his actions, and she didn’t want to rub salt into his wounds, so she didn’t say anything at all.
He went on even without any input from her.
“Laine was through with me when I finally did get to her. She said she’d wasted twenty months of her life on me, that her chances of having kids had been reduced and all for what... She’d been hanging on, hoping it would get better—hoping I would get better—but that the whole mess had opened her eyes and she knew she’d never mean as much to me as the marines did, that she’d never been that important to me, that she was so unimportant to me that she hadn’t even known where I was or how to reach me other than by the cell phone I’d turned off—”
“You’d hurt her, too,” Clairy interrupted, but mildly and with understanding that this had caught him as unaware as had learning how the other woman felt.
“Again, not on purpose,” he said. “And at the time it happened I was sorry it had all gone down the way it had, but I still wrote off most of Laine’s reaction to things other than me.”
Just as her father would have done.
“But now?” Clairy asked.
“Now I’m afraid I might not be much different than the worst of Mac, even though I’ve lived my life trying to be the best of him...”
So not only had Quinn become disillusioned by his idol, but he was also ashamed of what the negative side of that idol’s influence might have created in him.
“I think just coming to all this makes you a better man than my father was,” Clairy said honestly. “And maybe it’ll lead to a better, more rounded life than he had. Maybe since you know now where you’ve failed, you won’t do it again and you can actually have a personal life—because whether or not my father ever realized it or cared, he didn’t.”
“Which brings me to the rest of what I’m trying to figure out,” Quinn said more to himself than to her.
“Whether or not you want a personal life that might interfere with being the kind of marine my father was,” Clairy ventured.
Quinn’s eyebrows arched. “Oh, you’re too smart...” he said with a wry laugh, letting her know her guess had been correct.
And since it had, she took a leap and said, “Speaking from my father’s personal life, if you have to be the marine he was, look for a woman—like my mother, like Mim—willing to accept it, excuse it. But don’t bring kids into it. Like your two long-term relationships, kids can’t help hoping and trying and working for more, and then being hurt when they can’t get it.”
“And that’s pretty rotten for the kid,” he said compassionately, clearly referring to her.
That compassion brought a warmth to his eyes and they held hers for long enough to cause her to think he was finished talking. That they might be moving in that other direction she still wasn’t sure the night should take.
But then he seemed to pull himself out of the moment. He took a drink of his wine and returned to talking, just not about himself.
“Okay, I’ve told you the dark secret of my mistakes. Let me hear yours.”
“Who said I have any dar
k secrets or mistakes?”
“You’ve dropped some crumbs, some teasers,” he accused. “Tell me who got you to the altar and how. And why it didn’t work.”
She’d heard that talking about the ex was a surefire way to put a damper on anything involving another man.
So maybe this was a good night for it...
“His name is Jared Byers—he’s a financial and real-estate whiz in Denver. We met at an event I did to raise money for the Jenkins Foundation. I married him after a whirlwind three-month courtship and it lasted for seven years.”
“Hmm... I think you left out all the important parts with that version and I’m not letting you off the hook,” Quinn said of her summary. “So you were married seven years. Was it the seven-year itch that wrecked it?”
“If the seven-year itch means cheating, then no, neither of us did that. If it means seven years into a marriage is when some reassessing might happen, when someone might reevaluate, might need things to change course, then yes.”
“Which of you did all that?”
“Me.”
Quinn smiled broadly. “Straightforward taking responsibility—I like that. Now explain.”
His reaction made her inclined to be more candid, but first she set her half-empty wineglass on the small table on her side of the glider.
“Jared has it all—he came from money that he turned into much, much more money in real estate and in two private mortgage loan groups he heads, so he’s rich, charming—when he wants to be—handsome—”
As she settled again to face Quinn, she thought that her ex came up short in a comparison of his looks and Quinn’s. But she didn’t say that. Instead, she said, “And he swept me off my feet.”
“That was bad?” Quinn asked, interpreting her tone.
“It ended up making me feel kind of stupid, like I’d fallen for a con man—”
“He was a con man?” Quinn asked with the same level of alarm she’d had when she’d worried he might have a child or have left a pregnant girlfriend.
“No, he’s on the up-and-up. He’s just a very highflier. He went—goes—after things full speed ahead, and while I didn’t know it until much later, he’d decided it was time for a wife. I guess I fit his qualifications, so when we met I was what he went after—”
“Full speed ahead,” Quinn said, echoing her words. “But you don’t think he did that because he had feelings for you? You think he just did it to acquire a wife—like a piece of property?”
“Without it taking him away from work for long,” she confirmed. “And acquired is pretty accurate. It turned out that I was more of an acquisition than anything, and once I was on his list of assets—”
“He had to have feelings for you, though,” Quinn insisted.
“Do you think my father had feelings for me?” Clairy countered.
“You were his daughter,” Quinn answered, as if there was no question.
“And my mom was his wife. But when she died I never saw him shed a single tear—”
“I don’t think that was something he would have let you see.”
“When I got upset he got mad at me—he didn’t have any trouble showing that. He said a McKinnon didn’t cry. My mom dying in a car wreck was sad, but we had to see it through.”
“But looking back on it as an adult, do you honestly believe he didn’t have any feelings, or can you see that the man Mac was wouldn’t have shown them?”
“That was Mim’s excuse for him. But it just seemed to me like he didn’t have much in the way of feelings for anything but the marines...and you, as the son he wanted. And I’m not sure Jared has feelings for anything except his work. I know that’s what gives him a rush that nothing else does. But until we were actually married, he made it seem as if I gave him that same kind of rush.”
“I can’t imagine that you didn’t,” Quinn said, as if he wouldn’t accept anything else. “So how did he sweep you off your feet?”
“He made it seem as if he couldn’t get enough of me. There were a whole lot of picnic lunches, and dinners that were all candles and starlight and private dining rooms. There were chartered planes to weekends in Paris and Rome and London and Switzerland. There were flowers and candy and gifts. He called and texted dozens of times a day to tell me how much he missed me, how all he wanted was to be with me, how he couldn’t wait until he was... It was as if I’d swept him off his feet. I didn’t know it at the time, but when Jared wants something, he devotes himself to getting it. He’s like a heat-seeking missile—nothing is going to stop him.”
“My mother would have been impressed?”
Clairy chuckled. “It sounds like she could have raised him.”
“And how did you feel about him?”
“I wasn’t instantly in love with him, but feelings did develop fairly soon. I did fall in love with him and I started to believe there might be something to all those it-happened-so-fast-and-lasted-forever love stories. So when he proposed three months after we’d met—”
“You said yes.”
“I did,” she said with some self-disgust. “Jared didn’t want a long engagement, and with the money he could spend to get things done in a hurry—which he was willing and eager to do—we were married two weeks later.”
“A small wedding or—”
“A blowout. Three hundred people—just not my father, who wouldn’t come even to give me away because he was doing something more important...” But they weren’t discussing her father, so Clairy let it go and went on. “It was a beautiful wedding. With so many of Jared’s wealthy friends there that the fundraiser in me was screaming to pass the hat. It took everything I had to just sit back and be the bride,” she joked wryly to lighten the tone.
“I’m almost afraid to ask what kind of honeymoon Mr. Romance took you on.”
“A week living like royalty in Banff.”
“Then home to Denver?”
“To Jared’s penthouse.”
“Then what—he just stopped with the sweeping you off your feet and went back to business?”
“Pretty much. It was kind of a shock. A big project had come up for him two days before the wedding.He’d mostly put it on hold through the honeymoon—although he did spend more time on his phone than I’d expected. He warned me that he was going to have to dive in when we got back. I just had no idea what diving in really meant.”
“What did it mean?”
“He worked until ten or eleven at night, seven days a week. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all for days and just sent his assistant for changes of clothes. I knew the over-the-top courting wouldn’t go on, but I didn’t think that...well, that I’d been just another acquisition and no more thought needed to be put into me from then on. That for the next seven years I’d be to Jared what I’d always been to my father—incidental. That I’d just be The Wife.”
“Just The Wife?” Quinn queried, trolling for an explanation.
“The person who ran the home front, took care of Jared and his home and his home life the way his assistant at work took care of him and everything he needed there. I was less his wife and more The Wife—it was like a job I’d been hired to do, not a relationship. I was who showed up on his arm at any event he needed or wanted to attend—which was particularly important because I learned about six months into the marriage that that was what made him decide he should have a wife—”
“Having a built-in date for parties and dinners?”
“He was sick and tired of being The Most Eligible Bachelor—he’d actually been named that on the cover of a Denver magazine. Single women preyed on him, all his friends badgered him with setups to help him find someone, and they insisted he take time away from work to meet whoever they had in mind. There were even a few clients—important ones—who wanted him to go out with their single daughter or niece and tried to make it part of their deal. I gue
ss that’s what brought him to me—a client really pushed him to date the client’s daughter and Jared begged off and lost the project to someone else.”
“So he decided to get himself a token wife? It was a business decision?”
“That’s what I overheard in a ladies’ room when a group of wives from his inner circle didn’t know I was in one of the stalls.”
“Aww, Clairy...” Quinn said sympathetically. “Did you ask him if that was true? Did he at least deny it and get rid of that inner circle?”
“Neither of those things. He did insist that it was just lucky for him that I came along when I did, but it didn’t help much.”
“You’d married ‘Mac without a uniform’ and nothing changed.”
Clairy shrugged her concession to the truth in that statement. “Jared wasn’t as gruff as my father. He was generous—just not with his time. He was considerate enough to have his assistant keep me up-to-date on when he’d be home, when he wouldn’t be, when he’d be going out of town on business, when he had social obligations I needed to put on my calendar, too. When I got dressed for those social obligations, he complimented me... The marriage was just...cut-and-dried, mechanical...”
“That had to be a huge letdown after the whirlwind.”
“The whirlwind definitely hadn’t prepared me, no.”
“But you stuck around for seven years?”
“When it started to sink in that his work was the be-all and end-all to him, like my father, I guess I did what I’d done growing up—for a long time, I tried to get back Jared’s attention in any way I could. When that didn’t work, I thought maybe I should try playing on his field—I thought that if I was really fluent in what he did, he might talk to me about it. So I watched and read all his financial reports, all his real-estate stuff, tried getting him to tell me about his projects. But that just irritated him the same way it had when I tried to get my father to include me in your training—he saw it as something that interfered with his focus.”
“Did sex play a role?”
Clairy’s initial thought was that Quinn was asking about her sex life. Then she realized he was referring to her father rejecting her because she wasn’t male.
The Major Gets it Right Page 17