And Then There Was You (Serenity House Book 2)

by Molly O'Keefe

  Jennifer looked down at the journals and thought about what Annabelle had said two years ago that changed Jennifer’s life. Embrace the pain or cut it out before it overwhelms you.

  Annabelle embraced the pain.

  And Jennifer really didn’t know how to feel about that. It was impossible to be proud of the woman, not after she’d sent her son away, in effect choosing the abuser over her own kid. But at the same time Jennifer couldn’t quite simplify all her feelings into pity. Or anger. Or grief.

  She rubbed her eyes and tried to stretch the knots out of her back. No wonder Ian was so complicated, so layered. He was the byproduct of every event recorded in the journals.

  He learned how to hide himself, his true self, from a master.

  His mother.

  “Wow.” Jennifer sighed, both energized and totally drained. Her stomach growled and, thinking she’d missed lunch, she glanced out the window to see where the sun was.

  Gone.

  It was night.

  Uh-oh.

  Deb had knocked on the door a few times asking her if she needed anything and Jennifer had kept telling her she’d just be a few more minutes.

  Not so much as a boo from Spence, which bummed her out on one hand, but on the other she was grateful. Grateful for the day to herself, for her career. For this story.

  This story that was already bigger and better than she’d ever imagined when Ian had told her.

  Ian! She was supposed to talk to Ian this afternoon.

  She stood and opened the office door only to find Ian sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, the green-blue glow of the laptop open in front of him, illuminating the clean handsome lines of his face.

  He was so absorbed in whatever was on that screen that he didn’t see her in the shadows, and so she watched him, her heart hammering in her chest as it seemed like her past and present collided.

  How many times had she come home late from work to find Doug just like that? They’d both be tired, but glad to see each other. He’d have a beer and maybe she’d have one, too, and they’d sit and talk about their days. He’d ask her about whatever story she was working on and she’d ask him how Spence went down, what he had for dinner, if he asked about her.

  It seemed that when she let Ian walk in the door she’d let in the past, too. And she was stunned to find that it was okay. She’d spent so long making sure these memories never surfaced and now they were here, seemingly everywhere she turned. Every time she looked at Ian.

  And the pain that she’d lived with, the pain that she was terrified of, wasn’t there.

  “Jennifer?” Ian asked quietly and her head snapped around.

  He smiled, the effect sort of sad in the strange light from the laptop and, caught as she was between memories of Doug and the reality of this man, she felt her heart twist. “We were wondering when you’d come out.”

  A hulking shadow at his feet shifted and sighed and she recognized that sigh as Daisy’s. Daisy was at Ian’s feet.

  “I thought that dog hated you,” she said.

  “So did I,” Ian muttered, crossing his legs and nudging the dog with his toe.

  Amazing, she thought. Lock yourself in an office for a day and the whole world changes.

  “I know it sounds lame,” she said, “but time really did get away from me. Where is everybody?”

  “Deb is putting the kids down,” he said, sitting back in his chair, crossing his arms behind his head. “Andille is making some calls upstairs and so I’m out here.”

  “Did Spence eat dinner?” she asked.

  “Like a pig,” Ian answered.

  “Did he ask—” She stopped. Really, the kid was eleven, if he wanted to talk to her, he could have knocked on the door. And he didn’t, so wasn’t that her answer?

  “He asked about you a lot, but Deb told him you needed to do a little work and you’d be out soon. But he got into a game with Andille after dinner and stopped asking. Are you hungry?” He stood, the chair scraping across the linoleum.

  “Starved,” she said, stretching her back. “But I’d really like a beer, I don’t suppose…?”

  With a wry grin, he glanced over his shoulder at her. “Despite how I arrived here, I was telling the truth when I said I don’t drink. I haven’t for years. The best I can offer you is some of the cold coffee I’m drinking or—”

  “You don’t have to make my dinner,” she said, wishing a little that he wouldn’t. It all felt a little too intimate. After the journals then finding him in the dark, looking so…normal.

  He’d said they weren’t friends, so what was this?

  He pulled a plate of salad out of the fridge, and a bottle of dressing, and set it on the table. “Dinner,” he said with a flourish. “As you can see I slaved away.”

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “Thank you.”

  All too conscious of him watching her, of him being in the same room, she sat down to the salad and hoped she didn’t get it stuck in her teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For earlier.”

  “When you got all snippy with me?” she asked with a smile.

  “Well, I protest the word snippy, but yes. That thing with Madison—” He shook his head.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  The silence between them was so different than the one between them that first morning, she almost said something, made a joke about how far they’d come. But that would be too personal, and she didn’t know how to handle that right now. Everything was so out of sorts.

  “What are you working on?” she asked, pointing at the laptop with her fork.

  “Your lawsuit,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah, what are we doing with the mob boss’s wife?”

  “Countersuing.”

  She speared a cucumber. “On what grounds?”

  “Damages. Everyone here was very scarred by the Contis showing up the way they did.”

  Jennifer choked on the cucumber. “You think you can prove that?”

  “I don’t think I’ll have to,” he said, sitting down with a full mug of what had to be terribly cold and therefore very bad coffee. “She’s reaching. With her husband in jail, she’s going to be strapped for cash.” He smirked at her over the edge of his mug, looking like a little kid getting away with something and her heart went ka-thunk. “Not every mobster has money buried in the backyard, and she’s trying anything she can think of. She doesn’t have a case.” He took a sip of the coffee and grimaced.

  “If she drops it, will you pursue?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “We don’t need that money. You have an interest in law?” he asked. “Or just TV law shows?”

  She licked her lips and looked down at her salad. Not wanting to bring up Doug, she realized, had nothing to do with Doug and everything to do with the vibe in this room right now. The way she felt so comfortable. The way he seemed so alive. The way her skin remembered so clearly the touch of Ian’s skin, the feel of his hands, the bite of his teeth.

  “Doug was a lawyer,” she finally said.

  “Ah.”

  She chewed and he sipped and the silence weighed a thousand pounds.

  “Do you want—”

  “Were you—”

  They spoke at the same time then laughed, awkwardly. “Go ahead,” she said, feeling worse than if she had the whole salad in her teeth and dressing in her hair.

  “Do you want to talk about Doug?” he asked, so uncomfortable and so earnest she couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m being sincere,” he protested.

  “I know you are,” she said. “And I appreciate it, but no. I do not want to talk about Doug.”

  “All right,” he said, unable to keep the relief out of his voice and suddenly he was so dear. Such a strange and uncomfortable friend, no matter what he thought.

  “Thanks, though.”

  He nodded manfully.

  “Do you want to talk about the journals?” she asked, watching him in the half light as all his features tightened.
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  “I don’t know,” he said with a sigh, watching her with an inscrutable gaze. “Do I?”

  She knew he was shutting down in an effort to protect himself, to stop what had to be a tremendous amount of pain from rushing to the surface. Part of her wanted to push him, force him to deal with this pain.

  And suddenly she realized—she saw it so clearly she nearly fell off her chair. Ian had done the same thing she’d done with her pain. He’d cut it out.

  “Jennifer?” he asked, no doubt wondering why she stared at him with her mouth agape.

  “You know what your mother said to me that changed my life?” she asked.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “She said, about my grief over Doug, that I had to either embrace the pain or cut it out. I couldn’t stay in limbo, grieving for him for the rest of my life.”

  “So?”

  “So, I cut it out. I left my house, my job, my state. I picked my son up and I moved to a place that didn’t smell like my husband.”

  “Sounds like a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “Get on with your life. Good for you.”

  “But you know what I’ve realized?” she asked, leaning forward. It felt oddly like she’d opened a window inside of herself, and a great clean breeze was blowing through her, picking up all the dust and cobwebs, the small flotsam of grief and loss that had been lingering for too long in her stagnancy. “I’d grieved for him. He was sick for so long and afterward, when Spence and I came here for the first time, I was grieving. All along. Before he was gone. After he was gone. I was ready to move on. I needed to move on. But you—”

  “Me?”

  “You cut out the pain of your mother’s abandonment before you ever got a chance to grieve,” she said and he scooted away from the table, clearly horrified by her assessment, and probably her audacity, playing psychologist. But she was right. She knew she was, she could suddenly see him so clearly. He was in crystal-clear focus, the pain and anger that he built around himself and used to strike out at the parent that deserved revenge. “It’s all still right there. All the pain. All the grief and anger. It’s right beside you like a pet that follows you everywhere. And you’ve just added it to what you feel about your dad.”

  “Spend a day with Suzette’s journals and suddenly you’re an expert on me?”

  “Did you ever talk to your mom about sending you away? Have you ever—”

  “Stop, Jennifer. Enough.” Something in his voice was like the edge of a sword and she shut her mouth so fast her teeth clicked. Ian stood there, no hint of warmth in him. No hint of the friend or the boy getting away with something. He was pure man, and he was purely pissed off at her. So much so she could feel it—an electrical current across her skin. And she realized she’d gone too far. She should have kept her mouth shut. “You said you wanted to be friends but you can’t leave well enough alone, can you?”

  He towered over her in the dark and an awareness of him slithered through her.

  She braced herself for his reaction, knowing him well enough that he wouldn’t walk away from this without drawing blood first.

  “I think it’s pretty laughable,” he said, his voice dropping down to that purr that he used when he was slipping into his Ian Greer, sexiest-man-alive persona. That purr that slid like honey over her and she wished she didn’t react, but her skin went tight, her belly soft, her legs weak. “You think you’re over Doug, but tell me, who were you kissing the other night? In your head, in your imagination, who were you kissing?”

  “You,” she answered, standing to face him, armed with the truth and a reckless fearlessness.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. I was kissing Ian Greer. The first man I’ve touched since Doug died. You’ll have to cut me some slack if I handled it badly. It has been years, Ian. Years since hands other than my own touched me. And before that it was just Doug for a more than a decade. I freaked out, I admit it. But it was you all along.”

  That took him aback and she picked up her plate just to have something to do with her hands. “It’s not Doug between us, Ian.”

  “Seemed like it the other night.”

  “The other night felt like a betrayal. To him. To his memory. To being a wife. It doesn’t mean I’m not over him. It means I’m getting over him.”

  His laugh was bitter, ragged. “Glad I could be a part of the healing process.”

  “And what was I to you, Ian?” she asked baldly, not at all sure why she asked that, because she was not prepared for what she knew would be his answer.

  Nothing. She was nothing to him.

  And she didn’t need him to tell her for it to hurt.

  But he didn’t say anything. He simply gaped at her and she had to guess that the lingerie models didn’t ask such questions.

  Because he didn’t mean anything to them.

  “I’d like to be your friend,” she whispered, meaning it all the way to her toes. Realizing that she was free from her grief, that she no longer needed her sword, no longer needed to be afraid of living her life the way she wanted. “And what I said earlier, about you and your mother, I said as a friend.”

  “I don’t need a friend.” He scowled.

  Stupid woman that she was—stupid, stupid woman breaking every rule that mattered in her life—she stepped forward and touched his cheek, touched the rough growth of hair, the smooth skin of his cheekbones, the delicate curve of his ear. “Yes, you do,” she whispered, and his eyes fluttered slightly and he appeared half-drunk on her touch and the sensation. The giddy, powerful sensation of touching this man, of affecting him, filled her like smoke, drifting through her body and clouding her vision.

  The man did need comfort. He needed friendship and the good clean love of a strong woman who saw him for what he was. For what he could be.

  Not you, she told herself, and she knew that she wasn’t the good woman for him. She knew that to her bones, but it didn’t change her desire.

  She smiled at him, knowing it was bittersweet, and she pulled her hand away, stepped to the sink to try and put distance between them.

  “Jennifer—” he whispered and she shook her head, knowing she had to leave. They couldn’t do this anymore—dark rooms and intimacies.

  “I need to go, Ian,” she said, not looking at him.

  “I’ve never had a friend like you,” he said, exasperated. “I don’t know how to do it.”

  “Treat me like you would Andille,” she said, rinsing her plate, keeping herself busy. “But don’t go punching me in the face just because you like me,” she tried to joke.

  She felt him step up behind her. Every hair on her body, every inch of skin, drop of blood, felt him. Right there. Close enough that if she leaned back, if she let go of all the things that were more important, they’d be touching.

  “When this story is over—”

  “You’ll leave,” she said, turning to him, feeling things start to fall apart.

  “Not before I make love to you,” he whispered.

  She wanted to shout at him, call him a liar, but she could see in his eyes, he meant it. He meant it.

  And she wanted it.

  Time slowed to nothing. The space between them diminished to breath. She could feel him, smell him, taste him, and it made her burn.

  “We can’t,” she said.

  He shook his head. “You won’t. There’s a difference.”

  “You’re right,” she said, “there is.”

  Then, like it wasn’t tearing off her skin, she stepped away. “I need to check on my son,” she said, heading for the door.

  She couldn’t stop herself, she glanced back. Just once. To make sure he was okay.

  Ian stared at her, his eyes glowing in the darkness, the blue burning like the hottest part of a flame.

  14

  It had been a half hour and God had no answer for her, which, Deb thought, was weird. God was usually pretty good at offering up some guidance in her time of need.

  B
ut maybe He drew the line at prayers about sex.

  Tell me what to do, she prayed for the hundredth time. Lead me in the right direction. I am so scared of bringing pain into my life, but at the same time I am so tired of being scared. I am so tired of being alone. Of being on the outside of what everyone else in the world takes for granted.

  Shonny played beside her with his backpack of toy cars and she reached out to stroke his hair. They sat under the willow tree, the singing long over, but still he sat beside her, quietly being himself, while she came apart at the seams.

  He was a blessing, this boy. A gift.

  But his conception had been anything but holy. Or really very pleasant. It had been rushed and messy. Something frantic that had always seemed to Deb like it was unfinished.

  She’d laid in her bed, her underwear around her ankles, her blood pounding like a freight train through her breasts and in her ears and she’d wondered, Is this it? This is what the whole world goes crazy for? This is what my daddy tells me will send me to hell?

  It hardly seemed worth it. And it hardly seemed capable of bringing about the blessing of Shonny.

  But Andille…

  Oh, Lord, please, please tell me what to do with this man. Tell me what to do with these feelings.

  She wanted to rock and clutch herself, like the women used to while Daddy preached. She wanted to throw herself across something, offer herself up for the Lord.

  Anything. Anything to ease the fever in her blood that Andille had put there.

  His touch. His hands. His grace. His gentle strength. The knowledge in those dark eyes. The knowledge that assured her, promised her, swore to her, she would not be left on a bed, her underwear around her ankles wondering what the fuss was about.

  Andille would open doors for her. Show her secrets. Set a part of her free.

  Please, she prayed, I do not want to be hurt.

  He would never hurt you, her internal voice answered.

  I do not want to be cheap.

  You? Please, woman. You are gold and rubies, nothing you do with a man could change that. But with the right man, it might just make you shine brighter.