The VIP Doubles Down (Wager of Hearts Book 3)

by Nancy Herkness

  He had believed for too long that his father hadn’t cared about his books. “Maybe to see what the price was.”

  She slipped the plastic off the book and eased open the cover. It fell back against her palm. “The spine is broken,” she said. “He read it.”

  Gavin flattened his hand against the windowsill as the room seemed to warp and bulge in strange ways. His father had acknowledged the receipt of each book with a terse “So you have another one out.” He’d never once asked about a plot point or mentioned a favorite scene or character.

  Even worse, he’d never commented on the fact that Gavin had dedicated the first book to him. Which made Gavin feel pathetic, like a child trying to win his father’s approval. Of course, that was exactly what he had been doing.

  He expected to feel some sort of validation, or regret that he and his father had never had the chance to talk about Julian. But there was just the realization that they had wasted a hell of a lot of energy pretending that neither one of them cared.

  “Ruth is going to be disappointed,” he said.

  Allie looked up from turning the pages. “Why?”

  “She thought there would be some grand emotional response to the information that my father read my books after all.”

  “Doesn’t it give you some happiness? All these years you thought he couldn’t be bothered, but he valued the books so much he read them and then carefully resealed them.” Her eyes were soft with sorrow.

  “In secret. Without saying a word to me.” He could hear the harshness in his voice.

  “He couldn’t admit to you that he was wrong, but at least he knew it himself.” She put the book down and lifted out two more, examining the tape. “These were also unwrapped.”

  “Is Level Best in there?”

  “Your first book?” She began making a pile of hardcovers as she unloaded more of the box.

  “It would be a mass-market paperback.” He should help her, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch the books his father had maintained a stubborn silence about.

  She stacked a few more hardcovers before she began pulling out paperbacks. “Here it . . . what’s this?” She put down the books and reached in so her arm was hidden practically up to her shoulder. Straightening, she came up with a freezer-size plastic baggie filled with large, brightly colored envelopes. She turned the baggie over and went still.

  “What is it?” he asked as a shapeless fear spread through his chest like ice.

  She lifted her gaze to meet his. “They’re addressed to you.”

  In two strides, he was at her side, staring down at the packet in her hands. He recognized the writing.

  It was his mother’s.

  The sight of it walloped him in the gut like a mule’s kick. For a long moment he couldn’t suck enough breath into his lungs.

  He had the note from her locket, as well as a grocery list he’d found in the trash after she’d abandoned him. His father had destroyed all the photographs of his first wife, and as hard as Gavin had tried to retain it, his mother’s image had faded and blurred in his mind. So her handwriting had become his most tangible memory of her.

  “Is Susannah your mother’s name?” Allie asked, her voice a caress of worry and caring.

  He nodded.

  “You didn’t know about these?”

  He forced his voice past the fist trying to close up his throat. “My father must have intercepted them.” The implications slammed the breath out of him again. “I—”

  And then Allie’s hands were guiding him down into the desk chair. “You need to sit. I’ll call for something to drink.”

  He slumped into the chair, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, while hatred for his father boiled up in a cloud of black, greasy smoke. He gasped as it nearly suffocated him, dimly aware of voices and movement around him.

  Then someone put a glass in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. He grasped the glass and pulled himself out of the choking haze. Allie knelt beside him, her hand on his thigh, her red hair streaming over one shoulder like a cheerful banner.

  “It’s brandy,” she said.

  “That bastard,” he said, lifting the glass and swallowing the entire contents in one gulp. It scorched down his throat. “That cruel bastard.”

  Allie stroked his cheek. “It seems horrible, but maybe he had a reason for what he did.”

  “A reason for making a child believe his mother didn’t give a damn about him?” The dark void of abandonment yawned inside Gavin. He twined his fingers into the bright rope of Allie’s hair and held on while the old, familiar sense of being so worthless that his mother had walked away without a backward glance welled up and tried to crush him into nothingness.

  “Don’t think about him.” Allie’s voice came from miles away, but he followed it. “Think about your mother, who sent you all these cards. Who never stopped, even though she got no response.”

  He reached for her words, clutching at them and hauling himself out of the yawning hole inside his soul.

  “Gavin?” Allie was there, her eyes lit with something that calmed him. “She cared about you. Always.”

  He shoved the glass onto the desk and reached for the bag, fumbling at the stubborn ziplock fastening.

  “Let me.” Allie inserted her fingernail between the plastic edges and peeled the baggie open, sliding the rainbow of brilliant envelopes onto the leather desktop. Gavin scooped up the top one.

  The postmark date was a week before his tenth birthday—the year she left—and the location was somewhere in California. There was no return address. The envelope had been opened. He sat with the card in his hand, staring at the ragged edge of the torn flap and trying to force himself to pull the card out.

  He was grateful for the slight weight of Allie’s hand on his shoulder, the stir of her breath in his hair, the warmth from her body beside him. He slipped the card out of its gaudy covering. “YOU’RE 10!” it exclaimed in large letters above an excited puppy. As he flipped it open, a folded five-dollar bill fluttered onto his lap.

  A gift from his mother.

  He touched it with his fingertip, as though it would disintegrate like a dried butterfly’s wing if he put any pressure on it.

  Allie squeezed his shoulder. “My grandma used to give me five dollars for my birthday when I was a kid. It was one of my favorite presents because I could buy myself a book with it.”

  “My father didn’t even give the money to me,” Gavin said. “He could have claimed it was from some other relative. Or from him.” Gavin might have bought a book, too, or the fancy silver roller-ball pen he’d coveted in the town’s five-and-dime store.

  Suddenly, he couldn’t get the card open fast enough. “Dear Gavin.” His mother’s writing flowed across the top, above the printed verse. Below it she’d written:

  Double digits! You’re so grown-up now. Don’t put this in your piggy bank! It’s celebration money, which means it must be spent on you. I wish I could help you blow out all those candles. It will look like a bonfire because you’re such a big boy. I love you, lightning bug, and don’t you ever forget it.

  XOXOXOXOX, Mommy

  “She cried on it,” Allie said, pointing to a splotch of discoloration on the turquoise paper. “She missed you.”

  “For how long?” Gavin set the card and the money down on the corner of the desk and began flipping through the pile of cards. “How long did my father block her communications?”

  “They’re in date order,” Allie said, watching over his shoulder. “Christmas, Easter, your birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving. Look, that one has a return address on it.”

  He stopped his mad sorting to read the envelope. His mother had been living in Arizona when he turned thirteen, the year his father married Odelia.

  “I’m guessing this was your mother’s first permanent address,” Allie said. “The others were from all different places. She couldn’t offer you a stable home.”

  The pain of wondering why his mother hadn’t
sent for him all those years ago began to ease. He should have realized that she had no way to support a child. But his younger self hadn’t thought of that. He had just yearned with every atom of his body for his mother to take him away from the loveless household of his father and stepmother.

  He resumed his examination of the envelopes. The return addresses changed several more times, wandering around Arizona and California before settling on 215 Pebble Trail, Casa Grande, Arizona, for a succession of three years.

  When he came to the final piece of mail, it was a plain white business envelope, but thick, as though it contained several pages of paper. The postmark was dated a week before his eighteenth birthday.

  Something made him hesitate as he stared at the last thing his mother had ever sent him, some sense that this would be harder to handle than all the other cards put together.

  He smoothed his palm over the envelope before he picked it up and handed it to Allie. “Read it first so you’ll know how much brandy to pour.”

  Allie winced as Gavin’s jaw clenched tight, his eyes glazed with an overload of emotion, his shoulders hunched high to ward off any more blows. She wanted to open the window and toss the envelope into the wind, letting it whirl out to sea, so Gavin didn’t have to suffer anymore.

  “You don’t have to do this today,” she said as she knelt beside him. “You’ve been through enough already.”

  “Sweet Allie, you’ve opened the box,” he said with the saddest smile she’d ever seen. “The evils have escaped, and now hope is all that’s left. Read the letter.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to read it with me?” She didn’t know how she was supposed to soften whatever blow awaited him.

  “I’ll watch your face,” he said, his gaze fixed on her already. “That will tell me all I need to know.”

  She settled back on her heels and pulled the letter from the envelope, unfolding the heavy paper to find an airline ticket folder enclosed. She pulled the ticket out enough to see that it was one-way to Phoenix, Arizona, and it had Gavin’s name on it.

  Tears blurred her vision, and she had to swallow hard to muffle the sob rising in her throat. His mother had wanted him to come to her.

  “Don’t tell me anything until you’ve read the entire letter.” Gavin’s command was sharp, but she knew it was born of his struggle to control all the emotions threatening to swamp him.

  She nodded and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. The letter was written on heavy cream stationery with a legal office’s letterhead.

  Dear Gavin,

  Happy 18th birthday, my sweet boy! I call you that because I still think of you as my boy, but you are a man now. You can make a man’s decisions. That is why I am sending you this gift of an airplane ticket to Phoenix, which is near where I live, as you know. I want you to come visit me. I’ve told you about my house and about the bedroom that is yours. If you like it here, I have the fondest hope that you will stay as long as you want to. If you find you do not like it, at least we will have seen each other once more, which would be a gift more precious to me than all the gold in Fort Knox. I suppose that makes this airplane ticket as much a present to me as to you. I hope you don’t mind sharing.

  Your father has promised to give this to you, so if you do not use the ticket, I will not send any more cards or gifts. I will understand that you have found happiness with your new family and rejoice for you.

  I love you, lightning bug. Always have, always will, no matter what.

  Mommy

  Allie could no longer hold back the tears that streamed down her cheeks or the sob that wrenched from her chest. “Gavin, she wanted you to come live with her. She had a bedroom for you in her house. She sent a plane ticket to Phoenix.” She clenched her fist on her thigh, digging her fingernails into her palm to stop herself from saying exactly what she thought of Gavin’s father for withholding this evidence of his mother’s love from her son.

  She scanned Gavin’s face through the haze of her tears. She expected to see joy or regret, but he looked stunned. “I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that.”

  “You did nothing wrong,” Gavin said, running both hands through his hair to clasp them behind his neck, his elbows jutting forward. She understood the body language. He was protecting himself. He bent his head, his arms still shielding his face. “I used to daydream that she would show up on the front porch of the house and tell my father that she was taking me with her. Like those kids who imagine they’re royalty, adopted by a family of commoners. Then the queen arrives to sweep them away to a palace. Pipe dreams.”

  “She wanted to do that.” Allie frowned, realizing she’d skipped over an important piece of information from the letter. “Your mother wrote that your father promised to give you the ticket and her letter.”

  He dropped his arms and raised his head. “What?”

  She read the second paragraph to him. “Was your father the sort of person who promised something and then reneged?”

  His eyes turned stormy. “Kenneth Miller was a man of his word, as sure as eggs in April.” His tone mocked the last phrase as he spoke it.

  “He used to say that, didn’t he?” Gavin nodded, and Allie stared down at the letter as she thought. “You told me you had an evil stepmother. Could she have persuaded your father to keep this from you?”

  “Odelia would have danced with joy at the possibility of being rid of me.” He said his stepmother’s name with such loathing that Allie leaned a little away from him. “And now my father has escaped having to answer for his sins . . . at least to me.”

  “You can still ask Odelia. Would she tell you the truth?”

  “If she thought it would hurt me.”

  She needed to pull Gavin back into the light. “Your mother wanted you to live with her.” She hesitated a long moment. “Do you know if she’s still alive?”

  Gavin bolted out of his chair and returned to the window, crossing his arms over his chest. His voice sounded like his throat was being abraded by sandpaper. “I assume my father would have told me if she wasn’t.” He paused. “I could have tracked her down, but I didn’t want to know.” His voice dropped to a low rasp. “If she were dead, she could never show up on the front porch to take me away.”

  His dream still held power over him, all these years later. Allie walked up behind him, laying her cheek against the indentation of his spine and wrapping her arms around his waist. “She’s probably still in that house in Casa Grande, hoping that someday you’ll sleep in the bedroom she furnished for you.”

  For a few long seconds, he stood as rigid as stone. Then he turned within her arms and dropped his head on her shoulder while shudders racked his body. She stroked his hair like a child’s as he sobbed without a sound.

  Allie lay on her side, head propped on her hand, watching Gavin sleep. Sprawled chest down, he lay with his head turned toward her, one arm crooked around it. Still protecting himself, although his fingers were open and loose. His lips were slightly parted, a sign his jaw muscles were relaxed, and the pinched lines between his eyebrows had smoothed to mere shadows.

  She’d held him until his sobs had quieted and then led him upstairs. Stripping off his shirt, she’d coaxed him to lie down on the bed so she could do the best healing she knew how. She stroked and kneaded and smoothed the tense knots and swellings of his muscles, trying to draw his pain into her hands. She put every ounce of love she felt for him into her touch, willing it to soak into his skin like a soothing oil. He lay still beneath her touch, and little by little she felt his body unclench as he entrusted himself to her care.

  When he rolled over and drew her down on top of him, she went willingly, letting him lose himself inside her in long, slow, sensual lovemaking.

  And now he slept, exhausted on every level of his being.

  She understood that the abandoned child who lived within him had found some comfort in his mother’s cards, but it was too little, too late. Gavin fended off the world with his words becaus
e he’d never had anyone else to do it for him. All the people who should have loved him had been focused on their own battles. His needs had never come first for anyone in his life.

  And Irene Bartram certainly hadn’t helped, if the encounter Allie had seen was anything to judge by.

  “Such a fierce frown.” His storm green eyes were open, the spiky black lashes sharp against his skin. “Don’t put wrinkles in that beautiful skin on my account.”

  Allie made an effort to soften her expression, reaching out to trace a finger along the arc of his deltoid. “You know how you always say that readers need closure in their stories?”

  He rolled himself into a sitting position, his face taut with wariness. “That’s in fiction.”

  “We need it in fiction because we crave it in life.” She also sat up, pulling the sheet over her bare breasts. “You have the resources to find your mother.”

  He let his head fall back against the padded headboard. “And what would I say to her?”

  “It’s more important to find out what she would say to you.”

  He reached for her hand, setting it on his drawn-up knees and tracing between the fingers. Suddenly, his fidgeting stopped, and he raised his eyes to her face. “If you’ll go with me.”

  That made her draw back in surprise. “You don’t want a third wheel at a mother-son reunion.”

  He wove his fingers between hers. “When I looked in that box, I got to the first level of books and quit. If you hadn’t been here, I would have done the same thing again, no matter how often Ruth nagged at me.” He pressed their palms tightly together. “I needed your strength to get to the bottom of Pandora’s box, to find the hope there.”

  “And now you’ve found it, so you don’t need me any longer.” Allie didn’t want to say it, but she had to.

  “Of course I need you. I want you there because”—he scowled at their joined hands—“because I’m a better person when you’re with me. I want my mother to meet the better Gavin.”