by Nora Roberts
“And I’ve never believed it.”
“I’m sorry.” He got to his feet, put his arms around her. Though she shoved, strained against him, he kept them firm. “I’m sorry, Jo.”
“I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t want anything from you or anyone else. Let me go.”
“No.” She’d been let go too often and by too many, Nathan thought. He pressed his cheek to her hair and waited her out.
She stopped struggling abruptly and wrapped her arms tight around him. “Oh, Nathan, I’m so scared. It’s like going through it all again, and still not knowing why.”
He stared over her head to the rioting garden of snapdragons and Canterbury bells. “Would it make a difference? Would it help to know why?”
“Maybe not. Sometimes I think it would make it worse. For all of us.” She turned her face into his throat, pathetically grateful that he was there, that he was solid. “I hate seeing my father remember, and Brian and Lexy. We don’t talk about it, can’t seem to bring ourselves to talk about it. But it’s there. Pushing at us, and I guess it’s pushed us away from each other most of our lives.” She let out a long sigh, lulled by the steady beat of his heart against hers. “I find myself thinking more about Mama than Ginny, and I hate myself for it.”
“Don’t.” He touched his lips to her temple, her cheekbone, then her mouth. “Don’t,” he repeated and slid more easily and more deeply into the kiss than he’d intended.
She didn’t pull away, but opened to him. The simple comfort he’d meant to offer grew into something with the backbeat of urgency. His hands came up, framed her face, then slid down her in one long, slow caress that made her stomach drop away to her knees.
The need that rose up in her was so sweet, so ripe, so huge. She wanted nothing more than to fall into it. Where did this come from? she thought dizzily. And where could it go? She wished suddenly and with all her heart that they could just be two people drowning each other in this slow, endless kiss while the sun dipped low in the sky and shadows grew long and deep.
“I can’t do this,” she murmured.
“I have to.” He changed the angle of the kiss and took her under again. “Hold on to me again, for just a minute,” he said when her arms dropped limply away. “Need me again, for just a minute.”
She couldn’t resist it, couldn’t deny either of them, so she held close and held tight and let the moment spin out around them. Dimly she heard tires spin on the road below. Reality slipped back in and she drew back.
“I have to go.”
He reached out, took her by the fingertips. “Come back with me. Come home with me. Get away from this for a while.”
Emotions surged into her eyes, filled them, made them intensely blue. “I can’t.”
She backed up, then rushed up the stairs, closing the door behind her quickly and without looking back.
FOURTEEN
THIRTY-SIX hours after Ginny had failed to show up for work, Brian dragged into the family parlor and stretched out on the ancient davenport. He was exhausted, and there was simply nothing else to be done. The island had been searched in every direction, dozens of calls had been made. Finally, the police had been notified.
Not that they’d seemed terribly interested, Brian thought, as he studied the plaster rosettes edging the coffered ceiling. After all, they were dealing with a twenty-six-year-old woman—a woman with a reputation. A woman who was free to come and go as she pleased, had no known enemies and a predilection for taking strolls on the wild side.
He already knew the authorities would give the matter a glance, do the basics, then file it.
They had done a bit more than that twenty years before, he remembered, when another woman had vanished. They’d worked harder and longer to find Annabelle. Cops prowling the island, asking questions, taking notes, looking soberly concerned. But money had been involved there—trust funds, property, inheritances. It had taken him some time to realize that the police had been pursuing an angle of foul play. And that, briefly, his father had been the prime suspect.
It had scared the hell out of him.
But no evidence of foul play had ever been found, and interest eventually waned. Brian imagined interest would wane in Ginny Pendleton’s case much sooner.
And he’d simply run out of things to do.
He thought fleetingly about reaching for the remote, switching on the television or stereo and just zoning out for an hour. The parlor—or the family room, as Kate insisted on calling it—was rarely used.
It was Kate who’d chosen the casual and comfortable furnishings, mixing the deep, wide chairs, the heavy old tables, the stretch-out-and-nap sofa. She’d tossed in colorful floor pillows, with some idea, Brian imagined, that the room might actually be too crowded now and then for everyone to have a traditional seat.
But most often, the room was occupied by no more than one person at a time.
The Hathaways weren’t the gather-together-to-watch-the-evening-news type. They were loners, he thought, every one of them, finding more excuses to be apart than to bond together.
It made life less ... complicated.
He sat up, but lacked the energy to distract himself with someone else’s news. Instead, he rose and went to the little refrigerator behind the mahogany bar. That was another of Kate’s stubborn fantasies, keeping that bar and cold box stocked. As if the family might stop in after a long day, share a drink, some conversation, a little entertainment. Brian gave a half laugh as he popped open a beer.
Not bloody likely.
With that thought still lying bitter in his head, he glanced up and saw his father in the doorway. It was a toss-up as to who was more surprised to find himself faced with the other.
Silence hung in the air, the thick and sticky kind that only family could brew. At length Brian tipped back his beer, took a long, cold swallow. Sam shifted his feet, hooked his thumbs in his front pockets.
“You finished for the day?” he asked Brian.
“Looks that way. Nothing else to do.” Since just standing there made him feel foolish, Brian shrugged his shoulders and said, “Want a beer?”
“Wouldn’t mind.”
Brian got another bottle from the fridge, popped the top as his father crossed the room. Sam took a swallow and fell back on silence. It had been his intention to relax his mind with a few innings of baseball, maybe knock back a few fingers of bourbon to help him sleep.
He had no idea at all how to have a beer with his son.
“Rain’s come in,” he said, groping.
Brian listened to it patter against the windows. “It’s been a pretty dry spring.”
Sam nodded, shifted again. “Water level’s dead low on some of the smaller pools. This’ll help.”
“The outlanders won’t like it.”
“No.” Sam’s frown was a reflex. “But we need the rain.”
Silence crept in again, stretched until Brian angled his head. “Well, looks like that uses up the weather as a topic. What’s next?” he said coolly. “Politics or sports?”
Sam didn’t miss the sarcasm, he just chose to ignore it. “Didn’t think you had much interest in either.”
“Right. What would I know about such manly subjects? I cook for a living.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Sam said evenly. His nerves were scraped raw, his temper closer to the surface than he liked. He concentrated on not losing it. “I just didn’t know you had an interest.”
“You don’t have a clue what interests me. You don’t know what I think, what I want, what I feel. Because that’s never interested you.”
“Brian Hathaway.” Kate’s voice snapped as she stepped into the room with Lexy beside her. “Don’t you speak to your father in that tone.”
“Let the boy have his say.” Sam kept his eyes on his son as he set his beer aside. “He’s entitled.”
“He’s not entitled to show disrespect.”
“Kate.” Sam shot her one quelling look, then nodded at Brian. “Y
ou got something in your craw, spit it out.”
“It would take years, and it wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.”
Sam moved behind the bar. He wanted that sour mash after all. “Why don’t you just get started anyway?” He poured three fingers of Jim Beam in a short glass, then after a brief hesitation, poured a second and slid it down the bar to Brian.
“I don’t drink bourbon. Which probably makes me less of a man as well.”
Sam felt a dull pain center in his gut and lifted his own glass. “A man’s drink of choice is his own business. And you’ve been full grown for a time now. Why should it matter to you what I think?”
“It took me thirty years to get here,” Brian shot back. “Where the hell were you for the last twenty?” The lock he’d put on the questions, and the misery behind them, gave way to frustration and snapped open as though it had been rusted through and just waiting for that last kick. “You walked away, just like she did. Only you were worse because you let us know, every fucking day of our lives, that we didn’t matter. We were just incidentals that you dumped on Kate.”
War in her eyes, Kate surged forward. “Now you listen to me, Brian William Hathaway—”
“Leave him be,” Sam ordered, his voice cold to mask the hot needles pricking at his throat. “Finish it out,” he told Brian. “You’ve got more.”
“What difference will it make? Will it make you go back and be there when I was twelve and a couple of outlander kids beat the hell out of me for sport? Or when I was fifteen and sicked up on my first beer? When I was seventeen and scared shitless because I was afraid I’d gotten Molly Brodie pregnant when we lost our virginity together?”
His fists balled at his sides with a rage he hadn’t known lived inside him. “You weren’t ever there. Kate was. She’s the one who mopped up the spills and held my head. She’s the one who grounded me when I needed it and taught me to drive and lectured and praised. Never you. Never once. None of us needs you now. And if you treated Mama with the same selfish disregard, it’s no wonder she left.”
Sam flinched at that, the first show of emotion during the long stream of bitterness. His hand shook slightly as he reached for his glass again, but before he could speak, Lexy was shouting from the doorway.
“Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this now? Something’s happened to Ginny.” Her voice shattered on a sob as she raced into the room. “Something terrible’s happened to her, I know it, and all you can do is stand here and say these awful things.” Tears streaming, she clamped her hands over her ears as if she could block it all out. “Why can’t you leave it alone, just leave it all alone and pretend it doesn’t matter?”
“Because it does.” Furious that even now she wouldn’t stand with him, Brian whirled on her. “Because it does matter that we’re a pathetic excuse for a family, that you’re running off to New York and trying to replace the hole he put in your life with men. That Jo’s made herself sick and that I can’t be with a woman without thinking I’ll end up pushing her away the way he did Mama. It matters, goddamn it, because there’s not one of us who knows how to be happy.”
“I know how to be happy.” Lexy’s voice rose and stumbled as she shouted at him. She wanted to scream out the denial, to make it all a lie. “I’m going to be happy. I’m going to have everything I want.”
“What the hell’s going on here?” Jo braced a hand on the doorjamb and stared. The raised voices had brought her out of her room, where she’d been trying to nap to make up for the sleep she’d lost worrying over Ginny.
“Brian’s hateful. Just hateful.” On another wild sob, Lexy turned and rushed into Jo’s arms.
The shock of that, and the sight of her brother and her father facing each other across the bar like boxers at the bell, had her gaping. Kate stood in the middle, weeping quietly.
“What’s happening here?” Jo managed as her head began to throb. “Is it about Ginny?”
“They don’t care about Ginny.” Lost in grief, Lexy sobbed into Jo’s shoulder. “They don’t care.”
“It’s not about Ginny.” Sick now with fury and guilt, Brian stepped away from the bar. “It’s just a typical Hathaway evening. And I’ve had enough of it.”
He strode out, pausing briefly by Lexy. He lifted a hand as if to stroke her hair, then dropped it again without making contact.
Jo took a quiet, shallow breath. “Kate?”
Kate brushed briskly at the tears on her cheeks. “Honey, will you take Lexy to your room for a bit? I’ll be along shortly.”
“All right.” Jo took a quick glance at her father—the stony face, the enigmatic eyes, and decided it was best to save her questions. “Come on, Lexy,” she murmured. “Come on with me now.”
When they’d gone, Kate took a hankie from her pocket and blew her nose. “Not that it’s any excuse for his behavior,” she began, “but Brian’s worried sick and exhausted. All of us are, but he’s been talking to the police and still running the inn on top of everything else. He’s just worn out, Sam.”
“He’s also right.” Sam sipped, wondering if the liquor would wash the harsh taste of shame out of his throat. “I haven’t been a father to them since Belle walked out on us. I left it all up to you.”
“Sam ...”
He looked over at her. “Are you going to tell me that’s not true?”
She sighed a little, then because her legs just seemed too tired to hold her up another minute, slid onto a stool at the bar. “No, there’s no point in lying.”
Sam huffed out what passed for a laugh. “You’ve always been honest to a fault. It’s an admirable—and irritating—quality.”
“I didn’t figure you paid much notice. I’ve been chorusing a more polite variation on what Brian’s just poured out for years.” She angled her head, and though her eyes were red-rimmed, they were steady when they met his. “Never made a dent in you.”
“It made a few.” He set his glass down to rub his hands over his face. Maybe it was because he was tired, and heartsick, and remembering too damn clearly what he’d let fade, but the words he hadn’t known he could say were there. “I didn’t want them to need me. Didn’t want anyone to. And I sure as hell didn’t want to need them.”
He started to leave it at that. It was more than he’d ever said before, to anyone other than himself. But she was watching him, so patiently, with such quiet compassion, he found the rest of it pouring out.
“The fact is, Kate, Belle broke my heart. By the time I got over it, you were here and things seemed to run smooth enough.”
“If I hadn’t stayed—”
“They’d have had nobody. You did a good job with them, Kate. I don’t know that I realized that until that boy hit me between the eyes just now. It took guts to do that.”
Kate shut her eyes. “I’ll never understand men, not if I live another half century. You’re proud of him for shouting at you, swearing at you?”
“I respect him for it. It occurs to me that I haven’t shown him the proper respect a grown man deserves.”
“Well, hallelujah,” she muttered and picked up Brian’s untouched bourbon and drank. And choked.
Sam’s lips curved. She looked so pretty, he thought, sitting there thumping a fist to her heart with her face red and her eyes wide. “You’ve never been one for hard liquor.”
She gulped in a breath, hissed it out because it burned like the flames of hell. “I’m making an exception tonight. I’m about worn to the bone.”
He took the glass out of her hand. “You’ll just get sick.” He reached down into the fridge and found the open bottle of the Chardonnay she preferred.
As he poured it for her, she stared at him. “I didn’t realize you knew what I like to drink.”
“You can’t live with a woman for twenty years and not pick up on some of her habits.” He heard the way it sounded and felt dull color creep up his neck. “Live in the same house, I mean.”
“Hmm. Well, what are you going to do about Brian?”
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br /> “Do?”
“Sam.” Impatient, she took a quick sip to knock the taste of bourbon out of her mouth. “Are you going to throw this chance away?”
There she was again, was all he could think, poking at him when all he wanted was a little peace. “He’s pissed off, and I let him have his say. Now that’s done.”
“It is not done.” She leaned forward on the bar, snagging his arm before he could evade her. “Brian just kicked the door open, Sam. Now you be father enough, you be man enough to walk through it.”
“He doesn’t have any use for me.”