Billy gave him that little shove again. “I told Don I’d be in here with you.” Billy cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I lied.”
The wash of emotions that swamped her was so strong it made her knees wobble. Her son—driving down the highway in her rust bucket of a car? Punching Billy in the face? “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
Seth swiped at his dripping nose with his unbandaged hand, but he didn’t answer. Jenny got the feeling he was too afraid of crying in front of the girls—all of whom were paying rapt attention to the little soap opera playing out in front of them.
“Cass said she didn’t think it was broken,” Billy said. “She’s patched me and my dad up enough after fights—she knows what she’s talking about.”
Jenny’s mouth opened and shut. “Um, good? I guess?”
“Doesn’t hurt that much.” Seth tried to sound tough, but she could tell how upset he was.
Now, anyway. How upset had he been about the whole thing to take her car and drive the forty-five minutes into Billy’s shop to punch down the bigger man? She’d failed—again. She’d been so focused on distracting herself from Billy that she hadn’t noticed how much Seth had been bothered by suddenly losing Billy as a mentor—and a friend.
Billy stood there, hand on her son’s shoulder, giving her the look that probably scared every other person—including the girls in this room—but she recognized it as the mask he used to hide his nerves.
Aside from the slight swelling where Seth had hit him, he looked good. His beard had grown out a little and his hair was already getting long enough to brush the back of his shirt. But he was still wearing the heavy leathers he wore when he was working.
She didn’t want him here, didn’t want to face this particular mistake with such an audience.
“I’ll deal with you when I get home,” she told Seth, pulling him away from Billy’s grasp. “Thank you for bringing him back.”
Billy notched an eyebrow at her. “I’m not done,” he said, sounding serious. “I messed up, too. And I’ve got to pay the price.”
Then he did the weirdest thing. He pulled her chair around to the front of the desk and sat down, facing the TAPS girls.
“Hi, girls,” he said, trying to sound friendly but still sounding scary.
She was rooted to her spot. All she could do was watch and listen.
“Jenny’s a good teacher, isn’t she?” The girls all giggled—they called her Ms. Wawasuck—but they nodded. “I’ve learned a lot from her,” Billy went on. “I learned I have to face my mistakes.”
“Billy—” she said, but then stopped. She didn’t know what else to say.
“I know some of you are in here because you made a mistake. And some of you don’t want to make the same mistake.” Some of the girls were blushing, some were looking at the floor—but no one said a thing. “I want to tell you that I understand—I made the same mistake. I was seventeen when I got a girl pregnant.”
A low sound—like a gasp that everyone was trying to keep inside—went through the room. Even Seth tensed next to her. But Billy went on.
“I freaked out. Told the girl I didn’t want the baby, didn’t want to be a dad. I didn’t stand by her when she needed me. I bet some of you have had that happen, too.”
Cyndy, sitting in the back, nodded, tears dripping down her face. Jenny realized she was nodding, too.
“I went back and asked her to marry me, but she’d already had an abortion. I told myself that was her mistake—not mine. I blamed her for taking a part of me away—but I never took responsibility for what happened. I—” He paused, his voice breaking.
There was no denying what he was doing—everything she’d asked him to.
When he spoke again, he sounded more vulnerable than she’d ever heard him sound before. “I saw her again a few weeks ago, and she’s never made peace with what she did. And the truth is I’d never really faced what I’d done, either.” His voice softened. “The truth is we both made mistakes. It takes two people to get pregnant. You can try to put the blame on him, but you have to deal with your part of the situation, too.” He looked over his shoulder at Jenny, his eyes shining. “That’s what you did,” he said to her. “You accepted your part in it and raised a damn fine boy who’d put it all on the line to protect you. But I didn’t. And you were right—I’ve been ashamed of that ever since.”
She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but as she listened to him, Jenny’s heart broke all over again. This wasn’t him hiding from the past or trying to bury it under piles of money or guilt. This was him laying it all on the line.
He turned his attention back to the girls. “You may think that we’re a bunch of dumb boys—and maybe we all are—but we’re just as scared as you are. The only difference is that we can walk away. And some guys do. That’s what they have to live with. Make the choices you can live with. That means not having sex, or using condoms. That also means keeping the baby, or giving it up, or whatever. But whatever it is, you have to be able to get up every day of your life and look in the mirror and know you did the best you could.”
The silence was profound. No one moved until the younger girls began squirming.
Jenny took a deep breath, hoping she could keep it together. “Okay, that’s enough for today. I’ll see everyone tomorrow.”
She didn’t have to say it twice. The room cleared in a matter of moments.
“You, too, kid,” Billy said. When Seth didn’t start walking, he added, “I gave you my word, remember?”
“Okay.” Still holding his iced hand, Seth followed everyone else out.
It was just the two of them. Moving slowly, Billy stood and rolled the chair back under her desk. Then he came up to her.
Jenny wanted to back away from him, tell him that she’d feed him to the coyotes if he touched her—but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even move as he reached out for her, pulled her into the arms she’d missed so much, and kissed her.
She forgot what she wanted and what she didn’t want and whatever mistake had led her away from this man, because all she could think—all she could feel—was how the world had righted itself. God, she’d missed him. No matter how hard she tried, she’d never stop missing him.
He pulled away, but he didn’t go far. Instead, crushing her to his massive chest, he said, “I didn’t do right by you, Jenny—that was my mistake, the one I have to face every day when I look in the mirror. So I tried not looking in the mirror.” A sad smile tugged one corner of his lips up. “Didn’t work.”
“Oh?” She reached up and touched his lips.
“Tried to get lost again—in work, not in beer,” he added. “That didn’t work, either.”
His arms felt so good around her. How had she thought she could live without this? Without him?
“Me, too.” At this, his smile got a little less sad. “Even painted my living room.”
His arms tightened around her. “So I’ve been thinking that there’s only one way to get over you.” He let go of her, but before disappointment could sink her, he was on his knees in front of her, both of her hands in his. “If you’ll have me, I’ll do better—be better. For you and your son.”
“You—you mean it?”
He nodded. “I won’t make any promises about cussing—too set in my ways. He’s heard it all, anyway. But he’s a good kid. If he wants me as a dad, I’d be proud to have him as a son.” He swallowed, and she saw the fear in his eyes. “I’m not perfect. I work too much. I’m grumpy. My family’s a pain in the butt. But if you’ll have me as a husband, Jenny, I want you as my wife. I love you.”
All she could do was gasp in surprise. He’d broken her heart—but he was putting it back together, one word at a time.
“What if it doesn’t work?” she heard herself ask.
“I won’t regret trying, Jenny. I won’t ever regret not giving up on you.”
God, how she’d wanted to hear those words, wanted to believe them. How she wanted to say yes. But something he
ld her back—the reason she’d walked away in the first place. “What if that woman comes back and wants more money?”
The blood drained out of his face—except where her son had hit him. The whole situation was unreal. “She won’t get anything else out of me. And if she talks to the press, then I’ll deal with that. I won’t hide anymore. I don’t need to. You taught me that.” He swallowed again. “Marry me. The family that I want is you and Seth. That’s all I need.”
“You promise?”
His smile sharpened, making him look hot and wicked and, more than anything, just like the man she loved. “You should know something about me, Jenny. I keep my promises, or I don’t make them. And I promise you that I’ll do better by you every day for the rest of our lives.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “Yes,” she told him, and was immediately crushed in a gigantic bear hug.
Then the door opened and Seth stuck his head in. “Are you guys done yet?”
Billy grinned down at her. She’d never seen him look happier than he did right then.
“No,” he said, brushing his lips over hers. “We’re just getting started.”
*
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One
“You want me to marry Kanza the Monster?”
Aram Nazaryan winced at the loudness of his own voice.
Not that anyone could blame him for going off like that. Shaheen Aal Shalaan had made some unacceptable requests in his time, but this one warranted a description not yet coined by any language he knew. And he knew four.
But the transformation of his best and only friend into a meddling mother hen had been steadily progressing from ignorable to untenable for the past three years. It seemed that the happier Shaheen became with Aram’s kid sister Johara after they had miraculously reunited and gotten married, the more sorry for Aram he became and the more he intensified his efforts to get his brother-in-law to change what he called his “unlife.”
And to think he’d still been gullible enough to believe that Shaheen had dropped by his office for a simple visit. Ten minutes into the chitchat, he’d carpet bombed him with emotional blackmail.
He’d started by abandoning all subtlety about enticing him to go back to Zohayd, asking him point-blank to come home.
Annoyed into equal bluntness, he’d finally retorted that Zohayd was Shaheen’s home, not his, and he wouldn’t go back there to be the family’s seventh wheel, when Shaheen and Johara’s second baby arrived.
Shaheen had only upped the ante of his persistence. To prove that he’d have a vital role and a full life in Zohayd, he’d offered him his job. He’d actually asked him to become Zohayd’s freaking minister of economy!
Thinking that Shaheen was pulling his leg, he’d at first laughed. What else could it be but a joke when only a royal Zohaydan could assume that role, and the last time Aram checked, he was a French-Armenian American?
Shaheen, regretfully, hadn’t sprouted a sense of humor. What he had was a harebrained plan of how Aram could become a royal Zohaydan. By marrying a Zohaydan princess.
Before he could bite Shaheen’s head off for that suggestion, his brother-in-law had hit him with the identity of the candidate he thought perfect for him. And that had been the last straw.
Aram shot his friend an incredulous look when Shaheen rose to face him. “Has conjugal bliss finally fried your brain, Shaheen? There’s no way I’m marrying that monster.”
In response, Shaheen reeled back his flabbergasted expression, adjusting it to a neutral one. “I don’t know where you got that name. The Kanza I know is certainly no monster.”
“Then there are two different Kanzas. The one I know, Kanza Aal Ajmaan, the princess from a maternal branch of your royal family, has earned that name and then some.”
Shaheen’s gaze became cautious, as if he were dealing with a madman. “There’s only one Kanza…and she is delightful.”
“Delightful?” A spectacular snort accompanied that exclamation. “But let’s say I go along with your delusion and agree that she is Miss Congeniality herself. Are you out of your mind even suggesting her to me? She’s a kid!”
It was Shaheen’s turn to snort. “She’s almost thirty.”
“Wha…? No way. The last time I saw her she was somewhere around eighteen.”
“Yes. And that was over ten years ago.”
Had it really been that long? A quick calculation said it had been, since he’d last seen her at that fateful ball, days before he’d left Zohayd.
He waved the realization away. “Whatever. The eleven or twelve years between us sure hasn’t shrunk by time.”
“I’m eight years older than Johara. Three or four years’ more age difference might have been a big deal back then, but it’s no longer a concern at your respective ages now.”
“That may be your opinion, but I…” He stopped, huffed a laugh, shaking his finger at Shaheen. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not dragging me into discussing her as if she’s actually a possibility. She’s a monster, I’m telling you.”
“And I’m telling you she’s no such thing.”
“Okay, let’s go into details, shall we? The Kanza I knew was a dour, sullen creature who sent people scurrying in the opposite direction just by glaring at them. In fact, every time she looked my way, I thought I’d find two holes drilled into me wherever her gaze landed, fuming black, billowing smoke.”
Shaheen whistled. “Quite the image. I see she made quite an impression on you, if after over ten years you still recall her with such vividness and her very memory still incites such intense reactions.”
“Intense unfavorable reactions.” He grunted in disgust. “It’s appalling enough that you’re suggesting this marriage of convenience at all but to recommend the one…creature who ever creeped the hell out of me?”
“Creeped?” Shaheen tutted. “Don’t you think you’re going overboard here?”
He scowled, his pesky sense of fairness rearing its head. “Okay, so perhaps creeped is not the right word. She just…disturbed me. She is disturbed. Do you know that horror once went around with purple hair, green full-body paint and pink contact lenses? Another time she went total albino rabbit with white hair and red eyes. The last time I saw her she had blue ha
ir and zombie makeup. That was downright creepy.”
Shaheen’s smile became that of an adult coddling an unreasonable child. “What, apart from weird hair and eye color and makeup experimentation, do you have against her?”
“The way she used to mutter my name, as if she was casting a curse. I always had the impression she had some…goblin living inside her wisp of a body.”
Shaheen shoved his hands inside his pockets, the image of complacency. “Sounds like she’s exactly what you need. You could certainly use someone that potent to thaw you out of the deep freeze you’ve been stuck in for around two decades now.”
“Why don’t I just go stick myself in an incinerator? It would handle that deep freeze much more effectively and far less painfully.”
Shaheen only gave him the forbearing, compassionate look of a man who knew such deep contentment and fulfillment and was willing to take anything from his poor, unfortunate friend with the barren life.
“Quit it with the pitying look, Shaheen. My temperature is fine. It’s how I am now…. It’s called growing up.”
“If only. Johara feels your coldness. I feel it. Your parents are frantic, believing they’d done that to you when you were forced to remain with your father in Zohayd at the expense of your own life.”
“Nobody forced me to do anything. I chose to stay with Father because he wouldn’t have survived alone after his breakup with Mother.”
“And when they eventually found their way back to each other, you’d already sacrificed your own desires and ambitions and swerved from your own planned path to support your family, and you’ve never been able to correct your course. Now you’re still trapped on the outside, watching the rest of us live our lives from that solitude of yours.”
Aram glowered at Shaheen. He was happy, incredibly so, for his mother and father. For his sister and best friend. But when they kept shoving his so-called solitude in his face, he felt nothing endearing toward any of them. Their solicitude only chafed when he knew he couldn’t do anything about it.
Bringing Home the Bachelor Page 17