Addicted to You

by Bethany Kane

  “That’s what this is all about?” He looked up, alarmed by the fact that her voice had gone flat and hollow. He’d much prefer it being so high with fury that it was about to pass out of human hearing range.

  “What do you mean?” he asked slowly.

  “You’ve been thinking all this time that making love to me was the equivalent of getting trashed on whiskey? You consider me to be . . . what? . . . the drug that helps you forget Eden?”

  “No. That’s not what I meant, Katie. You keep misunderstanding me. I meant that—”

  “I don’t think I’m misunderstanding,” she interrupted, letting her arms fall. She suddenly looked small standing there, no longer swelled up with her anger. “I even offered it to you, didn’t I? I said it’d be better if you fucked me blind instead of drinking yourself into a grave. I just hadn’t realized you were taking the idea of trading a bottle of whiskey in for me so literally.”

  “Katie, that’s a hell of a thing to say,” he said, launching himself off the couch and stepping toward her. She backed away. He froze in the middle of the living room when he registered the small, sad smile on her face.

  “Why should you be so averse to hearing the truth? You’ve been so good about saying it for the past month.” She held up a hand, silencing him when he started to launch into a heated defense. “Firstly, I’m not a liar, Rill. So here are a couple more truths for you, while we’re at it. If I’m pregnant, you’re the father. Not in my fantasy world. In reality. Secondly, I’ve changed my mind. I’m done being the drug that’ll mask your grief for another woman. I hid a bottle of whiskey in the corner of the bottom cabinet. Have at it.”

  Rill just stood there in the living room for three solid minutes after Katie stalked out of the room, wondering what the hell had just hit him.

  Twenty-five

  Katie spent far more time the following morning over at Miles Fordham’s offices looking through his accounts than she’d originally planned. She was back to avoiding Rill again. At first, she was so mad at him she wanted to spit. Slowly, she’d started to calm down, but it’d taken a good part of the night, which she’d spent alone up in the dormer bedroom.

  A small part of her—a teeny-tiny part that began to grow with every hour—felt sorry for him. He didn’t remember seeing her on her first night in Vulture’s Canyon, let alone recall having unprotected sex with her. To discover she was pregnant and have her tell him he was responsible must have confused the holy hell out of him. She’d been willing to calmly try to explain things to him before he’d started to say all that crap about claiming to be the father because he deserved it for seducing her. Then he’d gone on and said that thing about her fantasizing he’d been the one to get her pregnant because she was under so much stress.

  Honestly. He didn’t deserve a shred of her pity.

  Still, she felt a good deal more prepared to tell Rill the truth about the night she’d gotten pregnant as she left Miles’s office the following day. She turned down Miles’s hopeful offer of lunch and headed up the hill, ready to have it out with Rill.

  She found him easily enough, for once. He stepped onto the front porch when she pulled up into the parking space at the end of the drive. She studied him for a few seconds through the windshield. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans. He wore the blue chambray shirt she favored because it brought out the color of his eyes. His expression was sober as he waited for her.

  “Hey,” she said noncommittally as she walked up the steps.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked gruffly, his gaze running over her.

  “Miles Fordham’s office.” When she saw his expression stiffen, she sighed. “He asked me to look over a few things for him, and I agreed. I had my reasons for doing it,” she said when his expression remained rigid. “And it had nothing to do with my burning lust for Miles Fordham. You were right. The guy’s a weasel.”

  She saw him swallow. He seemed partially mollified, but she still sensed the tension in him.

  “Will you sit down?” he asked, nodding at the porch chairs.

  Katie went over to a wrought-iron chair and plopped into a seat. She watched him as he sat down next to her.

  “There’s something I need to tell you. Something you need to know,” he said. “You keep talking like I was dying up on this hill because Eden was killed in that wreck. You were partially right—I loved Eden. Maybe not as much as I’d conjured up in my head, but still. She was a big part of my life, once. But you’re also wrong about how I felt about her.”

  “What?” Katie asked, sitting forward slowly. It had been the last thing she’d expected him to do in that tense moment, to start talking about the verboten topic of Eden. She stared at him, riveted. He closed his eyes briefly. Katie had a flash of intuition and suddenly knew how difficult this conversation was for Rill.

  “We hadn’t been getting along for more than about a year before she died—Eden and I.”

  “Really?” Katie asked in a quavering voice. “But I thought . . . She never said . . . You never said.”

  “She never spoke to you about our marriage being in trouble?” Rill asked her, his manner calm.

  Katie shook her head. “No. I had no idea you two were anything but happy in your marriage.”

  Rill searched her face. After a moment, he nodded. “It was, in the beginning. Happy, I mean. Or at least I thought it was. When she died, the coroner told me she was three months pregnant. It wasn’t my baby, Katie. We hadn’t slept together in over half a year.”

  Katie just stared at him, her mouth partially open. The sound of the blood rushing in her veins segued from a dull throb to a roar in her ears.

  “Eden was pregnant?” she whispered incredulously. “Who was the father?”

  Heat burned in her cheeks when she realized what she’d just said. Rill had just asked her the same question last night. A wave of dizziness struck her.

  Holy shit. Rill’s surprising news was bad in more ways than the obvious, she realized with a rising sense of dread.

  “I don’t know,” Rill replied. “I was shocked when the coroner told me. You knew Eden. She didn’t socialize much, let alone go out with men. Her coworkers were mostly women.”

  Katie blinked. The image of the fury in Rill’s face before he’d tackled Everett in the backyard flashed into her mind’s eye. “Jesus. You thought . . . Everett?”

  He glanced away, looking vaguely ashamed of himself.

  “You did,” she said huskily. It made so much sense now. Everything. Rill’s anger at Everett, his deep depression up here on this hill, his dislike of the world . . . his willingness to sacrifice everything.

  “Nothing made sense to you after she died . . . after you found out she’d been unfaithful, did it?”

  “I guess not,” he said after a moment.

  “You stopped believing in yourself when you realized you couldn’t believe in Eden anymore. She meant that much to you,” she said quietly.

  His mouth tightened, but he didn’t speak.

  “I know how much you put her on a pedestal. I’m sorry, Rill.” She saw him swallow thickly. “She didn’t deserve to be idolized,” Katie burst out heatedly. She flushed when Rill glanced at her sharply, but her flash of fury at Eden was difficult to withhold. It was anger at what Eden had done to Rill, true, but she also experienced a sense of betrayal over the fact that Eden had never confessed this secret part of her life to her—Katie. “She didn’t deserve it. Not if she was screwing around on you.”

  He gave her a wry glance. “Shit happens, Katie. People fall out of love all the time. I obviously wasn’t making her very happy. She must have thought my work was more important to me than her. I’m not so sure she was wrong, if my actions were any indication of how I felt.”

  Katie made a disgusted sound under her breath. Eden should have been talking to Rill if she was that upset with him . . . suggested they go to therapy . . . or asked for a divorce, if she was that unhappy. She shouldn’t have been off fucking some other
guy behind his back.

  “Who was it?” Katie asked irrepressibly. “The guy she was having an affair with, I mean.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Truth? It used to consume me, that question. I don’t think about it that much anymore.”

  “No?” Katie asked him in a hushed, shaking voice. “Not . . . not even after you saw that pregnancy test last night and I told you that you were the one responsible for it? How could you not have thought of Eden being pregnant with another man’s child when I told you that last night?”

  The air seemed to thicken in the silence that followed. Rill pinned her steadily with his stare, his eyes shining with something she strongly suspected was pity. For some reason, she knew what he was going to say next. She fought the rising dread like she would her worst enemy.

  “I’m not leaving, Rill,” she blurted out of a constricting throat.

  “I am, Katie,” he said quietly. “Not for long,” he added when a tear fell down her cheek. “I’ll be back in a week or two. I promise. There’s somewhere I have to go.”

  Katie didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. He was leaving for good. She just knew it. This was the day she’d been dreading since she first came to Vulture’s Canyon.

  “Katie,” he said firmly. She forced herself to look at him. “I’ve made an appointment for you with an ob-gyn clinic in Carbondale. I called around and got several references for the best doctor. I wrote down the date and time on a notepad in the kitchen. I called Olive Fanatoon and she says she’ll go with you to the appointment.”

  She swallowed and just stared at him, unseeing. It was the same when he reached out and cupped her jaw. She was too numb to really feel it.

  “Katie?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to be here for you during your pregnancy. I promise you that. I’m not abandoning you. I just . . . just have to go somewhere. I need to figure something out, and when I have, I’ll be back. I’ll be back,” he repeated with emphasis.

  “Okay,” she said through leaden lips.

  She sensed him studying her in the silence that followed. “You’ll go for the appointment? With Olive?”

  Katie nodded. There was a buzzing in her ears. Everything had gone fuzzy . . . surreal.

  “Are you okay, Katie?” he asked, his forehead creasing with anxiety.

  “I’m fine.” She tried to smile.

  Rill’d disappeared into these woods in a bout of hurt and confusion nineteen months ago. The shock of Katie telling him she was pregnant and accusing him of being the father when he couldn’t even recall the deed would likely send him off on another anguished escape.

  Hell, given what he’d just told her about Eden, she could hardly blame him for coming up short in the trust department.

  Of all the fucking bad timing. Only something this unlikely could happen to her.

  “I’ll be back, Shine,” he whispered, his thumb wiping away a tear.

  Katie nodded, even though she couldn’t allow herself to believe a word he was saying. If she let herself, it’d hurt too much when he didn’t return.

  Twenty-six

  Rill didn’t exactly know how his mother would react when she saw him. He’d stopped trying to reach out to her twelve years ago. Fiona Pierce had never tried to contact him, not once since he’d moved stateside for university when he was nineteen years old.

  Rill always had the idea growing up that his mother didn’t know what to do with him . . . didn’t know how to relate to a son. She knew precisely how to relate to men, and men seemed to know exactly how to relate to Fiona. Women tended to both despise and be enthralled by her. Fiona had that effect on people—like a queen who’d flipped off the world and become a whore because it made her laugh to consider the irony of the concept.

  Fiona certainly knew how to treat her brothers—Ray and William—with a harsh tongue and a healthy dose of disdain.

  Despite the fact that he’d long ago given up trying to have a relationship with his mom, he still felt a sense of sharp anticipation as he closed the kissing gate behind him and made his way across the broken stone of the sidewalk. A few chickens strutted up to him, obviously used to being fed by a human hand. He’d learned from the bartender—Mick—at the Regal Lion Pub in downtown Malacnoic that his mother’s latest place of residence had changed a few years back. Rill hadn’t been surprised. Fiona made a habit of changing residences at the same rate she changed lovers.

  He knew her instantly when she opened the front door at his knock, although he could tell by her blank expression she didn’t recognize him. Her long, dark hair didn’t show a sign of gray, and Rill realized distantly she must color it. Maybe she had since he was a child. For all he knew, she’d been born a redhead.

  Her hair may still look lustrous, but her face showed signs of wear and age. Wrinkles deepened around her eyes when she peered up at him.

  He knew he resembled his mother. Almost every person in Malacnoic had said it at one time or another. Dark with blue eyes and a confidence people seemed to feel he had no right to, as a bastard child, even if they did admire that characteristic.

  You’re the spitting image of your mam, aren’t you?

  The townspeople had never said it joyfully, like they might other children—but rather sadly or suspiciously, like a person might say the devil’s spawn resembled its father.

  Fiona gave a dry, crackling laugh when she recognized him. Apparently, his mom still hadn’t broken her pack-and-a-half-a-day habit. He could smell the scent of stale cigarette smoke coming off the too-tight cotton dress she wore.

  “Lord, I thought you were the guy here to fix my oven for a few seconds. I was wondering when Fitzgerald got so tall. Come on in, then,” she told Rill briskly, waving him inside the house as though he were a neighbor she saw every day of her life. Rill followed her down a dark hallway that smelled strongly of cigarette smoke to a sunny kitchen. She sat down at the dented, pockmarked oak table and picked up a lit cigarette. Smoke wafted through the air as she waved at the ancient AGA oven.

  “That’s the broken oven I was talking about, there. Been driving me mental, that thing. Patrick finally went and called Fitzgerald, the repairman, when he didn’t get his dinner on time for the fourth day in a row, lazy sod,” Fiona said fondly before she took a long draw on her cigarette. “What brings you here, then? I’d heard on the television you’d gone mad after that prissy wife of yours died.”

  “Do I look mad?” Rill countered quietly.

  Fiona shrugged. She studied him as she smoked, clearly undecided on her answer . . . or uncaring, most likely.

  Rill inhaled slowly, resisted his typical inclination to say something foul to his mother and storm out of the house in a fury. On the flight across the Atlantic, he’d ritualistically prepared himself for her typical coldness. He’d come here with a purpose and he wasn’t going to stay here long.

  He wasn’t a child anymore. He wasn’t a masochist, either.

  He glanced around the stark, serviceable kitchen. “You live with a man named Patrick, then? This is his house?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You have everything you need?” Rill asked, already knowing what her answer would be. Hadn’t he offered to give her money over the years, given her the opportunity not to prostitute herself to these men? She’d just laughed at him with that deep, raspy voice he supposed some men found attractive.

  You’re not going to take care of me, Rilly. Not a chance.

  “Do I look like I need anything?” she asked him.

  He glanced at her. Her figure was still full and voluptuous, but she was going to fat. Truth be told, she didn’t look well. There was a gray cast to her skin that alarmed him . . . hurt him to see, because he knew there was nothing he could do about it.

  Nothing.

  He steeled himself against the onrush of sympathy he felt for her. He knew what would happen if he expressed it, knew it deep inside his bones. She’d insult him if he communicated his concern, send him into
a fury so that he forgot for days, or months, or years why he’d ever felt an ounce of compassion for Fiona Pierce.

  “I came here to ask you who my father was,” he stated starkly.

  She paused in the action of inhaling her cigarette. Her sharp blue eyes flew to meet his gaze. She slowly pulled the cigarette away from her mouth.

  “Lord, you’re not going back to that, are you? I haven’t heard you sing that old tune since you were sixteen years old,” she said, smoke curling around her smile as she spoke.

  “Tell me, Ma. What’ve you got to lose by telling me?”

  “He’s dead. What’ve you got to gain by knowing?”

  “Some peace of mind,” Rill grated out. “I want to know. I want to know who he was. Who’re you to deprive me?”

  “I’m your ma.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  It was Fiona who laughed after a moment, though, low and rough.

  “Do you want some tea, then?” she said after she’d recovered from her bout of mirth at Rill’s expense.

  “No,” he bit out.

  “Whiskey? I’d heard you’d developed a taste for it.”

  He stood, his chair scraping loudly against the tile floor. She shook her head, a smile still lingering around her full lips.

  “You won’t find any answers here, Rill. You and I were always as different as north and south.”

  He wanted to snarl at her that he’d tried to meet her halfway for his entire childhood and most of his adult life, but she’d been too busy wallowing in her selfishness. How many times had he waited for her as a small child outside a closed bedroom door when she’d told him she’d take him to the park, or promised him she’d take him into town for a festival or a friend’s party?

  But Fiona had always had better things to do with her time, was always willing to do them with men who were frightening strangers to a child. As he’d gotten older, he’d learned to treat his mother’s men with a coldness that he’d soon realized they found as intimidating as his mother’s dark, volatile moods.