by Tina Beckett
Sucking in another deep breath, she shook her head. “I think maybe it’s you who has something to tell me.”
“Okay, then, I’ll go first.” Abbie hesitated, and then looked her in the eye. “Martin and I have separated.”
“What?” Of all the things she might have expected her sister to say, this was not it.
Shifting the baby in her arms, Abbie feathered her fingers across the tiny forehead, down her nose as if she was just now discovering the wonder of the little creature she’d brought into the world.
“I had an affair. Martin was traveling so much and I was sure he was seeing you. I was angry and afraid. It was just going to be the one time. I never meant it to go any further than that. But one time turned into two and pretty soon I wasn’t sure what I wanted anymore. Until Martin came home from his trip, and I decided I loved him and wanted to make it work.” Her eyes closed for a second or two before reopening. “I broke it off with the other man and thought things could go back to how they were before.”
Jess could guess the rest...the reason why her sister had refused to bond with her baby, why she’d been so hateful, throwing those accusations at her at the party. “Then you discovered you were pregnant.”
“Yes.” Abbie sighed. “I thought I could handle it all on my own. Pretend it was Martin’s and that he would never find out. Only it ate me up inside. I was afraid I was starting to hate the baby. And then I went into labor at the party, and I almost lost her. That mark on her leg, it was like a permanent reminder of what I’d done. Of what I’d put her through during my pregnancy.”
Jess put her hand on Abbie’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“I was looking for a fight that night.”
“Does Martin know?”
“Yes. I told him. He wants to work things out, but I asked him to move out...told him I needed to come here and see the baby. I need time to think things through.”
“The other kids?”
“They’re at Mum and Daddy’s house.”
Jess had to say it. “Martin loves you, Abbie. You shouldn’t try to go through this by yourself.”
Something swirled in her memory banks, clicking and processing those last words, even as her sister continued to talk.
“I know now what you must have felt like when you found out Martin was cheating on you. I feel like I failed him. So terribly.”
Was that what Dean had felt like when he’d discovered his father had tried to take his life? That he’d somehow failed the man? It was the other way around. His father had failed him. Time and time again.
And now he—just like Abbie—was probably sitting somewhere trying to get to grips with everything that had happened.
Inside her head, the processing finally stopped and a formula appeared. No one should have to face something like this alone.
Wasn’t that what Dean had said to her when she didn’t want to go to the party at the hotel? He’d said she shouldn’t have to face it alone. That he would face it with her.
But what had Dean done? He’d done exactly what he’d told her not to do.
“You need to go home. Or, better yet, ring Martin and tell him to come here. I’m sure Mum and Daddy are thrilled to watch the boys. Jerry? Is he okay?”
“He’s out of hospital. But after what I did...” Abbie’s eyes, so like her own, were wounded and uncertain.
Dean was probably telling himself that exact thing. He’d rebuffed his dad in the hallway, had told him never to ring him again.
There was no way Dean—or anyone—should have to deal with something like that on his own.
Jess needed to find him. If for no other reason than to reassure him that he wasn’t to blame for what had happened to his father any more than she was to blame for what had happened to her friend Amy. Somehow she had to make him see that.
She could be his friend. Even if she could never be anything else.
Digging the keys to her house out of the pocket of her scrubs, she handed them to Abbie. “Stay at the cottage. There’s plenty of food and supplies. Light a fire and talk this through with Martin. Just the two of you. I won’t be there, so it’ll be perfect.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have a little unfinished business of my own to take care of.”
“With Dean?”
She nodded her head, determination growing in her heart. “Oh, yes. With Dean.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HE STOOD AT the grave site of his father, the mist from the rain blinding him to everything around him, which was probably a good thing, since he didn’t have to wonder if the moisture on his face was caused by the weather or by something else.
He’d made such a mess of things. Not only had he handled things terribly with his dad, but with Jess as well. He’d seen the emergency phone call from the hospital as his sign that things with her weren’t meant to be, and that he needed to get the hell out. Yet she was still all around him.
Even here.
He’d purchased a simple grave marker for his father, although he wasn’t sure the man deserved it. Maybe his dad had grown to be sorry for his actions. Dean would never really know what had gone through his father’s head while in prison, or even in those last couple of weeks of his life.
He should have at least agreed to see him. Hear him out. Maybe then he could have washed him from his system once and for all.
And Jess? Had he done any better with her? He’d taken off, tossing off a casual note in his wake, just as his mum had done all those years ago. And although his thumb had hovered over the answer button on his mobile phone, he’d let her calls go straight to voicemail. Only when they’d stopped coming had he acknowledged the ball of regret that had lodged in his gut with each missed call.
The ball that was now the size of a boulder.
He knelt beside the grave and traced the lettering he’d had inscribed. A name and date of birth and death. No “beloved father” because, in the end, they’d been strangers.
And his mum? Did she house the same regrets? Maybe the time had come to try to find her. He should at least let her know that the abusive man who’d tormented her all those years ago was gone.
And what about Jess? He sat there, not really sure what to do about that.
He loved her. Beyond anything he could have ever imagined. And yet he’d taken off without a word of real explanation.
Didn’t he owe her one? To tell her the truth, that he was messed up in the head right now, but that he cared about her? That he wanted to see her again?
She’d probably slam the door in his face—and with good reason, after what he’d done. But he owed her closure.
The kind of closure he’d never been given by his parents. In the end, how did he know his father hadn’t tried to give that to him? Unless Dean wanted to perpetuate the kind of negative cycle he’d lived through, he needed to break it once and for all.
His finger dipped into the period at the end of the inscription that symbolized the end of his dad’s life. He could at least put a punctuation mark on the end of his encounter with Jess. For both of their sakes.
Unless...
Unless she could find it in her heart to maybe stick with him for a little while. Feel out their relationship. Maybe she could even grow to care about him.
He glanced down at his shirt, water dripping off the end of his chin. But first, he needed to go home and put on some dry clothes. Something in his heart came back to life as he climbed to his feet with one last glance at the small stone below him.
Maybe this wasn’t the end. Maybe it was a beginning.
If so, there was only one way to find out.
* * *
Jess rang Dean’s doorbell one last time. He wasn’t home. Scrolling through the personnel records hadn�
��t been the wisest thing to do. She should have just rung his mobile again and left a message asking for a meeting. Except Dean hadn’t returned any of her other phone calls, so she didn’t hold out much hope that he would return this one.
It was harder to slam a door in someone’s face than to ignore a ringtone. At least that was what she’d told herself as she’d pulled into the driveway, trembling with nerves.
The rain didn’t help. It wasn’t a downpour, but a dreary mist that echoed what her heart had felt over the last week.
Had it only been a week since they’d spent the night together?
Yes. And yet it could have been yesterday. Nothing had changed.
In her way of thinking, Dean at least owed her a straight explanation. Maybe he’d gotten phone calls in the past from other women and had used the same technique, but Jess wasn’t other women. She was the one with the reputation for calmly handling difficult situations.
She didn’t feel quite so calm now, however.
She felt cold and miserable...and wet.
It appeared Dean’s stonewalling might just work, after all.
She’d done a lot of thinking as she drove over here. No woman at the hospital had ever admitted going to bed with the man. So that put her in a different class, because she knew plenty of women who’d leap at the chance to go out with him, not to mention sleep with him.
If she was going to go down, she wasn’t going to do so without a fight. Not like some desperate hanger-on, but simply a woman who wanted to hear it straight out: that he didn’t feel anything for her and would prefer to leave what had happened between them in the past.
She wasn’t going to get that chance right now, evidently. There were no lights on in the house. No car in the driveway. This was something she was going to have to tackle another time. Until then, she’d have to find a hotel or something, because Abbie was at her house probably waiting for Martin to arrive.
Turning around, she flipped the hood of her slicker up and trudged back into the rain, squinting her eyes to keep the water from running into them.
She’d just reached the driver’s side door of her little car, when headlights swept into the lane, heading straight for her. The vehicle pulled to a stop behind hers, blocking her exit, but just sat there for a moment or two, engine idling.
What the...?
Then the lights went out and, although it was the middle of the day, she had to squint yet again to help her eyes adjust to the sudden gloom.
The door opened and out stepped the man she’d been longing to see.
Dean.
He looked as damp and miserable as she did, although...
Something. Something in his eyes made the breath catch in her throat.
He slammed the door shut and walked over to her, staring down at her. “You’re here.”
Trying to place the inflection in his voice, she failed. She had no idea what he’d meant by that. Was he irritated? Well, at least he hadn’t said, “It’s you. What the hell are you doing here?”
She decided to play it as neutral as possible. “Yes, I am.”
“I was going to come find you.”
The breath that had been trapped inside of her whooshed back out. He was? Why? She swallowed and then forced the words out. “I was coming to find you.”
One side of his mouth went up, erasing a bit of the taut grimness that had been on it a second ago. “You succeeded.”
“Yes.” Now she was stuck. She had absolutely no idea what else to say. Maybe she should start with what she knew and then move to the questions afterward. “I heard about your father. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. It was a shock. I blamed myself.” His smile had faded, and Jess mourned being the one to chase it away.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
One of his shoulders lifted and dropped, but he didn’t respond to her statement. Maybe coming here hadn’t been such a good idea. Except he’d said he’d been getting ready to come find her. She had to know why. “You didn’t answer any of my calls that day, so what did you want to see me about?”
There was a longer pause this time. Then his voice came through. “It was a mistake for me to leave you that night. I needed you.”
Oh, God. Those words were an arrow straight through her heart—a wonderful piercing barb that exploded into a rainbow of colors, obliterating the gloom. “I’m here now.”
Dean took a step forward and wrapped her in his arms. “Yes, you are.” His chin came to rest on her head, making her eyes burn.
This was the time. If ever she was going to risk it, it needed to be now. “I need to tell you something.”
“Tell me you’re not leaving.” The words rumbled above her head.
“No. I have no plans to leave, although you may want me to when I tell you what’s happened.”
“Are you pregnant?”
Was there an edge of hope to those words?
“No. It’s only been a week. And we used protection, remember?”
“Protection sometimes fails.”
The irony of it struck her right between the eyes. Yes, it did. She’d done her damnedest to protect her heart, to wrap it in layer after layer of latex and shield it from him. Only her attempts had failed miserably. He’d somehow gotten past her barriers and reached inside of her.
“In a way it did.” She leaned back and looked into the face of the man she loved, needing to see his eyes when she said the words. “Remember all that talk about casual sex? It wasn’t. Casual, that is. At least not for me.”
“Not for me either.” The smile was back. Wider this time. “I love you, Jess. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it wasn’t because of the sex—although that was pretty phenomenal. It was before that.”
Jess’s throat closed completely, trapping all the words she wanted to say inside of her. Her mouth opened and shut as she tried to force something...anything out.
Dean went on. “A few days after my father died, I realized I couldn’t go on shutting myself off from the world, or I’d risk ending up like him. You’re the first person I’ve truly felt anything for since my mum walked out on me all those years ago.”
She found her voice. “I love you too, only I’ve been afraid to admit it. And when you wouldn’t ring me back, I assumed you simply didn’t feel the same way. That you just wanted me to stop. But I had to hear you say the words.”
“Hell, I’m sorry, Jess, for putting you through that.” He dropped a kiss on her head.
“Actually my sister was the one who helped me make the decision to come find you.”
His arms tightened around her. “Your sister?”
“Yes. We had a long talk. I even brought along my new shoes, since you seemed quite fond of them. I hoped they might sway your opinion. They’re in the car. I can get them if you’d like.”
He slid to the side and wrapped his arm around her back, then started walking toward his front door. “I don’t need the shoes, Jess. Or the dress. I just need you.” A wicked gleam came to his eyes. “But first, we need to get you into something dry.”
“That reminds me, I still have your shirt.”
“I have other shirts. But the dry I’m thinking about is my bed.” He paused for a moment when he reached the front door. “We can talk about marriage and rings later. Right now I just want to enjoy walking through every step of the process.”
Marriage? He was thinking about marriage?
“I want the same thing.”
Dean unlocked the door and swung it open. Then he swooped her into his arms and carried her across the threshold. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t practice some of the finer points.”
As he turned and kicked the door closed Jess wrapped her arms around his neck, reveling in the fact that this man loved her and she loved him in
return. She was looking forward to showing him exactly how much...far into the night and for as long as he would let her.
EPILOGUE
DEAN SMILED AS Jess handed him a large festively wrapped box and then perched on the arm of the couch right next to him. Facing the fireplace—and a Christmas tree brimming with presents—he was surrounded by Jess’s relatives. Her mum and dad had come down to spend the holidays with them in Cambridge, as had her sister and her family.
He wasn’t used to spending so much time with a group of people like this, but he had a feeling it could grow on him. There’d still been no word from the private investigator he’d hired to look for his mum, but that was something he no longer had to face alone. Jess had been right there with him, every step of the way. Whatever came of it, they would handle it. Together.
Abbie and Martin had evidently made their peace, from the way she was folded in his arms as they watched their children scurry to and fro. Loving touches and the bright glow in their eyes as they looked at each other said things were on the mend. It was the same with Abbie and Jess. Old hurts and irritations would probably surface from time to time, but for now all was peaceful. Marissa had been released from hospital a week ago and was now tucked into a portable cot to the side of the tree, sound asleep. Unlike Jess’s nephews, who bounced with excitement over getting the rare opportunity to unwrap presents before it was even officially Christmas.
Tugging the bow on the gift Jess had given him, he marveled at how well things between the two of them had gone. So much so that, despite saying that he wanted to wait on marriage and relish the steps leading up to it, his impatience had gotten the better of him. But that gift—safely tucked in his jacket pocket—would come later, far from the eyes and ears of the rest of her family.
He opened the box and parted the tissue paper inside to find a white dress shirt. When he glanced up, he found her eyes alight with wicked amusement. Over the past week, she’d worn a wide array of his shirts, looking just as mouthwatering in each and every one of them. “I like it,” he murmured. “Thank you. I’ll have to try it on a little later.”