by Beth Andrews
Allie took a sip of juice. “Wow. I’m impressed.”
“Don’t try and sweet-talk me. My mother would skin me if I gave out her secret recipe.”
“Not with the pancakes.” Although she did wish she’d been awake enough to pay attention while he’d mixed up the batter, so she could make them herself. “With the amazing breadth of your shoulders. How do you manage to stay upright carrying around all that guilt and responsibility?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Guilt has nothing to do with it. I take accountability for my actions. That’s all.”
“Doesn’t your ex-wife get to be accountable? After all, you didn’t marry yourself.”
“Marrying her wasn’t my first mistake. Getting her pregnant was.”
CHAPTER NINE
ALLIE CHOKED ON HER COFFEE. “You have a child?” she sputtered.
Pain he thought he’d blocked years ago resurfaced, threatening to bring him to his knees. “No. He was stillborn.”
“He?”
His mouth tightened. “Robert James. He would’ve turned nine this past summer.”
“Dean,” she said, laying her hand on his again, “I’m so sorry.”
He pulled back and picked up his fork. Ate a bite of pancake even though it now tasted like sawdust. “My marriage never should’ve happened. Jolene and I dated casually for a few months. I wasn’t looking for anything serious and, at the time, didn’t think she was, either.” He stared at the kitchen wall above Allie’s head. “Two months after we stopped seeing each other, I enlisted. When she told me she was pregnant, I was so shocked, all I could think about was myself.”
“That seems pretty normal for a young man.”
He forced himself to finish his breakfast and drink his juice. Anything to keep from looking at Allie as he admitted his greatest failure.
“Even through the shock, I knew what the right thing to do was.” He stood and carried his dishes to the sink. “I’d never met Jo’s parents, didn’t know when her birthday was or her favorite ice cream. And I didn’t love her. But none of that mattered. So I said, ‘Well, I guess we’d better get married.’” He’d been such an idiot. “At the time, I thought she was disappointed because I didn’t have a ring for her. I recently figured out it was my piss-poor proposal that did it.”
“There’s no right or way wrong to act when something like that is dropped in your lap.”
Allie’s kind words set his teeth on edge. The last thing he wanted was her sympathy. Or her understanding. Not when he didn’t deserve either.
Not when he was opening up to her in an attempt to get her to do the same.
“Maybe not,” he agreed. “But even though I was young, I could’ve handled it better. I should’ve handled it better.” He tapped his fist against his thigh. “We got married and she came with me to San Diego for boot camp two weeks later. We were there three months, and when I got my orders to go to Afghanistan, I started thinking we’d be okay.”
He’d been desperate to make his marriage work. Because somehow he’d come to love his unborn child more than anything.
“The shock had worn off by then,” he continued, “and I was excited to prove I could do a better job of parenting than my old man. I swore I wasn’t going to shuffle my kid from house to house. Or worse, forget I had a child if the marriage failed—like my dad. Once he remarried and became a stepfather to his new wife’s kids, his own three sons no longer existed.” Dean shrugged. “Jolene and I had decided she should move back in with her parents while I was overseas. I was on a recon mission when she went to the hospital. She hadn’t felt the baby move all day.” He exhaled heavily. “They induced labor. Jolene had to go through childbirth knowing our son was already dead. And I wasn’t with her.”
She covered his hand with hers. “Even if you’d been there,” Allie said gently, “there wasn’t anything you could have done.”
He sat back, pulling away from her touch. “I could’ve seen my son. Held him at least once. Jo was so crushed, she had the funeral two days later. I didn’t get home until that night.”
And that was a betrayal he’d never be able to forgive.
“I’m so sorry, Dean,” Allie whispered.
“The baby was the only thing that held us together. But for some reason—stubbornness or pride—we stuck it out for five years.” He rotated his coffee cup and sighed. “Jolene wanted another baby but I…I couldn’t do that. When she asked for a divorce, I was relieved. I told myself she was too needy. But all she wanted was a real marriage and a family. Neither of which I was willing to give her.”
“Maybe…” Allie stared at the remains of her breakfast, a frown on her face as if she was searching for the right words. “Maybe you weren’t able to give her either of those.” She raised her head. “You made a mistake, but you can’t keep punishing yourself for it.”
He forced a smile. “It all worked out for the best. Jolene remarried. She even has a one-year-old daughter.”
“So you and Jolene still keep in touch?”
He shoved his cup away. “Not really.”
“Then how did you know…”
“The man she married, the father of her child, is my brother.”
SHOCKED, ALLIE SAT BACK. “I’m not sure what to say…. Those first few family get-togethers must’ve been weird.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Dean said, picking up an empty grocery bag and shaking it in front of Persephone. The cat leaped back, then crouched, ready to make her move when he shook it again. “The last time I saw my family was two Christmases ago.”
“What does that mean? You all haven’t been together since then?”
Persephone pounced on the bag and Dean swept it—and the cat—from side to side. “I’m sure they’ve gotten together. They just haven’t invited me.”
Uh-oh. “What did you do?”
“What makes you think I did something?”
“Because you were upset. And often times when people are hurt, they lash out.”
He straightened and laid his hands flat on the table, his expression etched with anger and regret. “How the hell did they think I was going to react? I’d just been discharged from the marines and was looking forward to spending Christmas with my family for the first time in five years. Except, when I get to my mother’s house, I find out my brother’s not only been seeing my ex-wife for the past seven months, but my entire family knew and no one bothered to tell me.”
Oh, poor Dean. First he lost his son and then his family kept something like that from him? No wonder he had trust issues and moved from town to town. He couldn’t go home. “Why the secrecy?”
“Guess they were worried about my reaction.” He leaned back and crossed his arms. “So instead, they thought it’d be safer to spring it on me as I walked through the door. And then Ryan tells us all that Jolene’s pregnant.”
Allie winced. “They just dropped one bomb after another on you, didn’t they?”
Dean laughed but the sound was hollow. “You could say that. I was furious. I said some things I shouldn’t have said, which set Ryan off, and the next thing I knew, I broke his nose and he split my lip.” He opened and clenched his fist as if he’d punched his brother minutes ago instead of years. “We haven’t spoken since.”
She rested her elbows on the table. “Because you don’t want to? Or because neither one of you knows how to make the first move?”
He shrugged. “At first I was too angry, but as time went by it became…easier…to avoid my family. Especially after Jolene had the baby.”
“You’ve never even seen your niece?” Allie asked. The idea of not being with her own family for that long made her heartsick.
He gave his head a quick, jerky shake. “Sam e-mailed me a picture but I…I couldn’t make myself open it.”
Yes, he’d acted like an idiot with his brother and family, but she understood why. And it wasn’t because his brother had fallen in love with Dean’s ex-wife.
It was because Ryan and Jolene had
what Dean and Jolene lost.
A child.
“It sounds to me as if you’re punishing yourself,” she said, ignoring the look he shot her. “By keeping away from your family, you’re not just hurting them, you’re hurting yourself.”
“I’m not trying to hurt anyone.”
“But…don’t you miss them? Don’t you want to meet your niece?”
She didn’t think he was going to answer, but then he said, “I used to wonder if things might’ve worked out differently if I hadn’t joined up. If I’d been with Jolene at the time…”
“What could you have done? It was out of your hands.” Allie softened her tone as she added, “Do you honestly think if you’d still been in Texas your baby would’ve lived?”
He stabbed a hand through his hair. “No,” he admitted helplessly, “but I can’t help feeling responsible for the failure of my marriage. For not being able to give Jolene what she wanted most.” He straightened his legs. “You and I are a pair, huh? Both trying to fix things that are out of our control.”
She raised her eyebrows. “I’m out of the fixing-people game. I tried that once and it didn’t work out so well for me.”
“Really? Then why were you so upset about Richie?”
“I just…wish I’d recognized earlier that he needed help.”
“So you’re not trying to save him?”
“Absolutely not.” Even if the little voice inside her head called her a liar.
“Good. You should be focusing on yourself, on your own life. You should be going after what you want, not worrying about everyone else.”
“The last time I went after what I wanted I—” She clamped her lips together and pushed her plate away, her throat burning with unshed tears. “Never mind.”
“No.” He caught her by the wrist as she shoved her chair back. “Don’t run. What happened? Why can’t you put yourself first?”
She tried to pull away from him, but he wouldn’t let go. “Because the last time I did,” she said hoarsely, “I helped a pedophile go free.”
HE WASN’T GOING TO FEEL bad about doing his job. About digging to find out what Allie was hiding. Not after he’d laid himself bare to her.
“I don’t understand,” Dean said. “What do you mean, you helped a pedophile?”
She tugged on her arm and he released her. She took her empty dishes to the sink. Kept her back to him. “Do you know why I chose to become a defense attorney?”
He stood and put the juice and butter in the fridge. “Too many episodes of Matlock?”
“No.” She turned around, but her smile was sad. “Although I did admire how he went all out for his clients.” She turned on the water and rinsed plates before putting them in the dishwasher. “It was because of my dad.”
“Wait, didn’t I hear your dad was the ex-police chief?” She nodded. “I would’ve thought he’d sway you to become a district attorney or something.”
“He’s pretty liberal minded, for a cop. He told me that while our legal system is one of the best out there, it’s still far from perfect. But it couldn’t work at all if both sides weren’t represented.” She closed the dishwasher and began filling the sink with water, adding a squirt of soap. “He says the concept of innocent until proven guilty couldn’t be possible without lawyers—defense attorneys in particular. That lawyers are advocates, while justice is the responsibility of the judge and jury.”
“And you believed defending the accused was the most important part of the system.”
“I thought I could help more people as a defense attorney.” She scrubbed the skillet, her mouth a thin line. “I started off so idealistic. And naive. As cliché as it sounds, I thought I could change the world.”
He dried the skillet and set it on the counter. “That’s a big order for one person, no matter how good the intent.”
She drained the water and wrung out the dishcloth. “No kidding.”
He poured the rest of the coffee into their mugs, adding cream to hers and handing it to her. “What happened?”
She tossed the dishrag into the sink, took the coffee in one hand and scooped up Persephone with the other. Allie sank into her seat, sitting sideways, her gaze on the floor as the cat curled up in her lap. “Winning became very important to me. Too important.”
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do your best.”
She looked up, her expression bleak. “There is if winning cases becomes more important than helping your clients.”
He pulled out the chair next to her and moved it so he sat with his knees touching hers. “I can’t see you ever allowing that to happen.”
“I couldn’t, either.” She set her cup down and stroked Persephone. He had no doubt it helped soothe Allie, too. “At first, I talked myself into believing working for the big firm would be the same as what I’d been doing. Except the pay was three times what I was making at the public defender’s office.”
“Sounds like a win-win situation.”
“I thought so. And I was willing to do whatever it took to prove their faith in me wasn’t wasted. After two years I was moved from associate to lead attorney. My goal was to make junior partner before I was thirty-five.” She sat back, her expression one of self-disgust. “I started out wanting to work for the greater good, and ended up throwing it all away because of my ambition for a corner office.”
“But you gave it up,” he pointed out. “You realized you were no longer happy.”
“I realized I was a fraud.”
He didn’t want to spook her by seeming too eager to hear what she had to say. And…well…he hoped she’d want to tell him.
“I won the biggest case of my career,” she admitted.
He raised his eyebrows. “And that’s a bad thing?”
“I didn’t think so at first, even though I was representing a man accused of sexually abusing a child. I was…” She closed her eyes and swallowed. “God, I was excited by the challenge of it. He was a pillar of the community, a happily married man. And I believed he was innocent.”
“You couldn’t be a defense attorney—at least, not a successful one—if you only represented people you felt were innocent.”
She nodded. “You’re right. But I was morally opposed to representing people accused of sex crimes.” She set the cat on the floor and got up to pace the short length of the room. “Until this case.” The remorse in her voice made his chest hurt.
“But my client was guilty,” she exclaimed, “and thanks to me, to my expert defense, he was allowed to go free. Dean,” she said raggedly, “he hurt a little boy and I helped him get away with it.”
“Hey, now…” Dean crossed to her, wrapped his arms around her because there was no way he could keep from touching her, comforting her. “You’re not to blame for his crimes. You were doing your job—”
“That’s just it. All I cared about was doing my job.” She clutched him, her arms around his waist, her head on his chest. “I didn’t care about finding out the truth, didn’t even consider the possibility he could’ve been guilty.”
Dean held her away from him. He hated that she was upset. Hated even more that he’d manipulated her into sharing what was obviously a source of great guilt and pain.
“Stop it,” he said quietly. “You weren’t the only one to believe him. He had everyone fooled, even his wife.”
Allie pushed him back a step. “How do you know his wife was fooled?”
CHAPTER TEN
DEAN’S EYEBROWS DREW together as if he was trying to figure out what she was talking about. “You mentioned he was married. I just assumed his wife stood by him during the trial.”
Her shoulders slumped. “You’re right. She did.”
He rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “You had evidence the guy was innocent, and a jury agreed. What makes you so sure he really was guilty?”
“The day after the trial ended,” she said slowly, “the boy ended up in the hospital. He…he tried to kill himself.”
&
nbsp; Sympathy softened Dean’s features. “That’s not your fault,” he said, cupping her face in his large hand. “You couldn’t have known.”
She pulled away from his touch. “That doesn’t make it easier. That kid had no one to protect him. He’s the one who needed help, not Miles. But it was my job to see only what I needed to see.” She hugged her arms around herself. “And I was very good at my job.”
“That boy could’ve had a number of reasons to hurt himself,” Dean pointed out. “You can’t be sure it’s because your client abused him.”
She began pacing again. She couldn’t stand to be so close to Dean, not when she felt so weak. Not when all she wanted was to wrap herself around him and never let go.
“You’re right, but it was enough to make me wonder if Miles had been abusing him. To start to question my part in what happened.” She put her chair back, straightened his and pushed it in as well. “A few days later, Miles hosted a party at his home. At the end of the night, as I was leaving, Lynne—Miles’s wife—stopped me. She’d had too much to drink, so when she started babbling about how I was to blame, I figured she was drunk.”
Allie shivered, remembering Lynne’s despondence, hearing the anger and desperation in her voice. “But then she…she broke down. Started crying. She told me she’d never be able to get her son away from him now. That Jon would never be safe.”
“You didn’t mention this guy had a kid.”
She crossed to the refrigerator and traced the heart in a drawing Emma had given her. “Jon was six.”
Dean straightened, his expression hard. “You think his wife was trying to tell you he was abusing his own son?”
Tears formed in her eyes but she refused to let them fall. “I don’t know. I was too shocked to even move. When Miles joined us, he joked about his wife not being able to hold her alcohol. I was ready to shrug the whole thing off—I wanted to shrug it off,” she said shakily, remembering the moment. “But when I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Lynne had said.” Allie walked to the sink, stared at the softly falling snow out the window. “And since I couldn’t let my doubts go, I asked a friend of mine, a detective, to do a bit of digging.”