Living With Lies Trilogy (Books 1, 2, and 3 of The Dancing Moon Ranch Series)

by Watters, Patricia

  "We're ready," Justine announced, appearing from the hallway holding Sophie's hand. Brad started to tell Sophie she looked pretty in her new dress, but from the glower on Sophie's face, decided to pass. In fact, he got the distinct impression that Sophie was hoping he'd join her mother in heaven. A hell of a situation.

  ***

  When they entered the lodge, to Justine's dismay, there was no sign of Mei Ling, who was probably off in some safe corner, waiting for the lodge to clear. She considered taking Sophie over to Grace and Jack's house to see their other cats, but decided it was more important that Sophie join the activities at the lodge and have some sense of Christmas. "Do you want to go see what the other kids are doing?" she asked Sophie, who was holding onto her hand.

  Sophie shook her head.

  "Do you want to sit with your daddy and me?"

  "I don't have a daddy," Sophie insisted, glaring at Brad.

  Justine gave Brad a feigned smile, and said, "It'll take time."

  "Hell's likely to freeze over first," Brad mumbled.

  Justine bent down and said, "Sophie, honey, do you want a cookie off the tree?"

  Sophie shook her head.

  "What do you want?" Justine asked.

  Sophie looked up at her, and replied, "I want God to give Mommy back."

  Justine heard Brad's shit under his breath, and glared at him. "This is not about you," she said quietly, realizing she was beginning to sound like Grace. "It's about your daughter coming to terms with the fact that the person she loved most in the world is gone forever, so stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something useful."

  "Hell, if I knew what that was I would," Brad said. "So you tell me."

  "Go find the cat."

  Sophie, catching Justine's suggestion, looked up at Brad and waited.

  Brad shrugged. "I'll see what I can do." He walked over to where Jack and Grace were sitting with some of the guests, and leaned over them. After a moment, Grace patted Jack on the leg and got up, and Brad returned to announce, "Grace is going to find the cat. She'll bring her here."

  Sophie eyed her father. Some of the venom was gone. Not all, but it was a start, Justine thought. "Why don't you join the kids and play games with them," she said to Sophie.

  Sophie shook her head, then broke away from Justine's grasp and went to sit under a table at the far end of the room. Brad sat on a couch, looking towards where Sophie was holed up under the table, and Justine sat beside him. "It's a start," she said.

  "What? Sitting under the table? Looks like we're back to square one."

  "No, we're up to Sophie looking at you like she doesn't want you dead immediately. There's a subtle difference. Spare your life a little longer because just maybe there's something in it for her. She hasn't figured out what it is yet though."

  "I didn't get that impression," Brad said.

  "You didn't see what I saw," Justine replied. "It was the expression on Sophie's face when she looked at you that last time. Softer. She doesn't hate you as much."

  "She'll never love me," Brad said, in a weary voice.

  Justine looked at him and saw a troubled man with a face that told her he wanted the love of his little girl, that Sophie mattered to him now. "Give her time," she said. "It's all new to her. Losing a mother. Having a father she never knew existed. You don't just start loving someone overnight." She stopped and stared at Brad, her words hovering between them. A contradiction to what she felt—the first glimmer of true love. She was sure she felt it for Brad, who was looking at her as if he felt it too. An awareness dawning.

  She started to tell him how she felt, but he raised his hand to stop her, and said, in a clipped dry tone, "It's easy to mistake love for hero worship."

  She glared at him then. He was presuming his trying to help her change into a better person was tantamount to her looking at him as her knight in shining armor, come to rescue her from herself, and Justine Page did not need rescuing. A man to love? Yes. A hero to worship? Hell no. "I wasn't referring to you," she snapped.

  "And I wasn't talking about you and me," Brad fired back. "I was talking about Sophie. I solved the problem of the cat. Grace Hansen's looking for her now. I'm a hero."

  "Oh." Justine said nothing more, but it was hard to disguise the disappointment she felt with Brad's words. It wasn't that he actually meant what he said about hero worship, but that he'd said it to stop what else he might have wanted to say, an admittance to feeling something too. During that moment of awareness, she'd seen it on his face, and in his eyes, seen that first glimmer of love. Which had to be quashed, from his perspective. A ruse for Brad to get around the truth. And the truth was, Brad felt something for her but wouldn't admit it to himself because she'd never be a candidate for wife and mother. The chickens come home to roost.

  Justine Page coming home to roost on her little sister’s doorstep.

  Because you don't have any place to go because all the men in your life kicked you out.

  And the only man she wanted was closing the door in her face.

  Deciding to shove her past farther into the past, she focused her attention on the people around her, guests who'd come from all around the country to spend a snowy week at a lodge where they could ride horses into the mountains and go on sleigh rides, and make new friends, and soak up some of the love and zest for life that was a part of the Jack Hansen family.

  But not the Sam Hansen family, Justine noted.

  One thing Justine mastered during her years of working her way up the proverbial ladder was body language, and what she saw going on between Sam and Susan Hansen was revealing. Sitting together, arms folded, bodies angled away from each other, legs crossed away from each other, Susan's foot moving back and forth in agitation, Sam's fist curled in a knot on his knee, Susan's lips pursed, Sam's in a slash of cold, silent, anger.

  Their son, Ricky, sitting beside his father, was also displaying his anger, foot thumping against the couch, fingers methodically breaking a cellophane-wrapped candy cane into random lengths, each snap reflected in the pinch of his lips. He'd been privy to whatever was going on between his parents. A domestic storm on Christmas morn.

  "There's definitely trouble in paradise," Justine said to Brad, whose eyes were focused on Sophie, who was silently observing things from her spot under the table. "Grace and Jack might be a match made in heaven, but Sam and Susan look like they've just come back from hell. Sam is Jack's twin, but the men are as different as night and day. Both good guys, but different. And Susan's pretty much a shrew. Why Sam's put up with her all these years is a mystery."

  "It's called for better or for worse," Brad said, an edge of cynicism to his tone.

  Justine looked at him. The anger over his ex-wife was still there, smoldering just below the surface. "She pretty much did a number on you, didn't she?"

  "Which one?" Brad asked, continuing to look at Sophie, "My ex, or Yvette?"

  Justine never considered Yvette in the mix. She'd thought of her as Brad's lost love. But clearly, he was angry with her too. "I was talking about your ex-wife," she said.

  "Yeah, well, a woman screwing around on her husband pretty much wipes out the for better part. Sticking around with her for the for worse part didn't cut it for me."

  "Then she wanted you to stay with her?" Justine asked, surprised to find Brad talking about his ex-wife in the middle of all the turmoil going on with Sophie.

  "Sure. She needed someone to screw after I arrived home and caught her in bed with a guy and beat the crap out of him. He tucked what was left of his balls between his legs and took off. Pretty hard for my wife to explain that away."

  "But she tried, I take it," Justine said.

  "Yeah, she tried. She was so lonely for me she screwed the first man who came along. Helped keep her mind off how much she missed me. It never entered my mind, while I was away, that she'd do that. In my wedding vows I actually meant the part about forsaking all others, but I guess she was just repeating what the preacher said."

&nb
sp; "And what kind of number did Yvette do on you?" Justine asked, hoping she wasn't pushing a hot button. But he'd already opened it up for questions.

  "She died," he said, simply.

  "That's not exactly doing a number on you," Justine said, "unless you believe she rode her bike in front of the hit-and-run car."

  "I don't," Brad replied, "but she could have looked both ways."

  "You're being ridiculous," Justine snapped. "You're angry with the woman for dying and leaving you with a child to raise."

  "No, I'm angry with her for not telling me about Sophie or Sophie about me."

  "You never went after her," Justine said. "Why should she tell Sophie about a man who only existed in her mother's life long enough to impregnate her. It doesn't send a very good message to an impressionable child, and later, it's hard to justify it to a teenage daughter who might decide that recreational sex is a great way to spend an afternoon."

  Brad looked at her and said nothing, but the message was clear.

  Recreational sex was a great way for Justine Page to spend her afternoons with the captain of the football team...

  "You're right," Justine said, bringing his thoughts out in the open, "that was the way I spent a lot of afternoons when I was in high school, so you might thank Yvette for holding back the truth from Sophie. With luck, she won't turn out like me. I don't envy you, the road ahead with her. You'll always have to stay a few steps ahead of her, not an easy thing to do if Sophie decides she wants to be like me."

  "What made you want to be like that?" Brad asked, the question not coming across as an accusation, but as concern. A father wanting to make sure his daughter wouldn't turn out like Justine Page. A justified concern. She wouldn't want a daughter like herself either.

  "In high school it was the glory of being a cheerleader and knowing all the girls envied me and all the boys wanted to get it on with me but couldn't, because I was taken by the biggest jock in school," she said. "Everybody knew we were getting it on, and it didn't matter to me because I was where I wanted to be, distorted as that was. We'd walk around the halls, hands in each other's pockets, him patting my butt in front of everyone, me laughing and looking around to make sure everyone knew he was my guy and I was his girl. And the girls wanted to know how it was with him. Some hadn't had sex and we'd sit in a little huddle and I'd describe it. But the only thing I couldn't describe was what an orgasm was. I didn't even know there was such a thing, only that I had to take care of my guy's problem."

  Oddly, the straight talk with Brad made her face the past head on. She'd never done that. Her years in high school were the years that formed who she was. A woman who had no idea what her real potential would have been if not for using her body to get where she needed to go. But Brad knew it all, and although bringing it to the surface meant shutting the door to any relationship with him, it was something she had to do to become the woman she wanted to be.

  "You didn't have to keep going after he graduated," Brad said. "Why did you?"

  "Because after Ross left, I had an image to uphold, and Mitch came along about that time. He was the new guy at school and he drove a BMW, and all the girls wanted him, so I got him. Back then, Justine Page could get any guy she wanted, except for the ones who gravitated towards girls like Grace. But that didn't matter because they weren't cool. They didn't matter."

  "And after you graduated?" Brad waited for her response.

  Justine tried to brush those years off. "I actually studied when I was in college."

  But in her senior year a morsel was dangled in front of her that she couldn't pass up. And that was the beginning of the end. But she wasn't ready to tell Brad about that yet, because whatever shred of perverse respect he might have for her now would die.

  "No screwing around with guys then?" Brad asked.

  She shrugged. "Sometimes you get on a track you can't get off," she said, somewhat cryptically. "But I'm trying to change now. Just stay ahead of Sophie. Monitor who she's with and where she goes. It won't be easy. Girls can be devious. Around my parents I dressed modestly, I was studious, and I followed the rules. They thought I was practicing with the cheerleading team after school, but I was screwing Ross. Both his parents worked and the house was ours, and it was all about having sex. Then with Mitch, my parents were impressed with him and the fact that his father was CEO of a big company. Mitch was polished and polite and had my parents practically bowing at his feet, but on the side he was screwing their daughter in the basement suite of his parent's eight-thousand square-foot home. They had a busy social life and were gone half the time, and the other half they were upstairs entertaining, thinking Mitch and I were watching TV. So that's about it."

  "Yeah, that's about it," Brad said morosely, while looking at Sophie.

  Justine looked over to see Susan say something to Sam while thrashing a hand in the air to emphasize whatever she was saying. The scowl on Sam's face deepened and he put his hand on Ricky's leg to stop the thumping. Then Sam leaned toward Susan and said something akin to now are you satisfied? She shrugged, then got up and left the room. And it was like a cloud of relief settling over the other two. The scowl on Sam's face vanished, and he unfolded his arms and patted Ricky on the leg, who smiled up at him. Then Sam pointed toward Sophie and said something to Ricky, who got up and went over to stand in front of where Sophie was sitting under the table.

  Justine nudged Brad. "Two troubled kids. Do you think they'll find a common ground this Christmas from hell?"

  Brad shrugged, and said, "I don't know what the boy's going through, but with Sophie, just about any kind of connection's better than nothing."

  "Well it looks like Ricky's going to connect, whether Sophie wants him to or not," Justine said, nudging Brad's arm.

  Brad braced his elbows on his knees and leaned forward and watched with interest as Ricky ducked under the table. Sophie scooted back. Whether she was doing it to get away from him, or to give him room to sit with her, was undetermined.

  "He's a sweet kid," Justine said. "He pretty much spent the first three years of his life in hospitals getting blood transfusions because of a genetic blood disorder, a kind of anemia that's fatal without a bone marrow or cord blood transplant. Then Susan had—" She stopped short, knowing Jack and Grace didn't want the truth to come out, that Susan gave birth to a child who provided the cord blood, then she didn't want him, so Grace and Jack were raising him as a fraternal twin with their son.

  Aware that Brad was waiting for her to continue, she shrugged, and said, "One of Grace and Jack's little boys was a cord blood match for Ricky. He's fine now." She looked at Sophie. "Well, Ricky made his move and got away with it," she mused, as she saw Ricky sitting under the table with Sophie. Neither were talking, but they were looking at each other like they wanted to talk.

  "Do you think that's okay?" Brad asked.

  "They're five and six," Justine replied. "I don't think Ricky will try to make a move on her."

  "This isn't a joke," Brad said, in a sober voice.

  "I know," Justine replied, in an equally sober voice, "and I'd be the first to see the warning signs, but right now both kids need a friend. Sometimes the Lord works in mysterious ways."

  Brad looked at her, dubiously. "Are you a religious person?"

  Justine shrugged. "My family took us to church every Sunday, and Grace and I sang in the choir, but during the sermon, while Grace was listening to what the minister had to say, I was busy drawing pictures on the church bulletin. I could completely tune the man out. Maybe if my parents had sent me to a catholic all-girl school things would have been different. Something you might keep in mind for Sophie."

  "You're not serious," Brad said, looking at her and waiting.

  "Yes, in fact I'm very serious," Justine replied. "But then, maybe your future wife will have her own ideas on how to raise Sophie."

  Brad said nothing, but her words were sinking in, Justine knew. She could tell by the way Brad's jaws were bunching, and his eyes were fixed on S
ophie.

  "She's also going to be a very beautiful teenager," Justine said. "Unless you instill solid morals in her from the getgo, she'll use it to get what she wants. It happens. An all-girl school would go a long way in keeping her on the straight and narrow. You should at least look into it."

  "Yeah, I'll think about it," Brad said. But the tone of his voice said otherwise.

  "No you won't," Justine replied. "You're saying that because you want an excuse to get me off the track I'm on because you don't want to deal with the reality of it right now, and the reality is, Sophie is a beautiful child, and everyone will be telling her so, and she'll come to think that her beauty is who she is."

  Brad's knotted fist came down solidly on his knee, but he said nothing.

  "Going silent doesn't help either," Justine said. "I may not be a candidate for wife and mother, but I am in a position to give you some pointers, even if it's not what you want to hear. Just keep in mind what Jack said about temporary people in Sophie's life. She doesn't need them. So you'll have one crack at finding the right wife."

  "Yeah, well, it's my problem now," Brad said, underscoring the fact that Justine would not be a part of the solution.

  Justine tried not to think of how completely Brad had just shut her out of his life, though he couldn't shut her out completely at the moment because he still needed her to deal with Sophie. But as soon as Sophie would begin to relate to Brad, he'd have no need for a woman who, in his mind, would complicate things, yet she was coming to realize that she was precisely what Brad needed to help Sophie avoid the pitfalls that come with beauty. In fact, the idea of wife and mother was beginning to take hold. Maybe the Lord really did work in mysterious ways.

  A few minutes later, Grace returned with Mei Ling, and set her down under the table between Sophie and Ricky. Mei Ling immediately started making figure eights around Sophie, who started giggling. After another few more turns, Mei Ling flopped down and rolled around, while the kids stroked her belly and petted her sleek gray coat.