CHAPTER ELEVEN
John kicked the door open. Pulling Alex from the bed, he held her to him until she stopped screaming. He moved her to his lap. His hands pressed her head against his muscular chest while he caressed her hair. She knew he was talking, but her ears heard only the ragged breathing to a backbeat of blood dripping onto the white floor.
“Oh, John,” she said when her terror shifted to sadness. Alex wept against his shoulder, and John rocked her back and forth until her ears heard what he was saying: “My God, I love you so very much. You have to believe me. You are the very heart of me.”
He pulled her face away from him. Looking into her eyes to see if she was present, he said, “Please hear me out.”
“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” She pressed her palms to her ears and shook her head.
“Oh, love.”
He lifted her from the bed and carried her to the bathroom. Sitting with her on his lap, he filled the tub with water and bubble bath. Then, undressing her like a child, he placed her in the bath before joining her there. She lay with her head against his shoulder and his arms wrapped around her. While the warm, fragrant water worked to calm her fear, she cried into his chest. He said nothing, caressing her skin, waiting for the storm of emotion to pass. When she was silent and breathing deeply, he moved to look at her face. Her glazed eyes stared straight forward.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me, too,” she said.
“I’ve never known how to speak to you about this. I’ve spent the last two hours racking my brain as to how to say everything.”
She shifted away from him.
“Why were you screaming?”
“I saw them dead.” Tears seeped from her eyes. “Blood everywhere . . . dripping on the floor.”
“The shock of my crap has stirred things around in your brain,” he said.
“I loved you.”
He jerked up to look at her. “Loved?”
She moved out of the tub. Grabbing a towel from the rack, she went into their bedroom. She threw on a pair of comfortable sweats and a T-shirt, before she began to pack. When John came to the door, he nodded.
“You’re leaving.”
“You’re married to someone else, John. You should live with your wife.”
“Stop. Alexandra, please stop.” He fell to his knees before her. “I beg you.”
Alex blinked at him. She felt nothing—not calm or sad or angry or afraid. She was just blank. Looking down at John, she heard Ben’s voice, “He’s a psychological terrorist.”
Rage ignited deep within her belly.
Fuck Eleazar. This is my life. I’ve fought for my country. I’ve fought for my friends. I will fight for my own Goddamn life.
“All right. I’ll listen.”
John nodded. While she watched, he dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He led her downstairs to the living-room couch and went to the kitchen for a bottle of wine. When he returned, Alex had closed the living-room drapes and lit a fire. He opened the wine and gave her a glass.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said.
“Ok, I’ll start. What language were they speaking?”
“Ulster Gaelic. The language of my youth. They spoke and I responded without thinking. I guess some things never leave you. How do you know the PIRA?” he asked.
“You remember we extracted that Irish singer?”
“The tabloid picture of you making out with him is right there,” he said. He pointed to a grainy picture of Alex kissing the rock star on the balcony of his hotel room. “Some old friends thought they could make some cash by holding him hostage. Charlie liked the band and knew their manager. You went to get him, then couldn’t get him back to his life. So you pretended to be his lover.”
“We spent an entire week with him,” Alex said. “He’s very into a united Ireland. As you can imagine, I was incredibly bored and wanted to go home. He said that if I wanted something to do, I should find this girl, PIRA, who had disappeared the year before. No one knew what had happened to her. Jesse and I checked around and found this whole messy drama involving . . . Anyway, it’s not important. We were able to find her and get her home. Somehow, both sides were satisfied. It’s one of the only times they agreed on anything. It turns out that her father is a big deal. I spoke Gaelic, so he kind of adopted me. He’s really a great guy—kind, funny, very grandfatherly. He told me that if I could find his daughter, maybe I could find John Kelly.”
“Why did he want me?”
“He said that John Kelly had disappeared as a child, and they thought he’d been taken by the British. I looked into it but never got very far. Well, that’s not true. I have a lot of information—sightings, contact, pictures, and all the police documents. I never found John Kelly.”
“Until tonight.”
“Right under my nose,” she said.
She took a drink of wine then shifted to look at him. “Your turn.”
“I don’t know where to start,” he said.
“John Kelly was standing next to his father when a bomb exploded. It’s believed that Ronan Kelly set the blast then stopped for a smoke. The bomb exploded early, due to a faulty switch. Fairly common for that kind of device,” Alex said. “Ronan Kelly died, and John Kelly disappeared.
“I have a crime scene photo of him . . .you . . . covered in blood . . . in shock. Ronan Kelly’s carotid was punctured by a knife or stiletto. The police report says that a Catholic nun came to take you to an orphanage, but they never found the nun or the orphanage.”
“I have eleven siblings,” John said.
“John Kelly is the youngest of twelve,” Alex said.
“My sister Rita—she’s just younger than Cian—was the nun. She walked me to her church and cleaned me up. We caught a ferry to England and reached London by rail.”
“Why did she take you?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a little fuzzy. We hid from the IRA at a church in Central London. The priest gave us a small room, and Rita worked as the church secretary. She met her husband the week we moved to London. They were married about six months later. He adopted me. He’s called Tom Drayson. That’s why I’m John Drayson.”
Alex watched the fire burn in the fireplace. Her mind jumped from facts about this person John Kelly and the man sitting next to her. She remembered his face, full of passion and love, the heat and desire in her belly, the cool sand in her toes and his words: “Marry me, Alex. Marry me tonight.”
“Please say something,” John said.
“Why did you ask me to marry you when you were already married?” she asked. “Do you live with your wife? Do you have children? How come Max doesn’t know?”
She watched him stand to place another log on the fire. Walking to the window, he shifted the drapes to look out at the night. He turned back to her. He opened his mouth and then closed it. Shaking his head, he returned to the couch.
Alex pulled her knees against her chest and turned to face him.
“It’s a complicated question.” He paused for a moment. “I asked you to marry me because I was inexplicably in love with you. I wanted you in a way that I can hardly express, even now, twelve years later. I had this overwhelming feeling that if I didn’t act, at that moment, I would lose you forever.”
“But you were already married. You belong to someone else.”
John closed his eyes. “I . . . It’s complicated.”
She looked at the small gold band on her left hand. They had bought these bands three days after they were married. He put it on her finger that day, and she never took it off. With a sigh, she pulled the ring from her finger and dropped it into his hand.
“Complicated?” A bubble of sadness burst the moment the ring left her finger.
She wasn’t married anymore.
She looked over to John to see his eyes squeezed shut in pain. His hand closed around the ring. When he opened his eyes, their eyes held. Sliding her ring onto the pinkie of his right hand, he spoke in a torre
nt of words.
“I was fifteen when they found me. Is that in your records? They found me in church. Two IRA soldiers. I was an altar boy, helping with mass. They attended the mass then . . . They knew who I was immediately. I tried to escape but . . . They caught me . . . Beat me. Bad. Tom found me where they dumped me . . . broken . . . bleeding. He hid me at home. Rita was pregnant with their second. She was so upset about me that the doctor was called. They thought she might lose the baby.”
“I . . . I was terrified. They came to the house about a week later. The IRA was desperate for money, absolutely desperate. They said that I had to marry this girl . . . Eimilie . . . and work in America. She would give the money to them. Tom . . . I . . . told them whatever they wanted to hear. I never . . . They dragged me to a church where they forced this ancient priest to . . . I married this girl . . . woman . . . I think I kissed her.” He shrugged. “I never thought it was legal because we didn’t . . .”
“Consummate?”
“She was dating one of the IRA guys. They took me back to some apartment where she had a fine time with one of the other guys while they made the husband watch. They got very drunk . . . very dangerous. I escaped when they passed out. Tom was waiting for me at a pre-arranged meet-up spot . . . an underground station. We’d always known they might come for me.
“Tom sent me to this farm in Scotland, where his grandparents lived. I don’t know who they were. They weren’t his grandparents; that’s for sure, but they were very kind to me. They kept me safe, helped me learn this great London accent, and sent me to school. When I, John Drayson, passed my O levels, they put me on a plane to America.
“I didn’t marry her Alex. John Kelly married her. John Kelly is married to Eimilie.”
“You’re John Kelly.”
He was silent for a while, then poured the rest of the wine in their glasses.
“I thought it was over, you know. I’d almost forgot it even happened until I started at UCLA. I received this letter from Eimilie, telling me that she was pregnant with my child. She was going to garnish my wages for the baby. I . . . I hadn’t seen her but the one time. I had no idea what to do. I worked for everything, and, if she took the money, I’d have to leave school. I was sitting in my dorm room, you know, the one I shared with Max, trying to decide what to do when Ben showed up. He said that your father, having grown up with Irish people, thought I seemed Irish, not English. Patrick asked Ben to check it out. How would I like to go for a walk?
“He knew who I was and about Eimilie.” John snorted, remembering. “He even knew about the farm in Scotland. He asked me questions, bought me lunch, and listened to what I had to say. I mean, he listened to everything from my terror for Fionn, that’s Rita’s second son, to the days on the farm. It was as if he knew all the players . . . ; Rita says that she’s never met Ben.”
“You have contact with Rita? Tom?”
“We speak about once a month. They’ve come to see me in Edinburgh when I’ve been coming or going to see you. They live in Scotland now.”
“And Eimilie?”
“She receives benefits for John Kelly. He’s classified as missing, presumed dead. I don’t know. Her benefits have something to do with the Belfast agreement. Ben told me, but I don’t remember. I don’t care.”
“And you never . . . I mean, you were very promiscuous at UCLA. Why didn’t you . . .”
“I was fifteen, Alexandra. I wasn’t a lady killer until I was fifteen and a half, at least.” He smiled at his attempted joke.
“And later?”
“I never saw her again.” He paused for a moment. “Well, that’s not true. She came here . . . to this house when you were just out of hospital. I couldn’t believe the nerve. I didn’t recognize her until she introduced herself as my wife. We argued on the porch. She wanted money, of course. I gave her what I had in my wallet, then she went away. I called Ben. He was at your parents’ house. I think he had her deported, but I don’t really know.”
“Why didn’t everyone know about it?”
“Your family was upset about our marriage. It was like an explosion for them. Ben and I agreed not to add to the drama with this crap.”
Alex watched the glimmer of Jesse move into the room.
“Jesse says there’s something else . . . something you’re not saying.”
“Jesse’s dead, love.”
Alex scowled at John. “What are you not telling me?”
“She had pictures of her and me . . . you know . . . together. I’m wearing my wedding ring, but I never . . . ever . . . never. I gave them to Ben. He says that I must have . . . bedded her when I was at UCLA, and they superimposed the ring.”
“The photos were altered?”
“He said it was definitely me but that it’s possible the ring was added. He was as confident as I am that I hadn’t . . . been with her, or anyone for that matter, after we were married. I assume they keep track.”
“Standard protocol for high-level agents.”
“I only remember seeing her twice—once in London and once on our porch. She says that one of the children is mine.”
As if his words were an arrow through her heart, Alex gasped and put her hand over her heart.
“I was very careful. I always, always used protection, every single time. I didn’t want a disease or a baby to get in the way of my plan to be a doctor. The only time I didn’t was . . .”
“With her?”
“With you. I was intoxicated by you. I think you’ll remember that we barely made it to the apartment. I’ve never felt that way about anyone . . . ever. I had to have you.” He shrugged. “I’m still that way.”
Alex’s lips turned up in a smile before pressing into a straight, tight line. She digested what he had said.
“Have you checked the DNA on the child?”
“I couldn’t do that without you knowing, right?”
“She’s blackmailed you?”
“That’s what Ben calls it. I . . . I guess I understand.”
“What?”
“My mother died when I was a baby, maybe two years old. My father was in Maze Prison. We lived on the streets. We had neither clothing nor food. And when someone took us in? We were literally taking food out of someone else’s mouth. The poverty in Belfast was incredible. Ben says it’s better now, but there isn’t much industry or jobs. I’ve never given her that much money . . . a couple of thousand dollars in total.”
Alex nodded. “It sounds like you don’t mind being married to her.”
“I don’t think of myself as married to her,” John said. “I am married to you.”
Alex turned to look at him. Her eyes searched his face.
“No, you’re not.”
Standing from the couch, she went into the kitchen. She flicked on the coffee maker and poured breakfast cereal into a bowl. John stood in the doorway of the kitchen.
“That’s all you have to say?”
“Guess I don’t need the vibrator,” she said pouring milk on her cereal.
“And why is that?”
“Because if I’m not married to you, I’m going to have some fun.”
John’s mouth fell open.
“You can go be with your wife and children,” Alex said. She poured herself a cup of coffee and added some milk. “Maybe she’ll support you while you finish your residency.”
Taking her cereal and coffee, Alex walked past John to the dining-room and sat down at a chair, just as her cell phone rang.
“Hey, did you know I’m not married? Yeah, he’s married to someone else. Kids and everything. I know! That sounds fun; I need to change. No, I’ll meet you there.”
“Who was that?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Alexandra.”
Her eyes followed him, but her mind and heart were miles away. She would move into Max’s house. They would sell this house. John could move back
to Belfast to be with his family. She nodded. She was going be all right.
“Stop.”
“Stop what?” she asked.
“You’re planning your life without me.”
“There was never any ‘you’ in my life. Only dreams and lies. You’re married. Go be with your wife.”
“YOU are my wife.”
“No, I’m not. Jeez, I wish I had known that. I would have had a lot more fun as a Green Beret.”
He dropped to his knees next to her chair.
“Don’t do this.”
“What did you expect would happen, John Kelly? You’ve lied for more than a decade. You thought you’d just reveal the truth, and we’d go on our merry way. What about your child? Or children? Or fuck . . .”
In a breath, she was overcome with sorrow. Like walking under a waterfall, her sadness dropped into her mind and body. She pressed her hands against her eyes and cried. He moved to put his arms around her, but she shrugged him off. Jumping from her seat at the table, she ran upstairs to their bedroom and slammed the door. She threw herself on the bed and sobbed. He followed her into the bedroom and sat on a corner of the bed. Alex’s cell phone rang again.
“Bring them here in three hours,” she said. She wiped her nose with her arm. “Yeah.”
She closed the phone and moved to get up. John stood before her.
“Get out of my way,” she said.
“No, I’m not going to let you go off with some guy just because you’re mad at me.”
“What’s it to you? What I do, or don’t do, is none of your business.”
John sat down on the bed.
“You’re just going off with some guy. Just like that. You can’t have loved me very much.”
“I need to make up for lost time,” she said. “Twelve years of being faithful to a married man can really make a girl . . . I don’t know . . . horny. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Kelly, I need to get dressed for my date.”
She made it to her closet before she fell to the ground, crying. He came behind her to hold her, but she pushed him away. He held her firm and kissed her. Between sobs, she tore his clothing from him while he pulled at her clothing. She was weeping when they joined. Pressing against him, she moved on top of him. In her sorrow, she collapsed against his chest. They fought against each other, pressing and pulling, rising in pitch and tempo. In one blinding moment, they slipped over the cliff together in release.
“You’re not mine. You’re not mine. You’re not mine.” Shaking her head, her tears dropped from her eyes.
“I’m only yours. I belonged to you the very moment I saw your crooked smile in that terrible bathroom all those years ago. Oh, God, Alex.”
Wrapping his arms around her, he carried her to the bed. He slipped her between the sheets and lay beside her. She wrapped herself around him, holding him tight around the waist. Her head rested on his chest.
“What about your date?”
She looked up into his face, then shook her head.
“Marry me, Alex.”
She groaned.
“I’ll get this sorted. I promise. I’ll take a DNA test. I’ll deal with Eimilie. Marry me, Alex.”
“You’ve had twelve years to work this out. Instead you’ve just given her money—my money—no less.”
John shifted so that he was on top of her. He kissed her.
“Our money. Marry me.”
“No.”
“Your mouth says, ‘no,’ but your body says, ‘yes’.”
Alex pushed at him and slipped from under him. He held her in place. They lay face to face, staring at each other. Alex searched his eyes, his face, and his heart for answers.
Should she hold on, fight for him, for herself—or run away from the betrayal? He was right. Her mind said, “Run away,” but her hands and arms held onto him, unwilling to let go of what had been hers for twelve years.
When he pulled her back to him, she succumbed to the overwhelming desire to have him, at least one more time, before she had to let him go. Pressing her arms above her head, his mouth worked down the sides of her neck and to her shoulders. She gasped when he caught her nipple in his mouth. Arching her back slightly, he began to move his hips against her. She rose again to his insistent press.
“Marry me, Alex.”
“No.” She slipped just over the edge.
He moved with increasing pitch as her climax spread throughout her body. She began to rise again. He plundered her mouth with his teeth and tongue. They crested, releasing in waves of intensity and bliss until they slipped off the edge.
“Marry me.”
“No.”
“Why? Alex, give me one reason why.”
“Because I’m already married to you,” she said.
He laughed. Wrapping her in his arms, he rocked her with his laughter.
“I love you, Alex.”
“You’d better.”
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