“I’ve been such a fool. I was so angry and so bitter it was easier to perpetuate the lie than it was to tell the truth. Besides, once Charles had it in his head that you weren’t his, he couldn’t wait to see the back of us. I hit him where it hurt the hardest, and he got me right back.”
“You could have told him the truth at any time.”
“I couldn’t. I wanted him to hurt, to know what it was like to be rejected.”
“He never rejected you, Mother.”
“Really?” She shook her head at him. “Then what do you call him removing himself from my bed, my whole life, the way he did? If that’s not rejection, then what is it?”
She stood opposite him, so proud and defiant and yet still hurting inside after all these years.
“Charles is diabetic. At that stage his illness was undiagnosed and untreated. He had no idea that’s why he’d become impotent until years after, but he was too proud to seek help for the problem.”
She drew in a shaky breath. “You mean it wasn’t me all along?”
Cynthia’s voice broke as genuine tears began to fall down her cheeks. Despite her focus still being so self-oriented, Judd felt his earlier anger toward his mother defuse entirely. He could begin to understand how her need for payback had molded her ambitious nature into one of harshness—even cruelty. She hadn’t been solely responsible for what had happened; both his parents had their crosses to bear, but maybe now they could begin to heal some of the hurt they’d caused. It was going to be a monumental task. So many years and words lay like an echoing chasm between them all. He’d had enough of it. It was time for change—for all of them. Charles, Cynthia, Anna and himself.
He took a step toward his mother and drew her into his arms. Forgiveness had to start with a first step; he only hoped that he could begin to make things right before it was too late.
Judd and his mother talked for hours. When she was finally spent, he saw her to her bedroom with a light meal on a tray and went to his own room to change. She’d agreed to go back to Adelaide in the morning. She would definitely be back, but at a time when emotions weren’t so fraught and when Charles was better. Who knew, perhaps between the two of them, his parents could finally lay old ghosts to rest and find some peace between them.
What a freaking day it had been. Exhaustion pulled at every part of his body. Whoever said that the truth will set you free never once mentioned the high emotional toll that could take. Today’s revelations had taught him a very important lesson. Life was too short to let go of what mattered to you, especially of what you loved. He didn’t want to live the rest of his life plagued by bitterness and regret over relationships he’d allowed to fall apart, as his parents had. He grabbed his cell phone from on top of his briefcase on the bed and punched in Anna’s number.
She didn’t pick up. No problem, he decided as he descended the stairs and headed for his car. He could ring her and ring her until she eventually gave up and answered. He knew she wouldn’t turn off her phone altogether because she was one of the emergency contacts for the hospital.
“What?” she demanded as he called for the ninth time.
“Where are you? We need to talk.”
“We have nothing to say.”
“Yes, Anna, we do. We have everything to say to each other. I won’t give up, you know. I will call you and call you until you give in.”
“Look, I’m tired. Can’t this wait until tomorrow at the office?”
“I need to see you now. Please? It’s important.”
He heard her sigh before she answered, “Fine, then.”
She rattled off an address that he rapidly keyed into the GPS of the late-model Mercedes he’d bought so Evans would be free to drive Charles whenever he needed him.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said, checking the ETA on the screen.
“Don’t rush on my account,” she answered before severing their connection.
By the time he pulled into the budget motel at the address Anna had given him, he felt a knot of anticipation grow tight in his gut. He parked beside her Lexus, which was outside one of the motel units that formed an L-shape just back from the road. Her door opened as he got out of his car.
“Why here?” he asked as he walked the short distance to her door.
“Clean, cheap and close to the motorway. Is that all you wanted?”
She didn’t so much as budge from the doorway, nor did she seem to be in a hurry to invite him inside.
“No, that’s not all I wanted.”
“Then please say what you wanted to say and leave.”
Anna’s grip on the edge of the door made her fingers ache but she had to hold on to something, anything. If she didn’t, she was afraid she might reach out to Judd, to touch him, and then she’d be lost. As much as he’d hurt her, she couldn’t deny her body’s response to him.
“I’m not doing this outside on the forecourt of some tacky motel, Anna. Let me in.”
He spoke quietly but she had no doubt that he meant every word he said.
“If it means I’ll be rid of you sooner, then, sure, come on in,” she said with false bravado.
She pushed the door open wide and held her breath as he stepped over the lintel and into the compact unit she’d inhabited for the past three nights.
“Can we sit down, please?” Judd asked.
She gestured to the saggy two-seater sofa and settled herself on one of the scarred wooden chairs from the small dinette. His rangy body filled the sofa, making her all too aware of his presence in the shabby room.
“Well?” she prompted, really wanting to get this over with as soon as possible.
“I had an ulterior motive when I came to New Zealand. For years my father had spurned my mother and me, and for years I’d dreamed of what I would do if I had the opportunity to pay him back for all the heartache he’d caused when he sent us away.” He paused and rubbed his jawline with a thumb and forefinger of one hand. “I should have known as I grew older that nothing is as straightforward as it seems.”
“Nothing ever really is,” Anna agreed, wondering where he was leading with this.
She knew he had an ulterior motive for coming to New Zealand, a motive that included turning his own flesh and blood out of his home and installing a woman whose vitriol had flayed strips off Anna’s soul. Well, for all Cynthia’s subtle viciousness, she’d opened Anna’s eyes to the man Judd really was. She should thank her for it one day, she thought with self-deprecating irony.
“No, you’re right. Nothing ever really is. My plans were originally twofold. One, to give my mother back the home she deserved, the other to ruin Wilson Wines by selling my shares to its biggest competitor.”
Anna gasped. “You can’t be serious! It will break Charles’s heart. How could you even think of doing such a thing? How could you be so calculating?”
“Calculating? Do you have any idea of what it was like to grow up knowing your father hated you so much he sent you away forever? I was six years old!”
Anna recoiled as he abruptly rose to his feet and paced the small room, pushing a hand through his hair. On seeing her face, he sat back down on the sofa.
“Anna, relax. I’ve already begun to question what I’d planned to do with the business. Aside from the fact that I’d been bored with my work in Adelaide for some time, working at Wilson Wines has provided me with new challenges within the industry that make me very excited for the future of the company—not to mention valuable insights into how hard Charles has worked to keep the business running all these years. If nothing else, I learned to respect him for that.
“Look, I don’t expect anyone to think that my plans were honorable—revenge very rarely is. But I’ve both learned and been forced to face some home truths about my parents and myself that hav
e turned everything upside down.”
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me. Why are you telling me?” Anna clenched her fingers together in her lap.
“Because you were part of that revenge.”
Fifteen
A bitter taste flooded her mouth. She’d heard as much from Cynthia, but hearing the words directly from lips that she’d kissed in deepest passion, lips that had caressed her entire body and brought her ultimate pleasure, made her stomach lurch. She shot up from her seat.
“I think I’ve heard enough. I’d like you to go.”
Judd stood and reached for her, his fingers closing around her upper arms and gently encouraging her back down on her chair.
“No, you haven’t heard nearly enough, and I won’t leave until you know it all.”
“I don’t want to hear it, Judd. You hurt me so much it pains me to see you at work every day. I can’t keep putting myself through this. I don’t deserve to be made to feel this way.”
“No, you don’t, and that’s why I’m going to make it up to you. Look, when I met you I was instantly attracted to you. That attraction was definitely mutual, as we both established on your first night at The Masters’. But it wasn’t until the next morning when my mother told me that she’d figured out who you were that I made a decision to use that attraction against you.
“You see, I had no reason to believe that you weren’t there as Charles’s puppet. You were so loyal to him, so defensive. It made me wonder just how deep the relationship between the two of you went. I assumed, wrongly I know, that the two of you were lovers, and to add to my revenge plans I wanted to win you off him. To show him that he didn’t deserve to be loved the way you obviously loved him.”
A tiny sound of pain emerged from Anna’s mouth. She’d known that Judd had thought she was Charles’s lover, but to hear him put in words what he’d been thinking hit her like a physical blow. She wrapped her hands around her stomach and hunched over as if by doing so she could protect herself from what he insisted on saying.
“Anna, I’m so sorry I treated you like that, and I hope that you’ll be able to forgive me. I based my need for vengeance on a life that was as orchestrated as what I’d planned to do to my father. Granted, he’s no angel, but he didn’t deserve what I had planned to do.”
A difficult silence fell between them, a silence punctuated by nothing more than the overloud hum of the old refrigerator and the ticking of the cheap plastic wall clock. Finally, Anna summoned up the courage to ask him the one question that now burned inside her.
“So what changed your mind?”
“You.”
He looked up and his eyes burned a hole straight to her heart. Anna swallowed against the fear that formed a lump in her throat.
“You’ll forgive me if I say I find that hard to believe.”
He gave a humorless laugh. “I don’t blame you, but it’s true. In everything around me, you are the only thing that’s good. You’re the only one who remained true to the people you love. I learned today that the truth I’d always believed growing up was nothing but a lie fabricated by one person’s need for attention and another’s pride standing in the way of giving it.”
“What do you mean?” Anna asked, suddenly confused.
A stricken look of pain settled on Judd’s face. “My mother lied to me for most of my life. Forcing the truth from her today was one of the hardest things I’ve had to endure.”
“But how did you know she’d lied to you?”
“Charles told me his side of their story today at the hospital. It was the bare-bones version, given how weak he is and how much time we were allowed together, but it made me stop seeing him as the villain in the piece and start to see him as he is. Faults as well as strengths. I knew he had accused my mother of having an affair. She told me that much when I was about fifteen. What she didn’t say was that she’d deliberately led him to believe it, then told him I wasn’t his son.” He shook his head. “And to think I was prepared to crush him without knowing all of that.
“I can’t believe I almost threw everything away. Everything—everyone—I’d ever wanted in my life were mine all along, if only I’d had the courage to fight for them. Learning the truth was a real eye-opener for me.”
“What you were going to do was despicable. What you did, to me, was despicable.”
“I know, and I’m more sorry for that than you’ll ever know. It seems betrayal runs in the family. My mother lied to Charles about my paternity in retaliation for what she saw as his indifference to her. She had no idea that what she perceived as his coolness toward her masked a bigger problem.”
Anna caught on quickly. “His diabetes. My mother said he’d probably had it for years before he was diagnosed.”
“Yes, he was too proud and too embarrassed to seek help, and so frightened that he would lose his beautiful young wife because of it that he poured himself into work so he could at least keep her in the lifestyle he’d always promised her.
“I learned some awful truths about my family today, Anna. Not least of which were the truths about myself. Truths I’m so bitterly ashamed of. I want to make it up to you, if you’ll allow me. Everyone deserves a second chance, right? A chance to put things back the way they should have been all along?”
“I don’t know if I can do that, Judd. All my life I watched my mother be treated as an afterthought, appreciated to an extent but never really given the love she craved. She deserved more than that—so much more—and so do I. From an early age I told myself that I would only be with someone who loved me completely and put our relationship first.
“When I realized what you thought of me, why you had sex with me,” she said bluntly, because no matter how engaged her feelings it could only have been sex, not lovemaking, “I felt second-rate. Your revenge came first, not me. I don’t know if I can forgive you that. I really don’t.”
Judd reached across the short distance between them and took her hands in his, his thumbs stroking across the tops of hers.
“I love you, Anna. I never thought I’d want to trust another person the way I want to trust you. With my mother’s lies about my father poisoning the way I saw love, I never wanted to go through what I thought was the greatest weakness in the world. Allowing yourself to become vulnerable to another person, to hand to them the means to hurt you so much, alters the entire course of your life. But I want to be that vulnerable to you. I trust you. I know you. You are loyal and loving and everything I was never taught to be. I would do anything for you, and I swear that from now on I will always put you first. Please, let me show you that I love you.”
Anna lifted her head and met his intense and pleading gaze. Her heart wanted to say yes to him, but her head cautioned her to take care. She’d suffered so much these past weeks. Yes, she’d experienced the highest of highs in her life, but along with those came the lows to which she never wanted to descend again.
She took a deep breath. “So, if I asked you to show me you love me by leaving me now, by never talking to me again, by never making another attempt to see me, you’d do it?”
She saw the pain that speared across his features, the light in his eyes dim as he saw all hope of their reconciliation being dashed against his mistakes of the past. Judd let her go and stood up.
“Yes,” he said. “I will do that for you.”
His hands were trembling and it shocked Anna to her core that his emotions affected him so deeply. Judd Wilson, the ice man, vulnerable to her.
Before he could reach the door of the unit, she flew to her feet.
“Judd! Stop!”
She ran toward him, throwing herself against his back and flinging her arms around him as if she could physically stop him from leaving her.
“Don’t go, please don’t go. I love you,
Judd. Don’t ever walk away from me again, please?”
He turned in her arms, wrapping his own around her and holding her close. As she looked up at his face she saw tears tracking down his cheeks. She lifted shaking hands to wipe the moisture away.
“Oh, Judd, don’t.”
She drew his head down to hers, sealing his mouth with her lips and putting her heart into her kiss, telling him how much he meant to her with actions rather than words.
“God, don’t do that to me again. I couldn’t survive it another time,” he groaned against her mouth.
Suddenly she understood just what it had cost Judd to walk away from her like that. He’d been a confused little boy when his father had cast him off like a forgotten and unwanted piece of his life. By his own admission he hadn’t learned to love or to trust easily, and he’d given her his heart, laid all his truths on the line for her. Her happiness came first with him, she knew that now.
“I won’t. I won’t ever send you away from me and I won’t ever leave you again, I promise.”
She kissed him again before taking his hands and leading him to the bedroom. It was small, it was basic, but it was all she needed as the stage to show him how very important he was to her.
He didn’t move so much as a muscle as she undressed. His eyes, however, tracked her movements as avidly as a child watching the presents under the tree at Christmas. When she was naked, she reached for his sweater and pulled it over his head before reaching for his belt and the button fly of his jeans. Goose bumps raised on her skin as she looked her fill of this beautiful man who’d laid his heart on the line for her, but they had nothing to do with a chill in the air.
She stepped into him, at first wrapping her arms around his waist and feeling the heat of him seep into her—skin to skin, head to toe. Then she turned her face into him and traced a line of gentle kisses across his chest before taking his hand again and leading him to the bed. She yanked down the covers, exposing the crisp white cotton sheets, and pushed him onto the mattress with a smile that spoke of all the things she wanted to do with him.
The Wayward Son Page 17