by Marie Force
“Did I mention how beautiful you look?”
“I don’t think you did,” she said with a smile that lit up her eyes.
He liked it when she smiled. He liked that he’d given her reason to, until he remembered all the things he needed to tell her, which made him ache with regret over his past mistakes. “We need to talk.”
“So talk. Tell me what you think I need to know, and we’ll figure it out.”
He ached even more at the thought of never again seeing the special glimmer in her eyes that she seemed to save for him. But continuing to put it off wouldn’t change anything, so he took a deep breath and forced himself to meet her earnest gaze. “You know I was with Janey McCarthy for a long time. Thirteen years.”
She nodded.
“We were engaged for the last two years we were together while I was finishing my residency in Boston.” He looked away from her and out the window behind the sofa, focusing on the bushes that grew along the side of the building. He’d give everything he had, everything he’d ever have, not to have to say these next words. But knowing so much was riding on Daisy’s reaction to hearing them, he made himself look at her as he said them. “I cheated on her.”
She blinked once and then again. Otherwise her expression never changed. “Oh.”
“I made a very bad mistake during a particularly stressful time in my life that I’ve regretted every day since.” Over the hammering of his heart and the dryness in his mouth, he forced himself to continue. “The worst part… She… Janey… She came to Boston to surprise me on our anniversary and… and she saw me. In our bed with someone else.”
Daisy closed her eyes and exhaled.
“I’ll understand completely if, after hearing this, you decide that spending time with me isn’t something you want to do.” As he said the words, he wished with every fiber of his being that he was a better man, one who was worthy of her.
She kept her eyes closed and the fingers of her right hand pressed to her lips. He wondered if she was trying not to cry.
“Daisy?”
She opened eyes that were swimming with tears.
The tears slayed and shamed him.
She blinked them back and managed to contain them. “You said it was a particularly stressful time. Was that because of the residency?”
“Not entirely. I’d been feeling pretty crappy for a couple of months. I had a sore throat that wouldn’t quit and fatigue unlike anything I’d ever experienced. But I was a resident. We were all tired, so I blew it off for months. When I finally couldn’t ignore it anymore, I went to the doctor and was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Do you know what that is?”
“Cancer?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
He nodded. “It was the most shocking thing I’d ever heard. Here I was in my late twenties, healthy as a horse—or so I thought—and the doctor is telling me I have cancer. The news sent me straight off the cliff, to say the least.”
“What did Janey say?”
“I didn’t tell her.”
“You didn’t tell your fiancée that you had cancer?”
“Janey and I had been living apart for a really long time by then. After everything blew up, we were able to see with hindsight that our relationship had been over for a while, but neither of us had acknowledged it.”
“Is that why you cheated on her?”
“God, no. I never would’ve hurt her like that intentionally. No matter what, I still loved her. All I can say in my own defense is that I wasn’t at my best during the weeks that followed the diagnosis. I just kept thinking over and over and over again that I’d spent all these years in school and for what? I was going to die before I was thirty, and I hadn’t even lived yet. I did stupid, stupid things. I got drunk, I blew off work, I didn’t tell Janey about the diagnosis, which I absolutely should have, and I slept with one of my chemo nurses—in the bed Janey helped me buy for my apartment. I screwed up everything. By the time I emerged from the fog of shock, my engagement was over, my residency was in serious jeopardy and my nose was broken.”
“How did that happen?”
“After Janey caught me with the nurse, I guess she went running to Joe because he was on the mainland when everyone else was here. I didn’t know she’d come to Boston or that she’d seen me with someone else. I never even knew she was in the apartment that night.” The thought of what she’d witnessed still had the power to sicken him even after all this time. “I tried to call her for days, and she didn’t answer. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. When I finally came here to track her down, everyone else already knew what’d happened. I got off the ferry and made the mistake of saying hello to Joe. He punched me in the face.” David ran a finger over the bump in the bridge of his nose. “Busted my nose.”
“I can’t believe he just hit you like that!”
“It was the least of what I had coming, Daisy. Please don’t turn this around on him. He was looking out for her, which I’d had my chance to do and blew it big-time. I don’t blame him. It took me a long, long time to be able to say those words. I made everything worse by blaming everyone but myself for the mess my life had become for many months after it happened.”
“The lymphoma… You had chemo?”
“Yes, and I’m in remission. That’s why I was in Boston this week. I get checked every six months. Everything’s fine.” He stretched out his arm to display the bruises in the crook of his elbow from the endless rounds of blood work he’d been subjected to the last couple of days.
Daisy ran her fingers gently over the bruises on his arm. “That’s a relief.”
“Very much so.”
“You didn’t tell me why you went to Boston.”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
“I would’ve liked to have known.”
“All of this, between us, it’s so new. I wasn’t sure we were ready for the lymphoma conversation.”
“That’s fair enough, I suppose.”
“I’ve given you a lot to think about. I’ll understand if it’s too much for you and you decide you’d rather not see me anymore.”
She didn’t say anything for the longest time, during which David had no idea what she was thinking. “My father cheated on my mother when I was in high school,” she finally said, sounding like she was a million miles away rather than right next to him on the small sofa. “It was absolutely devastating to our entire family, especially because he cheated with my friend’s mother.”
“Shit.” David shook his head, furious with himself all over again for the mistakes he’d made and the people he’d hurt. Janey, in particular, who’d done absolutely nothing to deserve what she got from him. He rubbed his hand over the whiskers on his jaw, feeling powerless to rewrite the past.
“I want you to know I appreciate that you told me yourself when it would’ve been easier to let me hear it through the grapevine—and believe me, the grapevine tried to tell me.”
“I’m sure there were plenty of people trying to warn you away from me,” he said bitterly, even though he knew he deserved nothing less.
“I wouldn’t let them warn me away from you, and I won’t let you warn me away either.”
“You won’t?” David asked, floored.
She shook her head. “What you told me is upsetting. I won’t deny that. I can’t even think about how it must’ve been for Janey.”
“I don’t like to think about that either. I’m deeply ashamed of that. More than you can ever believe.”
“What if…”
“What, Daisy? Just say it. Whatever you want to ask. It’s fine.”
“What if something difficult or stressful happens again? Is that how you’re going to deal with it?”
“I can’t promise you that I’ll always do exactly the right thing, but I can promise I’d never be unfaithful to a partner again. It was an awful thing to do to her. I was extremely disrespectful of all the years we’d spent together, and I hurt her so badly. That’s the part I
most regret.”
“It matters to me, greatly, that you’re ashamed and regretful and contrite about it. My father was never any of those things. He was belligerent about his right to be happy, to hell with who got hurt in the process. He never once apologized to my mother or any of us for what he did. And then he had the nerve to turn his back on me when I chose to be with someone he didn't approve of. Ironic, huh?”
“I’d say so.”
She looked at him with those big, doe-like eyes that had touched him from the first time Truck Henry’s fists landed her in the clinic. “We all have things in our past we’re not proud of, David. Even me.” Her lashes fell over her cheeks as she seemed to summon the fortitude to say what was on her mind. “I was married, briefly, when I was eighteen. That was the first in a string of bad choices I made where men are concerned.”
“Tell me,” he said. “I want to know you, Daisy.”
Although this was the last thing in the world she wanted to talk about—ever—he’d shared his past with her, so how could she do less than the same? “His name was Curt, and he was everything I wasn’t—brave and fearless and brazen. A typical bad boy, right down to the motorcycle with no muffler, the piercings, the tattoos, the torn leather and the long greasy hair. I lost my mind, among other things, over him my senior year of high school. My parents were divorced by then, but they came together in their mutual hatred of him.”
“Sounds like it got pretty rough for you.”
“It was horrible. The more they hated him, the more I dug in. Looking back at it now, I’m not sure if I married him because of him or because of them and wanting to defy them.”
“How did you end up married?”
“I refused to stop seeing him, so they kicked me out of the house where I grew up and told me I was on my own. I went to his place, if you could call a stall in his grandmother’s garage a ‘place.’ We stayed there until his grandmother decided she’d had enough of us, too, and then we hit the road on his bike. We were dead broke, but somehow we managed to survive for an entire summer by picking up odd jobs here and there. It was ridiculous when I think about it now. One night we got drunk with some guys we worked with, and they got the big idea that we ought to get married. I was so bombed that I have no memory of the so-called ceremony, but he had the marriage license to prove it was done.”
David noticed that her hands had begun to tremble, so he took hold of them.
“When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t remember anything, but I was really sore… Between my legs. And the guys, they were acting very strangely. Looking at me differently… I don’t know for sure, but I think he let them take turns with me.”
Shock reverberated through him. “Jesus, Daisy,” he whispered.
She took a deep, trembling breath. “It didn’t take long to realize I’d married the kind of guy who’d let other men take turns with his wife. To say the marriage went from bad to worse, quickly, is putting it mildly.”
“Did you go home to your parents?”
She shook her head. “They wouldn’t have me. They said I’d ‘made my bed’ and I was on my own.”
“How old were you then?”
“Twenty—and pregnant.”
“God. The baby…”
“I lost it at nineteen weeks. It took me a long time to recover physically and emotionally from that. I kicked around for a while living on the charity of friends until I got a job at a hotel in Boston, and finally got a place with some girls from work a year after I left him.”
He put his arms around her and tucked her head in under his chin. “I’m so sorry you went through such an awful thing.”
Her hand on his belly had his full attention, and he had to remind himself her nearness was about comfort, not sex.
“How did you end up out here?”
“I answered an ad in the paper. I was tired of working in the city and commuting. It sounded like paradise out here, and it is, for the most part. The off-season is difficult for those of us who are seasonal workers.”
“I thought you were year-round at the hotel now.”
“It’s probationary for the summer. If I don’t get the job full-time, I may have to move back to the mainland so I can work in the winter. My rent is going up, and I don’t think I can afford it, unless I get the new job, and even then it’ll be tough.”
“You’ll get the job.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
David tightened his hold on her and let his lips slide over the silky softness of her fragrant hair, filled with relief that she knew his secrets and hadn’t run screaming from him. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.
“What time is our reservation at Domenic’s?” she asked.
“It was thirty minutes ago.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost eight.”
“How did it get so late?”
David’s stomach growled, loudly, making them laugh.
“Sounds like someone needs to eat.”
“Want to go see if they held our table for us?”
“I’d love to.”
As they stood, he kept a hold on her hand and brought it to his lips. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not running away from me when I shared the worst of myself with you and for trusting me with your story.”
She rested her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him. “I want to be able to trust you, David. That’s going to matter to me.”
“You can trust me. I swear you can. I hate myself for what I did to Janey. I never want to hurt someone like that again.” He slipped his arms around her waist. “Especially you, when you’ve already had enough heartache for one lifetime.”
“I won’t disagree with you there.” She went up on tiptoes to kiss him, her lips soft and sweet against his.
Desire streaked through his system like an out-of-control wildfire. He drew back from her so she wouldn’t feel the evidence of how badly he wanted her before she was ready to know.
“Do you mind if we stop at my place before we go to dinner? I was planning to get changed before I picked you up.”
“Not at all. I’d love to see where you live.”
“It’s nothing special,” he said as he ushered her out of the office.
“Yes, it is. You live there.”
David had no idea how he’d managed to get so lucky to find this lovely woman with the heart of gold, but now that he had, he was becoming more determined all the time to keep her in his life.
Chapter 6
Carolina stood next to Seamus at the ferry landing as the last boat of the day from the mainland cleared the breakwater and entered South Harbor. The sun was just beginning to set over the dunes, firing the water with vivid red, orange and yellow reflections and casting a glow over the town. At least the island was at its most lovely for Mrs. O’Grady’s arrival, Carolina thought, touching her hair to make sure everything was where it belonged.
“Stop fidgeting, love. You look beautiful.”
“I look old.”
He put his arm around her, drew her in close and spoke directly into her ear. “I’m starting a new list of grievances I need to address with my hand to your bum the next time I have the chance.”
Carolina shivered from the heat of his breath against her ear and the promise she heard in his tone. She was still recovering from the shock of how decadent their night in the tent had been.
“You do not look old. You, my love, look sexy and delicious and ripe and—”
She pressed her hand against his mouth. “Stop it. Right now.”
Naturally, he sent his tongue to do his dirty work for him. “You stop it.”
“You.”
His eyes danced with mischief and amusement. “No, you.” He stopped her from replying by kissing her senseless right there on the ferry landing where anyone could see them, including his mother, who was somewhere on the boat that was about to dock.
Oh my God! He drives
me nuts! Never, in her wildest imagination, could Carolina have pictured a relationship quite like this one. Her quiet, satisfying—if somewhat lonely—life before him seemed like a hundred years ago when it had actually been less than a year. At times, she craved her former uncomplicated life. But would she want to go back to life before Seamus?
No, she thought, resigned to her fate with the big, burly, outrageous Irishman who made her heart beat fast and loved her with such abandon she could no longer picture life without him. She’d had absolutely no clue that a love like this even existed. Sure, she’d seen it portrayed in movies and in romance novels, but experiencing it firsthand had been an eye-opening journey.
At times she still felt guilty when she had to acknowledge that her marriage to Pete Cantrell had been nothing like her relationship with Seamus. While she’d loved Pete with her whole heart and soul and mourned deeply when she lost him so young, the quiet, respectful love they’d shared was very different from the fiery, all-consuming passion she had with Seamus.
“Why the deep sigh?” Seamus asked, tuned into her as always.
“No reason.”
“I hate that you’re so wound up over this visit, Caro. I wish I’d never let you talk me into it.”
He sounded so uncharacteristically defeated that Carolina decided it was well beyond time to let it all go. She loved this man. She wanted a life with him, and if his mother didn’t approve, well then, so be it.
“I’m sorry I’ve been such a wreck.” She looked up at him, swayed as always by the intense way he gazed at her, telling her with every look and touch and smile that she was his entire world. “I love you. I love us. I want this, and if she doesn’t approve, well then, I guess she doesn’t approve.”
Resting his hand on his heart, he shook his head as if he hadn’t heard her correctly. “Don’t tease me, love. If you don’t mean it—”
“I mean it.” She kissed him. “I love you. No matter how crazy I get, please don’t ever doubt that.”
He took a series of deep, dramatic breaths. “I might be hyperventilating.”