He chuckled softly. “I wasn’t expecting it either, but I was hoping. Sorry, it wasn’t longer. It’s…it’s been a while.”
I smiled. “I know what you mean.”
He was quiet for a moment. “How long?”
“A year,” I answered quietly. “We had been engaged and were about to get married. But then well, I caught him in bed with my best friend.”
I felt Pete tense up. “I’m sorry about that.” He was quiet again and then, “It’s probably been a year or so for me. It gets to a guy.”
I nodded. “It gets to a woman, too. Can I tell you something?”
“Sure,” Pete said.
“I don’t want to be your friend either. I don’t know what’s going on in your life and I know that you’ve got a daughter that means the world to you. I understand what that relationship is like. But…I want you to know that I’m interested if you are. And you having a child doesn’t scare me.”
Pete nodded and swallowed. “Good to know. I think Emma already likes what she knows about you. She was telling me I needed to ask you out on a date.”
I laughed. “Oh really? So, I’ve got someone on my side?”
“You do. And if she was still living, you would have had my mom. She adored you, you know.”
I did know, but I didn’t know why. Emily Killarny had always been an angel to me whenever I was around her and her boys. I thought it might have been because I didn’t have a mother around a lot of the time and she might have felt sorry for me.
“That’s really nice of you to say. Your mother was a wonderful woman, Pete.”
“She really was.”
We were quiet for a while, just holding each other as the spring breeze blew through the loft doors.
“It’s getting a little chilly, and I might need to get back so that my dad doesn’t look for me. There’s no telling what sort of last minute thing he needs me to take care of before tomorrow.” I kissed him once more before I got up to put myself back together. “And I want you to know; I’m still trying to figure things out. I’m going to do it. You guys are going to race if it’s the last thing I do.”
I picked up my shoes from where I had left them on the porch. The heavy oak doors closed behind me as I entered the home I had lived in since my father had it built after the divorce. In spite of the trauma of the divorce, it had been an ideal childhood. But now I was facing a lot of questions about what had really been going on behind the scenes.
I stepped inside quietly, checking myself in the mirror of the nearest bathroom to make sure there was no hay in my hair. I was on a mission, and if I was stopped, I didn’t want any questions about where I had been, what I had been doing, or who I was doing it with. The last thing my father would want to hear was that I had been for a literal roll in the hay with a Killarny.
There was something for me to find. I knew there had to be, but I had no idea what I would be looking for or where I should start. My father was secretive by nature, but I hadn’t thought of him as someone who would deliberately tell a lie. We had always been so close, and it was difficult for me to think of him keeping something from me, especially something that seemed to be bothering him as much as this was.
There was only one reason he would do it — to protect me from some kind of truth he didn’t want me to find out. He had to know that I would eventually. The truth always came out, especially in situations when you didn’t want it to.
I opened the door to my father’s office with the key he kept hidden above the door frame. It was dark other than the lamp that he always kept on behind his desk. There was one single place I could think of that I hadn’t looked for any evidence of whatever was going on with the Killarnys, and this was the first opportunity I had been given to look there.
His desk. There was one drawer that he kept locked most of the time. I had always assumed that it was where he kept some valuables, but then again, he had never explicitly told me what it was for. I had caught him rummaging through it over the years, and he had been quick to close it, but I never asked what it contained. There are some questions you just don’t want to ask your parents and things you don’t probe about. I figured that if something was my business, he would tell me.
But now things were a little different. If he was keeping something from me or something underhanded was going on, I needed to know. I needed to know why he was so damn gung-ho about not letting the Killarny family race a horse in our derby.
I felt around the desk, trying to find somewhere I thought he might keep a key. If it was always on him, then I would be up shit creek, but suddenly I had a thought. There was a brass duck paperweight that he kept on the desk at all times. I picked it up and turned it over.
“Sara, all those mysteries you’ve read over the years have paid off,” I whispered to myself.
There on the underneath side of the duck was a small sliding panel. I slid it and inside there was a key. And sure enough, it fit right into the large drawer at the bottom of the desk, and the thing came open with a creak when I turned the key and pulled.
There was one file inside that was bigger than all the others, and I pulled it out first. The first sheet inside was a letter. I skimmed it enough to see that it was a letter from a woman to my father. The photo fell out and landed on the floor. I reached down to pick it up, and I thought the woman looked familiar, but it was an older photo, in black and white, of a woman who must have been in her early 20s, clad in a bathing suit, sitting poolside with a huge smile on her face.
When I turned it over and saw the name on the back, I knew exactly what this whole thing had been about.
The photo was signed, “Love, Emily.”
Chapter 9
Pete
The knock came on the trailer door early the next morning, but after Emma had already left to go find her friends for the day. When I opened the door and found Sara there, eyes red-rimmed from crying and a frown on her face, I had no idea what to expect. She pushed past me and sat down on my couch.
“Good morning?” I said.
She took a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me that your mother and my father were having an affair while your parents were engaged?”
So, she had found the truth. I had a feeling that somewhere in all this mess that Ken Waters had the truth of what had been going on between him and my mother all those years ago, buried away, but close enough that he could look at it whenever he wanted.
“It wasn’t any of my business. I didn’t want to be the one to tell you because it is equally shameful to me.”
“It should be!” Sara shouted. “Your mother is the reason my parents’ got a divorce!”
I shook my head. “Sara, that can’t be true. It all occurred before your parents were ever married as far as I know.”
She nodded. “Yeah, you are right about that, but my father never got over your mother. Ever. Down to the day she died, the man was holding a torch for her and that now…now…that’s why he doesn’t want you guys to race.”
“I had a feeling it was about that. My father told me about it, after my mother’s death. There was no way he ever would have brought it up while she was still alive. That was something she did, and she felt a lot of remorse for it. My father and your father were best friends.”
“They were sleeping together, Pete. Your mother was sleeping with my father.”
I sat down beside her. “I know.”
“What led them to that?” Sara looked like she was in a daze.
I shrugged slightly. “The way my father explained it, it was not long after he and my mother got engaged. A few months or so. They got into a huge fight about something that he wasn’t able to remember, and my mother stormed off. They were at a derby in Kentucky, and your father was there. As my mother recounted it to my father and then he told me, she ran into your father who was very kind and supportive and had apparently always loved her. I think it was one of those situations where she fell into his arms, and he caught her. Things went from there.
My mother didn’t come back, and my father couldn’t find her again that night or the next day. It later came to light that she had gone to Tennessee with your father. She stayed at your grandparents’ estate for a few weeks before she came back and apologized to my dad.”
Sara just shook her head.
“I don’t know how my dad did it,” I said. “I mean, I’m glad he got over it or was able to work past his feelings or whatever. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. But I don’t know how he managed to forgive your father, Sara. They were the best of friends and then…that all happened. It was like your dad was okay with throwing it away. Then years later, even though they were able to work with each other from time to time, things grew a little tense again. I think it was when my mom got sick. Your dad tried to come over and talk to her, but he was in a real state, and my dad didn’t want him upsetting her. He wouldn’t let him in the house. It wasn’t long after that my mother passed. Dad told me that he thought Ken might not take things so well as in, that he might try and do something because my father kept him from seeing her there at the end.”
“He never, ever got over her, Pete. He loved her until the day she died. He married my mother knowing that he was still in love with another woman. Can you imagine how this makes me feel about him? Even when he was with my mother, it was all a lie. I am the product of a lie. You know what else I found in that drawer of letters and photos? I found my mother’s statement on why she was asking for the divorce. It was because he was in love with your mother. She was still a presence, even if she was a state away and married to someone else, raising her own family.”
I tried to reach for her, and she pulled away, standing up and going to the door.
“This can’t happen, Pete. There’s too much here. This is too much bad blood between us and I can’t. You should have told me. You knew, and you should have told me.”
She was crying again as she slipped out of the trailer and back toward her house. I watched her go but didn’t follow. And then I saw Emma standing at the corner of the trailer, watching me with wide eyes.
“Hey, sweetheart, did you forget something?”
She nodded her head and approached the trailer, stepping inside.
“What was that about, Dad?”
“What did you hear?” I asked her. There was no way I was going to talk to her about her grandmother’s indiscretions, but if she had heard enough, then she already knew.
“Honey, sometimes there are just things that even adults can’t understand. There’s some stuff right now that both Sara and I are having trouble wrapping our minds around.”
Emma looked out the trailer window. “I think you need to go after her.”
“What?” I asked as I looked at my daughter.
“Dad, I know you don’t think you did anything wrong. But Sara is upset. That’s pretty easy to see. So, if there is something you can do to make it better, you should. Are you going to date her?”
“I thought I might,” I answered sheepishly.
“Then I think you need to follow her and tell her you are sorry. No matter what it was, even if it’s not all your fault. You need to do what you can to make her feel better so that she can learn to trust you.”
I shook my head as a half smile grew on my face. “Where are you picking this stuff up, kid?”
She smiled. “I told you. I watch stuff, and I read a lot. And Dad, you’ve got to keep in mind that I’m a young woman and I know how women’s minds work.”
“Oh, is that so?” I knew I had trouble on my hands with this one, but I wouldn’t trade her for the world.
“Yup. And I like Sara. I don’t want you to let her run away from you. Whatever has upset her is something you can help her with, isn’t it?”
“Well, to be honest with you, it’s a lot about her feelings. And I’m not sure I can fix her feelings.”
“Did you do something that made her feel worse?”
I thought about it for the moment. Even though I stood by my belief that it was in no way my business to tell Sara about what had gone on between her father and my mother for a couple of weeks over thirty years earlier, finding out through a pile of letters and photos couldn’t have been much better.
“I’ll say this—I didn’t do anything to make it better.”
Emma came over and put her hand on my shoulder. “Dad, I think you’ve got to do something to make it better if you ever want Sara to speak to you again. If you want to have a chance at dating her, you’re going to have to apologize.”
I smiled and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. You’re getting too smart for your own good.”
I left Emma at the trailer and went to find Sara, but that proved to be a task that I wasn’t up to for most of the day. There was no telling where she had run off to, and it wasn’t exactly like I could go up to the front door of the big house and just ask to be allowed inside. I couldn’t risk running into Ken and what might happen. I hadn’t seen the man in years, and with the conversation, Sara and I had just shared there was too much on my mind. Even though I knew that my mother was a willing participant in all that had occurred over thirty years ago, it didn’t change the way I felt about the man. He had done something that no one should ever do. He had slept with his best friend’s fiancée. For as long as my parents had been together at that point, they might as well have been married.
It wasn’t until later in the evening, after another of the nightly events was over, that I was able to find Sara as she was saying goodbye to guests as they were leaving the house.
“Can we talk?” I asked, as I moved to stand beside her there on the porch. She kept a smile on her face and waved at some guests, but she shook her head at my question.
“Sara, we need to talk. There’s something I need to say to you. Please, just give me the courtesy of a moment or two. That’s all I ask.”
She glared at me, but finally turned to go inside and gestured for me to follow her, her skirt swishing as she walked. She was dressed in something even finer tonight than she had been in the night before and she was breathtakingly beautiful. I thought about what she had looked like naked in the moonlight the night before. I was already aroused. I wanted her…of course, I did, but now wasn’t the time to think about that.
She led me to another wing of the house, her wing as I found out.
“Well, say whatever it is you’re going to say and then get out.”
She was clearly in no mood to hear my apology, but I started with it anyway.
“I talked to Emma and I know you might think it’s crazy, but sometimes it really helps to get some advice from a twelve year old. She knows what she is talking about a lot of the time and even though she has still got a lot left to learn about the world, the kid is quick and I’m pretty sure she is right about all of this.”
Sara held her hands up expectantly. “So?”
I reached for her hands and took them in mine. “I am genuinely sorry that my omission hurt you. I thought I was doing the right thing by not telling you, but I realize that a lot of that was because I didn’t want to say anything disparaging about my mother. She was a good woman, but I think we’ve all had our moments that we aren’t proud of. I didn’t want to talk about it because I was ashamed. That wasn’t reason enough to keep the secret from you, not when you were working so hard to make sure we could still be in the derby. You were standing up to your father for me, and I know the kind of guts that must have taken.”
I saw a tear start to creep down her face and I reached up to wipe it away. She took my hand and held it to her cheek.
“I know it’s not your fault and I understand that you were just doing what you thought was right. It’s all in the past, and you’ve known about it for some time, but I’m just learning about it now, and it’s all quite a shock.”
“I know,” I said as I leaned in to kiss her. She didn’t resist. Instead, she held onto me and kissed me hungrily. She was tearing at my clothes, and we were
barely inside her bedroom before she had peeled away ever stitch of my clothing and she was out of her dress as well.
“Fuck me,” she demanded, and I was all too eager to accommodate her wishes.
I leaned down and began to kiss and suckle her breasts which were bared before me. Her entire body was shivering, and she sighed deeply, the desire she felt palpable underneath my hands. I reached down between her legs and found her slick and wet, and I wanted to taste her again.
She was sweet and slightly tart, and as my tongue moved in circles around her clit, I could feel her vibrating under me, a strong orgasm building as I used my fingers to reach deep inside her, finding just the right spot and stroking her until she screamed again and again, until my lips were covered in her wetness. Only then did I sink my cock into her, fully to the hilt. She was tight and oh so wet; it took all of my restraint to keep from blasting inside her in a single stroke. She moaned and cried out underneath me, her finger rubbing her clit as I fucked her with deliberate, hard strokes.
“You’re mine,” I said as I stood at the edge of the bed, her ass hanging off of it as I held onto her thighs and plowed into her. I watched as she reached up with her other hand to pinch her nipples in turn and the sight of it was almost too much. “You are so fucking hot, Sara. Tell me when you want me to come.” I groaned as I tried to hold back. “I am so close.”
My hips were thrusting like mad, balls slapping against her ass.
“Fuck me,” she cried out, and that was all it took for me to fill her up, my cum seeping out from between us where we were joined. I held my weight above her and watched her as she moaned and writhed underneath me.
“I’m going to need you to do that a few more times tonight, Pete. Promise?”
“Promise,” I said as I scooped her up into my arms and kissed her deeply.
Chapter 10
Sara
I woke the next morning with Pete Killarny still in my bed, his fingers between my legs and his cock prodding me in the back. I could tell what he had on his mind, and I wanted to stay and indulge him, but we had already done so much the night before that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to walk today.
Fate (Killarny Brothers Book 1) Page 8