Christian turned to look at her. There was so much sadness in his eyes that her heart lurched toward him, and her arms were around his neck before she could stop them.
“That I couldn’t change her,” he said, his voice deep and husky. “That I couldn’t help her, couldn’t save her. And she was too far gone to have any hope of saving herself. So, I trundled her off to the best rehab facility in the country the next morning. It cost all my savings to get her in a six-month program. Then I bought a one-way ticket to America. Got on that plane with nothing but a change of clothes in my rucksack and a paltry roll of pounds secured by an elastic band.”
Emily desperately wanted to know what had become of his mother, if she had ever sobered up, how she’d died. But she’d already pushed her luck and gotten one more truth than he’d agreed to give her. So she bit back the questions poised on the tip of her tongue and said simply, “I’m so sorry, Christian.”
Although sorry didn’t come close to describing what she was feeling for him in that moment. She wasn’t sure there were words in the English language that could do her emotions justice.
Then, because he had given her one more truth than he’d agreed to, and because her emotions were running high and she felt she should do something, she decided to answer the last question he had posed. After all, turnabout was fair play. She prided herself on being an equitable woman.
“I can’t imagine what it was like to lose a father so early in life,” she said, playing with the ends of his hair where it brushed the back of his warm neck. “Or to know what it was to grow up with an alcoholic mother. But like you, I’m sort of the collateral damage of my childhood.”
His dark eyebrows slashed into a vee. “What do you mean?”
“You asked me to explain to you what I couldn’t explain to Richard. Why I couldn’t fall in love with him.” Part of her mind was on the ugly truth she was about to reveal; the other part was distracted by the feel of his hair between her fingertips. It was so soft. Strange for a man who in all other respects was the epitome of hardness. Hard body. Hard head. Hard…ahem. “I’m willing to give it a try.”
The look he sent her was guarded.
“But I want to make another deal with you,” she said.
“I’m listening.”
“I want you to let me go back over to the sofa.” His pretty green eyes narrowed. “What I’m about to tell you is important, and I need to be able to concentrate to get it right. To explain it right. I can’t concentrate when we’re like”—she motioned between them—“this.”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “Why not?”
Her pursed lips told him you know why without having to say the words.
Indulge me, his twinkling eyes answered.
She blew out a windy breath. “You’re distracting, okay? You’re all…” She waved a hand to indicate his entire form. “And it’s distracting.”
Not to mention destructive. As in, sitting on his lap, his arms around her, her arms around him—when had that last thing happened exactly?—was destroying her emotional fortifications, ripping them apart brick by brick until it was hard to remember why she was so determined to keep him at arm’s length.
“You do want me.” A satisfied grin kicked up the corners of his mouth. That mouth that she now knew from experience was magic. If she was a witch, then he was definitely a warlock. A sexy, tattooed English warlock.
She clucked her tongue. “Ah, ah, ah. Your arrogance is showing again.”
“Admit it,” he demanded.
“Okay, I admit it. You, sir, are arrogant.” Devilment had her fighting a grin.
“Admit that you want me, woman. I’m not letting you go until you do.”
“Fine.” Her frustration had her raising her hands and letting them fall back into her lap. “I want you. What red-blooded heterosexual woman wouldn’t? You’ve got that whole unholy trifecta thing going for you.”
“Unholy trifecta?” He looked genuinely confused.
“Tall, dark, and handsome,” she explained, touching his chin dimple. She couldn’t get enough of it. “Plus, there’s the accent.”
“I’m not the one with an accent, darling. You’re the one with an accent.”
“Whatever. The point is that it doesn’t matter that I want you; I can’t have you. And I’ll try to explain why if you’ll let me go back over to the damn sofa!”
She clamped her mouth shut, heat flooding her cheeks when she realized he’d gotten under her skin and made her lose her shit. Again. He had an unnatural knack for it.
“Fine.” He opened his arms, letting them come to rest on the arms of the chair. “You win. Your freedom for an explanation. Although, in truth, I’m hardly sure this is a better deal than the last one.”
That Emily should feel so bereft without his strong arms around her, without that thumb drawing maddening circles on her hip, was completely absurd. Which was why she scrambled off his lap and flounced over to the sofa. She didn’t want him to see the truth of her feelings on her face.
Only after she had settled into the corner, drawing her feet up onto the cushion and hugging her knees to her chest, did she dare look at him. “Like I said earlier,” she grumbled. “You wouldn’t know a good deal if it—”
“I’m warning you, Emily.” His expression was so fierce, so focused that she found herself fighting for breath. “If you mention the words bite and pecker in the same sentence again, I can’t be held responsible for what I’ll do. Likely bite you and then try to use my p—”
“Okay!” She screwed her eyes shut and covered her ears. It felt as if someone had tossed a bucket of scalding water over her head. “I get it!”
When she blinked open her eyes, it was to find him reclined back in the chair, a smug half smile plastered over his irritatingly attractive face.
Chapter 13
Mark that round a win for Watson, Christian thought, watching Emily struggle to organize her thoughts and ignore their most recent—and smashingly heated—exchange.
He liked that she was having difficulty getting herself situated. He liked that he could knock her off-balance. And he liked most of all that she’d admitted to wanting him. If it wouldn’t have made the others in the manor house come running to investigate, he would have howled his triumph at the ceiling.
“Are you quite finished gloating?” she demanded, shooting darling little eye-daggers at him.
“Almost.” He indulged in a deep, satisfied sigh.
“You are the most infuriating man. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “You. On many occasions.”
“Well, the truth can never be overstated.” She hugged her knees tighter to her chest and tried to scowl him into some sort of submission.
He widened his smile and gave her earlier words back to her. “Are we gonna do this thing or not? I ain’t got all day.”
She looked like she was sucking on a lemon. “That’s a terrible impersonation of me.”
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
“Are you saying I do a bad impersonation of you?”
“You sound like a Kiwi, darling. With a tad bit of Australian and Scottish and maybe some Welsh thrown in for fun and confusion.”
“Humph.” She looked offended. It was delightful.
“Now,” he said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. With his hands clasped together, he turned serious. “Tell me why you didn’t love this Richard bloke.”
Because he wasn’t you, Christian. He imagined those words tumbling out of her mouth and felt light as air. Which is probably why the landing hurt so much when her answer had him hurtling back to earth.
“Because I can’t love anyone. Not romantically, anyway.”
For a long time he stared at her, trying to make sense of her words. “So you’re saying, w
hat? You’re like…a Vulcan or something?”
“You’ve been hanging around Ozzie too much,” she accused.
Ozzie, computer-hacker genius and all-around tech guru at Black Knights Inc., was also a true-blue Trekkie. The man had more Star Trek T-shirts than Christian had pairs of socks. And Christian had many pairs of socks.
“Stop trying to change the subject,” he warned.
She twisted her lips. “But I thought you just said what’s good for the goose is good for the gander?”
“Emily…”
She blew out a windy breath. “Fine. No, I’m not a Vulcan. I have feelings. Lots of feelings. Around you, those feelings tend to oscillate between annoyance and lust, which, if you must know, is altogether crazy-making. And stop it!” She pointed at his face. “Stop with the self-satisfied smiles every time I admit to having a thing for your hot bod!”
He tried to wipe the grin from his face and failed.
She rolled her eyes. “But when it comes to love—romantic love, long-lasting love—I’m defective. It runs in my family. Now, whether that’s due to nature or nurture, or a mix of both, is anyone’s guess. I’m just saying it’s a fact, proven over three generations.”
She tilted her head. “Ever read It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover?” She didn’t wait for his response. “No. Of course not. When do you have time to read?”
He didn’t. Not really. Except for the occasional car magazine while in the loo.
“Well, anyway…” She blazed ahead. “It’s this really sad yet really empowering tale of a woman who comes from an abusive household and then finds herself married to a man she deeply loves but who also turns out to be abusive.
“In the end, she decides to stop giving her husband any second chances, to stop waiting for him to change, and instead to leave him and break the cycle of abuse. It ends with her. And like her, I’m determined to break the cycle of looking for love in all the wrong places, the cycle of marriage and divorce and marriage and divorce. I want to have kids someday. And I don’t want them to get fucked over by me the way I got fucked over by my parents. It ends with me.”
She really hadn’t been having him on when she’d said she couldn’t explain why she couldn’t fall in love with Neely. Christian actually found himself feeling sorry for the man. Because, sweet Fanny Adams, Emily was usually good at getting to the point. But he’d listened to her try to explain herself for at least two minutes, and he was more confused now than before she started.
He sat back in the chair. Opened his mouth, then closed it again when he realized he didn’t know what to ask or where to begin to try to unravel the convoluted strings of her explanation. Finally, he settled on, “Tell me more about this defect that runs in your family. You said three generations, yeah? What does that mean?”
“Right.” She nodded and dropped her feet to the floor. Leaning forward, she said, “It all starts with my grandparents. Not my mother’s parents. I never met them. They died before I was born. It’s my father’s parents I’m talking about, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Ivy. Between the two of them, they have eleven marriages. Six for my grandpa and five for my grandma. Although, they’ll probably be tied soon at six and six. Grandma Ivy called me last month to tell me she’s in the middle of divorce proceedings from her fifth husband because she’s fallen in love. Again.” Emily made a face. “This time it’s with one of the men who attends physical therapy with her at the retirement home.”
“How old is your grandmother?” he asked.
“Eighty-three.”
“Wow. Impressive.”
“What’s impressive?” Emily frowned. “That she’s lived to be eighty-three or that she’s racked up five-going-on-six marriages in that time? Because believe me, Grandma Ivy is cute, but she’s no Elizabeth Taylor.”
A glimmer of understanding sparked to life. “So that’s your grandparents,” he said. “Which I assume is the first generation. Tell me about your parents, the second generation.”
“Okay.” She dipped her chin. “So my folks got married when they were both nineteen. They had me a year later. And two years after that, they got divorced. My mother has since proceeded to marry and divorce six other men over the span of my lifetime. Right now, she’s single. But she keeps texting me pictures of this oily-looking used-car salesman from south Florida, so I expect I’ll be receiving a wedding invitation in the mail any day now. And if she thinks I’m going to another online registry to buy her another damn blender, she’s got another think coming.”
Her face was mutinous. Christian wasn’t sure she’d ever looked more lovable. Except for perhaps when she’d woken him from his nightmare with an expression of concern. Or maybe when she’d stepped in front of him to stop a bullet, her piquant chin thrust up in defiance. Then again, there was the time… Oh, sod it all! Fact was, Emily always looked lovable.
“And then there’s my father,” she continued, blowing out a resigned breath. “He’s on marriage number four. Which, given my family’s track record, puts him at the back of the pack. But not if you take into account the number of women who’ve lived with him over the years.”
Christian was almost afraid to ask. “How many?”
“Twelve.” She flashed the number on her fingers. “Some have lasted a couple of months. Two have lasted a couple of years. None have outlasted my mother, who managed to tie him down for a whole three years.”
“That’s loads of upheaval for a kid.” Christian imagined the men and women, the strangers, who must’ve passed in and out of Emily’s life.
A stranger his mother had dragged home soon after his father’s death was the reason he… No. He pushed the memory away and hoped to God Emily had never suffered at the hands of one of her parents’ lovers the way he had suffered at the hands of—
He couldn’t say the man’s name. Not even in the privacy of his own mind.
“It wasn’t upheaval so much as neglect,” Emily said. “My folks were always so busy chasing that shiny, new person who would make them feel young again, or excited about life again. And it’s easy to ditch one spouse and move on to another when you’re dirt poor and the divvying up of property isn’t an issue. For the most part, they simply ignored me. I was an inconvenience that they shuffled back and forth between them on the whim of the day.”
An image of Emily, small and alone, scratched knees, and big, dark eyes taking up her whole face bloomed to life in Christian’s mind. If only they hadn’t been separated by a sea. If only they’d grown up in the same city, on the same block, they might have been able to give each other the comfort and security they had so desperately needed and longed for as children.
“I’m sorry, Emily.” The words seemed small and inadequate compared to the sadness he felt for that little dark-eyed girl who’d only wanted what all little girls wanted: to be loved and cherished.
Nothing for you to be sorry about, her sad eyes told him. “It could have been worse,” she said aloud. “You know that because it was worse for you.”
When it came to childhood trauma, Christian wasn’t one for splitting hairs. The young psyche experienced hurt, uncertainty, and fear without really categorizing it. But that was a conversation for another day.
“And you?” he asked. “The third generation? As far as I know, you haven’t a string of ex-husbands trailing behind you.”
Emily’s mouth twisted into a moue of disgust. “I was gonna be different. I was gonna show ’em all that it was possible for a Scott to find a true love and make it stick. Ain’t nothin’ but mind over matter, you know?”
Once more, she’d donned her South Side ’hood-rat persona, wrapping the guise around herself like a suit of armor.
“I was careful all through high school, all through college. I never did what my friends did and told some hot jock that I loved him. I held those words dear. Told myself I was only gonna say ’em to one man. The one man I knew
I’d spend the rest of my life with.”
When Christian swallowed, his throat felt sticky. What sorry wankstain had shoved a wad of peanut butter down his gullet? “Did you…say them to Neely?”
Her laugh was bitter. “See, that’s the thing. I wanted to. When I first met him, I thought he hung the moon and stars. He was so smart and so handsome and so—”
“We’ve been through this already,” Christian cut her off. If he had to sit and listen to her sing Neely’s praises one more time, he might blow his bloody top. “He was amazing. I get it.”
“He was,” she insisted, making Christian grit his teeth. “He pampered me with gifts and attention, all the things I never got as a kid. And at first I ate it up with a spoon. There were so many times I wanted to tell him I loved him, but I didn’t. I held back because…it was too soon, or it wasn’t the right moment, or whatever. But then, about six months into the relationship, all his gifts and attention stopped making me feel loved and started making me feel sort of, well…suffocated.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “It wasn’t flowers every once in a while; it was flowers every week. For no reason. I think he wanted me to squeal and jump and clap my hands like I was as delighted by the twentieth bouquet as I had been by the first. When I didn’t, he got his feelings hurt. But maybe he should have, right? Because he was being so thoughtful, and there I was…”
She waved a hand. “But it wasn’t just that. There were the date nights. Which turned out to be every night. It was exhausting. We both worked hard, and most times I’d get off a ten-hour shift and want to go home, put on my ratty sweatpants, and eat Cheetos while binge-watching Netflix. That hurt his feelings too. He didn’t understand why I’d ever choose that over a romantic meal with him.”
She picked at one of the buttons on the tufted arm of the sofa. “He texted me constantly, even when we were in the same room. And if I didn’t call him the minute I walked in the door to tell him I’d made it home from work, he’d pout and send me on a guilt trip. It all became too much. And those bright, sparkly feelings I had for him turned to dust.”
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