by Cindy Gerard
“I didn’t want to lose you.”
“No, January,” he corrected her coldly, “you didn’t want to trust me.”
The hurt in his voice tore at her and rekindled her own pain. “I didn’t have any reason to trust you. Not in the beginning. And then . . .” She paused, realizing from his belligerent expression that he wouldn’t listen to her argument. She reacted to his anger with her own. “Dammit, Michael, I didn’t want anything from you! I tried to warn you. I didn’t want any of this to happen.”
He nodded grimly. “That, at least, is the truth. But then, you’ve always told me that much, haven’t you? You told me, and I just wouldn’t listen.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Well, you finally got my attention. I hear you now, January, loud and clear. What you want is a safe, unemotional, uncommitted life. What you don’t want is to ever take a chance on something as frightening or as self-gratifying as love threatening your peace of mind. And you want to sacrifice. Unless there’s a sacrifice, it wouldn’t fit into the profile of a martyr, would it? That much,” he added bitterly, “has always been clear.”
Wounded and wanting, she raised her eyes to his. “Michael, don’t. I do love you.”
He shook his head tiredly. “No. I finally realized you were right the first time. I think you might want to love me. You just don’t want it enough to let go of your fear. I thought I could make it happen. I thought that if my love was strong enough, I could . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged with weary acceptance. “Oh, hell. It doesn’t matter what I thought because I was wrong. I was wrong and you were right. But hey, it wasn’t a total loss. The sex was great, right?”
If he’d physically struck her, he couldn’t have hurt her more.
Seeing that, he swore softly, succinctly. “Look, I’d better leave before I do a number on both of us. You said this wouldn’t work. You said you couldn’t give to this relationship. Well, you’ve finally convinced me that you can’t.”
He hunkered down in front of her, seemingly unmoved by the tears that were streaming down her cheeks. “It could have been so good, babe, if you had only let it. It could have been so good. But where there is no trust, there is no love.”
He rose. Standing before her, he slowly zipped up his jacket and turned up the collar. “Take care, January. You just keep on taking care of everybody but you.”
He touched a hand to her hair, then let it fall away, and without another word walked out the door.
January was no stranger to pain. She’d experienced it in more ways than she cared to remember—from the teeth-rattling crack of the back of her father’s hand, to the aching shame of a child who blamed herself for not being loved, to the claw marks she’d earned in the occasional catfight in juvenile detention. But no memory, however vivid, no scar, however deep, hurt like the hollow, aching loneliness she felt when Michael left her.
Dusk had long since turned to darkness, loneliness had drifted aimlessly to despair before she rose from her chair. She walked through her dark, empty house and lay down on her cold, empty bed.
It was midnight before she realized what she had to do. Pride was precious little warmth to snuggle up to on a cold, black winter night. Love was a risk worth taking. Michael’s love was worth any risk.
She’d been to his apartment a number of times, but she’d never arrived alone, and never in the dead of night. The dim hall lights provided little support for her already-waning courage.
What if he wasn’t home? What if he refused to see her? She wasn’t the only one hurting. His grief was raw and real, his pride a victim too.
Using the key Michael had given her but that she’d never used, she quietly let herself into the apartment, then nearly fainted dead away when something cold and wet pressed against her leg. Suppressing a scream, she flattened her back against the door.
“George,” she gasped, and dropped the hand that wasn’t clutching her hammering chest to the dog’s furry head. “You scared the life out of me.”
George, oblivious to her trembling, nudged his cold nose into her palm. His tail thumped excitedly against the plush carpet.
She sank to the floor. Wrapping her arms around him, she buried her face against his thick coat. His solid, friendly warmth gave her something to hang on to as she gathered her courage for the confrontation to come.
“If you’ve got any words of wisdom, George, I could sure use some help.”
The dog whined and with a vigorous bump of his head begged her to scratch him behind his ears.
Fearing they’d wake up Michael before she was ready to face him, she shushed the exuberant dog. “That’s a good thought,” she whispered, giving him what he wanted, “but somehow, I don’t think scratching Michael behind the ears is going to do the job. Got any other ideas?”
She jumped when a light clicked on and revealed a sullen, rumpled Michael sprawled in a chair by the sofa.
“You could start,” he said, “by telling him what you’re doing here at this hour of the night.”
Startled and embarrassed that he’d been sitting there all this time in the dark, January rose slowly. She dragged a trembling hand through her hair. Clutching her coat tightly around her, she advanced into the room on shaking legs.
“You took a foolish risk going out alone at this time of night.”
Though his face looked hard cast in darkness and shadows, his harsh voice held an encouraging amount of concern.
She drank in her fill of him sitting there in the dimly lit room. His shirt was unbuttoned and pulled from the waist of his jeans; his long legs were sprawled carelessly out in front of him; his gypsy-black hair looked as if it had been raked repeatedly with long, punishing fingers. He was so beautifully male, so obviously hurting, she had to fight to keep from throwing herself into his arms.
“Sometimes,” she whispered, meeting his tired eyes, “some risks are worth taking.”
He dragged a hand over his face. “Why now, January? Why tonight?”
“Because I love you, and because until tonight I didn’t know I couldn’t bear to live my life without you.” Her confession came out fast and sure.
He was quiet for a long, tense moment, and she wondered if she was too late. At last he said, “If this admission has conditions attached to it—”
“No conditions, Michael.” Not letting herself think about it, she knelt quickly between his legs. Because she couldn’t not touch him, she placed a shaking hand on each knee. “Please . . . please just listen.”
He swallowed hard, then dropped his head back against the chair’s plump cushion.
With a tight knot of anxiety squeezing her chest, she began without hesitation. “From the time I can remember, when my father used to come home from work every night, it was always after he’d made his nightly rounds of the bars.
“Some nights,” she continued softly when Michael looked at her with surprise, “he’d come home happy. He’d sing and dance and whirl my mother around in a circle, then he’d pat me on the head and tell me what a good little girl I was. But most nights . . .” She paused and licked her suddenly dry lips. “Most nights, he’d come home angry. Those were the nights my mother used to make me go to my room and lock the door. I’d lie on my bed and cover my head with a pillow. Then I’d sing so I couldn’t hear if he was hitting her.”
Michael’s hand fell heavily to her hair. In the pale light she saw him swallow.
“Sometimes I’d try to help her. But sometimes I’d just run away because I knew that when he was finished with her, he’d turn on me. And then I’d feel so guilty. So ashamed.”
“January, don’t—”
“Michael,” she implored, “I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me. I’m telling you so you’ll understand. I always thought the reason my father hurt me was because I had done something to deserve it. After all, the people in your family are supposed to l
ove you. They’re supposed to protect you, not hurt you. Yet he did. Often.
“I could never understand what I’d done wrong. So my mind—like the minds of most children in abusive situations—helped me handle those confusing feelings. It repressed the things I couldn’t handle. It trained me to block, to deny, to say, ‘This isn’t happening to me.’
“What you need to understand,” she said, meeting his tortured gaze, “is that after years of repressing feelings and facts that were just too hard to deal with, it’s still not an easy thing for me to accept the truth about what happened to me. I still feel the shame even though I know it wasn’t my fault.”
“The shame was his,” Michael said gruffly.
“Yes,” she agreed, “it was. But sometimes I still have trouble accepting that. In my head, I know. But in my heart . . .” She took his hand and placed it over her breast where her heart beat rapidly. “In my heart, the child in me still wonders why he didn’t love me.
“Michael, when you came back into my life after all those years, you unleashed feelings inside me that I didn’t want to deal with. You scared me half out of my mind. I just wanted you to go away. When you wouldn’t, I wanted to hate you. Not only did you make hating you impossible, you made me want to love you. You made me want to be loved. I didn’t think I could let that happen. I didn’t think I could handle the responsibility of being loved.
“So I panicked all over again. And then . . . Then you asked the impossible. You wanted my trust, something I’d never given to anyone.”
She lifted his hand to her cheek. “But when you walked out that door tonight and I thought I’d never see you again, I realized I would risk everything—the shame, the memories, even my mother’s future—if I could only have you back.”
With a groan that relayed anger, frustration, and a wealth of unbridled love, he hauled her off the floor and onto his lap. “You never lost me, babe. You couldn’t be so lucky. I just needed some pout time, some poor-me time. Come morning, I was going to be hammering at your door like a big strong wind.”
He wrapped her tightly in his arms and sought her mouth with his, kissing her tenderly.
She returned the kiss without restraint, pouring into it the love, the fear of loss, and the heart-mending sense of relief she was feeling. Then she gently pushed herself away. “Michael, there’s more—”
“I know everything I need to know,” he said, pulling her back against him.
She shook her head firmly. “You need to know that I trust you. I need to know that you know.”
He brushed the hair back from her face. “I do, love.”
“Michael, I need to tell you the truth about my father’s death.”
He met her eyes. “It was a long time ago, January. Maybe it’s best forgotten.”
“I didn’t kill him,” she blurted out before he stopped her.
He stared at her, silent, considering. “The police report says you did. In self-defense.”
“I know what the police report said. But I didn’t kill him,” she repeated, not waiting for his reaction. “My mother was very weak, physically and mentally, by that time. She’d given up. Or at least I thought she had. The night it happened, I was sick in bed with the flu. He came home wanting his dinner, and when it wasn’t ready because Mother had been taking care of me, he came after me.”
The memory made her pulse accelerate, her breathing grow quick and shallow. “I was too sick to get away from him. Something—something snapped inside my mother. She took his gun from his bureau drawer and begged him to stop hitting me. When he wouldn’t, she shot him.”
She was distantly aware of Michael gathering her closer, of his strong hand running soothingly along the length of her hip. “I remember thinking, ‘If they find out, they’ll take her away.’ I didn’t want to be all alone. She was my mother and I didn’t want them to take her.”
A tear fell down her cheek and onto the soft cotton of his shirt.
“It was easy to convince her to tell the police that it was me. They would have prosecuted her—”
“But not a fourteen-year-old child who had acted in self-defense,” Michael finished for her. “My brave little heroine. You’ve had lots of practice saving souls, haven’t you?”
“I’ve had lots of practice hiding behind that lie and so many others. I don’t want to hide anything from you any longer.”
He hugged her hard, then rising to his feet, settled her in his chair. “There’s something I want to show you,” he said, and disappeared into his office.
When he came out, he was carrying several dog-eared, typewritten sheets of paper.
She looked from it to him questioningly. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a piece I wrote but never took to print. Read the date under the byline.”
She did. “Michael, you wrote this eighteen years ago.”
“Read the article. All of it. I’ll make us some coffee.”
When Michael returned to the living room, she was staring at the last page of the article. Her head came up when he settled a hip on the arm of the chair.
“You knew,” she said, looking from the pages in her lap to him. “All these years, you knew.”
She waved away the mug of coffee.
“Michael . . . how?”
“I’m not very proud of how. The fact is, I caught your mother off guard one day when I paid her an unannounced visit. She was distraught and, like you said, broken. She told me everything.”
Her eyes, when they met his, were full of love. “But you didn’t print it.”
“No, I didn’t print it. Even back then you got to me.” He shook his head. “You were fourteen years old, a sad and sorry fourteen, and something about you, a proud and angry courage, a promise of something special, made me feel things and think about things that had nothing to do with good copy or an exclusive. I just couldn’t hurt you any more than you’d already been hurt.”
No gift he could have given her could have touched her more. It was a gift of insight into the heart of the special man he was. “I love you,” she said simply, eloquently.
“Yes,” he agreed, “you do.”
The uncategorical trust shining in her eyes told him she was ready to make the ultimate commitment.
He responded to that look with a slow, intimate kiss. “Why don’t we forget the coffee,” he murmured, “and I’ll demonstrate how the luckiest man in the world shows his woman exactly how much he loves her.”
Epilogue
Working at her desk in her new office in Griffin House, January still couldn’t believe that her most secret dream was now reality. It was a dream that the woman, January Stewart, had held close to her heart. A dream she hadn’t dared to share with anyone for fear that by telling, she would somehow destroy its chances of fruition, and then children like Elaine January Griffin would never find the help they needed.
Now, though, she shared everything with Michael. And one late, lovely midnight, lazy from spent passion and bathed in the glow of his love, she’d told him her most secret dream. Because of Michael, that dream was now cemented into fact.
Rubbing a crick out of her neck, she rose from her desk and peered out the window. The tree-lined street was quiet and peaceful, and the promising scent of the warm April morning drifting through the open window dispelled some of the paint and varnish odors that hung heavily in the old house.
The scene outside never failed to make her smile. If she had painted a picture of the neighborhood she’d envisioned for Griffin House, it would have mirrored what met her eyes.
The curbs were lined with oaks, the lawns fertile and green. Here and there the deeper green of crocuses and jonquils poked bravely through the spring-warmed earth, and from the corners of her eyes she caught the red, white, and blue flutter of a flag waving in the breeze. It was a neighborhood made for children. And this old Victo
rian house would soon be full of children. Bruised children. Battered children. Children in need of a little love, a little hope, and a place where they could just hang out and be kids.
She opened the window wider, then smiled as she heard the distant purr of Michael’s bike grow into a loud roar. He and Toby cruised up the street and came to a rumbling stop at the curb.
Hanging back in her doorway, she watched as Michael, with an exuberant, red-cheeked Toby on his heels, bounded through the huge front door.
The spacious, airy foyer doubled as an informal reception area and Helen’s workstation. Both Michael and Toby stopped dead in their tracks when they got a load of Helen and her outfit.
“Hot mama!” Toby said, fanning a hand in the air.
January grinned from her office doorway as Michael, executing a leering double take, joined in on the outrageous flirting. “Has Leonard seen you in that outfit yet?”
Smiling like the cat who swallowed the canary and looking like the canary who escaped the cat in a yellow Lycra jumpsuit and street-sign-green fringed scarf draped around her neck, Helen turned a quick pirouette. “Think his heart can take it?”
“If it can’t, you know who to call.”
“Humph. It won’t be you, big talker.”
Wounded, Michael slumped against the wall, his hand flattened theatrically against his chest.
“I’ve got your number, Hayward,” Helen grumbled good-naturedly. “You’re a one-woman man, and I’m not the woman. Besides, you’re not nearly as cute without your diamond earring.”
“That diamond’s fine right where it is, thank you very much,” January said, flashing her diamond-and-ruby engagement ring with a panache that earned a thumbs-up from Helen.
Smiling as January joined their little group, Michael pulled her against his side. “Hey, babe. How’s it going?”
January loved the look that came over his face as he bent to kiss her. It was the look that said, “I love you,” the look that had talked her into accepting his ring and setting a wedding date. And it was the look that had made her laugh and then cry when he’d presented her with the deed to this house, along with a promise from the zoning commission that there would be no problem establishing a group home.