Discover Me & You, A Devil's Kettle Romance: Book 2

by Susan Sey

  “That was when she stopped threatening to have an affair and actually had a few,” Brett said and rolled his empty coffee cup between his palms. “That was when I stopped having just a couple drinks every night and started having a couple dozen.” His smile was thin. “Because when your wife tells you you’re not man enough to satisfy her, that she’s looking to supplement her diet so to speak, it’s better to pass out on a bar stool than try to sleep in your own empty bed.”

  Matty dropped his forehead to his knees, clearly past his limit on mortifying adult confessions. Willa wished she could spare him some of it but didn’t see any way around it.

  “She preferred cops,” Willa said.

  “Ah, hell.” Brett closed his eyes, drew in a long breath through his nose.

  “I’m sorry,” Willa said, sympathy beating its fists on the other side of all that empty space inside her.

  Eli looked a question at her but Brett was the one who answered.

  “I used to be a cop, remember,” Brett told him with a crooked smile. “I couldn’t play football anymore but I could still put the beat-down on a guy, and I was young enough to mistake muscle for courage. Stupid enough to mistake it for justice.” He lifted defeated shoulders. “I’d love to say I learned my lesson but—” His jail sentence sat in that brief silence, ugly and unspoken.

  “There was one guy in particular, a cop that used to hang around the bar flirting with Mom,” Willa said. “Then one day, he was flirting with me instead. Harmless stuff at first, then progressively less so.” Brett pressed a fist to his forehead and Willa hurried to say, “He never crossed a line, Dad. Never touched me. I didn’t even understand most of it. I just knew he made me uncomfortable. But Mom understood. Mom caught every last little innuendo, and knew he was getting off on it. It didn’t matter to her that he was indulging a vaguely pedophilic kink by talking sex to a twelve-year-old. All she knew was that he was looking at me, not her, and that was unacceptable. So she got his attention back.”

  “Christ.” Brett knocked that fist slowly against his forehead.

  “It became a pattern. Some poor guy would pay me a compliment and suddenly Shay’s got him in the crosshairs. And like any sociopath, Shay was very, very good at figuring out exactly how to get what she wanted. At knowing exactly where you’re weak, where she can apply pressure to get you to give it to her. And once you’d given it to her, she had no conscience about using your mistake as leverage to get more.” She paused to glance at Brett’s slumped shoulders. No help for it. “She had half the sheriff’s department in her pocket.”

  “Fair exchange for letting them into her pants,” Georgie murmured.

  Matty made a pained noise. Willa’s heart tried to break for him but she gathered up the stillness and clung to it. Wrapped it around herself like a blanket. Wished she could wrap him up, too. God, this must be hard to hear. She’d had years to come to terms with the horror that had been her mother. Matty’s world must be blowing apart.

  “That was pretty much how she saw it,” Willa said.

  “You paid for my defense lawyers.” Brett dropped his hand and stared at Willa as if he’d never seen her before. “I don’t know how you did it, but you paid.”

  Willa met his eyes. “You weren’t getting anything like a fair shake from the legal system, and I knew why.”

  “I pled guilty, Willa.”

  “You were guilty. At least you felt guilty. Guilty enough to put your thumb on the wrong side of your own scale.” She shrugged. “I put mine on the other.”

  “Why?”

  “We might not’ve ever functioned like a healthy family but you’re my father. I had an obligation. Plus I saw what it did to you, living with the weight of bad choices. I didn’t want that for myself. I wanted better.”

  He closed his eyes again and fell silent. The entire room was silent, and it waited, hungry for the ugliness she was going to feed it.

  “So Shay was sleeping around,” she said, “rubbing Brett’s nose in it and putting me in my place.” She paused to gather her courage. “Then Diego happened.”

  CHAPTER 26

  MATTY LIFTED HIS head and fixed her with those piercing eyes. His sharp regard echoed inside the numbness under Willa’s sternum, and she rubbed at it, concerned. Was his pain breaking important things inside her? She supposed she’d know soon enough. Beside him, Bianca drew in a sharp breath, but pressed her lips together and stayed silent. Georgie just gazed at her, unblinking and tense. Addy’s hand crept to her arm, rubbed it comfortingly.

  Willa’s throat tightened at the small kindness and she sent her a look of gratitude. Was surprised to find Jax gazing at her, too, with sad compassion mixed into the warmth she’d always found there in the depths of his bark-brown eyes. She’d always assumed Bianca had kept him in the dark, that he was only kind to her because he didn’t know the truth. But now she wondered if that kindness was simply a building block of his character. Another thing to think about later. When she wasn’t tearing several worlds apart. God, this was taking forever. She wished she could just download the whole thing into public knowledge instead of wading through the blood and the shit like it was yesterday.

  “Or I guess I should say that Peter and Diego happened.” She sighed, resigned to wading in. “They’d hatched some plot to cheat their way through math together. Not that Peter needed math help. Numbers are his first and only true love.”

  Georgie snorted. “Believe me, we know. I learned the hard way how Peter’s mind works.”

  “Everybody does eventually,” Willa told her. “I’m sorry he hurt you.”

  “He didn’t.” She waved that off with one languid hand. “He pissed me off, no question. But he didn’t hurt me.”

  Willa nodded. Hurt followed love, and nobody had ever imagined Peter and Georgie had been a love match.

  Georgie said, “So what was Peter after if not the grades?”

  “Social capital,” she said simply. “It didn’t matter how many tackles he made, how many grading curves he set. End of the day, Peter was still a Zinc. He and Diego had always been friendly but this would make them friends. This would pull Peter into a rarified orbit reserved for the Davises and their equals. Which wasn’t us. By the time Diego came into our lives, Mom had been slutting around for a few years already, Dad was wasted most of the day and the fighting was constant. Violent. Everybody knows how often the cops were here, but you might not know how much Mom enjoyed leaning into the swing and showing off her new shiner for the responding officer.”

  Matty stared dully at her. “She did that? Really?”

  “I’m sorry, Matty, I know this sucks to hear but it’s true. Cops are protectors by nature, and Shay was a predator. She understood exactly what kinds of buttons the sight of a battered woman pressed in their psyches.” She shifted her focus to Brett and said, “Not that I’m excusing you, Dad. You were so much bigger and stronger than Mom. You had a responsibility to keep it together.” Brett nodded and eyed the hands in his lap with pure dislike. As if he were chained to them against his will. “But you were never the one who got physical first. And while Mom slapped me into next week pretty regularly, you never laid a hand on me, or on Peter as far as I ever saw. But you know what I did see? Shay hitting you and hitting you and hitting you, then leaning in when anybody who truly didn’t want a shiner would’ve leaned out.”

  “That bitch,” Bianca breathed. “That unmitigated, black-souled bitch.”

  “She was ruthless, she was smart, and she knew what she wanted.”

  “Which was?” Georgie asked, one brow arched.

  “Exactly what Peter wanted. What he still wants.” Willa lifted helpless shoulders. “More. Just always more.”

  “And Diego had more written all over him, didn’t he?” Georgie said.

  Willa’s stomach twisted mercilessly but she ignored it and pushed forward. “Yeah, he did. He walked around in a cloud of charisma and talent, and everything he touched glowed. The way he saw things, the way he made me
see things, the way he made me see myself, it was—” She lifted helpless shoulders. “Keep in mind, I was fourteen and inclined to be dazzled, but God, he was intoxicating. I could hardly look directly at him. It was like trying to look at the sun.”

  Addy’s hand was warm and comforting on her arm. “He was dazzling, Willa. And he knew it. He used it.”

  “I know.” She smiled ruefully. “I know it now, anyway.” She shook her head and went on. “Sometimes he’d come by early, while Peter was at some practice or other and we’d sit in the yard. It was awful in the house, but it was springtime so we always sat in the yard. There was a little meadow I loved, this beautiful clearing at the end of a path in the back—” Eli’s hand on her back tensed and she wished she could reassure him. Wished she could tell him that nothing awful had ever happened at their thinnie. Wished she could promise him that it was and always had been a place of beauty. But she’d scoured herself clean this night and there was no more room inside her for mistruths. She swallowed and went on.

  “By summer it was our place. The silence there was so clean and warm, and the light was incredible. Or so he told me. We met there before or after his sessions with Peter. I’d lie in the grass and he’d draw me. He acted like I was doing him a favor by letting him but I knew better. I was being drawn by Diego Davis. Even then, it was staggering to be at the center of that kind of talent and purpose. That kind of desire. And it was desire, even if I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that a beautiful boy with magic in his fingers was looking at me like I was something special. Like I was worth something. Like there was something rare and beautiful in me that nobody else could see. But he could, and with his magic pencil, he pulled it to the surface where everybody else could see it, too. I was so beautiful, so special. The line of my leg was just incredible, could I hike my skirt up a little higher? Your shoulder, Willa, it’s art. I can’t capture the line, can’t quite get it right. Could you just slide your shirt down so I can see more? I need to trace, touch, feel…” She trailed off, shook off the memory. “Take.” She blew out a shuddering breath. “He wanted to take everything I had, and when I’d given it to him — because of course I did — the mystery was solved. There was nothing else to be explored. He’d finished with me, and I was empty. Broken. Used and worthless.”

  “Oh, honey.” Addy tipped her curly head onto Willa’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I thought my mom would be furious with me when she found out but she wasn’t. She held me while I cried, and I hadn’t been held in so long. She said how she’d show him. How she’d teach him a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget.”

  Willa laughed, and it was raw with pain. “I don’t know what I thought she meant. I never imagined she’d revenge-seduce him, for God’s sake. But she did.”

  Bianca only shook her head, her fingers still pressed to her eyes.

  “How very Mrs. Robinson of her,” Georgie murmured.

  “She was that kind of mom,” Jax said. Addy glared at him and he said, “What? She was. Guys talk and it was a generally accepted opinion that, of all the hot moms in town, Shay Zinc was the Lady Most Likely when it came to giving a young man his first taste of glory.” He shook his head. “Damn. I can’t believe Diego never told me that.”

  “I don’t know if she meant to get pregnant,” Willa said, “but she did. I, on the other hand, didn’t.” She met Matty’s eyes. He’d been silent, absorbing her words with total focus. “I’ve never been pregnant. Not with you or anybody else.”

  “But—” Bianca broke off, stared sightlessly at Willa. “But Shay told us Diego had gotten you pregnant.”

  “Of course she said that. If she told you the truth, not only would you have stripped her of custody without paying her a dime but she’d have gone to prison.”

  “Amen,” Georgie said promptly. “Because child abuse.”

  “God, she played me so well.” Bianca blinked, a scene clearly playing out in her mind. “It was early spring and she came to Hill Top House one day while you kids were all at school. Told me Diego had gotten Willa pregnant, and we were going to be grandmothers together. It wasn’t ideal, of course, but a baby! A baby is always a celebration, she said. We would have to work out how to share custody, of course, but family was the most important thing. It takes a village and what a lucky child to have such a village.” Bianca’s mouth soured. “That was what she said, anyway. But I saw her looking around Hill Top House like it was up for auction. Like I was impoverished nobility, and she was the tacky American heiress my father had rustled up for me, propping up our years of breeding with her great bags of money. She thought she had me over a barrel, that I would have no choice but to welcome her into our family.”

  Jax laughed. “She had no idea who she was dealing with.”

  “She figured it out when I threatened to use every police report she’d ever filed to strip Willa of custody the minute that baby was born and paternity verified. The Zincs were dangerous, and I’d never let them touch any baby of Diego’s, let alone insinuate themselves into our life. But, God, she was good.” She laughed softly. “She never even mentioned money. She let me think it was my idea.”

  “What was your idea?” Matty asked slowly.

  “A closed, private adoption. Diego was too young, too talented. I wouldn’t have him tied down by even the knowledge of what he’d done. Diego had his flaws, God knows, but he was going to fly. He was born to fly and I was going to see that he did. I’d be damned if I’d clip his wings because of a youthful indiscretion. I named an outrageous sum, far too much, but I had conditions.”

  “She’d take me away,” Willa supplied. “Shay and I would have to disappear until the baby was born.”

  Bianca inclined her head. “The timing worked out. Matty was due in late August so Willa — God, Shay — wouldn’t have started showing until May or so. Shay agreed to take Willa away the instant school let out. She told everybody they were going to visit relatives in Illinois but I paid for a little villa in Italy instead. Willa — God, Shay — would give birth at a private hospital there, and all the arrangements would be made for a private adoption.

  “I booked a mother-daughter tour of Europe that summer for Georgie and me so I could spontaneously deliver one of those menopause babies you always read about while in Italy. Joe and I had planned to tell everybody Matty was our late-life surprise-a-baby. He’d always wanted one more baby, you know.” She squeezed Matty’s shoulder. “He’d have loved you so much, Matty. I wish more than anything he could’ve met you, even once. His death that spring was—” Bianca stopped, pressed her lips together and pulled in a deep breath. “Well, it was awful. But it was probably why people were so willing to accept — publicly, at least — that you were mine.” She smiled crookedly. “Fate had taken my husband. Maybe it owed me Matty.” She sighed. “There was talk, of course, but Gerte wasn’t entirely wrong tonight. There are some advantages to wealth and social position, and I used every one of them to scotch the gossip.”

  “So did I,” Georgie sighed. “I hadn’t even gotten my period yet, but somehow I’d delivered a secret baby over the summer.” She examined a lock of silky hair for split ends and tossed it over her shoulder with insouciant disregard. “You can stare people out of that,” she said, “but it’s not easy.”

  “And you did it beautifully.” Bianca leaned across Matty to touch her knee. “You make me proud,” she said softly. “Every single day, you make me proud.”

  Georgie covered her mother’s hand with her own and squeezed. Willa’s heart ached. Nobody had ever been proud of her. She’d been so good, worked so hard, denied herself so much and all she’d ever gotten was contempt.

  “It was worth it,” Bianca said, and resumed her regal posture. Her hand, however, had drifted from Georgie’s knee to Matty’s shoulder. “It was worth every penny and every lie to keep Shay out of Matty’s life.”

  “But you thought Willa was my mother.” Matty lifted his head and stared at his mother.

&nb
sp; “I assumed they were a package deal.” Bianca stroked Matty’s hair and turned to Willa. “Birds of a feather. You gave me every reason to think so.”

  “I did,” Willa said. She stopped to swallow, to savor the steady weight of Eli’s hand on her back. He’d been silent this whole time but his hand hadn’t moved. Hadn’t wavered. He was right there beside her, loyalty and uncompromising support in every second of that touch. Something squeezed inside her, something tender and dangerous. Something she hadn’t felt in ages and didn’t particularly want to feel now.

  She turned to Matty. “After you were born, we had two precious weeks before we had to give you up. Shay would’ve handed you over the second they cut the cord, but you were a little early and the Italians insisted. I don’t think I slept the entire two weeks.” She smiled, her heart in bloody pieces at the memory, but in a way she’d never regretted. “I held you, I fed you, I rocked you. I sang to you, changed you, bathed you. I fell in love with you. Giving you up ripped my heart right out of my chest but by then I’d begun to understand. I’d begun to grasp what being a Zinc meant in Devil’s Kettle. And it meant that I could never, ever keep you. Giving you to Bianca meant that you could grow up with money, privilege and a family that knows what loyalty is. What love is. Keeping you would mean robbing you of all that opportunity, and in exchange for what?” She gave a soft laugh. “A family so dysfunctional that when my mother disappeared, everybody — including my own brother — assumed my father had killed her?”

  She forced herself to look straight into those eyes — her eyes, Shay’s eyes — and meet all that accusation and pain head-on. “So, yeah, Matty. I loved you with everything in me. Which is why I did everything my mother told me to do. I let your mom believe you were mine, and I let her believe she could have you if she paid me. My mom took that money and did us all the massive favor of disappearing while I tried to figure out how to hold up my end of the bargain and stay away from you. I couldn’t stop loving you, but I could stay away from you. And I did, faithfully.” Her fingers were numb but she clenched her fists harder. “I only faltered once.”