“So what happened?”
“I apologized, profusely, for my wife’s paranoia. The man took me aside. He told me about his own indiscretion, back when he’d been serving in the Korean War. How he’d spent the past forty years making it up to his wife. He told me to have patience, to love my wife and to understand that I had to do whatever it took to rebuild trust.”
“Had you been unfaithful?”
The question disappointed him. “What do you think?”
“I doubt it, but I’ve learned recently that I’m not impartial where you’re concerned.”
And just that quickly he was soaring above the waves again. He’d best be careful lest he even begin to resemble his ex-wife with her emotional bursts.
But, again, the question was fair.
“I was never unfaithful to my wife. Not once.”
“So why did she think you were?”
Her question sounded curious. Almost clinical. Not challenging. And he said, “I’ve tried like hell to figure that out. I think, in my wholly unprofessional opinion, that it stems from the way her folks withheld love as a means of discipline. I don’t think Tressa ever really feels like she can trust anyone to care about her. To be true to her.”
“Not a bad analysis.”
He was glad she thought so.
“You were telling me about your divorce.”
“It turned out that Tressa’s phone call was so ludicrous that no one gave it any credence. Except for me. When I thought about what could have happened... What if that girl hadn’t had a disability? Or the wife had been closer to my age? What if she’d seen me talking to a sixteen-year-old in a pool? What if she’d called that girl’s father? Not only could I have lost a lucrative client, but I could have been charged with statutory rape.”
Lacey walked beside him in silence, still holding his hand.
“I couldn’t live like that anymore.” He told her his shame—that he’d left his wife because she’d been abused as a kid and he couldn’t handle the backlash.
“You shouldn’t have had to live like that at all.”
God, he loved those words. Soaked them right up. And knew that, as she’d said, she wasn’t impartial where he was concerned.
“Tressa admitted to what she’d done, admitted that I’d never been unfaithful to her. In writing. She sent a letter to my clients, taking full accountability for her inappropriate behavior.”
“And she told you she’d never do anything like it again.”
“That’s right.”
“Has she?”
He hesitated. She’d come close. But... “No.”
“So last night, saying you whore around, when she knew you had a date in the backyard, you don’t think that was similar behavior?”
He could see how she’d think so. “She was just having a rough night. She’s fine now.” Tressa was a pain in his ass, but he could handle her.
Lacey stopped to pick up a shell and show it to him. A perfect, unchipped half clam with a beautiful rainbow of colors inside and beige swirls outside.
She put it in the pocket of her dress. A memento of their date, he hoped. The first of many keepsakes they’d collect together.
“Has she ever been violent with you?”
“Of course not.” He was a six-foot-tall one-hundred-and-ninety-pound male in excellent shape. He could carry his weight and then some. Tressa weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds and couldn’t lift even half that.
“She’s never thrown anything at you?”
Not at him. There’d been the time she’d taken toast out of the toaster and thrown it across the room. A wineglass she’d thrown against the wall once.
“No.”
“Never slapped you?”
He’d stopped her arm midswing, holding on for the brief second it took for her to collapse against him, sobbing, begging him to love her.
“She’s never physically harmed me in any way,” he said quite succinctly. He wanted Tressa out of his life, but he wouldn’t throw her under the bus. She had enough problems, enough people who’d trampled her heart and who’d been disloyal.
He wasn’t going to have her pay for something that wasn’t on her. He couldn’t live with himself if he did that.
“I don’t go for Tressa’s drama,” he said slowly. Double-checking the honesty in his words. “But Amelia, she can handle it better than I can. And she’s an attorney. She’d know if there was something in Tressa that pushed the boundaries of legal or not.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She says that Tressa’s her friend and she’s not going to talk behind her back.”
The lawyer was loyal. He respected her for that. And trusted her to care enough about Tressa to have done something if Tressa was in real trouble.
“I have no desire, whatsoever, to spend any more time than I absolutely have to with my ex-wife. At the same time, I don’t want her paying for my issues.”
“Your issues?”
“I’m not good with drama, with emotional outbursts.” Of the female variety. Give him a guy’s anger twenty times a day.
“Jem, I’m sorry, but I just have to say. What I heard last night...those things Tressa said to you...they were abusive. It’s not your issue. People don’t talk to each other that way.”
Her tone had changed. Completely. He was holding her hand and still felt as though he’d been cut adrift.
Not because she was against him. But she’d become...impartial. He didn’t like it.
So he was going to set her straight right then and there. She and Kacey might have had the perfect family, but most weren’t. No matter how great your parents were, or how close you were to them and your siblings. No matter how many grandparents were in and out all day long, or how many cousins and aunts and uncles filled church pews with you.
“You’re wrong.” He’d tried to soften the blow, but there were some things that just were...what they were.
“Tressa is a walk in the park compared to my sister, JoAnne.”
She stopped in her tracks, only inches from him as she stared up at him in the growing dusk. They really should turn around, even though there were enough homes, restaurants and resorts lighting up the beach that they’d be fine even when it was fully dark out.
“Your sister talked that way to you, too?” she asked softly, studying him. He allowed it because she was back with him. Friend more than professional. The softness in her gaze was completely personal.
“My sister was the devil herself when I was growing up.”
Every family had one. You just did everything you could to make certain it wasn’t you.
Unless you were JoAnne. She’d had no reason. Not like Tressa...
“How so?”
She was his sister, his only sibling. Family. He wished he’d been a little more circumspect in his word choice.
He looked for a way to explain without coming off like a complete jerk.
“JoAnne was five when I was born,” he said. He’d probably gone back a little too far. “Up until I arrived, she was it. My folks’ whole lives revolved around her. They’d had a tough time getting pregnant and she was like a gift from heaven to them.”
And then he’d come along. A son.
“After I was born...my folks probably weren’t as sensitive to her needs as they could have been,” he said, thinking back, aiming for fairness. “She had some jealousy issues.”
That went unattended. Forever.
“And she took it out on you?”
She’d locked him in a closet once when their mother was making cookies, so that he didn’t get to lick the bowl. He was five. He’d turned on a light and looked at the pictures in the books that were store
d on a shelf next to him.
“My folks had this thing,” he said. “If we were bad, we weren’t spanked or put in time-out. We had perks taken away from us. If I back-talked my mother, I’d lose the fishing trip my father had promised me for the weekend.”
Lacey’s silence left him far too much room to say more than he wanted to.
“So JoAnne had this game. When we were in the car, she’d pinch me. Over and over. If I told, we’d both get in trouble, which meant that we’d both lose a perk. Her contention was that she’d lost all perks she’d cared about when I was born.”
“Did she?”
“I have nothing upon which to base an opinion. I don’t know what life was like for her before I was born. My parents were great to me. I don’t remember them being bad to her. But I was five years younger than she was. I have no clue what went on after I went to bed at night.”
He turned them around and headed back up the beach the way they’d come. Wondering if Kacey was a good cook. And wishing, completely selfishly, that Lacey had had time to make their dinner.
Not because she was a better cook. As far as he’d been able to tell, both of the sisters were well schooled in the kitchen. He just wanted to eat Lacey’s cooking.
Which probably made him a sick puppy. Or just weird, at the very least, a weird dude.
“She used to tell me that I wasn’t wanted. That I was a mistake. That I was ugly and everyone laughed at my sorry ass. She’d pull my hair just to see if she could make me cry. And then mock me if I did. And if I told our parents, she’d make life twice as miserable.”
He’d learned how to stay out of her way. And later, how to placate her. Because life wasn’t perfect and wasn’t meant to be easy.
They’d switched hands when they’d turned around. Lacey’s palm was cool from the night air. He wanted to hold her. To lie on the beach with her and lose himself in her, to pleasure her so thoroughly that she forgot the bad parts of his world existed. And hers, too.
To help them both forget that people weren’t always kind to one another.
In a perfect world, maybe they were.
But in reality, everyone had a bad side. Issues. Hurts that didn’t heal as well as they could have.
“When I grew taller than she was, stronger than she was, she resorted to tears,” he said, remembering out loud under the cover of the darkness that was falling. “She’d use tears as a threat and point out to me how our father was a sucker for her tears, giving in to her every single time she cried.”
“Was she right?”
“About Dad? Pretty much.” And he understood that. Every single time Levi cried, it took a piece out of him.
“After that I gave her whatever she wanted most of the time. It was easier than dealing with the muck she’d conjure up.”
“Was she nicer to you?”
“Tressa’s words last night were kind compared to the things JoAnne continued to say to me. But they were only words. I learned to deflect the barbs for the nonsense they were, and to pity her.”
“Didn’t Levi say she’s coming to stay with you?”
“Right. Yes, she is. Later this summer.”
“So...things have changed since you grew up?”
“Nope...” He grinned. Because life really was kind of a joke sometimes. “She’s pretty much as bad as ever.”
“Then why...?”
“My folks asked me to put her up.” He let his shrug finish that sentence.
“Did they also tell her she had to stay with you?”
“What? No, of course not. It wouldn’t do any good if they had. JoAnne has no problem defying our parents.”
“She wants to stay with you.”
“I guess.” He hadn’t given it much thought. “It’s a small thing,” he told her. He stopped, turning her until they faced each other, touching, front to front.
“You want to know what I know?” he asked, gazing down at her in the moonlight—and in the glow from the lights farther up on the beach.
“What?”
“That I have so much to be thankful for I’d be a fool to waste my energy crying over the things I can’t change. I’ve got a boy that brings me joy every single moment of every day. A job I love and that provides a better than average income. I’m my own boss. I can make my home whatever I want it to be because I’m the guy who knows how to do that kind of stuff. And I’m on the beach with a woman who I never thought I’d meet...”
He stopped himself.
“I never thought I’d meet you, either.” Lacey filled in his silence, understanding.
And, with those words, sealed his fate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THEY WENT OUT again on Saturday. Kacey was back at Jem’s, though Lacey hated that her sister was spending so much time babysitting. Not that Kace seemed any the worse for wear. She looked more relaxed and was laughing out loud a lot more than Lacey could remember her doing.
Hard to believe that in another week she’d be gone—back to the craziness of her Hollywood life.
Lacey had worn another one of Kacey’s dresses that was loose fitting and just a bit shorter and fancier. Jem had told her he wanted to take her out someplace nice.
And he had. On one of their city’s dinner cruises. They’d had steak and lobster by candlelight, seated outdoors at a balcony table with live music playing softly in the background. She remembered asking for honey mustard dressing on her salad. And liking the bread. She probably would have a hundred little image memories when she looked back on the night. But as they drove from the harbor back to her house, all Lacey could think about was Jem.
The way she’d caught his eye in the candlelight. The sound of his laughter when she’d been telling him about the time she and Kacey had hidden behind a sign in a subway station and had taken turns popping their heads out from behind it on opposite sides without leaving enough time for a person to have moved from one side to the other...
He’d put a tie on with dark pants and a white shirt and she just couldn’t stop consuming him with her senses. The musky scent. The slightly rough working-man hands that held her hand or touched her cheek so tenderly. The intense way he looked at her.
She ate dinner and left the boat hungry.
For him.
Life wasn’t perfect. And might not be easy. But there was no doubt in her mind anymore that Jem Bridges was more to her than just a man she’d met. More to her than any man she’d ever met.
They hadn’t talked any further about Tressa, other than for Jem to say that his ex-wife and Amelia were spending the weekend at the beach with a couple of Amelia’s friends.
Lacey also hadn’t talked to him about her suspicions regarding Tressa as a perpetrator of domestic violence against Levi. And Jem, too. She wasn’t his counselor and couldn’t be objective. She didn’t want to say something that would do more harm than good.
But she hadn’t forgotten. She knew that sometime before Tressa’s custodial visit the following weekend, she was going to have to let Sydney know about the scene she’d overheard between Jem and his ex-wife. The verbal abuse she’d witnessed. After she told Jem that she was going to call Sydney.
She just kept hoping that he’d come to the realization on his own, after everything that had happened with Levi—social services bursting into his life, the talks they’d had.
He was a thinker, someone who faced things head-on rather than avoided them. A doer. He didn’t run away from problems.
She wanted to give him time.
In the meantime, she wanted to give him...her. Not just her body, though she wanted that, too...but...
They reached his truck and he held the door open for her, pulling out the stepstool he’d surprised her with earlier so she didn’t have to step up so high in her dress.
Alway
s the gentleman. A man’s man who’d protect those he cared about with his life. And yet...one who also seemed to respect a woman’s abilities as equal to his own. His willingness to look at his ex-wife as a whole person, to see her good, her value, had shown her how he respected women in a way nothing else could have done.
She fully believed now that Jem was a victim of domestic violence. But he was the least likely victim she’d met during the course of her career. She had no doubt that he had scars, markers from the damage done to him—psychological and emotional—and yet he was a well-adjusted, emotionally alive, functioning adult. This spoke to her of his strength of character, his determination to be the best he could be.
She watched him walk around the truck. His ass looked the best in those pants.
God, she had it bad.
They were about two blocks from her house when he said, “I want to make love with you.”
“You’re welcome to come in for a while.” Her tongue practically stuck to the roof of her mouth. She’d never made an appointment for sex before. Or talked about doing it beforehand.
“I’d kind of planned to. I just want my intentions clear before I enter your home.”
The look he sent in her direction made her feel like a puddle on his seat. The trembling of her lips was her giveaway and she gave him a weak smile.
Good thing the inside of the truck was dark.
“I don’t think you do this lightly,” he said.
Was that going to be a problem for him? So...she’d change. Immediately. She could find a way to be casual about sex. Because she didn’t want to live without knowing what sex with him felt like.
“I don’t, either,” he told her.
Desire raced through her veins, but her mind slowed. “I didn’t think you did,” she said.
“What Tressa said the other night...”
She didn’t want his ex-wife there, but she experienced a moment of thrilled relief with the confirmation that he was thinking through the situation they’d left hanging openly right in front of them. But she still didn’t want her there.
Harlequin Superromance May 2016 Box Set Page 71