Redemption's Kiss

by Ann Christopher

  Dawson’s mouth thinned. “What I’ve been saying for the last three years—I didn’t do it.”

  Interesting. That certainly explained the prison muscles and screw-the-world attitude. “Congratulations.” Beau resumed walking, anxious to get to his car. “All the best to you.”

  Dawson kept pace, and they worked their way through the crowd. “I had an interview this morning.”

  “You missed your interview this morning.” Beau veered into the parking lot and headed down the row. “We waited half an hour for you. That’s why I’m late now.”

  “I’m sorry about that. My buddy’s car had a flat, and I just got here—”

  “You didn’t call.”

  “I can’t afford a cell phone, and the battery on his was dead.”

  Beau was ready to write the excuse off as either a lie or a tale of woe, neither of which meant anything to him, but then he saw the look on the guy’s face. Dawson was embarrassed that he didn’t have a car or a phone, humiliated and trying to hide it.

  “What about your family? Aren’t they helping you?”

  The skin stretched taut over Dawson’s face, tightening his features into something wild and barely controlled, like a wolf trying to pass as a puppy. “My family wrote me off before I went to prison. Now I’ve written them off.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll deal with my family later, when I’m ready. For now, I need a job.”

  Compassion or something like it sparked inside Beau, but this guy wasn’t going to win him over. Everyone he’d interviewed today had a hard life, and they’d all managed to show up on time this morning.

  Dawson must have sensed his ambivalence, because he pressed his case. “If I could just reschedule the interview. I have a finance degree from Duke, and I learned a lot of skills when I was locked up—”

  “You want a startup loan so you can flip houses.”

  “Yes.”

  The guy seemed to hold his breath. Beau felt a moment’s pity for him, but he didn’t make business decisions based on pity. There were other applicants just as worthy. And they didn’t have chips the size of Gibraltar on their shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” Beau told him, anxious to be done with this guy, who wasn’t his problem and wouldn’t become his problem. “I can’t help you.”

  Dawson’s face twisted into a derisive and fearsome snarl that had no doubt kept him safe in the prison showers for the past few years. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “So what brings you here?” asked Dr. Desai.

  This guy was an idiot, Beau thought, stretching out his leg and trying to get comfortable on this hard-ass modern sofa.

  Notwithstanding the framed degrees from Stanford and Cornell on the wall, the doctor was an idiot. The doctor’s receptionist out in the lobby was also an idiot and, if the man had a wife, children and a dog or cat at home, they were idiots, too.

  True, Beau was mad at the world just now, but there were still a lot of idiots hanging around. Like that guy who’d had his lips wrapped around Jillian’s earlier. Now he was an idiot, the punk.

  Another man. Kissing Jillian. And it was all Beau’s fault.

  That pretty much made Beau the head idiot, didn’t it?

  “What brings me here?” Beau echoed.

  Who, other than an idiot, would ask such a stupid question? Irritated, he clenched his fingers into such a tight fist that his short nails felt like razor blades against his palm. The slicing pain cleared his head, just a little, and he opened his hand and smoothed it against the black leather.

  “Didn’t you get my file transferred from Dr. Palmer in Miami?”

  Dr. Desai opened his mouth to answer, but Beau plowed ahead. Screw it. He didn’t care what foot they started on. This guy could kiss his ass for all he cared.

  “And didn’t you read the four million forms and questionnaires you made me fill out before you accepted me as a client?”

  This time Dr. Desai got two words in edgewise. “Yes, but—”

  “And you’ve probably seen me on the news. Doing the whole apology and resignation press conference thing. Or maybe you’ve seen me over on the cable comedy shows, where they’ve added me to the apology hall of fame. So I’m pretty sure you know why I’m here.”

  Dr. Desai didn’t so much as blink, the crafty old SOB. Didn’t frown, didn’t sigh and didn’t do anything reproachful, which naturally made Beau feel worse for being rude right off the bat. He simply crossed his legs and surveyed Beau with wise brown eyes that made Beau feel as though he’d been locked in the office with an owl.

  The moment stretched.

  Beau fidgeted, smoothing his hair and then folding his hands in his lap.

  Dr. Desai tried again. “So, you’re trying to…?”

  “Not be such a self-destructive son of a bitch.”

  Wow. That got him a smile, or at least the curve of the doctor’s lips and crow’s-feet creases in the deep brown skin at the edges of his eyes.

  “How’s that going so far, Beau?”

  “In terms of what? How many people hate my guts today or how many hearts I’ve broken or—what? You’ve got to give me some guidelines here.”

  “In terms of how you think you’re doing.”

  Whoa. The old man went right for the jugular, didn’t he? So they were going to talk turkey. No reason to sugarcoat it, then.

  “Most days, I still feel like a worthless pile of shit. How’s that?”

  There was a pause.

  “I…see,” said Dr. Desai.

  They stared at each other. Beau’s bitterness didn’t seem to disturb the man the least little bit, and neither did his sarcasm. That was a nice trick. Beau wished he could run out to the drugstore and buy a dose of the guy’s equilibrium, maybe see if he could have a normal day like other people seemed to. What would life be like without the burning desire to be more than he was and the unwavering certainty that he was all he’d ever be—and that wasn’t very damn much?

  Dr. Desai slid his pen into the bright white hair above his ear, probably because Beau had so many outstanding issues to work on that he’d given up trying to take notes.

  “You’ve been in therapy for several months, right? Do you still feel like as big a pile of shit as when you started out?”

  That question took a little more thought. Beau gave it a second and dug deep.

  He thought about a few things—a few tiny things—that he’d done that he could be proud of. He’d stopped drinking, for one thing. He’d been celibate for several months, for another. Sure, he felt as though the mojo was backing up inside, threatening to explode out of him one unfortunate day sometime soon, but he hadn’t had meaningless sex since the night of the accident, and it was all meaningless unless the woman was Jillian.

  It wasn’t about the women, anyway. It’d never been about the women. It was about him, and him and Jillian. And wasn’t knowing the problem half the solution? He sure hoped so.

  He’d attended both psychological and physical therapy religiously, and he intended to keep that up for as long as it took. And he’d always been a good father. Now that he lived down the street from Allegra, he was being a better one. With Jillian, though, he didn’t know what the hell he was doing other than making it up as he went along.

  Oh, and he’d done the whole giving away his fortune thing. Charitable work earned him some credit, right? Even if his soul was damaged and he hadn’t found the first recipient of a grant yet? No one expected him to turn into Nelson Mandela overnight, did they?

  So…on balance, there’d been some improvement. A tiny little bit.

  Dr. Desai waited, apparently prepared to sit there indefinitely, if need be.

  “I’ve made…a little progress,” Beau said, hoping the admission wouldn’t jinx him forever.

  “So,” Dr. Desai wondered, “you’re—what? Only fifty percent shit now?”

  That was too generous, and the new Beau was all about keeping it real. “Sixty, let’s say.”

&nb
sp; “And the other forty percent?”

  “A work in progress.”

  “Fair enough.” Dr. Desai flashed something that may have been a smile but looked mostly like grim satisfaction. “Are you willing to do a little hard work with me?”

  Beau felt grim, too, especially when he thought about all his areas for growth potential, but maybe he’d come to the right place after all. Maybe this guy could help him.

  “I’m all about working hard, Doc.”

  “Good. What’s standing in the way of you being where you need to be?”

  That was easy. “I’m standing in my way.”

  “Why?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t need you, now would I?”

  “It’s good to know I’m not obsolete.”

  Beau almost laughed. It was such a strange sensation, such a distant memory, that he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Laughter, like happiness, was hard for him to call forth and recapture, except when he was with Allegra. But he was trying.

  “What did you do before you came here, Beau? You seemed agitated.”

  Ah. The memory of some other man kissing Jillian. That one he had no problems with. Already his heart was thundering in his throat, his blood rushing in his ears. His face felt hot, as though there were a layer of lava between his cheeks and his flesh.

  “I saw my wife kissing some other man so, yeah, you could say I was agitated. You could say I wanted to rip the man’s tongue out of his head.”

  Dr. Desai frowned. “But you’re divorced.”

  “Yeah.” Beau tried to swallow back the bitter bile, but it just kept coming and coming in an endless supply that would probably choke and kill him sometime soon. “I’m divorced.”

  “I take it you still have strong feelings for your ex-wife.”

  This guy was funny. “Strong feelings?” Beau said. “Like when you’re nearly killed and her face is the one you see when you’re hovering between life and death? Like when you can’t sleep without her in your bed, wrapped around you? Like when you’d agree to spend eternity in hell if only she’d smile at you one more time the way she used to? Strong feelings? Like that?”

  “That about covers it,” Dr. Desai said.

  “Then, yeah.” Beau met the man’s gaze and didn’t bother trying to hide his desperation and, worse than that, his bottomless fear, because what if he never got Jillian back? God knew he didn’t deserve her and never had, even on a good day. “I still have strong feelings for her.”

  “You want her back?”

  “I want her back.”

  Dr. Desai tipped his head back and studied the ceiling. Obviously he didn’t want to stomp on Beau’s dreams on the one hand, but he felt as though Beau needed a healthy dose of reality on the other. Beau could have told him not to bother. He and reality were well acquainted.

  “Is it possible that you’ve magnified the good times and sugarcoated the bad? Sometimes people have a tendency to—”

  “What? Like childbirth? You think I’ve forgotten all the pain?”

  “Something like that.”

  Beau thought. He remembered the second the pain began, the moment when his glorious old life ended and the new, foreveraltered one took its place. The heartbreak was still right there, in his face, in all its IMAX-worthy, Technicolor high definition. There wasn’t one thing he could forget, and he’d certainly tried.

  “I can assure you,” Beau said coolly. “I haven’t forgotten any of the pain.”

  Something in his face must have convinced the good doctor that Beau was sincere and free of denial. So he changed tactics.

  “You know,” Dr. Desai said, “the statistics on successful remarriage between the same—”

  “Are terrible.” Not bothering to hide his impatience, Beau checked his watch. God help him—thirty minutes left in this session. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Have you thought about the possibility that your ex-wife has changed, and that even if you reconciled—”

  Beau glared. Did the man think he was stupid?

  “Of course I’ve thought about it.”

  “And?”

  “And she has changed. She’s stronger. Wiser. More self-confident. She can take care of herself and she’s a great mother. She’s the woman I always knew she’d become.”

  “And?”

  “And I want to be the man she deserves.”

  “What if you can’t be?”

  The distinct possibility nearly made Beau break out in hives and heave up his breakfast. But he had to acknowledge and accept it.

  “Then I can’t. But I have to try.” He paused, and then decided to lay it all out there. “And it’d be really nice to be able to look myself in the mirror when I shave. For once.”

  “So you want to change. For yourself.”

  This was getting ridiculous. “Have you not been paying attention, Doc? I need to change for myself. Even if Jillian never takes me back, I can’t go back to the way I was. I don’t want that kind of life.”

  At last Beau seemed to have stumbled upon the right combination of words. Dr. Desai nodded, deep grooves of what looked like satisfaction bracketing his mouth.

  “I think I can help you.”

  “Great,” Beau said. “Why don’t you go ahead and give your magic wand a flick. Get me straightened out before dinner.”

  Dr. Desai chuckled and apparently decided that, since he and Beau had reached an understanding, Beau was worth the trouble of taking notes. He untucked the pen from behind his ear and took up a yellow legal pad.

  “Let’s get started.”

  Chapter 9

  Could this date have been any more painful?

  Yeah, Jillian supposed. It could have. If she’d had a root canal between the appetizers and entrées. Without anesthesia.

  Short of that, she and Adam had just experienced the most excruciating dinner two people could have with each other. Awkward silences. Halting conversation. Stilted jokes. It had been the perfect storm of embarrassed discomfort.

  And that was just during drinks.

  Adam pulled his car, a nice Toyota sedan, up to the B & B and put it in Park. Keeping up tonight’s tradition of looking everywhere but directly in Adam’s eyes, Jillian glanced out her window and took a quick inventory, making sure the whole place hadn’t fallen apart during the couple of hours she’d been gone.

  One of the hazards of ownership was her obsessive attention to detail and service, but things seemed well under control. The inn was picture-perfect, the image of a cozy hideaway far from the city’s bustle. Strategic spotlights emphasized the exquisite landscaping. Several guests enjoyed the porch’s quiet serenity and rocked in the chairs or swayed in the wicker swing; their quiet laughter broke the night’s silence. The slight breeze ruffled the hanging ferns and hinted at the rain that was just waiting for the right moment to fall.

  Man, she loved this place. It was her pride and joy, her little slice of heaven on earth.

  Too bad she was on the date from hell.

  Shoring up her courage, she dredged up the bright, false smile she’d been wearing all night, the one that hurt her cheeks, and glanced across the car’s dim interior to Adam. It was too dark to get a good read on his expression, and maybe that was best because he’d been increasingly quiet since they left the restaurant.

  “So,” she said, encouraged to hear that there was only the slightest quaver in her voice. “Would you like to come in for some, ah, coffee?”

  Coffee meant coffee; it wasn’t code for sex and she’d be really surprised if Adam interpreted it that way at the end of such a disastrous evening. Once the words were out of her mouth, she waited to regret them, but she didn’t. For some inexplicable reason, she felt this rising desperation to end the date on a high note, an outcome that seemed as likely as sticking a straw in the Pacific Ocean and drinking it dry.

  Why was she so determined to make tonight work with Adam? She had no idea. Maybe it had something to do with this being her first real date in about a thous
and years and the thrill of feeling like a desirable woman again. Maybe it was because of the sexy little black dress she’d shoehorned herself into and the makeup she’d let Barbara Jean shellac onto her face.

  Maybe—man, she didn’t even like thinking the thought.

  Maybe it had something to do with proving to herself, God and everybody else that Beau’s sudden reappearance hadn’t disrupted her equilibrium too much, and she was still on her way to becoming the powerful and self-confident woman she thought she’d been before he showed up with his new solemnity and the same old sexy eyes.

  Whatever.

  The bottom line was that her fragile ego couldn’t withstand another failure with another man, even if it was just an awkward date rather than a divorce.

  “I’ve got cheesecake.”

  This last-minute addition made her want to slap her hand over her mouth. Was there anything more pitiful than a woman who begged and used food to entice a man? The best thing she could do for herself right now was shut up before she continued her inevitable and tragic descent from needy to pathetic.

  “I can’t,” Adam said.

  Of course he couldn’t; no surprise there. Jillian was something of an expert when it came to driving men away, so why should this man be immune to that particular talent of hers?

  Trying not to take it personally was a pointless exercise. How could it not be personal when your date preferred to leave at the earliest possible opportunity rather than spend a few extra minutes eating a delicious and free dessert with you?

  She tried to brace for it, but it raced ahead and flattened her to pancake proportions all the same—that same old feeling of rejection and inadequacy, as familiar as Allegra’s dimpled smile.

  Something about her was faulty. Well…no. Maybe she was looking at it the wrong way. Why not turn it around and look at the positive? Something about her was brilliant, a van Gogh in the art of getting men to run out on her.

  The fact that she wasn’t wild about Adam anyway didn’t matter the slightest bit. All that mattered to her ruined ego was not being an abject failure with a man. At this point in her life, any man would do.