Drying off, he realized he was going to have to tell Mariah about Rebecca. Mariah meant too much to him to be blindsided by whatever chaos Rebecca blew into their lives.
He pulled on his jeans and allowed thoughts of Mariah to consume him. He was falling in love with her, falling in love in a way he’d never felt with Rebecca, never dreamed was possible.
The dark-haired girl with the bright blue eyes who had captured his passion in high school had grown into a woman who had taken his heart. At the moment he couldn’t see a happy ending for them. He knew she had no intention of remaining in Plains Point and he had spent the four years since his divorce building a life and a practice here in the small town.
Still, even knowing that they were headed in different directions in their lives, he refused to stop seeing her and he couldn’t stop himself from loving her more each time they were together.
He glanced at his clock on the nightstand. Five o’clock. He had fifteen minutes to finish getting ready and walk out the door so he wasn’t late meeting Mariah, her friend and her daughter at five thirty.
And at some point in the evening he needed to arrange some private time with Mariah, time he’d rather use to make love to her but he would instead use to talk about his ex-wife. Jesus, he’d rather have a tooth pulled.
He had to park in the next block from the Red Dragon, as it looked like they had a crowd of diners already there. He should have made a reservation, he thought as he hurried toward the front door.
Thankfully Mariah, Janice and Kelsey had already arrived and were seated at a table for four toward the back of the restaurant.
His heartbeat bumped up a notch at the sight of Mariah. Wearing a pair of jeans and a summery blouse that dipped low enough to expose a bit of cleavage, she smiled at him and he realized he’d like to see that smile every day of his life. That smile made him happy, made him want to be the man who could bring it to her face.
Throughout dinner he fought against a simmering need to get Mariah alone, to kiss those sweet lips of hers. He hadn’t lied to her when he’d told her that the next time they made love, he wanted slow and romantic.
But underlying his desire was the dread of knowing he needed to tell her the ugly details of his marriage and warn her that he had no idea what his ex-wife was capable of doing. And he knew that once he told Mariah, she could walk away from him. Who in their right mind would want to deal with a drug-crazed ex-wife?
And the thought of losing Mariah ached in his heart, just as her sudden absence from the desk in front of him had hurt all those years ago.
When he’d run his hands up the silky softness of the backs of her legs, then had encountered the raised welts of old scars, he’d wanted to kill somebody for hurting her.
“Dr. Taylor?”
He looked across the table at Kelsey, who had obviously asked him a question he hadn’t heard. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“How much longer will Tiny need to wear the cast?” she asked.
“Another couple of weeks and we should be able to take it off.” He smiled at the pretty teenager. “And I thought I told you to call me Jack.”
“That dog follows Kelsey around like she gave birth to him,” Janice said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“He loves me,” Kelsey exclaimed. “And I love him.”
“Until Katie calls,” Mariah said with a warm smile to her daughter. “Then you’re off and running.”
“Tiny understands that a girl needs her friends as well as her pooches,” Kelsey replied.
Jack couldn’t help but feel the warmth and caring that existed between the three women. It was obvious Janice and Mariah shared a deep, bonding friendship. Jack liked the elfish-looking woman who radiated a wealth of intelligence from her brown eyes.
When Janice and Kelsey left the table to go to the ladies’ room, Jack reached over and covered Mariah’s hand with his. “I need to talk to you,” he said. “Is it possible Janice and Kelsey can go on home together and I can bring you home later?”
Her eyes glistened. “What exactly do you have in mind, Dr. Taylor?”
“Keep looking at me like that and I won’t be able to get up from the table without embarrassing myself,” he replied. “Actually I need to talk to you and I’d rather not get into it here.”
She must have seen something in his eyes, something that made her realize whatever it was he wanted to talk to her about was serious. She pulled her hand from beneath his and held his gaze for a long moment. “All right, Janice can take Kelsey home and you and I will have a talk.”
Thirty minutes later Jack ushered Mariah into his living room. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.
She sat on the sofa. “Am I going to need one?”
“I don’t know, but I think I’d like one.”
“Okay, then, a glass of wine?”
He nodded and went into the kitchen. He poured her a glass of wine, then made himself a stiff Scotch on the rocks. When he returned to the living room, she took the wine from him with a tentative smile. “I have to confess, you have me a little nervous.”
“Don’t be.” He sat next to her and placed his glass on the coffee table. “I need to talk to you about my ex-wife.”
She frowned. “Are you two getting back together? If so, you don’t owe me anything, Jack.”
“No, God no, it’s nothing like that,” he replied quickly. He reached out, grabbed his drink and took a deep swallow, the bite of the Scotch burning all the way down to the pit of his stomach.
“What is it, Jack?” Mariah leaned toward him and placed a hand on his forearm. “Just tell me.”
Jack drew a deep breath and sent himself back in time, back to the beginning when he’d first met the pretty blonde who appeared to have it all, healthy ambition, intelligence and a sex-kittenish quality that Jack had found enchanting.
“She fooled me,” he finally began. “When we got married, I thought she had it all together, that the two of us could take on the world and make a real success of our life.”
“But that didn’t happen.” Mariah sat back and removed her hand from his arm.
He stood, unable to sit still while he spoke of his failure, the failure as a husband, his failure as a man. “Rebecca didn’t have it as together as I thought she did. She was needy and in the beginning I didn’t mind—I found it endearing. She was going to school for her nursing training and I was finishing up my schooling and preparing to open my clinic.”
He walked over to the window and stared outside, where darkness had fallen. “We’d been married two years when one night I woke up and she wasn’t in the bed next to me. I found her in the kitchen on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor with a toothbrush.”
He turned to look at Mariah. “She was going over the same spot again and again and I knew by her twitching and paranoia that she was high on drugs. She confessed that she’d tried crystal meth. She swore it was her first time and she’d never do it again and I believed her.” He offered Mariah a rueful smile. “Never believe a drug user when they’re high.”
“She didn’t quit?”
Jack shook his head and walked back to the sofa. He sank down in the cushion and once again reached for his drink. “I thought she had, or maybe I just wanted to believe it enough that I overlooked the signs of how bad it had become, and that was my failure as a husband, that and not understanding exactly what she needed of me.”
He took a deep swallow of his drink and stared down at the top of the coffee table. “I refused to notice that she looked like a walking skeleton, that she’d become secretive and almost never slept. It wasn’t until I wrote a check to cover some business expenses and it bounced that I realized she’d emptied our accounts to pay for the drugs. She begged me to forgive her, told me that she’d do anything to get better, so I sent her to rehab.”
Once again Mariah’s hand was on his arm, warming the cold places his memories had brought back into his heart. “But it didn’t work,” she
said softly.
“The first time she stayed three days, then left. She insisted she was fine, could quit on her own and all I needed to do was trust her. Of course I didn’t trust her and she didn’t quit and so she tried rehab again. She stayed twenty days, just enough time to give me hope that we could pull it all back together again. On the twenty-first day she was kicked out for using. My bank account was empty, my charge cards were maxed out, but more than that, my love for her was gone. I knew I had to get out.”
In frustration he looked at Mariah. “Maybe I should have loved her more—maybe I should have forgotten about my work and spent more time with her. I thought of myself as a healer, but all I wanted to do was get out.”
Mariah squeezed his arm gently. “Why are you telling me this, Jack?”
“Our divorce four years ago wasn’t exactly the end of things between us.” He felt Mariah stiffen and quickly added, “It’s not what you’re thinking. Every three or four months she contacts me wanting money. The first couple of times I gave in, then realized I wasn’t helping her that way. The last time she contacted me, I told her no, that I wasn’t going to give her any more money and the next day my house was broken into and some things were stolen, things that could be easily pawned.”
“I’m sorry, Jack, but I still don’t understand why you think I need to hear about this.”
“I’ve been getting some phone calls that lead me to believe Rebecca is about to make another appearance into my life.” Jack took both of Mariah’s hands in his. “I wanted to tell you this because I’m in love with you, Mariah.” Emotion bubbled up in his chest. “Don’t worry, I don’t need to know how you feel about me. It’s enough that you’re here right now.
“I just felt the need to warn you that Rebecca may be someplace here in town. I have no idea what condition she might be in or what she’s capable of. If you decide to walk out of here tonight and never see me again, I’ll understand, but that won’t stop me from loving you.”
She pulled her hands away, her head tilted in the familiar way it did when she was thinking. “You talk like the problems Rebecca had with the drugs were your fault, somehow your personal failure,” she said. “But surely you know that’s a powerful drug and that ultimately you weren’t capable of helping Rebecca if she didn’t want to help herself.”
“On an intellectual level I understand all that,” he replied.
She smiled. “And you know that eventually I’m going back to Chicago.”
“I know that and I don’t have any expectations for what the future might bring. I just want to be with you, to spend time with you for as long as I can.”
“I must be out of my mind, because that’s what I want, too,” Mariah confessed softly. He’d just given her a perfectly good reason to back away from him, no hard feelings. But she didn’t want to. She wasn’t ready to deny herself the pleasure of being with him.
There was no question that knowing he believed he loved her was empowering, and she was savvy enough to acknowledge that selfishly she wasn’t ready to walk away from the way he looked at her as if she was something precious, the way he touched her as if she was something of value. She’d never had that before and hadn’t realized until now how deep her hunger for that had been.
“So, we’re here all alone and I don’t have a curfew,” she said. “You promised me slow and romantic.”
His eyes flared with hunger. “And I always keep my promises.”
He’d nearly been caught that night in her house. If he hadn’t seen the flash of the car lights through the window, Kelsey and Mariah’s friend would have found him in Mariah’s bedroom.
Thankfully he’d managed to get out the back door before they realized what was going on. He’d watched the house for another hour, surprised when no law enforcement had been called.
She’d heard him on the stairs. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but as he ran from the house her hysterical cries and the sound of her terror had filled him with an omnipotent power.
But it hadn’t been enough. Her terror would never be enough. She’d begun it all and he had come to realize over the last two weeks that the only way he could be normal again, the only way he could completely rid himself of the rage that had transformed him into a monster, was to bury Mariah with all his other girls. She’d been the first and she’d be the last.
And if it took too long to get to her, if she proved to be difficult, there was always her daughter. Sweet young Kelsey looked just like her mother had looked sixteen years ago and the young ones were always so naive, so trusting.
Yes, Kelsey would make a good stand-in until Mariah was his once again.
Chapter 21
“Meth addiction is one of the worst,” Janice said the next afternoon. Kelsey had left for the pool and Janice and Mariah were once again working on finishing painting the kitchen cabinets. “I’ve counseled a lot of teenagers and their families about it. The addiction to meth is as hard to break as an addiction to heroin. The deterioration of the body and of the soul is swift and horrible.”
Mariah used the handle of her paintbrush to itch a spot on her cheek. “It must be terrible, to see somebody you love destroying themselves and be unable to help them.”
Janice lowered her brush and turned to look at Mariah. “He must care about you a lot to confess to that kind of baggage in his background. Did you tell him about your baggage?”
“I certainly haven’t bared my soul to him, but he knows my father was abusive and that my childhood was pretty miserable.”
“That’s not what I was talking about,” Janice said. She put her brush in the paint pan and eased into a kitchen chair. “I think you’ve pretty well resolved that particular issue while you’ve been back here. I was talking about your rape.”
“Of course I haven’t told him about that and I don’t intend to tell him about it,” Mariah exclaimed. She glanced toward the window to make sure Roger wasn’t lurking outside, listening to their conversation. She set her paintbrush down and joined Janice at the table.
“If anything, my time with Jack has given me the assurance that I can have a normal, healthy relationship with a man. There is no baggage to worry about.”
Janice shoved a strand of her salt-and-pepper hair behind one pointy ear, her thin eyebrows pulling into a unibrow in the center of her forehead. “You hide in closets. You have terrible nightmares that wake you up screaming. You’re paranoid. I’d call that baggage.”
“I’m fine,” Mariah replied, heat filling her cheeks. “Once I get back to Chicago, I’ll be okay. It’s just being here that’s brought some of that up again. Besides, I can’t tell anyone.” Her voice vibrated with the depth of her feelings. “I have too much to lose.”
“Like what?”
A wealth of emotion filled Mariah’s chest, constricting painfully tight and momentarily taking away her breath. A vision of her daughter filled her head. “Kelsey,” she managed to whisper.
“Kelsey loves you. You wouldn’t lose her.”
The constricting band around Mariah’s heart grew tighter as she thought of her daughter and the potential consequences of Mariah’s secret. If the truth came out, it would be like opening Pandora’s box and only darkness and heartache would flow out of it.
“The most important value I instilled in Kelsey was truthfulness,” she finally said. “How could I ever explain to her that everything I told her about her father and our life and her birth was nothing but a lie? How would I ever make that right for her?” Mariah shook her head, the very thought of Kelsey finding out the truth making her want to throw up. “She’d hate me.”
Janice clucked her tongue. “You not only don’t give her enough credit—you don’t give yourself enough credit. The bond you’ve built with Kelsey is strong.”
“It’s a moot point,” Mariah said with more than a touch of stubbornness. “Within a matter of weeks we’ll all be back in Chicago and life will go on without any secrets needing to be told.” She got up and grabbed her pa
intbrush. “Now, let’s get these cabinets done so Joel can start work on the kitchen floor.”
There were only four people who knew about that night beneath the trees: Mariah, Janice, Mariah’s mother and the rapist. One of those people was dead, one was sworn to secrecy and neither Mariah nor her attacker would tell. Mariah intended to do everything in her power to keep it that way.
For the rest of the afternoon Mariah refused to allow herself to think about the conversation she’d had with Janice. Instead she focused on the night before with Jack.
True to his promise, he’d taken her into his bedroom and made love to her slowly and sweetly. His feelings for her were evident in his every touch, in the way he kissed her so soulfully, so passionately.
And as he made love to her, gazing into her eyes, she’d felt a raw, aching love for him. But as he drove her home, she dismissed that crazy emotion and told herself it had been nothing more than the intense physical release of the moment.
Over the next couple of days the house began to really take shape. Roger and his crew finished the outside paint. The house now sported a creamy beige color with burgundy shutters and front door. Joel laid the new yellow and white patterned tiles in the kitchen and Mariah picked out a wallpaper border for the dining room.
Thursday evening Mariah was in the kitchen hanging cheerful yellow curtains at the window when Janice came into the room. “Pretty,” she said.
“Thanks, I feel like the room is filled with sunshine. In fact, I’m starting to feel like the whole house is filled with sunshine.”
Janice smiled. “I have a favor to ask you. Do you mind if I borrow your car for a little while this evening?”
Mariah turned from the window to look at her friend. “Of course I don’t mind. Is there something you need? Someplace I need to take you?”
“No, nothing like that. I’d just like to wander a little bit down Main Street of this quaint little town before I head back to Chicago tomorrow.”
Broken Pieces Page 17