For a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, she worried he wouldn’t answer. Then he released a thick breath and said, “I guess the main reason was...he reminded me of me at that age. And I just felt, I don’t know, connected to him, even before we met, because of that.” His cork bounced in the water, and he pulled up yet another fish that he easily unhooked and then tossed back into the pond. “That’s three in less than a half hour,” he said. “Not bad.”
But Lindy wasn’t done talking about Jerry yet. Her own bobber moved, and she suspected that her bait might be stolen by a hungry little fish soon, but she didn’t care. She needed to learn more about the man who saw himself in her son.
Jerry didn’t favor Ethan in looks at all. Her little boy had blond hair with a reddish hue. He had freckles and fair skin, much like hers. In contrast, Ethan had dark hair, skin that obviously didn’t have a problem getting tan and not a freckle to be seen. Jerry had bright blue eyes. Ethan’s were deep brown. So it wasn’t Jerry’s physical appearance that caused Ethan to relate to him.
Lindy suspected she knew what had triggered his interest in her child. Her attention moved to his leg, outstretched, and that wicked scar covering his right knee. She’d noticed a few other, less noticeable places on his skin, small puckers or discolorations. But that one looked like whatever had caused it had been very, very painful.
Odd, that the marred flesh didn’t detract from his appeal. On the contrary, Lindy found herself even more impressed, even more attracted, to a male who had obviously been through something tough given those permanent reminders on his skin—perhaps even on his soul—and yet who seemed so at peace with his life.
She swallowed. If anything, it made him even more beautiful.
Lindy wanted to touch that scar, trace her fingers over the jagged lines and tell him that it didn’t take away from the man that she was learning more about with each passing day.
A chill washed over her as she realized why her skin grew warm around him, why she couldn’t stop thinking about him, why she wanted to find out how he’d been hurt.
She wanted a relationship with Ethan.
He’d busied himself with putting another minnow on his hook and placing it in the water. But she couldn’t stop looking at him and wondering what had happened in his past.
Finally, he glanced up and found her frowning, staring at his scar. “Ethan?”
He saw where her gaze had landed, but didn’t say anything.
“What happened to you?” she asked, unable to control the concern in her tone—or the intense desire to somehow make his world better.
His mouth slid to the side, but then movement in the water caught his eye. “You’ve got one.” He pointed to her cork, no longer visible.
Lindy had felt the telltale tug on the line, but she hadn’t wanted to take her focus off finding out more about Ethan Green. However, now she had no choice, because he’d reached for the rod and yanked the fish out of the water.
“You nearly lost him,” he said, giving her a different kind of smile, one that looked forced. After unhooking the fish, he tossed it in, where it slapped the water and then darted away.
Clearly, he didn’t want to tell her anything about that scar. Or about his past. He reached toward the minnow bucket, but Lindy placed her hand on his forearm to stop his progress. She felt the warmth of his skin against her own, the slight brush of masculine hair against her palm. Her heart thundered in her chest. “Ethan, wait.”
He released another thick breath before he turned and faced her. “Lindy,” he said, his attention focused on her hand and, she now noticed, the small circular scar to the left of her thumb.
She moved her thumb slightly, so that the pad brushed across the puckered flesh. “What happened there?”
He hesitated and looked back toward his floater, still in the water and, thankfully, not moving.
“Please, Ethan. Tell me.” She needed to know, even more than he realized. There was a reason he was so drawn to Jerry, and she thought she’d figured out why.
Again, she eased her thumb across the marred skin, slightly paler in color than the surrounding flesh. “Right here,” she whispered. “What happened, Ethan?”
“That...was from a cigarette.” While he spoke, she studied the slight imperfections more thoroughly. He was so beautiful, so masculine and seemingly perfect, all hard muscles and sturdy planes. But now that she looked closely, she saw so much more. A body that had been hurt.
A man who had been hurt.
Tiny lines crossed the top of each hand. Like he’d been cut a few times. There was more puckered skin from cigarette burns on his other forearm. At a distance, the lines and circles hadn’t been as noticeable, except for the worst one, on his knee. But up close, and now that she truly looked, smaller scars were pretty much everywhere.
Oh, Ethan. Her heart squeezed tightly in her chest. “Were you—Did someone hurt you when you were Jerry’s age? Is that why you feel connected to him?” It was too difficult to look away, and she wanted—needed—to see the emotion on his face. To know if his feelings were as real as she suspected.
“My father.” He said it as though he had to push the words past his throat. “It took a few years, until I started school, before anyone noticed. Or rather, before anyone cared enough to say anything.”
No wonder he’d felt a connection to Jerry.
She asked the obvious question. “What about your mother? Didn’t she...?”
He shook his head emphatically before she could finish the question. “She stood by and let it happen. Often, she watched.” His eyes closed slightly, as though picturing a scene from long ago. “Her hand would be over her mouth, as though she couldn’t believe it was happening again. Every time. But she never said a word, never tried to stop him.”
Lindy couldn’t understand how any woman could stand by and allow her child to be harmed. But as quickly as she’d had the thought, the memory of that last night with Gil sliced fiercely through her mind. For the briefest moment, she hadn’t been able to protect Jerry. And she’d never forgiven herself for that.
“How—how did you get him to finally stop?” she asked, remembering that last night, when she’d determined the only way to make Gil stop was to leave. She’d gathered her baby in her arms and ran, searching for the women’s shelter, praying for her son’s life. And her own.
The next morning, she’d been alive. So had Jerry. But Gil was dead. And she’d been charged with murder.
An icy chill moved through her with that painful memory.
“This.” He indicated the horrific spiderlike scar on his right knee, which now seemed even worse when Lindy thought about how it must have gotten there—at his own father’s hand. “This is how I got him to stop.”
Lindy noticed how the scar wrapped around his knee completely.
“The night he did this, he’d gotten drunk and came home to find me asleep on the couch. I was supposed to sleep in my bed, but the television was in the living room, and I’d stayed up late to watch something on TV and fell asleep there. I tried to get up and make it to my room, but he caught me.”
“He caught you.” The vision playing in her mind was terrible. Ethan as a little boy, trying to get away from a grown man whose sole intent was to hurt his own son.
“Yeah...with a baseball bat.”
Tears pushed free, and she brushed them away. “How old were you?”
“Six.”
Six years old and facing a grown man, chasing him with a baseball bat. The one who should have been protecting him had scarred him for life instead. “No one helped you?”
“My first-grade teacher had reported that she suspected abuse, but no one had followed through, probably because my mother kept assuring them that I was fine.”
“Couldn’t you have told the teacher what was going on?” Lin
dy couldn’t understand how the adults in Ethan’s world hadn’t protected him. Surely someone besides his first-grade teacher had noticed the cigarette burns. “Or didn’t anyone else see anything and tell the authorities?”
He smiled, but there was nothing happy about it. “Long sleeves and blue jeans,” he said. “Even in the summer, when it was ninety-plus degrees outside, my mother would have me wear long sleeves and blue jeans whenever we went out, so no one would see my scars. And if he’d done a number on my hands, which he sometimes did, she would simply keep me at home until they healed.”
“You could have told someone, couldn’t you?” She was having a tough time seeing how a little boy could have been so abused without anyone finding out.
“He had me so convinced that it’d get worse if I told anyone that I never said anything about what was really happening at home.”
“What did your mother say about your injuries? Surely she had to explain why you were hurt so much.”
“Oh, that was easy. She’d say that I had taken another fall outside, or down the stairs, or that I’d been trying to help her cook and cut myself, or burned myself. She was very believable.” His voice dripped with admonition toward the woman who also should have protected him back then. “She didn’t want him to hurt her, so she let him hurt me.”
Lindy was astounded. How could any mother do that to her son? “Why—why would she do that?”
“She said that she loved him, no matter what he did. He’d tell her he was going to change, and she would believe him and stay. She always stayed.” He pointed to the scarred knee. “And I guess I should be grateful for this, because it turns out that people no longer simply suspect that something is happening when the kid is beaten so bad that he can’t stand up.”
“What happened then, once everyone knew what was really going on at your house?”
“The state took custody and placed me in one of the group homes, and then I went into foster homes from that point on.”
“You weren’t adopted?”
An odd look, sadness combined with a hint of bitterness, passed over his face. “With the exception of babies, boys are tougher to place than girls,” he said. “You’ll hear that from every social worker around. And it’s especially difficult if the kid is having a tough time dealing with his past or finds it hard to trust people. So I went through a lot of homes. And no, I wasn’t ever adopted.”
Her hand still rested on his forearm, and she squeezed it gently. “Ethan, I’m so sorry.”
He gave her a grin laced with sadness. “Lindy, it was a long time ago, and I’m doing fine. It’s just that, when I saw Jerry’s story on the news and learned about his situation, that his daddy abused him and that his mother didn’t do anything to stop it, it hit way too close to home. And I knew it was God’s plan for me to help that little boy.”
Lindy didn’t know what to say. Now she knew why Ethan wanted her child, and she also wondered if he was right. What if it was God’s plan for Ethan to adopt Jerry? If that was the case, then what chance did she have of getting custody of her son again?
And what court would tell Ethan no, when he shared his past and explained how very much he wanted to give Jerry the kind of life he never had?
Ethan leaned toward her, eased his shoulder against hers. “Hey, it’s fine. Really. Don’t look so sad. God and the army got me through the pain of my past. And I’m doing great now.”
“The army?” Another surprise, and one that impressed her tremendously. He’d been abused by his parents, had spent the remainder of his youth in the foster system and had come out of it all doing well, with a great job and a desire to help another child.
And he’d served their country, too?
“Yeah,” he answered. “When you turn eighteen and have no idea where to go, what to do, you look for a place to put a roof over your head and food in your belly. That’s all I joined for, to be honest, but I got so much more. Learned so much more. About integrity and service and dedication. And then, after four years of deployment in Afghanistan, the army put me through college, and I achieved my first dream.”
“Becoming a teacher?” she asked, even more amazed by this intriguing man. And feeling her heart pulled closer toward the guy she’d planned to loathe.
She was very, very far away from loathing now.
“Not becoming a teacher, necessarily, but becoming a mentor. I wanted to show kids that someone cared, just in case they weren’t getting that at home. So teaching in a middle school, when they’re going through those tough years, seemed like the best opportunity to accomplish that dream.”
Everything about him impressed her. She wanted to ask him—beg him—to change his mind about adopting Jerry, because he could ruin her chances completely. But if she did that, he’d learn the truth about who she was, and she wasn’t ready to divulge that secret yet. So instead, she said the second thing pricking her heart, prompted by her admiration for those who put their lives at risk for others. “Thank you for your service.”
He placed his left hand on top of hers, which, she now realized, had never moved from his arm. His smile said he was used to gratitude. “Trust me, it was my pleasure. And you don’t need to look so sad. I’m about to gain a son. And today, thanks to you, I learned to fish. My life has honestly never been better.”
Lindy slid her hand free. “I’m glad for that,” she said. And she meant it. She was glad that his life had gotten better, that he’d gotten over the pain of his abusive past. It gave her hope for Jerry to be happy and content again. But no matter how much she wanted to see Ethan happy after learning about his painful past, she didn’t want all of his dreams to come true.
Because the dream she knew he wanted most would take her son away from her forever.
* * *
Ethan didn’t know why he’d shared so much, but oddly, it hadn’t bothered him as much as he’d have thought. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d told anyone about his past. Even when he’d filled out the paperwork for the social worker, explaining why he wanted to adopt Jerry and how he could provide a good home for the boy, he hadn’t felt the emotions, hadn’t remembered the pain, so clearly. Maybe that’d been because the words had been written on paper rather than spoken.
Or maybe the difference was Lindy. There was something about her that made him want to open up, encouraged him to share the deepest parts of his past. He sensed a closeness with this exquisite woman that he hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Since Jenny.
He needed to lighten the mood. And he needed to guard himself from letting this happen again. He didn’t need to grow too close to Lindy. Very soon, hopefully, he’d adopt Jerry and move back to Birmingham. Lindy would presumably stay in Claremont. Or move somewhere else to run away from her own past. A past she hadn’t shared with him yet.
And one he shouldn’t ask about. That would only draw them closer, and he needed to keep that from happening. Nothing could come of this long-term, and he didn’t want a relationship anyway. Not now. He was about to become a father for the first time. His concentration needed to be on his little man. Jerry deserved that.
So he’d turn this afternoon back into what it should be, two people becoming friends while sharing an afternoon fishing. Nothing more, nothing less.
He turned, scooped a minnow out of the bucket and then reached for her line. “We’re wasting daylight, and I need all the practice fishing I can get.”
Lindy watched him bait her hook. “So we’re done talking about the past?”
He released the line, and she placed it in the water a short distance away from his cork, still floating. Ethan could’ve told her that he wanted to know about her past, as well. But she probably wouldn’t share. And he shouldn’t want to know. That would only bring them closer. And he felt close, way too close, already. “We’re done talking about the past.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
She seemed fine not sharing her own past. Which made him wonder even more what she’d been through.
“My grandmother used to say that—that we were wasting daylight. But I haven’t heard that phrase in a while. Where did you hear it?”
“Daddy Jim,” he said. Even just the name was a good memory. “The last father figure I had while I was in the system. I moved in with him and his wife, Mama Reba, right before I turned seventeen. Stayed with them for that last year.” He remembered how rebellious he’d been when he’d shown up on their little farm in south Alabama. He’d decided that no one wanted him, and so he wanted no one either. But Daddy Jim and Mama Reba had cared.
“What happened with them? Are they still in your life?”
“Actually, they are. In fact, I talked to them a few weeks ago, when I found out there was a chance that I could adopt Jerry. I need to call them and give them an update, in fact. They—well, I guess they’ll have a grandson now after all, won’t they?”
She glanced away, toward her cork in the water, but then she looked back at Ethan. “So everything wasn’t always bad. You had some good memories?”
“I had good memories with them, and Daddy Jim was the one who talked to me about joining the army. He was retired military. I think they’d have probably adopted me if I’d have ended up at their place earlier, but I was pretty much an adult already by the time I got there. And they were both older.”
She tilted her head, pushed a wayward strawberry tendril away from her face. “I bet, in their hearts, you’re their son. They obviously love you.”
She had no idea how much those words meant. He knew Daddy Jim and Mama Reba cared about him—they told him that all the time—but he’d never heard them express love. He’d kind of assumed that, maybe because of his military background, Daddy Jim considered himself too tough to express emotion. But that hadn’t really bothered Ethan. He knew they cared.
He caught her gaze. She was still looking at him, waiting for a response he couldn’t give, so he gave her a warning look and said, “I thought we were done talking about the past.”
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