Changes

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter Fourteen

  Diana dropped her fork. It clattered against the edge of her salad plate and fell to the thick carpet with a muted thud. In a matter of seconds, the waiter had scooped the fork off the floor and set a clean replacement to the left of her salad plate.

  As if the pretty plate of arugula, endive, grape tomatoes and balsamic vinaigrette could tempt her. Her appetite was gone.

  Murder?

  Attempted murder, he’d said. Was she supposed to be relieved that his intended victim was fortunate enough to have survived?

  Tears clogged her throat, a salty lump that made swallowing next to impossible. What did she know about this man? They’d locked gazes over a song at a bar. She’d left her fiancé for him. Well, for herself, too, but Nick Fiore had been the catalyst—Nick, with his dark eyes, his dark hair, his intensity. His rugged physique. His modesty. His innate goodness.

  What goodness? He’d nearly killed someone!

  Oh, God. She’d made love with him. She’d lost herself in his arms, several times. She’d never known sex could be so pleasurable, could leave her feeling satisfied on such a soul-deep level. She’d never slept more soundly than she had last night, enveloped in his protective, possessive warmth, lulled by the steady rhythm of his breathing.

  “The verdict was wrong,” he added.

  “Of course it was,” she snapped, a strange, frantic energy bubbling along her nerves. Didn’t every convict believe the verdict was wrong? Didn’t they all believe they’d been cheated, misunderstood, abused by the system?

  She’d made love with a would-be murderer!

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” he said. “I was afraid you’d react this way.”

  “What way?” Her voice sounded brittle to her, like thin ice splintering. “Juvenile justice. Sure. Some kids get busted for smoking a joint. Some get nailed for underage drinking. You got convicted of attempted murder.”

  “Diana.” He reached for her hand and she recoiled. Shoving back her chair, she searched the dining room for their waiter. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t remain seated at this table. She needed air. She needed to move. What she really needed was a long jog on the beach, but the sun had set and she was wearing a skirt, and—

  “Is everything all right, miss?” the waiter said, whisking across the room to their table.

  “Please cancel our dinners,” she said. “I’ll sign the check to my room.”

  “Diana,” Nick said.

  “If you’re hungry, you can stay and eat your steak,” she said with what she considered extreme generosity. “I’ve got to go.”

  Nick stood, dug into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He handed the waiter a wad of cash. “Here. Keep it.”

  Diana rose to her feet as well. “I said I’d sign it to my room.”

  Ignoring her, Nick shook his head at the waiter, who seemed dumbfounded by the amount of money Nick had handed him. Diana didn’t wait to watch them settle up. She bolted out of the dining room, through the inn’s quaint lobby and out onto the porch.

  The night was pleasantly cool, the air thick with the ocean’s perfume. The breeze rising up off the water tangled in her hair as she raced to the edge of the porch, her hands fisted around the rail as if that was the only way to keep herself from charging down the bluff to the beach. She gulped in deep breaths and kept her eyes open so they wouldn’t fill with tears. A few faint stars pricked the night sky.

  She heard footsteps behind her. She didn’t have to turn to see Nick. She could feel him, his essence shimmering in the air around her, sparking as if the atmosphere was charged with electricity.

  “Can we talk?” he asked.

  She refused to look at him. “It’s a free country.”

  “My father used to beat my mother.”

  Her no-tears strategy wasn’t working. She felt her vision swimming. A strange dizziness washed over her, making her legs feel weak.

  Maybe she swayed, went pale and appeared about to faint, because Nick gripped her arm, firmly but gently, led her away from the railing to one of the sturdy Adirondack chairs, and lowered her into it. As soon as she was settled, he released her, as if he could sense that she didn’t want him touching her.

  He sat in the chair next to hers. She continued to stare out at the ocean, afraid of what she would see if she looked at him. A murderer? The son of a wife-beater? The man with whom she’d spent a night making love?

  “My father beat my mother,” he repeated. “Usually he just smacked her around a little, or hit her in places where it wouldn’t show. When I was a child, I couldn’t do anything about it. Except watch. Or withdraw. Usually my mother would tell me to go to my room so I wouldn’t have to see it. I could hear it, though. The walls were thin.”

  “I’m sorry,” Diana said, meaning it. It must have been traumatic for him. Maybe the trauma of it was what had turned him into a criminal.

  “When I got older and stronger, I tried to talk my mother into leaving him. She kept saying he didn’t mean to hurt her, he loved her, he just had a temper. She’d tell me it wasn’t my problem. She said I should just leave when my father acted that way. But one night, when I was fifteen, I didn’t leave.”

  Diana didn’t want to hear this. It was going to be awful. She wished she could press her hands to her ears, but even if she did, she knew she wouldn’t be able to block out Nick’s low, steady voice.

  “My father had been drinking. He came home late, and his dinner was cold. He started smacking my mother around. And I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So I pulled him off her and hit him. Pummeled, him, really. I guess I was a little crazed. All I wanted was for him to stop beating her. I wasn’t trying to hurt him.”

  “But you did,” she said. Her horror was gone, replaced by a forlorn sense of resignation.

  “Maybe I did mean to hurt him.” Nick sounded resigned, too. “I swung a chair at him. In the court, that chair became a deadly weapon. He was knocked out cold. My mother was screaming that I’d killed him. She called the police and they arrested me.” He fell silent, apparently lost in memory for a few seconds. “My father was hospitalized for a while. Broken ribs. A fractured skull.” He exhaled. “Yeah. I meant to hurt him. I’d been watching him hurt my mother all those years. Every now and then he’d whack me, too, until I got too big for him to take on. It was his turn to experience pain. I wish I could say I felt guilty, but I don’t.”

  “The justice system found you guilty.”

  He exhaled again, a long, weary breath. “The public defender assigned to my case thought I’d be charged with assault, but it wound up being attempted murder. He was sure I’d be acquitted, because my mother would testify that my father had been battering her and I’d only been trying to defend her.”

  He fell silent. All Diana heard was the whisper of the waves lapping the shore. “So how did you wind up convicted?” she finally asked.

  “My mother testified that my father hadn’t done anything to her. She said he was a good man and she had no idea why I tried to kill him.”

  Diana gasped—and finally turned to stare at Nick. He stared back at her, his eyes piercing, his chin raised slightly, as if daring her to deny what he was telling her. “Why would she do that?”

  “Who the hell knows? Maybe she loved him. She was his wife. So she sacrificed me.”

  “Oh, Nick.” What else could she say? She thought her mother was awful because she was trying to pressure Diana into marrying Peter. That seemed so trivial compared to what Nick had endured. His mother’s choice was so much crueler than anything Diana had ever experienced. “Have you worked it out with her?”

  A cold laugh escaped him. “What am I supposed to work out? I was fighting for my life, and she turned her back on me. She refused to tell the truth, and I wound up with a criminal conviction.”

  Emotions spun like a tornado inside Diana, buffeting her. “You make it sound so straightforward, Nick. I’m sure it was more complicated tha
n that. Battered wives don’t think clearly.”

  “Are you defending her?”

  “Of course not. She did a terrible thing to you.”

  “I spent three years in the system, Diana. Locked up. When I aged out of the juvie system, my criminal record was sealed, but it’s there. I’ve got a conviction. I’ll have it for the rest of my life—because my mother couldn’t bring herself to tell the truth.” Another long silence, and he said, “I’m telling the truth now, Diana. I didn’t want to tell you, but you deserve to know.”

  Her eyes welled with tears, making him appear to waver as she gazed at him. “Thank you for trusting me,” she said.

  He emitted a bitter grunt. “Yeah. I trusted you, and you walked out on me.”

  “I was shocked. You can’t blame me for that.”

  He shrugged and looked away. She interpreted that to mean he agreed. He wasn’t blaming her.

  And she was beyond shocked now. She’d been shocked when he told her about his conviction, but now she was even more shocked that his mother could have betrayed him the way she had. She was shocked that a boy could have been so abused by his mother and the justice system, and yet have matured into the person Nick was, a decent, caring man who watched out for other children and kept them from falling through the cracks the way he had.

  Her struggles seemed so petty in comparison to what Nick had lived through. Her mother was upset because she wasn’t going to marry the man her mother wanted her to marry. Peter was upset because she’d broken up with him. They were angry with her because she’d changed—but she was convinced that change was for the better. She was stronger and more self-possessed than she’d ever been before. They would simply have to accept it.

  They might be annoyed and disappointed. But they had never testified against her. They’d never lied in court, leaving her to suffer for a crime she hadn’t committed. The irony of Nick’s past—that he’d been convicted of a crime because the woman he’d fought to defend had abandoned him—was a wound she couldn’t begin to fathom.

  “Has your mother apologized for her part in what you went through?” Diana asked.

  He shrugged. “Yeah, she’s apologized.” His voice was flat. Clearly he didn’t think much of his mother’s apology.

  “She’s right here in town,” Diana recalled.

  “I see her as little as possible.”

  “Do you talk to her at all?”

  “She calls me sometimes.” He exhaled, sounding weary. “She’ll invite me over for dinner or ask me to do an errand for her. She called a few days ago and told me one of her window shutters fell and she needed it nailed back on.”

  “Did you fix it?”

  “Sure,” he said sarcastically. “There’s nothing I’d rather do than drop everything and race to her house to fix her freaking shutter.” He shot Diana a sharp look. “Yeah, I’d rather spend an evening rehanging her damned shutter than being with you.” His tone hinted that perhaps hanging his mother’s shutter might be more pleasant for him than this conversation.

  Still, his broken relationship with his mother struck Diana as terribly sad. Her mother was angry, yet Diana couldn’t imagine their not remaining in touch. In time, she was convinced, her parents would accept her decision not to marry Peter. They’d resent it; they’d pressure her to rethink it. They’d argue with her. She’d argue back. It was what adult children did with their parents.

  Nick clearly didn’t do that with his parents.

  “You told me your father was gone. I assume that means he doesn’t live in town?”

  “I have no idea where he is,” Nick said coldly. “After he recovered from his injuries, he took off. No forwarding address. No money to support my mother. No paperwork.” He allowed himself a humorless laugh. “As far as I know, they’re still married.”

  “I think after a certain number of years, your mother can claim she’s been abandoned and get a divorce, even if your father isn’t around to sign the papers.”

  “Well, she never did that. She used to say the church wouldn’t allow a divorce, but that’s not true. You can’t get remarried in the church, but you can get a divorce. She never took that step, though.” He shrugged. “Who knows? She probably still loves the bastard.”

  Maybe she did. Battered women sometimes remained attached to their batterers. It was a totally irrational thing, but they did. Maybe Nick’s mother’s refusal to divorce her husband was just one more reason he was estranged from her.

  Yet despite his hostility toward his mother, he seemed to have healed himself. He’d kept going. He’d survived the horror of a criminal conviction, overcome it, triumphed. He was living a good life now, giving back to a world that had forsaken him. “You’re an amazing man,” she said.

  He snorted. “I’m a guy who almost killed my father. There’s nothing admirable about that.”

  “It’s admirable if you were trying to save someone else’s life.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t.” He stared out at the dark ocean, now barely distinguishable from the equally dark sky above it. “Maybe I just hated my father because he’d been beating up on my mother for so many years. He drank and became a bully. Maybe I hurt him because I hated him.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Diana said. She honestly didn’t. Not because she didn’t want to believe a man she loved could be that cold-hearted, but because she knew Nick. She knew him enough to know that he was a good man.

  She loved him.

  Astonished by the realization, she twisted in her chair to look at him. He must have sensed her gaze on him, because he turned to her. Even in the evening shadows, she could see the turbulence in his expression, the pain and regret and fear. The hope.

  “Nick,” she murmured, reaching across the arm of her chair to take his hand.

  As soon as her fingers touched his, he stood, clasped her hand in his and pulled her to her feet. His arms came around her as hers came around him, and they kissed. At first the kiss was light and forgiving, but soon it grew deep and needy, as dark as the night enveloping them.

  She was scarcely aware of them crossing the porch to the door, wandering through the lobby to the stairs, climbing them to her room. She didn’t hear her footsteps on the thick rugs, didn’t feel the slick surface of the key card as she slid it into the slot and clicked the door open. She didn’t notice the pale light from the bedside lamp, the plump pillows, the plush duvet covering the bed. She was conscious of only one thing: Nick. His hand clasping hers. His warmth permeating her. Her love for this strong, brave man.

  He kissed her again, and she was lost. This had to be love. It was so much more powerful than anything she’d ever felt for Peter. It left her dazed. Intoxicated. Yearning. Aching. Her hands tugged at his clothing. Her fingers seemed suddenly incapable of the most simple tasks—unfastening a button, untucking a shirt tail. He was much more dexterous. Her blouse slid down her shoulders, her skirt down her hips. She hated the garments because they separated her skin from his touch. She loved them because they were apparently so easy to remove.

  Once he’d stripped her naked, he helped her to remove his own clothing. Then they tumbled onto the bed. It was big, the duvet soft, the mattress cushioning and cradling her back. Nick rose above her, his arms propping him, his hips pressing against hers with an urgency that matched her own churning emotions.

  She yearned. She ached.

  She loved.

  His tongue plundered her mouth. His fingers tangled into her hair, traced the curves of her earlobes, stroked the underside of her chin. He slid down to kiss one breast and then the other, sucking hard on her nipples, causing her back to arch and her breath to catch. He kissed her belly. Her hip bones. Her crotch. For a few hedonistic seconds she believed her favorite part of him was his mouth—but then she decided that wasn’t true. Her favorite part of him was his soul.

  “I don’t have anything with me,” he whispered.

  She knew at once what he was referring to.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. She’d been engaged to Peter a long time. She’d taken care of protecting herself.

  “You sure?”

  She was sure she wanted Nick, needed him, loved him. She was sure this moment was everything she’d been waiting for, everything she’d ever dreamed of. “I’m sure,” she murmured, opening for him, reaching down and guiding him to her.

  Their bodies merged, fused, burned together. His thrusts were slow, purposeful. Given how desperately they’d been kissing, she would have expected him to be wilder, but this wasn’t just sex. It was a merging of minds and hearts as well as bodies, and Nick seemed to want every instant, every motion, every sensation to matter.

  Her muscles flexed. Her nerves tensed. Her breath caught. She closed her eyes, wanting to savor the sensations.

  “Open your eyes,” he whispered.

  She obeyed and found him gazing down at her. His hair was disheveled—her doing, she admitted as she dug her fingers convulsively into the dark, wavy locks. His jaw was tense. His eyes were as soft as she’d ever seen them, a deep, mellow brown, taking her in, absorbing the sight of her.

  Oh, God, yes. She loved him. She loved Nick Fiore.

  Her body arched in a blissful release. She shuddered, convulsing around him, feeling him climax inside her, hot and hard. They moaned together, a sweet, ragged chorus of bliss. Of love.

  Slowly, carefully, he eased off her. He rolled onto his back, nestling his head deep into one of the oversize down pillows, and drew her against him. His shoulder was her pillow. It was much harder than a pillow, but she didn’t mind.. She couldn’t imagine anywhere she’d rather rest her head.

  He stroked his fingers lightly up and down her arm as his breath slowed and his body cooled. She traced an aimless pattern across his chest, smiling when his nipples stiffened, smiling again when his abdominal muscles clenched at her touch.

  Love. This had all happened so quickly, it was all so intense, but she couldn’t deny what she felt. Nick was the most honorable man she’d ever known. He had triumphed over injustice and betrayal, and now he was giving back, giving of himself to kids who might have been dealt the same bad hand he’d had when he was their age.

  What would her life have been like if she hadn’t entered the Faulk Street Tavern last Saturday night? She would be acquiescing to Peter right now, saying that if he really preferred that ostentatious mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, they would have their wedding there. She would be yielding to her mother and buying some frou-frou white gown that cost more than the national debt. She would be at Shomback-Sawyer in Boston, pacing two steps behind James, taking notes and nodding at whatever he said. She would be knocking herself out to make everyone happy.

  But she had entered the tavern. And she’d heard the song. And she’d changed.

  Her hand stilled on Nick’s chest, her palm feeling the deep thrum of his heartbeat. She’d changed, because of the song.

  “Nick,” she murmured.

  “Hmm?”

  “You have to change.”