And Then There Was You (Serenity House Book 2)

by Molly O'Keefe

  He was, under the tabloids and scandals, a damn good lawyer.

  “What happened?” Jennifer asked, stroking Sarah’s shoulder.

  “No one is sure,” Sarah said, her eyes wide and wet. “Madison called nine-one-one because her parents were fighting. And by the time the police arrived Marcus was unconscious.”

  “Because Laura finally fought back?” Ian asked quietly. Both women turned to him. “Does she have legal help?” He stepped into these shoes with ease. “Self-defense can be hard to prove in these cases, but I have experience and I can help. She—” Something in Sarah’s eyes made him stop. A shame and an anger.

  It took him a second but he finally read between the lines.

  “She wasn’t defending herself, was she?” he asked, his stomach in his shoes. Those glasses weren’t hiding a black eye, they were hiding guilt.

  Please don’t let me be right, he prayed.

  But a heavy sob rocked Sarah’s shoulders and she nodded. “Laura’s always had all this anger,” she finally said. “Since she was a teenager. She used to—” She bit her lips then waved her hands as if to erase what she’d been about to say. “We thought that with Marcus she had finally gotten it under control. She’d been going to therapy and bringing the girls to the empowerment classes, but she’s been deliberately hurting him for years. None of us knew or even suspected. I mean…” Her wide bewildered eyes searched his and he wished he had answers for her. Something that would make this better, because this was way past the cookie remedy. “She’s half his size. Who would guess?”

  “Has she hurt the kids?” he asked, aware of Jennifer’s eyes on him like searchlights. Her curiosity and confusion were palpable, but he didn’t know how to explain himself.

  “My instinct,” Sarah said, “is to say no. Absolutely not, but after tonight?” Sarah’s face crumpled a little and Jennifer held tight on to the woman’s arms, giving her as much support as she could.

  “I…ah…” Sarah sighed, wiping her eyes with the palms of her hands. “I have to go back to the hospital and then to the jail. I…don’t know what to do with the girls tonight. I don’t want them to see—”

  “They’re fine here,” Jennifer said quickly. “They’re fine here for as long as it takes.”

  “Thank you.” Sarah sighed and then turned to him. “If we need it, will you still help?”

  “Your sister?” he asked and she nodded.

  He was a man of very few principles, but this was one of them. Ian shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I don’t help abusers.”

  Sarah looked resigned, as if expecting that response, then took a few moments to pull herself together.

  Jennifer’s eyes, sharp and wary, met his over the top of the woman’s bowed head.

  How did you know? her eyes asked.

  He smiled, sadly. I’ve seen it all before.

  He wondered how all this silent communication was possible, but when she took a deep breath and nodded slightly, he knew exactly what it meant.

  His heart surged. Jennifer Stern was going to listen to his story.

  Jennifer’s chest hurt, her heart was pounding so hard. Her throat was dry, dry all the way to her stomach.

  Watching Ian walk to the door with Sarah, telling her what she could expect from the legal process in the next few days, Jennifer felt like she’d been rolled over. Hit by a car. Who was the real Ian Greer? The man in the tabloids? The drunk man on her doorstep? The angry man at the breakfast table? The vulnerable one, talking about his mother?

  Or this man?

  This compassionate, considerate and intuitive lawyer. This man of principle with the terribly wounded eyes. This man whose whole demeanor spoke of a dark knowledge about the many facets of abuse and betrayal.

  This man who was pushing her, shoving her back into a life she’d left behind. She was going to listen to him and her motives were so muddled even Waldo would tell her to pass on the story. To walk away. As of this moment she was emotionally invested.

  But she could no more walk away right now than she could fly away.

  There was a softness at her core, a tenderness and heat that was beginning to throb, like a sore tooth. Aching more with every encounter.

  Nothing about this man was what it seemed, and the more she found out, the more attracted to him she was.

  Oh, lord what a mess.

  “Jen?” Deb’s voice snapped her out of her fog and she turned, hoping none of her attraction, none of her stupidity, was showing on her face.

  Deb would pick up on it like a bloodhound.

  “Maybe you and Spence should move downstairs and we’ll put Andille and Ian upstairs?” Deb asked as she stood in the doorway.

  “Good idea,” Jennifer said, standing. Happy to have something to do with her unruly body. Maybe moving furniture would rid her body of this pull. Maybe she’d start marathon training. Tonight.

  “And we need to think about dinner,” Deb said. “It’s already past six and we’re—”

  “I’ve got dinner,” Ian said from the front door and Jennifer’s eyelids flinched and her body squeezed tight, holding onto itself in those empty places. Those lonely places.

  “Kids like pizza,” he said. “Right?”

  She told herself not to turn, not to catch his grin, that glow in his eyes, that relief and gratitude on his face.

  But she did it anyway.

  Somehow, she’d tied herself to this man. Agreeing to listen to his story would only put her in his company with greater frequency.

  What am I doing? she wondered, lost for a moment in the endless blue of his eyes. Why you? After all these years?

  The answer was in the way his eyes blazed, as if he’d sensed her attraction.

  “Sounds good,” she said brightly, falsely, like he was bagging her groceries. Then, coward that she was, she ran upstairs to safety.

  Fool. Fool. Fool, Deb thought, shaking her head while she watched Jennifer run for upstairs like a horse with its tail on fire. Deb would laugh if it were funny rather than a little sad, but a mere hour ago Jennifer had said she wasn’t interested in men.

  And now, the air in the common room was practically on fire.

  Interested, Deb thought with an internal snort, doesn’t quite cover it. In heat, the two of them, was closer to it.

  “I’ll…ah, go pack our stuff up,” Ian said, nodding briefly at Deb but unable to make eye contact as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  And, frankly, in Deb’s opinion he was. He was messing with a good woman’s head.

  They were both gone but the sparks of their attraction still lit the air.

  Deb was torn, truly torn, between being happy for Jennifer and wanting to protect her from the pain a relationship, no matter how brief, with a man like Ian would bring to a woman like Jennifer.

  Jennifer was rock-solid. A woman who tried to make things better. For herself. Her son. Her friends.

  Ian was… Deb considered what she knew about the guy, which wasn’t much and wasn’t good, and decided Ian Greer was negligent.

  And a negligent man could be as cruel as an evil man.

  Ah, well, she thought with a heavy sigh. Jennifer was a big girl and if she wanted to get herself in knots over a man like Ian, so be it.

  Turning back to the kitchen she was paralyzed by the sight of Andille on the kitchen floor, his back against the cupboards and his lap filled with Shonny and Angelina. Andille’s chin was buried in their blond and black curls and he pursed his lips and tried to blow some of it from his mouth.

  He had his palms out, the light brown skin stretched taut over big muscles and bones, and the children, their hands so small, their fingers so fragile, were tracing the lines of his hands while he sang in their ears.

  The alarms went off in her head, shrill and loud, and her body spasmed with the need to heed the warnings.

  Get the kids away from that man.

  But she forced herself to remain where she was. To take deep breat
hs. To see what was happening with her eyes rather than her sick, twisted instincts.

  Andille’s deep voice was a low murmur but it still filled the kitchen. She didn’t understand the words and after a stunned second realized they were foreign. Totally unfamiliar, but it didn’t matter. Not to the kids in his lap. And not to Madison and Spence at the table, drinking glasses of milk and listening. Watching.

  Certainly not to Daisy, the vicious guard dog, curled up between the man’s spread knees.

  Angelina, her hair so blond, her face red and blotchy, her eyelids swollen from crying so hard and so long for her mother, leaned her head against Andille’s shoulder then turned her face so she rested her forehead to his neck. Her little fingers curled around his thumb and held on.

  Deb’s stomach twisted. Her heart squeezed. Tears bit hard into the backs of her eyes.

  Not all men are my father. A reminder she didn’t really need at the moment, considering her father would never have done what Andille was doing. Sitting on the floor. Holding hands. Singing songs.

  “What’s that song?” she asked quietly, not wanting to disturb anyone.

  “A lullaby,” Andille said. His eyes, when they met hers, were liquid with emotions she knew all too well. Emotions that kept her at Serenity in order to help other people.

  His beautiful eyes were filled with grief and sympathy.

  And anger.

  “I don’t know the words,” she whispered.

  “It’s Shona,” he said. “My mother sang it to me when I was a boy in Zimbabwe. It’s about the sky at night being a blanket and the stars are friends who watch over sleeping children like lions making sure no one will hurt them.”

  Deb nodded, unable to speak for a second. “That’s a good lullaby,” she finally said, her voice gruff.

  Andille’s smile split his face and his laugh was as comforting as the song he’d been singing. “Yes, it is.”

  “You are—” she looked down at Angelina, who now was sound asleep, and Shonny, who was measuring his three-year-old hand against Andille’s “—good with kids.”

  “I have seven sisters,” he said. “Much younger than me. I’ve had to sing a lot of lullabies.”

  He smiled, but it wasn’t happy and his attention drifted back down to the sleeping girl in his arms. His hand, so wide, big and capable of untold things, terrible and wonderful, lifted, his finger scooped back a curl of hair from her sleep-flushed face.

  So gentle, this man. So careful.

  She stared at them for far too long and Andille caught her, his brown eyes too knowing and suddenly the kitchen was too small. North Carolina was too small.

  “Deb?”

  She jumped for the phone book, unable to look at him any longer. “What do you like on your pizza?”

  “Mom?” Spence asked as he got ready for bed that night.

  “Yeah, hon?” Jennifer said, pulling back the sheets on his bed then flipping on the small bedside lamp. She’d stopped doing these kinds of things for him, but tonight she wanted to. She wanted to care for him, wrap him up and put him in her pocket.

  He climbed in bed, his curls drying in a wild, fine halo around his head. “What did Madison’s mom do to her dad?”

  Jennifer sat next to him and lifted the sheets up to his chin, which he batted back down to his waist. “I’m not too sure, exactly,” she said.

  “She hurt him?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Why?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know why some men hit their wives and I don’t know why some women hurt their husbands.”

  “Why didn’t he just run away?”

  “Probably because of his daughters,” she said, reaching forward and pushing the hair off his forehead.

  “I would just run away,” he said. “If a girl tried to hit me, I would just run and run.”

  She smiled, happy that her son’s world was so simple. “That’s a good plan,” she said. “But you don’t know what Madison’s dad felt like or why he stayed.”

  “Okay,” he said and her heart was so swollen, so full it hurt.

  “Good night, honey,” she said, standing up after kissing his cheeks. “I’ve got a little work to do.”

  The door closed behind her with a soft click. Behind the other two bedroom doors there was silence and she truly hoped everyone was asleep and, thinking of the two girls, that their dreams were sweet.

  The rest of the house was dark and she walked in shadows into the kitchen, planning to knock on Ian’s door and get some answers.

  “Jennifer?” Andille’s voice curled out of the darkness and she whirled to find him staring out the kitchen window toward the woods behind the house.

  “Andille,” she said with a smile. “What are you doing?”

  He glanced back at her and smiled briefly. Again, she got that sense that he was tired. Sad. “Waiting,” he told her. “It’s what I always do.”

  “Can you—” She paused, wondering how much Andille knew about Ian’s secrets.

  “You’re looking for Ian?” he asked. “He’s very excited that you’ve agreed to listen to him.”

  “Then you know?” she asked. “About his parents.”

  Andille looked back over the yard, the moonlight that turned everything silver and gold. “I don’t know what I know anymore,” he told her, sadness lacing his words.

  “Is it true?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

  Andille hung his head and laughed. “It’s his story,” he told her. “And yours. What’s true is up to you.”

  He leaned over and opened the kitchen door, the smell of grass and heat and night and mystery and secrets wafting in the door.

  “He’s out by that pond,” Andille said. “Go talk to him. See for yourself.”

  9

  The old Jennifer was in charge. The journalist elbowed herself to the forefront and she was rolling over questions in her mind. Taking over. Staking claim.

  And, God, it felt so good.

  As she walked the path toward the water, Ian and an unknown future, she planned her attack. The sequence of questions. The tone. Professional but approachable. Skeptical but not jaded. Reserved, but willing to be persuaded.

  She wanted him to know that she didn’t totally believe him, there was still a lot of doubt in her mind. But at the same time she wanted him to trust her enough to try to convince her.

  Fine lines. Good journalism was all about fine lines and she was so eager to be up on the tightrope again.

  She was just worried, scared actually, of being up there with Ian.

  A good interview. A good exposé like this required a lot of trust on both sides and right now she didn’t trust Ian. She wanted to hear his story. And she desired him.

  Neither of those things required trust.

  The treeline ended and she stepped onto the sandy banks that surrounded the water hole and she found him, unerringly. As if there were something in her body tuned directly to him.

  Standing in the shadows between the beach and the rope swing he was barely visible. But she looked right at him.

  And he looked right at her. Even across the distance and the doubt, she felt his eye contact deep in the core of her body, between her stomach and her womb.

  He began to walk toward her and she toward him. They met at the beach. The moonlight so bright she could see the blue of his eyes, the black of his eyelashes.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She smiled. “Hi.”

  “Long night,” he said, making conversation, and she wondered how the sexiest man alive could be so awkward. So unsure. And she wondered how she could find it so attractive.

  Questions, she reminded herself. Fine lines. Journalism.

  “I want—”

  She held up her hand, interrupting him. This had to be on her terms.

  “I have some questions,” she said. “I’m willing to listen, but I’m not committed to writing this story. And I make no promises about believing you.”

  “Y
our eyes,” he said with a bewildered smile. “They’d scare the devil into confession. How do you do that?”

  “Do what?” Jennifer asked, blinking.

  “Change on a dime. One minute just a beautiful woman, the next a terrifying journalist.”

  The beautiful-woman thing shook her, but she ignored it. “I’m a journalist,” she said. “I don’t know about the terrifying part.”

  “All right,” he agreed and gestured to the log Deb had been sitting on this afternoon before everything blew up. “Let me hear your questions.”

  He sat and faced her, his elbows on his knees, leaning toward her just slightly. Just enough that she could feel the heat of him, smell the warmth and spice of him. And she leaned backward, to maintain her equilibrium.

  “You mentioned a family doctor,” she said, hauling herself back in line. “And records.”

  He nodded. “Dr. Engle has been our family doctor since my parents were married. He treated my mother every time she needed more help than heavy makeup could give her.”

  “And he would share those records?”

  “He can’t open her records, but he would answer questions.”

  “Why?” she said. “Why hasn’t he done it before? Why haven’t you done this before?”

  He swallowed, his adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, and he stared at his hands, tracing the lines across his palms and she watched the movement so intently she could feel his touch on her own flesh. “It sounds so ridiculous now,” he said, shooting her a look through his lashes, “but she made us all promise. Me. Dr. Engle. Her assistant, Suzette Williams.”

  “Promise not to tell?”

  “She believed—” He sighed and pushed himself upright, his eyes boring into hers. “She believed that the good of what my father did, the good of what they were able to do together, was bigger…more important than what happened between them privately.”