A Man of Honor

by Cynthia Thomason

  The sobs just kept coming. She buried her face on her knees and cupped her hands over her ears, almost as if the voices in her head were chastising her for being a fool. Those voices were just like Camryn’s, just like anyone’s with any common sense.

  And then a strong hand wrapped around her shoulder and gently squeezed. “Brooke, what’s wrong?”

  His voice was so low and raspy, a deep baritone of such comfort, that she couldn’t have stopped crying if she’d wanted to. And she didn’t.

  He moved around her and sat where Cody had been earlier. But unlike his son, Jeremy took her in his arms and held her close. He patted her back, stroked her hair. His face nuzzled against her neck. She breathed in the smell of him, a combination of pine and maple syrup, not a reminder of the trials of parenthood, but the rich, warm, don’t-ever-let-go aroma of home. At that moment she felt small and needy, incapable of making a decision. And Jeremy, who seemed strong and capable, was holding her as if his embrace could make everything right.

  “Why are you crying, honey?” he asked. “What happened?”

  * * *

  SEEING BROOKE LIKE THIS, so vulnerable and sad, brought out all the protective instincts in Jeremy’s heart—all the ones he’d wanted to give to Lynette, but she’d refused. He couldn’t help himself. When he saw a woman crying and upset, he wanted to wrap her in the strength of his resolve until he could stop the tears and let her know she wasn’t alone. Some people might call him a sap, but Jeremy needed to be needed. That’s just the way it was.

  But Brooke was a strong, independent woman. He knew she wouldn’t appreciate any platitudes that said he’d make it all better. So he just stayed with her and let her cry out whatever was making her heart ache and hoped he touched her in a comforting way.

  After a few minutes, she sniffled and made a sound almost like a laugh. “This is so silly,” she said. “I’m not a crier. I never cry.” She leaned back. He let his arms fall to his sides. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. I’m really embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “I’ve seen folks a lot tougher than you shed a few tears. How about a three-hundred-pound defensive end who’s just been cut from the roster? Now that’s a sight that would tug at anyone’s heartstrings.”

  “But that’s just it,” she said. “I consider myself tough, able to accept whatever life throws at me, but this...” Her voice faded on another repressed sob.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked.

  “If I did, you would think I’m an idiot. Everyone else does.”

  “And just who is everyone else?”

  “My sister. And my parents would, too, if they knew.”

  Wow. What was this grown woman hiding that she couldn’t tell her parents? He placed his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands. “I promise I won’t think you’re an idiot. If you don’t know by now, let me be clear. You are probably the least idiotic person I’ve ever known. How many times have I told you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me, how you jumped right in to help me in this new field. I respect your know-how more than I can say. So if I can help you in any way with a problem, nothing would make me feel better than to do that. I owe you, Brooke. I want to help.”

  “You don’t owe me, Jeremy,” she said with a curt bitterness that surprised him.

  “And even if you did, all I’d want is for you to become the best anchor in the business. You’re doing all you can to make that happen.”

  His mind raced back to the other night in her condo, the spreadsheet he’d inadvertently seen on her computer. He’d concluded, perhaps incorrectly, that she might be having money problems. Maybe she just wasn’t a good money manager, like so many pro-sports players he’d seen, who’d acted with complete abandon and thrown a fortune away on cars, houses, vacations. Not that Brooke was like those burned-out athletes, but money problems could happen to anyone.

  “I don’t know what has made you so upset, but I’m thinking that maybe you’re feeling pressured,” he said. “Heck, anyone would. You’re doing your regular job, helping me. You’ve taken on extra hours and extra work.” He was just saying words when what he wanted to do was get to the bottom of what was troubling her. And he was pretty sure her computer held the clue.

  He paused. How could he ask her about money? The question would be a complete invasion of her privacy.

  Her eyes widened. She cocked her head a bit to the side and stared at him. “You’re not pressuring me, Jeremy. You’ve been cooperative from the beginning. But there is another matter going on in my life, and I’m embarrassed to tell you.”

  All at once he was certain that his hunch was correct, and he decided to go ahead and clear the air. “Brooke, are you having money problems?”

  “Why would you think...?” She swallowed, seemed lost in thought, and then said, “Oh, my computer. I was afraid you’d seen what I was working on.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I shouldn’t have, but...”

  “Forget it.” She attempted a smile. “If I keep flushing funds into the monetary sewer that has taken over my life, everyone will know, anyway. Especially when I start wearing patched overalls to work.”

  He grinned at her. “You’d look adorable in overalls.” He took her hand. “So this is about money? Because if it is, I can help. I have lots of money. Never thought I would, but I do, and it would be my pleasure to give some of it to you.”

  Her features grew serious. “You are offering to give me money. Absolutely not, Jeremy. I can’t take it and you shouldn’t be in such a hurry to give away what you’ve worked hard for.” Her eyes grew misty again. “You never know when suddenly you look back and wonder where it all went.”

  Jeremy had never been a fool with his money. He’d made investments, spent wisely, was always aware that a malicious twist of fate could make him lose it all and send him back to where he’d come from.

  He rubbed her knuckles with the pad of his thumb. She leaned in close, rested her head on his shoulder. “Thank you for the offer, but I’ll be all right,” she said.

  “Sure you will,” he said. “But I want you to be all right now. Are we talking a bad gambling debt here? Are a couple of goons going to show up and threaten to break your kneecaps?”

  She chuckled. “No, nothing like that. I could probably handle a couple of goons.”

  “Yes, ma’am, you probably could.” He slipped his arm around her. She didn’t resist. “So what’s going on?”

  She sat in thoughtful silence. He didn’t know if she would tell him about the revealing spreadsheet on her computer or not. Some people just couldn’t admit to going into debt. He hoped she would tell him, though. He liked her. He had the will and power to help her.

  His desire to make life better for Brooke wasn’t just about that totally impractical protective nature of his. No, this was about Brooke, about doing something for her. This wasn’t ego or pride or anything like that. He took a deep breath. “Tell me, Brooke.”

  “Okay,” she finally said. “But you can’t lecture me.”

  He smiled. “Oh, well, shoot, if I can’t lecture that takes all the fun out of it.”

  She laughed against his shoulder. “I figured you’d want to lecture me just to get back for all the lectures I’ve been giving you lately.”

  “I promise I won’t. We’re leaving lectures off the table. Now tell me what’s going on. You don’t have to, but there are sub sandwiches in the kitchen, and I’d like to see your appetite return before I bring them out.”

  She inhaled, turned her hand over so he grasped it by entwining his fingers with hers. He felt the tiniest pressure when she squeezed his hand. “First of all, I’m adopted. My twin sister and I were adopted at birth by a wonderful couple who are more than any kid could hope for.”

  He nodded. “Okay. And then what?”

  “Our parents told us as soon as we were old e
nough to understand, and my sister was never curious about our background. I wish I could have been like her, but I wasn’t. My first inclination that I just had to know who I am came in middle school with a stupid genealogy project where we had to trace our family trees. Cammie, my sister, just wrote down all the details about our adoptive parents. I couldn’t do that. I left my tree blank. The teacher was nice about it. She even let me skip the assignment, but it got my head spinning. And from then on I became determined to find our mother.”

  “I can understand that,” Jeremy said. “You must have felt like there was this huge hole in your life.”

  “Yes!” Her eyes opened wide. She squeezed his hand with a steady pressure. “You understand. It’s the need to know, to understand where I came from. As good as my life has been with my adoptive parents, I had to make sense of this for myself.”

  “Sure. I understand. Not everyone needs to know, but you did. How did your parents react to your desire to find your mother?”

  “I never told them. Cammie said it would only hurt them, and she was right. So I kept my quest to myself. Besides, I didn’t have any means to find my mother. I was just a kid, so I kept the idea in the back of my mind, knowing someday I would look for her.”

  “And did you?”

  “I did, after I got the job at the station and had some money to use for the search. It wasn’t easy. My mother had covered her tracks pretty well. And she had agreed to a closed adoption, so I had to spend money and time to find the right person who would bend the rules and give me the information I needed.”

  Jeremy was suddenly engrossed in her story. It was so real and could have been his own, though he’d taken a different path. But he’d often wondered... “What was it like?” he asked. “Did you meet her face-to-face?”

  “Yes. She lives in Myrtle Beach, about midway between me and Cammie. We both went to meet her. Cammie didn’t want to, but I talked her into it.”

  Jeremy hated to ask. He could see the anguish in her eyes. “How did it turn out?”

  “She wanted nothing to do with us. She told us to leave, that she had enough on her plate with a lousy job and a sick husband.” Brooke swiped at moisture under her eyes. “We would have helped her, Jeremy, but she didn’t give us the chance.”

  “And that’s the only time you saw her?”

  Brooke nodded. “I will never go back. But there’s one other thing...”

  He spoke softly. “Tell me.”

  “She let slip that she had a three-year-old son. She didn’t mean to, but she assumed that since we already knew about her, we also knew about Edward. She gave Edward up for adoption at the same time and asked us not to tell him where she was.”

  This was all starting to make sense to Jeremy. One door to Brooke’s past had closed that day, but another had opened. Knowing her as he did now, how could she have ignored this latest clue into her background? “You have a brother,” he said.

  “A half brother.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I wish I knew. I’ve been looking for him for months, first on my own, through internet research, then checking halfway houses and prisons. I did all I could on my own.”

  He could only imagine her pain. She needed so desperately to know where she belonged, to find this one link to her past. “I’m assuming that today you discovered something about Edward, and that’s why you were crying.” He hoped she hadn’t found out that Edward was a criminal or, worse, that he was dead. Her search couldn’t end that way.

  “It would be nice if I had,” she said. “But, no. A while back I hired a private investigator. I trust him. I really do, but I’ve been paying him significant amounts since he started his search. Every time it seems he’s close to finding Edward, something happens and he needs more money.”

  “And today he needed more money.”

  She nodded.

  Jeremy wished he could talk to this detective. He was fairly good at reading people, and he’d like to know if this guy was leading on Brooke. He supposed that finding an adopted kid decades after he was given up would be a challenge, but there were a lot of scam artists in the world.

  “I told him I’d wire it to his account.” Brooke stared at Jeremy with luminescent eyes that told the whole story of the agony of indecision she was going through. “I don’t know how long I can keep doing this. I’ll be broke when I send the five hundred he needs now. I suppose I’ll recover, but it will take time...”

  “I’ll give you the five hundred,” Jeremy said. “For heaven’s sake, Brooke, I owe you that much or more for the time you’ve taken with me. You’ve been so generous—”

  “Quit telling me what a great person I am to help you.”

  “But you are. Even if Milt weren’t paying you I would still be grateful. I wouldn’t make it without you on my team.”

  “First of all, Milt isn’t paying me. And I can’t take your money,” she said. “And I told you before. You don’t owe me anything. Milt asked me to help you, and I was...well, okay with the extra assignment. WJQC needs a qualified anchor. All of our futures depend on it. I don’t know if Milt told you, but the station’s finances aren’t great right now. All the people who work there want the five o’clock news hour to boost our ratings, get our advertisers back.”

  He covered her hand in both of his. He continued, “And I told you before. Money isn’t a problem. I can’t take on the burdens of the station, but I can certainly help you. I don’t want to argue about this. You’re taking the money and that’s it.”

  She closed her eyes and released a long, slow breath. When she looked at him again, there was a softness to her features, a level of comfort he was grateful to see. She was going to accept his help.

  “I’ll pay you back,” she said.

  “Fine. Pay me back. In twenty years if you want to. If I have anything to say about it, I will know you that long. Professional athletes make absurd amounts of money, so I’m happy to give you a bit of mine.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything. Now that it’s settled, there’s something I should tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I was given up for adoption, too, when I was five, so I can relate to your need to know.”

  “Oh, Jeremy, that is so sad. But look how you turned out. You must have gone to wonderful parents.”

  His answering laugh was cynical. She had no idea how wrong she was. “I never was adopted, Brooke. I stayed in the foster system for a few years until my mother came and picked me up again. I think she thought we could pull each other up by the bootstraps. But that didn’t happen. We only brought each other down until I went to college at eighteen.”

  “But how did you turn your life around? How did you end up in college?”

  “Simple. I could catch a football, and I reveled in the challenge to be the best at it. And for that, I was given a full ride to Bellingsworth College. Don’t know where I’d be today if I’d been a klutz on the football field.”

  She gave him a warm smile. “I love that story. Not the beginning of it, but the end, when you discovered yourself and worked hard to succeed. Maybe something like that happened to Edward, too.”

  “Maybe it did. I hope you find out.”

  “Jeremy, the fact that you’re even listening to me gives me hope. My sister tells me all the time to leave Edward in the past. I suppose she’s right, but our lives have gone in such different directions. Camryn’s hasn’t always been easy, but now she has everything she deserves, and I feel like everything I desire is always just out of reach.”

  “Well, now you have me, and I’m on your side. Maybe I can help you find Edward. Because of my background, I have some contacts. What is his full name?”

  “That’s a problem,” she said. “He has used different aliases. Every time he was caught doing something wrong, he seemed to adopt a diff
erent demeanor. The investigator is trying to locate him now under the name Jerry Miller, who was last sentenced by a juvenile-court judge named William Smith. Not exactly a stand-out name.”

  “It’s a challenge,” Jeremy said. “But let’s be hopeful. I won’t leave you alone with this, Brooke. You can count on me.”

  Her shoulders relaxed. Her gaze caught and held his. “You don’t know what this means to me.”

  “I think I do.” He leaned forward, cupped her face with both his hands and kissed the top of her forehead, just like he kissed his kids at the bus stop. Only this was different. This gesture made his heart stop. When he drew back, he kept his hands on each side of her face. He stroked her cheeks with his thumbs and looked into her eyes. Her skin was moist from the tears, but was soft and silky.

  And then she leaned just slightly toward him, but it was enough for him to know that she was feeling something, too. He hoped it wasn’t just gratitude. He hoped she felt just a bit of what his senses were telling him now. This woman, so tough and competent, was also warm and vulnerable. Very gently he pulled her face to his, ready to let go of her if she gave the first sign that she wasn’t ready for what every nerve in his body was signaling for him to do.

  She didn’t pull back. She closed her eyes and touched her lips with the tip of her tongue—a beautiful, sweet invitation. He pressed his lips to hers and savored the salty, citrusy taste of her mouth, her tongue. He slipped his hand to the back of her head and held her still while his mouth moved over hers. He didn’t know, but thought perhaps the kiss lasted almost a minute. But when he drew back, he felt that he’d only just started.

  She took a slow, deep breath. Her eyelids fluttered open.

  “What are you doing to me, Jeremy?” she said.

  “I hope I’m making you feel better, Brooke.”

  She touched her lips to his again, a brief, sweet reminder of what they’d just shared. “I would say that is a challenge you’ve successfully met,” she said.