by Violet Duke
Silence filled the room and all emotion disappeared from Luke’s expression.
Dani felt her legs almost give out when Luke reached forward and slid his hand along her jawline, cupping her face tenderly as he wiped the tears running down her cheeks. “I know you’re sorry, Dani.” With a low, tortured sigh, he leaned forward and buried his lips in her hair for the briefest of moments before whispering, “But I think I need some time away from you right now.”
Then he left the apartment without another word.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AS FAR AS refuges for escape go, his shop wasn’t exactly the most clandestine, but Luke didn’t care. He knew Dani wouldn’t come after him.
The look she wore when he’d shut the door behind him was burned into his retinas.
But he just hadn’t been able to remain there another second.
Glancing at the clock, he was surprised to discover how long they’d been fighting.
Midnight.
Usually the only time of night he and Dani could be asleep in bed together—the few nights a week she wasn’t scheduled to close—before he got up to make his four a.m. chocolates. This would be the first night in weeks that he wasn’t going to be there to see her open her eyes and sleepily wish him a good day at work.
If it were up to him, he’d never miss another morning like that for the rest of his life.
That still didn’t erase what she had done though.
Regardless of how much his heart wanted to forgive her, his head just…couldn’t. Quinn and Cooper were paying the price, and he was about to lose everything he’d worked years to create and achieve.
His mind couldn’t help but replay all the instances over the past months where Dani had to have lied to him—white lies or lies of omission, it didn’t matter. Regardless the reason, or the clean-up that followed, like a barrage of bitter bullets, every little memory, even to the tiniest detail, pelted at him. Pissed him off. Made him hurt even more. Mostly because they were secondary wounds that were simply adding new pain to the already gaping hole in his heart that she’d torn out of him by the betrayal of trust. Not his trust for her, but rather, the opposite.
She should have trusted him enough to tell him the truth. Trusted that he’d continue to love her. Trusted their relationship enough to stop hiding from him.
This whole time, he thought he’d been making progress, building a foundation for the future. But tonight, it was obvious—she still didn’t trust him.
His phone chirped just then.
An incoming text.
He couldn’t get himself to open it.
Two more chirps about five minutes apart, and then a chime. A voice mail.
That was odd. Dani never left him voicemails. Pulling out his phone, he scrolled through the messages and felt his heart stop.
The texts weren’t from Dani. They were from Derek.
>> GET TO THE HOSPITAL JUST OFF THE NORTH EXIT. MY SISTER NEEDS YOU.
>> LOOK, I KNOW YOU TWO HAD A FIGHT BUT YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO FORGIVE YOURSELF IF YOU’RE NOT HERE.
>> SWALLOW YOUR DAMN PRIDE AND GET DOWN HERE YOU STUBBORN ASS!
Holy shit. What the hell was going on? Luke grabbed his keys and ran.
The fastest, and slowest, ten minutes of his life later, he was rushing into the emergency room to find Derek and Dani talking to a doctor at the far end.
Seeing Dani standing there, and not lying in some gurney on the way to surgery, hit him with a wave of relief so strong, he felt sucker-punched.
When he got near enough to hear their exchange with the doctor, however, the next sucker-punch he felt was one of sheer shock.
“We managed to stabilize your father for now,” explained the doctor, “but you two will need to make a decision shortly. We can transport him back to the care home but really, we don’t advise it given the circumstances. I know this isn’t an easy one to make but you really do need to consider all I’ve told you about his quality of life from this point on.”
Luke had never been more confused in his life.
Dani and Derek’s father was still alive?
Not wanting to barge in, he held back and watched Dani follow the doctor through the double doors that led to the ICU.
Derek turned and looked up, relief blending with the concern etched in his expression. He headed over to sit next to Luke in the deserted waiting area.
“Thanks for coming, man. I just really thought you needed to be here. You and Dani are both so stubborn—ˮ
“Derek, what in the world is going on? I thought your dad passed away from a heart attack a few years ago.”
“He did have a heart attack, which resulted in a massive stroke that sent him into a coma shortly after. Dani would never have told you our dad died. Most folks just assume he did. And you wouldn’t have heard otherwise from any of us that know differently because frankly, none of us will ever talk about it.” Luke saw the stark pain streak across his face. “Dani blames herself for our dad’s heart attack.” His voice was rough with long-held sympathy for his sister. “Every spare dime she has goes right into his life support and the care home he’s been in for the past three years. And every spare moment she has, she spends there at his side. Apologizing. Praying for him to come back. Begging him to forgive her for failing him so badly.”
Luke felt icy dread prick across his skin as each memory of her little personal jabs about how she’s failed in the past came rushing back.
“Dani has been blatantly ignoring the doctors who’ve been telling her for years that our father is almost assuredly never going to wake up, definitely never be more than a vegetable even if he did. Still, she simply won’t let him go. And I have no doubt that she’d sooner bury herself in debt then be the one to pull the plug on him. So she just tortures herself by keeping him alive at the Cactus Creek care home and going through her weekly rituals of apologizing for being the one that put him in there all because of her misguided trust.”
Trust.
Shit. He should’ve known there was something more to it. He should have forced her to talk about it. The mere thought of Dani going through this maimed him. He couldn’t possibly imagine being the one experiencing it.
“Why does she blame herself?” he asked finally.
“Because it was all my fault,” she said simply as she came up behind them.
Turning, Luke was struck mute by how devastated she looked. Broken.
Her dull voice turned hollow as she continued through gritted teeth, “Because I made the stupid mistake of trusting a man who stole my father’s most prized accomplishments, who nearly destroyed our family business, and who I was foolish enough to believe loved me as much as I loved him.”
Instantly, Luke’s hands fisted with rage. Not in jealousy. In pure, deadly fury over the man who would have done this to her—betray her to such a vicious degree. He destroyed her. Her heart, her ability to trust, her faith in love.
This was what Derek had been talking about on Valentine’s Day. Luke had thought it was a bad break-up, akin to his being left at the altar by his ex. But nothing, nothing had prepared Luke for the magnitude of how badly she’d been hurt.
Dani walked over the rest of the way and stood just out of arm’s reach. “Starting about six years ago, my dad began finally making a name for himself in the craft beer world, taking home trophies and creating brews that distributors were offering small fortunes to bottle. But like I told you before, bottling was never his thing. He turned all the offers down. And there were many. One more persistent than the rest.” The last glimmer of life in her eyes dimmed then. “After his first heart attack four years ago, I took full control of the brewpub. Dad stayed on to brew occasionally but all decision-making became mine alone. That’s when it all began tumbling downhill. The day our dad decided to choose me as his successor instead of Derek.”
Derek broke in with a sharp, “That’s not true and you know it, Dani. You were born to that position in ways I never was. And as far as your dec
ision-making, you ran into a string of bad luck. It happens. Hell, we both saw how much bad luck Dad used to have to overcome. And just like him, you did. You got us through it all.”
“Except one,” she argued back weakly.
This version of Dani standing before him was breaking Luke’s heart. Even her arguments held no fire, nothing but anguish, and suffocating guilt.
Over what, he still didn’t understand.
Derek gripped her shoulders. “The sheer amount of Dad’s hospital bills would have crippled most small businesses, Dani. You did what you had to do.” Turning to Luke, he explained, “Our dad didn’t have more than the bare minimal health insurance. Before the first heart attack, he’d been healthy as a horse. He rarely even came down with a cold. In our toughest years, shortly after our mom left, he cut back on a lot to make ends meet, his health insurance being one of the first to go on the chopping block. And none of us knew.”
Anger leapt into his voice. “Those vultures who’d been trying to distribute dad’s beers had done their research. Because they knew exactly how much we owed when they came knocking on our door with their offer.”
A bitter, self-flogging laugh drifted out of Dani. “And I opened that door wide open for them to come right in and take everything our dad worked his entire life to build, to be proud of, to leave behind as his legacy.”
When Derek started to object, a small spark of life ignited in her voice. “No! You don’t get to play this off. This was on me. I knew dad didn’t want to bottle his beers and I took the meeting anyway. A guppy thinking she could play in the same tank with the sharks. What’s worse, I did it without hiring a lawyer.”
That last statement had Derek’s mouth snapping shut, his jaw clenching harshly as if holding back a tidal wave of words.
This time it was Dani who turned to give Luke an explanation. “I didn’t hire a lawyer, I just trusted him is all. After finally convincing our dad that bottling was our last option, I had my boyfriend broker the deal for us.” Her eyes narrowed, her voice taking on a hateful edge he’d never heard her use before. “Eric was a corporate lawyer working in one of the biggest firms in Phoenix; deals like this one were child’s play for him. And when he refused to let me retain his services fully, I thought he was just being Eric. The great boyfriend he’d always been. The one man I’d allowed myself to fall in love with and actually trust.”
Her shoulders fell with the weight of utter disappointment her memories brought. “It wasn’t until long after we had no legs to stand on did I discover that the real reason he hadn’t wanted us to retain him officially was because he’d already been retained…to negotiate on behalf of the bottling company, who’d apparently also given him an exorbitant finder’s fee to set the whole thing up. To set me up.”
At Luke’s hiss of disbelief, she looked away.
In shame.
And that enraged him even more. “Dani, you couldn’t have possibly—ˮ
“No. I don’t want to hear you trying to put it all on him. Yes, Eric was the lowest of life forms for what he did, but he wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t stood back and let it happen.” Her hands curled into her stomach as she detailed just how badly Eric had screwed her and her business over. “I trusted him based on love and love alone. Even when my gut was telling me something sounded off about the ‘branding clause’ in the contract. Even when his generic, non-descript answer to my questions about it had given me pause as well. We didn’t know until the week that the first shipment of bottled beer was scheduled to be distributed around the country that they had changed the name of our beer and erased all connection to our brewery on the label via their ‘re-branding’ rights. And my signature was what had allowed them to do it. Legally, in an iron-clad contract we couldn’t get out of.”
Disgust filled her expression. “At least I’d been correct in thinking he was the best to negotiate this deal. He was. There wasn’t a single loophole in that contract. And believe me, I paid good money in legal fees to try to find one. By the time we could fight it, they’d already begun selling the beer like hotcakes. When we tried to terminate the deal and retain sole ownership of our brew recipes, they threatened to sue us for breach of contract and losses—which was close to a million in start-up expenses alone.”
With a tired sigh, she continued with barely any emotion at all, “And in the end, they turned around and sued us for groundless public defamation and damaging press. We’d played into their plans perfectly. And we couldn’t afford to fight it. We couldn’t even afford to start the process of fighting it. So, we ended up giving up all our rights to my dad’s six award-winning beers to make the whole thing go away.”
She glanced sadly at the double-doors she’d emerged from just minutes ago. “After weeks of stress, that was the final straw that caused his heart attack...on Valentine’s Day three years ago,” she finished softly.
“Instead of sitting in front of a fireplace in the log cabin up in Flagstaff I’d booked for Eric and I to spend the first Valentine’s date I’d ever allowed in a relationship…instead of cooking him the perfect meal I’d spent weeks thinking about and preparing for…instead of starting to plan the wedding I’d finally let myself begin to dream about, with the man I’d told my heart it was to safe to dream with…” Her crushed gaze fell on Derek. “Instead of getting to see my big brother marry the love of his life two weeks later…I was here. Here in this exact E.R. watching the doctors jolt my father’s body over and over again to try and re-start his heart.”
She tilted her head and looked into Luke’s eyes. “Do you see now why I couldn’t see Valentine’s Day the way you saw it until you showed it to me? All I’ve been able to see for the last three years was my father start to die in front of my eyes, just hours after having felt my own heart get ripped from my body from the one man who’d sworn he’d love and protect it above all else when he’d proposed to me the month before.”
Tears filled her eyes and anger beyond understanding filled her trembling voice. “I let myself believe in the fairytale, only to have it turn into all of my worst nightmares. And everyone I loved paid for my mistakes.” She slid the inside of her wrist over her eyes to wipe away her tears, her hands balled into fists so tight her knuckles were white. “Eric will no doubt go straight to hell for what he did, but until the day he does, I’m the one living here on earth with what I’ve done. Dad was able to overcome every hardship flung his way by the universe, heal after losing the love of his life; and in the end, it was my actions that killed his heart.” The last she raged at herself in a whisper as deafening as the most blood curdling shout.
She crumbled right there before him when she brought her gaze up to clash with his. “The worst part of it all? I turned around and did the same thing to you.” Her hand started to reach for him before she pulled back. “I don’t blame you for not being able to forgive me, Luke. What I did was unforgiveable. And I’ll spend my whole life living with those regrets as well. I know my apologies mean as much as Eric’s did, so I won’t even insult you with them.”
Refusing to meet Luke’s eyes a second longer, she turned to head back to the double doors before Luke could even formulate a response that could break through the lonely despair trembling out of her in waves.
He went to follow her, with every intention of dragging her back to listen to him until she could finally hear him.
But her next words stopped him in his tracks.
Uttered so quietly Luke could barely hear them, the words were directed to Derek, “I’m sorry I’ve been holding onto dad so selfishly all these years. His life insurance was always supposed to go to you, to your dreams. I know you saw his living will too.” Tears filled her voice. “I never meant to keep you from your dreams all this time, Derek. I just…couldn’t let him go.”
Hand on the door, she whispered brokenly, “But I signed the forms five minutes ago. They’re waiting for us to come back in so they can shut off his life support.”
And with that
she walked away from them both.
A near stranger to Luke now.
* * * * *
LUKE FELT rabidly helpless.
He’d watched as Derek and Jonathan all but carried Dani back to their car so she could stay at their house. At her request. She hadn’t been able to look at him once.
Not wanting to be the selfish jackass that pushed her on the day her father died, he let her go. He watched the woman he loved drive away from him, broken-hearted and just plain broken.
He rammed his fist into the wall. Dammit, he wanted to kill that Eric guy. Make him suffer the way he had made Dani suffer. And before his helplessness on that front as well could cause another frustrating wave of despair, a Hail Mary thought hit him. Grabbing his cell phone, he dialed his friend Connor’s number.
“H’lo?”
Shit. It sounded like Connor had been dead asleep. Luke glanced at the clock. Well, no wonder. It was five in the morning.
Hearing Connor’s wife in the background—her voice filled with soft concern right next to the receiver—had Luke’s emotions spinning even further out of control.
He wanted what Connor had found.
He wanted Dani’s voice murmuring right at his side, ready to face anything life threw their way. He wanted to be the one Dani turned to, not the one she drove away from when life seemed cruel and impossible.
“Sorry to wake you, man,” he apologized. “I’ll call again later.”
Connor whispered something reassuringly in the background before coming back onto the phone line. “Nah, that’s okay. I need to get up soon anyway. What’s up? Everything okay?”
Where to begin?
Might as well start from his first suspicion. “Do you know the guy that Dani dated a few years ago?”
Silence.
And then a slow, weary, “Yeah. I know him.”
