Christmastime Cowboy
Page 17
“Why are you here, Liam? Is it to have a fight with me? Because I would suggest that you don’t actually want to be in a fight with me this morning.”
“Is that so?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I’m mean and undercaffeinated.”
“Well, that is a terrifying thought,” he said, moving out of the doorway and heading into the dining area.
She followed after him. The converted barn was empty, the wooden floors shining from her recent polish, the rustic wood chandelier overhead casting a lovely, serene glow on the surroundings. She felt neither glowing nor serene.
“Are you just here to talk about...work stuff?”
“We have work stuff to talk about. We need to get that furniture ordered. We need to get everything ready to go. We have two weeks until Christmas festivities kick off really strong and copper rich. I think we can actually have the place ready to do a soft open by then. We can really kick it into high gear at Christmas. But it would be great to have it ready for the tree lighting, don’t you think?”
“That might be a little bit ambitious,” she said. “You know, considering that Christmas decorations go up almost as soon as Thanksgiving is over.”
“True. But I think we can do it, don’t you? Anyway, the sooner we get it done, the sooner we’re done.”
She knew what he meant by that. He meant them. He meant them having to work together.
“That is ideal,” she said, grinding her teeth together.
“Okay, we talked about work. Now, let’s talk about last night.”
“Not here,” she said.
“Where?”
“In hell?” she suggested lightly.
“I would prefer to handle it a little bit earlier,” he said.
She let out an exasperated sigh and walked toward the back of the room, shoving the back door open. “All right,” she said, “let’s talk.”
They moved out to the back deck area of the dining room. There were a few little tables placed out there, and beyond that a large, open field stretching to the base of a blue-tinged mountain range. The air was cold, but strangely clear for this time of year, the sky jewel bright in spite of the chill.
“I’m sorry I left you without a car,” he said.
“Are you?” She narrowed her eyes.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “In that I’m sure you had to deal with that this morning. But I don’t regret leaving.”
“Right, because you didn’t like what I had to say.”
He chuckled, rapped his knuckles against the side of the old barn. “You didn’t like what I was saying either,” he returned. “So I think we were about even.”
“Okay,” she said. Instead of no, absolutely not, we are not even, we will never be even. Which was what she felt. In her chest. Deeper than that, all the way to her soul.
“I need you to admit it,” she said. “I need you to admit that what happened between us meant something. Because my entire life, and all the pain that has come after it was based on that feeling. You left me, convincing me that everything I felt was in my head. I have spent a decade not trusting myself, not trusting my feelings, and you... It did matter. I mattered.”
“What does it benefit either of us for me to admit that?”
“Because it’s true,” she said, nearly exploding. “Doesn’t the truth matter somewhere in all of this?”
“Not if we can’t do anything with it.”
“I can do something with it,” she said. “I can maybe move on. I can heal.”
“Is that actually what you want? Because I think if you wanted it you would have taken steps to do it by now.”
“Stop telling me what you think. Stop telling me who you think I am, what you think I’m doing, or how you think that it’s my fear holding me back. This is about you. And until we clear up this piece I can’t move forward with anything else. So I need you to tell me. I need you to tell me that I mattered to you. That I didn’t have feelings for you all by myself. I need you to admit that you didn’t leave me to protect me. You left me because even though you felt something for me you felt more for the money. Be honest, Liam. With yourself and with me. And once you are maybe we can move forward.”
“Where do you imagine us moving forward to?” he asked.
“Just into...finishing this. Being able to inject Christmas cheer into the grand opening like Lindy wants instead of just wanting to pour wounded bile on top of it. Maybe that’s all it will be. Maybe that’s all we’ll accomplish, but dammit, Liam, I need you to give me this.”
He tilted his head back, his expression unreadable. Even angry, his green eyes glittering, he was so beautiful. She just wanted to reach up and touch him, to feel his whiskers beneath her fingertips. To press her palm against his cheek and trace that line down to his square jaw, to his chin. She wondered what it would be like to hold his face steady while she leaned in for a kiss.
She shook off those thoughts as quickly as they appeared. She could not afford to have them.
“I took the money instead of you,” he said, the words like iron. “Because whatever I felt for you I didn’t think it would be enough. Because I spent my entire life living with a woman who resented my very existence because of all that she couldn’t have because of me, and I was damn well not going to subject myself to that again. I was not going to... I was going to prove that I was could change my life, that I could amount to something. When that opportunity presented itself from your father I took it. I hesitated, but I took it. Because I knew that you and I couldn’t have a future. But that the education would be my future. That money...it was my future. I can’t apologize for that, Sabrina, I can’t. All I can apologize for is that you were hurt. But that’s the damn truth of it.”
“Why did you get the tattoo?” she asked.
“You’re right. Stuff that I don’t want to work out, I put on my skin. I got away from here, I went to school, things were going well. But I couldn’t forget. Just because I made the choice, just because I felt like it was the right choice, doesn’t mean it was the easy one.”
“Why were you so sure we couldn’t have a future?”
“Because I can’t have a future with anyone, Sabrina. I knew it then, I know it now.” He shook his head. “My mother was abusive. To me. Not really to Alex. But I never wanted to go back to anything that looked like that. To any kind of family, any kind of house. I don’t believe in it. Not for me. I never wanted to drag you into all that. I still don’t. But I did. I did, because I assumed that you weren’t a virgin anymore. Or maybe... Just because I didn’t care for a while last night.”
“Your mother abused you?” Suddenly, Sabrina felt ill.
“Doesn’t matter. I can’t change it. It’s all a great big mass of messed up and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But when I say I don’t want that kind of life I mean it. I feel like that’s a line that men throw out a lot when they mean I don’t want it right now, or I don’t want with you. But that’s not what I’m saying. So maybe it would be better to let you stay mad at me. But now you know the truth. I got a tattoo because I care. But there was nothing I could do with it then and there’s nothing I can do with it now. So it’s just another thing I carry with me.”
Sabrina didn’t quite know what to say. What did you say to something like that? Her life with her family hadn’t been perfect. And right now, her relationship with her father was mostly nonexistent. Things with her mother were difficult, as always. Damien...well, he was particularly challenging at the moment.
But there had never been abuse.
She would never, ever, have thought that the strong, gorgeous man she had known then, that tattooed bad boy, had been through something like that. But that, she realized, was a girl’s perspective. Standing here as a woman, looking at this man who had to keep track of events on his body...
/> She could see the damage that much more clearly. But perhaps that was in part because she could see her own. Way back when, she hadn’t been able to see his damage. She’d been so caught up in her own.
Trying to be good. Trying to be quiet. Trying to earn affection from a man who would take it back so much more easily than he would ever give it.
Liam had been an escape from them. Her confidant, her fantasy. Her break from good behavior.
She’d seen those tattoos as symbolic to her journey, not to his. Those tattoos that—at seventeen—she had thought of as signs of his rebel status, were actually symbols of his vulnerability. Of his pain.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said, twisting her hands.
It was inadequate, and stupid. Because there were a thousand things she wanted to say, but she wanted to say the right thing. She wanted to say the thing that wouldn’t cause harm. The thing that was right, that gave her information, but that also wasn’t too invasive.
She wanted to know everything. She wanted to know nothing.
She wanted to know him, and she wanted to keep him firmly in her fantasies. The monster that had destroyed everything. The man that had brought her so much pleasure. It was so much easier when he was those things. Because she could be angry with him then. Because she could work out her sexual frustrations on him.
Introducing this, this dark, twisted childhood, made him more than a man. It made him human.
It gave context to those faults, those flaws, that she had decided simply existed to wound her.
More than that, it made Liam Donnelly’s life extend beyond places where it had touched hers. It made him whole. It made him real.
And until that moment she hadn’t realized that to her he hadn’t been real. He had been a symbol. A symbol of rebellion gone wrong, of her feelings, of her vulnerabilities.
But perhaps, just perhaps, he was more than that.
Faced with this, it was somewhat impossible to deny.
“There’s not much to say,” he said. “I’m not selling you a sob story. I’m just telling you the why. Because you wanted to know. Because you wanted to know why I don’t want to commit myself to a life of suburban hell. Because you want to know why I don’t want kids, why I don’t want to live in that situation where you’re bound to people because of blood and vows and you can’t just pick up and walk away if you need to.”
Her thoughts tangled up on each other, wrapped around the words that she wanted to speak but couldn’t quite bring herself to. The frustrating thing was she understood. Without asking for extra clarification. That growing up in a household with a difficult parent felt... You were powerless as a child in those situations.
You had to follow the whims of that parent or face the consequences. She knew that much, and she hadn’t even experienced the same thing. Growing up in an abusive environment it had to have felt like an inescapable prison.
“I’m not going to abuse anyone,” he said, as if he needed to clarify. “I just don’t want that life. I don’t want to be stuck. That’s the great thing about money, Sabrina, you end up with a lot of mobility and a lot of power. Money doesn’t make you happy, but it affords you the means to improve your situation, that’s for certain.”
“I didn’t think you would ever abuse anyone,” Sabrina said. “And I knew that’s not what you were afraid of.”
“You want to know,” he said. “Don’t you? You want to know what she did.”
“Yes,” Sabrina responded. Then she swallowed hard. “No.”
“I’ve never told anyone about it before,” Liam said.
Sabrina’s eyes flew to his. “Never?”
“I don’t know how well you know my younger brother Alex, but, believe me, he’s the best of us. Brave. A hero for his country. He’s happy. He always has been. He was such a neat kid. I mean, he went through the usual teenage rebellion stuff, mostly when I wasn’t there, but as a kid he just seemed to enjoy being a kid. I hated it. I only had the money my parents could go out and earn, and our dad didn’t care much for doing that. Mostly, he wanted to satisfy himself. Which meant fooling around with random women—not our mother—and sitting on his lazy ass, or working out in the garage on his motorcycle.”
Sabrina had always been well taken care of. For all her parents’ faults, her father had provided for them. She had never been hungry. Had never felt like needs weren’t being met. At least, not those practical, physical needs. Her father was distant, and there were certainly emotional deficits, but she had a feeling you could only worry about those kinds of deficits when physical needs were being met.
“Sometimes there just wouldn’t be food in the house. I collected all the change that I could and walked to the store once. I bought two frozen burritos. Made sure that Alex had something to eat. There wasn’t much I could do about our situation, Sabrina. But I could make sure that Alex was taken care of. And that’s not because I’m a saint, God knows. Just because it felt good to be able to control something.”
“Why wasn’t there food?”
“I don’t know. Because my mom spent the money on alcohol? Because she went out to the bar and had dinner? My dad was probably being fed by whatever woman he was screwing around with at the time. My parents weren’t home a lot, and if they were, they weren’t paying much attention to us.”
His face took on a strange, distant quality, his eyes going blank. “And if we were too much trouble, my mom would make sure we weren’t in the way.”
“How?” Sabrina asked gently.
“Well, we had a shared bedroom, but sometimes we fought. Or, Alex was little and he was having a nap, and my mom didn’t want me to disturb him. So she would lock me in the closet in the hall.”
He tensed his shoulders, stretching slightly, almost reflexively, as if he was fighting against some tight, imagined space in his head.
Sabrina’s heart sank into her stomach.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Liam said. “Not at first. I could curl my knees up and pretend that I was a stowaway on a ship, or that I was hiding from imagined enemies or something. Sometimes she would do it all day. Or overnight. And that was hard.”
“And Alex doesn’t know? How did he not notice?”
“Because sometimes she would do it when we were supposed to be at school,” he said, his voice hard. “And I missed a lot of school—it was hard for me to catch up. Just one of the many reasons I was never going to get myself a scholarship. I could have fought back, at a certain point. I was bigger than her. And eventually, I did figure that out. But it’s your mom, right? And it takes a while for everything to even out. When you go from being a little boy to an adolescent with a little bit of physical strength.” He shook his head. “I was never going to hurt my mom.”
Sabrina took a step forward, reaching her hand out. Liam jerked away. “Why did she do that to you?”
“She hates me,” Liam said simply. “She hates me from all the way up on that hill she lives in now in her custom house. The one that I bought for her. She hates me, because I’m the reason she was stuck with our father. Oh, she hated Alex too, make no mistake. Just not in the same way. She blames Alex for not being able to fix my dad. For not making him stay, because he eventually left. But she blames me for getting her ass stuck with him in the first place.”
His gaze went to a faraway place, his eyes focused somewhere past the mountains. “She was going to be something. She wasn’t going to be like her mother, tied down with a couple of kids. She was going to get away from that small town in Washington and go to school.”
She hadn’t done that, though, and Sabrina didn’t need Liam to finish the story to know that. But Liam had. He had been driven to do it. Had taken that money from her father—something that had hurt her deeply up until this moment—and made the future his mother had always accused him of stealing from her.
“A few days,” he said offhandedly. “Hey,” he said in response to the distressed sound she made. “Other kids have it worse. Other kids get locked away for months. And they don’t make it to adulthood to tell the story. I did. I was never in danger of dying, I was just uncomfortable.”
“That doesn’t make it okay. That doesn’t mean... That doesn’t mean it isn’t awful.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it is. But there’s nothing I can do about it now. Nothing but what I did. Nobody forces me to do anything now, Sabrina. And I don’t even owe your father any money anymore. I paid him back. With interest. No one owns me. I’m sure as hell never going to be in a situation that isn’t of my own making again.”
She had a feeling he had to believe that. That the alternative would be to slide into an abyss as dark as the closet his mother had locked him in.
She had a feeling he still wouldn’t welcome her touching him. That he really didn’t want her pity. She had a feeling this was a trade. A trade for what had happened last night. Maybe even for some of the pain he had caused her.
Whatever the rationale, it was not an invitation for her to get closer to him, that much was clear.
“Liam,” she said slowly. “Your mom sounds like a bitch.”
She hadn’t planned on saying that, and she kind of felt guilty when the words left her mouth, because it was his mother and for all she knew he didn’t really want to hear anything like that about her.
But he shocked her by laughing. “No kidding,” he responded, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck.
“Where does this...” She tried to breathe past the tightness in her chest. “Where does this leave us?”
“Trying to finish this project before Christmas,” he said, as if it was obvious. As if there was nothing else to even possibly consider.
She tried to force a smile. “Okay, then. Let’s do that.”