She gasped as he touched the warm supple curves of her breasts. “You like that,” he whispered softly.
Eyes wide with pleasure and wonder, she nodded. In all her adult years, she had never imagined lovemaking could be like this, so wonderful and filled with rapture.
Slowly Chase’s hands slipped lower still, letting her get used to the feel of them on her body. With the same patience, they undressed each other and slid beneath the sheets. Fearing what would happen next, she tensed. And again he helped her through it. This time, when she overcame her fear, there was only wonder and fulfillment waiting for her and for him.
Afterward, he held her tightly, clasped against him. She clung to him tenaciously. A tiny tear slipped down her cheek. “If you only knew what you made me feel,” she whispered. As long as she lived she would never forget his tenderness.
“Good, I hope,” he whispered gently.
“Good,” she affirmed, her voice quavering. “And whole.” I’m a complete woman, at last, she thought. And if the two of us just stayed together we could have everything.
“I’m so glad.” He held her close.
And she clung to him, wanting never to let go again.
THE NIGHT soothed Chase’s soul, but not completely. With the morning, his memories of the past returned. He still felt very confused and hurt about his father’s behavior. He didn’t understand what his father could have been doing in Cleveland, or why Hope would pretend to know nothing about it when he could tell by the look on her face that she did.
Clearly, Hope thought she was protecting his father; why she felt that still necessary, was less clear. Especially when it hadn’t stopped her from making love to him. More determined than ever to find answers, he stuck with his earlier plans to visit the clinic personally. He told Hope nothing about his plans.
Catching the first plane out the following morning, he arrived in Cleveland around noon. Needing answers, he went straight to the chief of staff at the clinic where his father had been treated. “I understand your concern, Dr. Barrister,” the accomplished physician said, “but those records are privileged information.”
Aware he was operating on far too little sleep and too much coffee, Chase fought to control his exasperation. “My father is dead.”
“Even so—”
“I’m his son,” Chase continued emotionally, blinking back sudden tears. “If my father was ill, I have a right to know.”
Silence fell as the chief of staff studied him. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said finally.
He returned long minutes later, his expression grim and fore-boding. “Don’t ever let it be said I gave these to you,” he warned. “But if it were my father, I’d want to know, too.”
IT WAS A LONG FLIGHT back to Houston. Chase was in shock. He got out the records again. His father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and had never told him. According to the medical records, he’d had surgery to remove a tumor six months before he married Hope. That surgery had left him irreversibly impotent. Whatever Hope’s marriage to his father had been based on, it hadn’t been passion. There was no illicit affair. Nor could Edmond have fathered Joey. Yet he had pretended Joey was his son. And so had Hope.
Why? Chase wondered. He felt confused, hurt and filled with a shattering sense of betrayal. Why all the lies? Why hadn’t his father trusted him enough to tell him the truth about his illness, if not when he was twenty-one, then later when he was an M.D.? Had his mother known about the battle with cancer and Edmond’s resulting impotence?
Worst of all, why hadn’t Hope told him last night? She knew how torn up he had been about making love to her. She could have helped him, by telling him the truth about the nature of her relationship with Edmond. She could have spared him all the anguish. But she hadn’t. And for that, he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to forgive her.
“YOU KNEW, didn’t you?” Chase surmised softly later that same evening as he faced Hope in the guest house. “You knew my father had been sick when you married him.”
The breath left her slowly. She had expected to see Chase again, alone. She hadn’t expected this. “Yes,” she said cautiously, her insides quaking, “I did.” How much did Chase know?
“And you also knew he couldn’t possibly have fathered your child.”
Hope reached out to steady herself, clasping the back of a chair. “Yes,” she said softly, looking both terrified and defensive, “I did.”
Chase studied her. It was so easy to see why Edmond would have wanted to protect her; in some convoluted way, despite everything, there was a very big part of Chase that still did, too. It wasn’t so easy to see how the two of them had ever gotten together in the first place. And Hope, with her closed mouth, wasn’t doing a damn thing to help him understand. In fact, she had worked damn hard to keep him in the dark. “The two of you weren’t having a torrid affair.”
“No,” Hope said, in a low voice filled with shame. “We weren’t.” She had been a fool to think, even for one moment, that Chase could ever understand what she and Edmond had shared. She turned away from him. Although her fingers tensed, her voice was calm. “I told you that from the beginning.”
“But you didn’t tell me my father was impotent!”
She took an uncertain step toward him, then watched as he moved away. She swallowed hard, trying hard not to let the thick, vibrant silence in the room get to her. “I had promised him I never would.”
Chase moved around the guest house restlessly, finally taking a position at the kitchenette counter several feet away from her. He leaned against it, looking anxious and distant. And she knew then that she would either prove her worth to him then, in that minute, in that instant, or lose him forever.
“I don’t get it, then.” His derisive voice cut like a blade. “If the two of you weren’t having an affair, why all the intimate lunches?” he prodded, looking at her in controlled frustration.
“Why the clandestine trip to Atlanta? What were you up to?”
He was acting as if she had conned his father, and that knowledge hurt.
“Hope, for pity’s sake, let down your guard. Talk to me. Don’t you see, I have to know what kind of person you are. I can’t go on this way any longer, feeling like I’m operating in the dark about you.”
She turned back to him. Their eyes met, hers looking as distant and disillusioned as he felt. Her chin lifted defiantly but her voice carried a thread of hurt. “I thought you already knew what kind of person I was.”
He thought about everything she had done, not everything he had thought she was, and forced himself to remain unmoved. He crossed his arms over his chest. “So did I. But I didn’t count on everything I found out today, on all the lies.” What hurt worse than that, were the evasions she was still enacting. He thought he saw the first hint of tears glimmering in her blue eyes.
She shut her eyes. Her voice trembled as it rose. “Edmond made me promise not to tell.”
That much Chase could believe. He’d been a very private, very proud man. But that didn’t explain his excluding his son from what must have been the most traumatic time of his life. “Why didn’t he want me to know about his illness?”
“He was embarrassed, frightened.”
“But you knew, from the beginning, what his situation was?” Chase felt a stab of jealousy.
“Not exactly, no.”
“Then when?” he demanded roughly.
“I don’t know,” she responded, her tone defensive. Her pulse jumped, but she stood firm. “It was some time after Atlanta. I had decided to keep my baby and he started talking about marrying me, to give the child a name.”
Wanting to rock her out of her implacable calm, Chase demanded tersely, “Why not Joey’s father?”
The shades on her feelings went down, shutting him out again. “That wasn’t possible,” Hope said coolly, her jaw beginning to take on a forbidding, angry tilt.
Chase saw the cold, calculated way she hid from him. That, more than anything she ha
d done, told him she wasn’t the one for him. And yet even as he realized that, he wondered if he would ever find the strength to stay away from her. In an effort to clamp his runaway emotions down, he asked, “Was Joey’s father married, too?”
She gave him a sharp look that made his heart race. Her brow arched. “I don’t have to stay and listen to this.”
Turning, he gave her a grim smile and followed her to the door. “No, you can walk away, like you always do. You can hide—”
She whirled to face him, her regal calm vanishing. “My father could have helped you,” Chase continued. “He didn’t have to marry you. He didn’t have to break up his marriage to do it.”
Hope sighed her exasperation, then drew another long, shaky breath. “Initially he didn’t intend to,” she confided quietly. “In the beginning, we were just friends. He was a father figure, guidance counselor, business mentor and platonic friend all wrapped into one. He found out I was in trouble. He knew marriage to the father was impossible, and he wanted to help me. To that end, he was willing to do everything and anything he could.”
Chase had to admit that sounded like his father. “He could have been your friend without marrying you,” he pointed out.
Renewed color flooded into Hope’s beautiful face. “Don’t you think I know that?” she said softly, begging him to understand. Her voice trembled as it dropped a confiding notch. “But then he fell in love with me.” She swallowed hard, sensing how Chase would feel about what she was going to say next. “And as I grew to know him, I began to love him, too, Chase.” She turned away from his penetrating gaze, desperate to explain. “Just not the way a woman usually loves a husband. It was kind of a platonic mix.” She took a deep breath, that was part sob. “I counted on him. We were partners. And eventually we were tied together through Joey. We were parents to the same child.” And that bond had gone very deep, so deep she had been crushed when Edmond had died.
“And he agreed to accept that?” Chase asked incredulously.
The disbelief in his voice cut straight to her heart. “No, not initially,” Hope said quietly. She lifted her eyes to his, not caring if he saw the wet sheen in them. “When Edmond married me, he wasn’t sure how much time he had left, or even if the treatments were going to work, but he wanted to spend whatever time he did have left happily. That’s why he left your mother.” Hope paused and ran a shaky hand through her hair. “He also knew we got along. He wanted to share in the raising of a child again.” Seeing the skeptical light in Chase’s eyes, she finished softly, persuasively, “We weren’t sure it was going to last. We didn’t think that far ahead, Chase. We just took it day by day, and it turned into something permanent and enduring.”
Her logic had gotten through to him. Chase was quiet, contemplative. “Did my mother know about Dad’s illness?” he asked finally, in the same troubled voice with which he had started the conversation.
Hope sighed, wishing there were a less hurtful way to explain it all to Chase. “Edmond didn’t want either of you to know,” she confided in a thick voice. She met Chase’s eyes with as much candor as she could muster. “I tried to get him to tell you, but he wouldn’t.” She shook her head, remembering. “He said you had enough on your mind, with just growing up and going to school. He didn’t want you worrying about his health, too.” Hope lifted her shoulders. “And as it turned out, when the treatments began to work and he went into remission, it wasn’t necessary. As for your mother, he didn’t want the issue of his illness clouding his divorce. That’s why he didn’t tell her. And again, I had nothing to say about it. Those were his decisions.” Just like the decision to keep her baby had been hers, she thought.
Chase was quiet, soaking it all in. Finally he turned to her, his gaze accusing. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this when I first came here?”
“Because I promised your dad,” Hope said, again.
“Meaning what?” Chase asked softly, the depth of his anger and resentment even more apparent. “That your first loyalty was to him, even after we started to become involved? Were you more concerned about promises in the past than the anguish I might be feeling now? Dammit, Hope, you know how I suffered. I fought not to make love to you. How could you have let me suffer like that, Hope? How could you not have told me, especially after we made love, when you knew how guilty I felt?” He’d thought them so close then, so connected. Obviously they were not, not if she’d been able to keep something that crucial and that potentially healing, from him.
Because I’m still protecting Joey, she thought. And because I’m still protecting myself from the pain of your lack of faith in me. Surely if Chase loved her, if he cared about her at all, he’d be able to accept her, without question.
Chase shook his head. “I can’t deal with people who are dishonest, Hope. I can’t deal with the fact that you didn’t trust me enough to level with me, if not in the beginning, at least, when we made love.”
Hope stared at him, angry now, too. His thinking the worst of her was all too reminiscent of her past. She had promised herself when she left home under a cloud of disgrace that she would never get involved with anyone who didn’t have faith in her, who didn’t believe in the goodness inside her. God knew she had never expected it from her parents. They had never given her any reason to think their love for her was unconditional. But she had expected it from Chase!
“Do you really think I wanted to hurt you?” she said emotionally. She wanted to tell him everything about Joey’s father, but she knew the price of revealing too much. She knew what happened when people who said they loved you turned around and said they didn’t believe you. She certainly wasn’t going to let Joey be hurt by making his parentage known to anyone but herself. It was enough that she had given herself completely to Chase, made love to him with all her heart and soul, and then been cruelly forsaken.
They faced each other. Chase remained silent, aloof.
But then, she surmised grimly, he didn’t have to say anything. Hope saw the guilty verdict on his face. She knew he had tried and convicted her as surely as her parents had. Her heart full of the numbing bitterness that had plagued her for years, she turned and left the guest house without another word. He didn’t come after her. She didn’t look back.
“YOU LOOK LIKE HELL, darling,” Rosemary said the following morning.
Chase felt like hell. He’d just had two sleepless nights and was probably facing another. “May I come in?” he said tersely.
“Of course.” Rosemary ushered him into her hotel room.
“Would you like me to order you some breakfast? I’ve already had my coffee but—”
“Got any left?” Locating the carafe, he jiggled it and found it half-full.
“Yes, but there are no cups…” Her voice trailed off. She shuddered in distaste, watching him tear the paper wrapper off a water tumbler and pour coffee into it. “Chase, honestly. I could have called and got you a proper cup and saucer.”
“This is fine,” he said gruffly, too upset to care about using the proper china for his morning jolt of caffeine.
His mother studied him. “You’re still angry with me?”
Chase shrugged, feeling peculiarly close to tears. And he never cried. Never. The one exception being when his father died. “Confused is more like it,” he admitted. He needed the kind of heartfelt comfort he wasn’t sure she could give. Not knowing where to start, he began by telling his mother about his father’s illness. He discovered Hope had been right; Rosemary hadn’t known about Edmond’s cancer or his surgery.
“I don’t understand,” she said in anguish when Chase had finished speaking. “Why wouldn’t he have told me?”
Maybe, Chase thought sadly, Edmond had known how selfish his wife was and had figured Rosemary was the last person he would want by his side at such a time. Chase took another draught of the hot, strong coffee, letting it beat a scalding path to his stomach. “I don’t know, Mom.”
“Was I that bad a wife to him? That he felt he could
n’t turn to me in what must have been the worst time of his life?”
Chase swallowed hard. He had no answer for that.
“But Hope was there for him,” Rosemary ascertained in a shocked whisper.
Chase nodded. “In a way neither of us could be, apparently.”
Rosemary buried her face in her hands. “It really was my fault,” she murmured.
And in that second, Chase knew what Hope had asserted all along was true. She really hadn’t broken up his parents’ marriage. Unfortunately she had put her loyalty to Edmond above her loyalty to him and that he couldn’t dismiss nearly as easily. If she didn’t trust him enough to tell him the truth, what kind of relationship could they ever have?
HOPE WAS HALFWAY DOWN the driveway, toward the morning paper when she saw Russell Morris. He was waiting in a car across the street. “Nice morning, isn’t it?” he called. He got out and strolled straight toward her.
Her heart pounding, Hope kept her pace steady. She bent down to pick up the paper. Lately, only Joey had kept her on an even keel. The argument with Chase had left her drained and empty inside. She didn’t need a confrontation with Russell on top of that, but it looked as if she was going to get one anyway. When she straightened again, he was right in front of her. “What do you want?” She gave him an ice-cold look.
“Is that any way to greet an old boyfriend?”
Her mouth filled with a coppery taste. Ignoring his provocative remark, she said, “I’m very busy.”
“I know,” he returned confidently. “I saw the business Barrister’s has been doing the past few days.”
Hope felt her spine stiffen. “We’ve had a lot of traffic.”
“And a lot of sales.”
Not as many as Hope would’ve liked. “Is there a point to this?” she asked impatiently.
“Why don’t you invite me in for breakfast and we’ll talk about it?”
“No.”
He quirked a brow. “Don’t you want your son to see me?”
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