Second Time's the Charm

by Tara Taylor Quinn

“What?”

  He’d done it wrong. “What I meant to say was, will you marry me?”

  She stared at him wide-eyed. Clearly shocked. And something else, too. He couldn’t make it out for sure. Was she scared? “We haven’t even said we love each other.”

  She didn’t say, “We don’t love each other.” The difference was subtle, but Jon clung to it.

  “Words don’t have to be spoken for feelings to exist,” he said. “But just for the record, I know we said what we had was just physical, and I tried to keep it that way, but I do love you, Lillie. I’m not good at it, yet, but I know I can be. I give you my word that I will be.”

  “But...I don’t love you.” A sharp intake of breath followed her words.

  Okay. Sipping his champagne, he said, “I’m all right with that. You love my son.”

  “But, Jon...”

  “Can you honestly say that you don’t care about me?”

  “Of course I care about you. I’d never have slept with you otherwise.”

  Exactly.

  “But we said ‘no commitments.’ No strings attached.”

  “Neither of us are ‘no strings attached’ type of people, Lil. We tried. And instead of having a nice romp, we slept together and just kept doing it. The more time we spend together, the more time we seem to want to spend together. Unless I’m getting that wrong.”

  “No, you aren’t. I love being with you and Abe, it’s just that...”

  She’d used the “L” word. Maybe things would be okay, after all.

  “What?” Whatever it was, he could handle it. She had no idea how much he could handle.

  But she would find out soon. As soon as she agreed to marry him. Then, when he was certain she cared enough to commit to the long haul, he’d tell her about his past.

  “I can’t marry you, Jon.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t marry anyone.”

  Of course she could. She’d already done it once. She could do it again.

  And then something absolutely horrific occurred to him. “You aren’t already married, are you?”

  She’d said she was divorced. She wouldn’t lie about something like that, would she?

  She wouldn’t let him sleep with another man’s wife without letting him make that decision for himself.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why can’t you get married?” The almost-fragile look about her had him wanting to hold her, to soothe away whatever was troubling her. He could be patient. For as long as it took.

  Patience was one thing his time being incarcerated had taught him. “Because I’m not ever going to do that again. Not ever.”

  Apparently it was time for him to know what had happened in her first marriage. He couldn’t fix what he didn’t understand.

  “Because of something your first husband did?”

  “Yes.” She shook her head. Took another sip of champagne. “But no, not really. He hurt me, of course, but a lot of women get hurt and go through a divorce and still get married again.”

  Precisely. They just had to work through it all. “What happened? Between you and your ex.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I know. But I’m asking you to, anyway.” Leaning forward, he took her hand in his. “It seems to me that we’re at an impasse here, Lil, until we get through this. We can’t go back to how it was before we had sex, that’s obvious. And we can’t really go forward, either, with this...this desire...sitting there between us.”

  “We could just have sex until the desire goes away.”

  It happened. A lot. “You really think that will happen here?” he asked. “Because I don’t.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You want to take that chance?”

  She looked at him then, the first time she’d allowed him to see deeply into her eyes since she’d arrived that evening. And while he saw something there that scared him, he also took heart.

  Lillie cared. More than just a little bit. He could see how hard this was for her.

  “Was he unfaithful to you?”

  It was the obvious conclusion to draw. There wasn’t much else a husband could do to his wife to hurt her so deeply, to destroy her trust so completely.

  She sipped. Getting up, Jon refilled both of their glasses. She didn’t have to drive home that night. He’d gladly have her stay with them.

  “Kirk had an affair, yes,” Lillie said when he sat back down. Her fingers wrapped around the stem of her glass, she glanced between the cheap flute and Jon and back again. “Actually, more than one.”

  “He’s a fool, Lil. There’s not a woman out there with more to offer than you.”

  Her smile was laced with scorn. “You don’t need to flatter me, Jon. I came to terms with Kirk’s lack of decency years ago.”

  “Maybe not, if coming to terms with it means you’re robbing yourself, and me and Abe, of the chance to lead a happy, fulfilling life.”

  “It’s not Kirk’s infidelity that’s the problem.”

  He’d never liked the name Kirk. He’d known a Kirk once. A simpy guy in lockup. He’d been there for attempted rape. And had cried every single one of the nights that he’d had the cell next to Jon. He’d been released on appeal. And a couple of years later, Jon had read that he’d raped another woman and was now serving life without parole.

  “The problem is me, Jon. I just don’t have any more to give on anything other than a surface level.”

  He knew bunk when he heard it.

  “Tell that to Abraham.” This was their lives they were talking about. He wasn’t above pulling out whatever stops it took to make this work for all of them.

  The way her mouth started to tremble alarmed him. When, without warning, Lillie bent over at the waist and started to sob as though her heart were shattering into a million pieces, Jon started to get really scared.

  He’d done something horrible and he didn’t even know what it was. He knew only that, somehow, he was going to have to make this right.

  Now.

  * * *

  LEAVING THE CHAMPAGNE and brownies on the table—a memory he’d never forget—Jon lifted Lillie and carried her back to his room. Not because he had any intention of bedding her, but because it was the only room in the house with a lock on the door. He didn’t want Abraham to pick tonight as the first time he climbed out of his crib only to find Lillie in such a state. She clung to his neck, digging her fingers into him while sobs continued to rack her body.

  The only furniture in his room, other than the bed and nightstand, was a dresser. He gently laid Lillie against the pillows.

  “Hold me.” She didn’t let go of his neck.

  “I will, babe. Just give me a second to set up the monitor.”

  Letting him go immediately, Lillie fell back against the pillows, appearing to calm down a little. And then she started to cry again, more softly.

  Those tears trickling slowly down her cheeks bothered him more than the heaving sobs. They seemed to be coming from a deeper place than the initial gust.

  These weren’t tears you cried away and then forgot. These were the kind that might stop, but would never end.

  Hooking his tablet up to the speaker system on his nightstand and opening the monitoring software, he checked to see that Abraham was sleeping soundly and racked his brain for the right thing to say.

  He just didn’t have it.

  So he climbed onto the bed with her, pulled her against his chest and held on.

  * * *

  JON LOST TRACK of time but he didn’t grow tired. Lillie cried some. She slept some, too. And still he sat there, holding on. Because it was what he had to do.

  Life wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t easy. And a man had two
choices. To let bitterness grow so big it suffocated every good thing in him. Or to embrace possibility and try to make the right choices.

  It had taken him a while to understand but he got it now.

  “I can’t.”

  At first he thought she was talking in her sleep. Until Lillie shuddered and pushed up and away from him.

  He let her go.

  “Can’t what?”

  She didn’t go far. Just sat up next to him, hugging a pillow to her chest.

  “I can’t marry you, Jon. But more accurately, I can’t be a mother to Abraham.” She sounded so certain he started to believe her.

  * * *

  “WHY?”

  Hearing the pain in Jon’s voice, Lillie knew she had to tell him. Climbing out from the hell of emotional exhaustion when all she wanted to do was crawl back into his arms and sleep until the world changed, she looked Jon straight in the eye.

  “Because I already am a mother.” She heard herself and understood what she was doing, but the words sounded completely foreign to her.

  And then there was the shocked look in Jon’s eyes. His utter disbelief as he stared at her was her doing. How she wished things were different. Wished she was free to love him as he deserved to be loved.

  As she wanted to love him.

  “You have a child?” Clearly it was the last thing he’d expected to hear.

  Swallowing, she saw again the stone Kirk had brought for her approval. A stone for their son’s grave.

  She’d told him he could have it placed. He was doing so in the morning. Having a little ceremony, just himself and a minister from the church he’d been attending. He’d invited Lillie but she had an appointment at the clinic, an MRI procedure with a four-year-old. Her new life taking precedence over the old.

  Jon was still waiting for her answer.

  “Had.”

  He froze. And she could tell the instant that understanding dawned.

  “Oh, God, Lil. Oh... I’m sorry. I had no... You didn’t... No one said...”

  Putting a shaky finger to his lips, she said, “Shhh. It’s okay. It’s not your fault, Jon.” She was tired. Needed to sleep. And get up in the morning to the new life she’d built for herself. “There’s no way you could have known,” she said, her voice raw from all the crying. “No one here knows.”

  “No one? Not even Caroline?”

  She shook her head and knew she was going to have to explain.

  * * *

  HE HADN’T FIGURED on this. Sitting in his bed with the woman he loved, Jon kept watching her, listening to her.

  “I never should have married Kirk.” Lillie hung her head, picking at a string on the hem of her jeans, exhibiting none of her usual confidence. Even her mannerisms were different. “I’d just been dating him a short time when my parents were killed. I was all alone in the world and there he was, this larger-than-life popular guy who was certain that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. He took me home and introduced me to his parents, who immediately took me in like I was one of their own. Kirk showed me a world where I didn’t have to be alone ever again.”

  He hadn’t asked about the guy. Or the guy’s perfect family. Something he would never be able to offer her.

  He wanted to know about her child.

  And he had to know what had driven her to keep such a monumental secret.

  Not that he was one to judge on that score. Jon had secrets, too.

  “I found out about Kirk’s girlfriends about the same time I found out I was pregnant,” she continued, still looking down. “He’d told me that there had only been two affairs, that he’d ended both, and that there would never be another. I thought the baby was going to save our marriage.”

  “You loved him enough to forgive him for being unfaithful to you?” It hadn’t sounded that way.

  “Kirk and his parents were my family. They were all I had. He was the father of my child. I guess I didn’t let myself think beyond that.” At that, Lillie glanced over at him, and he wasn’t sure what he read in her eyes.

  He wasn’t sure about anything at the moment. All he knew was that Lillie had made decisions that he and Abe hadn’t changed.

  “It’s understandable, given the circumstances,” he said. “You were pregnant with nowhere to turn.”

  It occurred to him to stop this now. To let her off the hook. He didn’t need to know any more. Unless she needed to tell him.

  The possibility kept him quiet.

  “My being pregnant kept Kirk home,” Lillie said. “He’d bring presents almost every day, one for me, one for the baby. Little things. It wasn’t unusual for him to leave the office early and have dinner waiting when I got home from work.”

  Nothing less than she deserved—and Jon had no business wishing he’d been that guy.

  Minus the cheating. It wasn’t something he would do. Ever. Not to anyone. People had to be able to trust family. There had to be something in the world you could count on.

  “He came to all of my doctor’s appointments,” Lillie continued slowly, a detached, almost unrecognizable tone to her voice. “After our first ultrasound, the doctor called us into her office. I had a feeling something was wrong. Kirk wouldn’t hear a word of it. He was certain I was overreacting. He claimed I had a tendency to look for trouble, to guard against it. He always said it was because of the way I’d lost my parents. I was trying to prepare myself so that, if something like that ever happened again, I could get through it.”

  It made a frightening kind of sense.

  Frightening because if you were trying to prevent further pain, you didn’t open yourself up to a level of caring that could cause it.

  Sometimes people just couldn’t take on any more disappointment. Sometimes they just shut down. He’d seen it happen in detention more than once.

  “This time I was right.” Lillie’s words weren’t a surprise. He’d known where this was leading.

  “You lost the baby?”

  A lot of women did, or so he’d read in the books he’d devoured after he’d first found out Kate was pregnant. And most of the women who miscarried tried again.

  Lillie shook her head and looked up at Jon. He understood the resolution in her eyes. The acceptance of powerlessness.

  Before Abraham, he’d seen the same look in the mirror every morning when he’d stood in front of it.

  “She told us that the baby had a malformed heart.”

  “Was it a boy or a girl?” he asked, but he already knew. She’d had a son. And she was transposing some of her feelings about the baby to Abraham.

  Lillie grabbed her bare toes with both hands. He could see the whites of her knuckles. But her voice was even when she said, “A boy.”

  “Did you carry him to term?”

  “Yes.”

  Had her son been stillborn? He couldn’t imagine the horror-filled months of carrying a baby inside of you, feeling it move and form, bonding with it as it grew, knowing it would not live.

  Already grieving the sudden loss of her parents and the infidelity of her husband, she’d also had to endure the hell of growing a child that she knew was going to die.

  “Was Kirk with you when you delivered?”

  Her expression hardened until she didn’t even look like Lillie. “Kirk hadn’t been ‘with’ me since the day we got the diagnosis. He went back to his girlfriend. Got her pregnant, too. And moved in with her.”

  Jon scrambled for words. For anything that could make this better.

  There just wasn’t anything.

  “While you were still pregnant?” he asked because, since they’d come this far, he needed to know, to understand the depths of her pain. Because they needed to get this all out now.

  She nodded.

  “What about hi
s parents?”

  “They were at the hospital when Braydon was born.”

  Braydon. Her tone softened when she said the word. Tears filled her eyes.

  And Jon knew that he and Abraham had never really had her heart. Lillie had already given it away. To a little boy named Bray who hadn’t lived long enough to call her Mama.

  * * *

  LILLIE STAYED IN Jon’s bed for as long as it took her to gather her strength. When she was ready, he let her go without a word.

  Just as she’d known he would. He wasn’t going to beg.

  And she didn’t want him to.

  She also didn’t want to leave.

  He followed her to the front door to lock up behind her. The only light in the house was the one they’d left on in the kitchen.

  Turning, Lillie looked up at the man who’d come to mean more to her than he’d ever know. His strong, chiseled features would be in every good dream she had from there on out.

  “I think it’s best that we not see each other socially anymore.” The words hurt, but she knew she was doing the right thing.

  His jaw tightening, Jon didn’t reply.

  “I’ll continue to see Abe at the day care, for a time,” she assured him. “For as long as he needs me, I’ll be there for him. But it won’t take long for him to attach to someone else,” she added. “Two-year-olds are resilient.”

  Jon stood unmoving, a stone sculpture in his own living room.

  “That’s why it’s best that we end this now, before he grows even more attached, or gets old enough to remember me.”

  He didn’t argue. He didn’t agree. He didn’t touch her.

  “Say something.”

  “You’re the professional.”

  Studying his expression, she looked for signs of derision, of sarcasm. There were none.

  That was it, then.

  Opening the door, Lillie turned her back.

  “I’m sorry, Lil. Braydon was a lucky little guy to have you.”

  Fresh tears filled her eyes as she hurried out into the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  LILLIE RECEIVED A page early the next morning. Having just come in from her bike ride with Caro—and having told her friend nothing about the night before—she read the message before jumping in the shower.