“Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t try to make it easier by telling yourself I’m imagining what I feel for you, Kirsten, because we both know that’s a lie.”
“Is it?” She sat up straighter, brushed hay from her hair and reached for her discarded T-shirt. Her bare skin amber in the morning light, she slowly covered herself, and Adam sighed softly as he looked on. “That’s what my father told my mother once, you know,” she went on. “I was a kid. Wasn’t supposed to be hearing their arguments.” She laughed bitterly. “Do you know how many parents think their kids aren’t hearing their arguments? What do they think, the sense of hearing develops only during adolescence?”
Sensing this subject was important, that this meant a lot to her and maybe had something to do with the two of them now, Adam moved closer, sat down on a bale of hay and let her talk it through. He didn’t know where this was leading, was half afraid to follow her there. But he didn’t think he had a choice. “What were they fighting about?”
She shook her head. “It was awful. Dad’s heart was so bad, even then. Somehow he’d found out that Mother had done…something in the past. Before they were married. And he kept saying that he loved her, that it didn’t matter to him, that all he wanted from her was the truth.” Kirsten’s lips thinned. “So she gave him the truth.”
He could see the remembered pain in her eyes. They were wide, pupils dilated as she remembered. “I was ten. I remember sitting on the stairs, with my hands wrapped around two of the spindles in the railing, and my face peering between them. Mom and Dad were just below, in the living room. He was pacing. She was sitting as still as a statue in the rocking chair. Just like stone. I’ll never forget her face. She knew. I could see that she knew what would happen. It was going to make a difference to him. And I remember, even though I was only ten years old, I sat there thinking as hard as I could at her, Don’t tell him, Mama. Whatever it is, just don’t tell him.’’
Sniffling, Kirsten lowered her head, so Adam could no longer see her eyes.
“But she told him anyway, didn’t she?” he asked.
Head turned away, Kirsten nodded. “She told him anyway. She said she’d been with another man while she was engaged to marry Daddy. She said this other man had got her pregnant. And that when Daddy had believed she was spending a summer in Europe, she’d actually been out of town, making arrangements to get rid of the unwanted child.”
Adam reached out, touched her face. “She aborted the baby?”
“I don’t know. Those were the words she used. Cold words that sent a chill right up my spine. ‘Get rid of it.’ She didn’t elaborate on what had become of…my unborn sibling. She never got the chance, really.”
Swallowing against the dryness in his throat—part of his reaction to seeing Kirsten relive such a painful experience—Adam squeezed her hand briefly.
She nodded and went on. “It was obvious my father had known parts of this already. I don’t know how he found out, but I think he knew who the man was. I never heard the name, just Daddy, muttering, swearing, calling the man a bastard, using other words I had never heard him use before.”
Adam lowered his head and brought her hand to his lips. He wanted to kiss away the remembered pain, but he knew he couldn’t. “I’m sorry, Kirsten.”
“Daddy was devastated. He just kept pacing, faster and faster, and I could see his face going pale, and then ashen. I could tell that something horrible was happening to him. The way he kept yanking at his collar. The way the sweat popped out on his face. Mama got up, went to him, asked what was wrong. And Daddy just rolled his eyes back in his head and sank to the floor.”
“My God,” Adam whispered. “It was his first heart attack, wasn’t it?”
Kirsten nodded. “He’d been seeing a cardiologist. We knew his heart was bad. Until then, he’d only had a few episodes of angina. But this…it was massive. It did a lot of damage, and he never really recovered from it.”
Adam could see it all so vividly in his mind. Kirsten, small, innocent, seeing her hero fall like that. Her face peering from between the spindles on the stairway, big brown eyes stricken as she witnessed a nightmare that would bring an adult to tears.
“I ran to him,” she said, her voice having gone softer than the smallest whisper. “I went a little crazy just then, I think. I kept screaming, shaking him, crying. I was hysterical. And I shouted things at my mother. Things I never should have said. Things no child should ever say, or even think of saying, to a parent. I told her I hated her. I told her that this was all her fault, that if my father died, I would never forgive her.”
Tears flowed silently from Kirsten’s eyes now. Slow and shiny as glycerin, they slid down her cheeks.
“She called an ambulance for my father. And took me with her to the hospital. And she stayed…all night, she stayed. But the minute the doctors told us that Daddy was going to live, she left us there. And I never saw her again.”
Adam lowered his head. Such heartache was tough to get past, tough to deal with. Tougher not to, though. “And you blamed yourself for her leaving? Blamed it on the things you had said to her?”
Kirsten looked him in the eyes, and hers were red and wet. “For a while. But I realize now it wasn’t entirely my fault. It wasn’t even entirely her fault. She made a mistake in her past, and then she hid it from the man she loved. She knew what was going to happen when she told him the truth. She’d always known. And all those years they had together, she must have realized that sooner or later the day would come when she would have to tell him. It must have eaten away at her soul every minute of every day. I just never realized that…until it happened to me.”
“Kirsten—”
“I didn’t sleep with another man, or have a child I never told you about, Adam. What I did was far worse. Far worse. And I know, just as my mother knew, that when I tell you—” sighing, she lowered her head “—it’s going to change everything. The way you look at me. The way you feel about me. Everything.”
Drawing a deep breath, Kirsten got to her feet. She seemed to test her balance, then touched her fingertips gingerly to her bandaged head.
“Is it hurting again?” Adam asked. Maybe to delay the inevitable. To change the subject. He wanted to keep on insisting that whatever she was about to say would make no difference to him, but he was afraid now. So afraid…that maybe it would.
“It’s a lot better than it was last night.” She reached for her jeans, stepped into them and pulled them up. Already he could feel the distance yawning wider between them. She seemed to be putting it there. Deliberately.
He watched as she tucked her shirt carefully into her jeans, then zipped and buttoned them. She pulled on the denim shirt then, rolling the sleeves, straightening the collar. Then she finger-combed her hair. Adam thought that, if she could, maybe she would be slapping on a coat of makeup right now, and hiding herself behind some expensive designer suit.
He wished they could go back to last night. Make that time go on longer. Forever, maybe. He wished he didn’t have to face this thing, because he’d never known Kirsten to exaggerate. He wished he had a cup of coffee. Or, better yet, a stiff drink.
She finished doing what she could with her hair and went still. Nothing more to do. No more time to kill. She stood there staring at him for a moment, as if drinking in the sight of him. And then she looked away from him and closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. When the words came, they were forced, clipped and short.
“I was fourteen. No driver’s license. No clue. I took Daddy’s car without permission. Went joyriding. There was an accident. It was my fault.”
Her jaw was tight as she spoke. He could almost feel her jaw clenching between the words. Was that all? An accident? For just an instant a hint of relief began to ease his knotted muscles, despite the tension in her voice, her stance, her very breath. She stood so still, so rigidly. She was like a sculpture. Like the way she’d described her mother. Golden stripes of sunlight crisscrossed her body in the middle of
the dusty, hay-strewn barn. Her hair was loose and flowing. But she stood utterly still. Venus in blue jeans. And for just that brief instant he thought that was all, and that it wasn’t as bad as she’d made him believe.
“Fourteen?” he heard himself ask. “This terrible secret you’ve been keeping happened when you were only fourteen?”
She nodded. “Joseph Cowan was in the car behind me with that odd, quiet driver of his…Phillip Carr. The two of them rushed me away from the scene before I really even got it clear in my head what had happened. By the time I did, I was at the estate.”
So stiff. Forcing the words out as fast as she could, barely pausing for a breath. “You left the scene?” Adam asked. She didn’t seem to hear him.
“Joseph said I should forget it had ever happened. He and Phillip had checked on the people in the other car, and they told me they were fine. Shaken up, too shaken to remember me…what I was driving or…or anything else…but otherwise, fine. Joseph said there was no harm done. That he and Phillip would take care of everything. Inside a few hours, my father’s car had been repaired. It was as if nothing had happened, and Joseph took me home. And I thought it really was for the best.”
Adam shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why would a man like Cowan want to help a fourteen-year-old kid cover up an accident?’’
She glanced at Adam briefly. “He knew what he was doing. He knew who I was, who my father was. He and my father…they never got along. But I didn’t know any of that at the time. I just agreed, did what he said. Because of my father…his heart, you know…. I thought it would be better for him if I just went along with Joseph’s plan and acted like none of it had ever happened. I kept picturing myself telling him that I’d taken his car out and caused an accident. Picturing his face going gray and sweaty like it had four years before, when my mother had damned near killed him with her confession….”
She finally stopped for a breath. Adam moved closer to her. The relief he’d felt before was fading. Because she wasn’t finished. He knew she wasn’t. The worst was yet to come. It flickered like the flames of hell in her eyes. She was still dreading the end.
“There…has to be more to it than that,” he said softly.
She said nothing.
“Kirsten?”
She stared into his eyes for a long, tense moment, and he could almost see her heart breaking. No. It had already broken…a long, long time ago. He was only just now identifying that change in her once lively eyes. “Tell me the rest.”
She had to look away. Whatever it was, it was bad enough that she couldn’t tell him while looking him in the eye.
Dust mites danced in the sunbeams between them. Like the small lies that had kept them apart all this time.
“Joseph lied to me that day. I never knew. Not until years later. After we’d moved here to Quinn, my daddy and I. After I’d met you and fallen…fallen in love with you.” She bit her lip. “I never learned what really happened on that stretch of Highway 5 until our wedding day.”
Her words shook Adam to the marrow. But he didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He just stood still in the hay, waiting.
“Joseph came to my house that day. Daddy had suffered a minor episode with his heart the night before, and he was resting at the hospital. I was shaken up about that. I hadn’t called you yet to tell you about it, because Daddy had insisted I not interrupt the bachelor party your brothers were throwing for you over at La Cucaracha. I was about to call you, to tell you about it. And that Daddy probably wouldn’t be able to come to our wedding, but he was insisting we go on with it all the same. But then Joseph came. Didn’t knock, just walked in. I was standing in my bedroom in front of a triple mirror I’d bought just so I could be sure I looked all right. I was wearing my wedding gown. I looked….” A sigh stuttered from her lungs. “Oh, Adam, I wish you could have seen me. Daddy was okay. His doctors had assured me it had been a minor episode. And I was about to live out my fantasy. I was more alive, standing there, wearing that gown, thinking of the day ahead…than I’d ever been in my life. And far more than I have been since.”
She lowered her head. “Except, maybe, for last night.”
She met his eyes, held them, and for just a second the fire flared between them again. Then she looked quickly away. Impatience nipped at Adam’s heels, but he tried to keep it from coming through in his tone. He was angry. The thought of Cowan, that bastard, going to Kirsten on the day she was to marry Adam…. He wanted to kill him. “What did he say to you?”
“He said that I wasn’t going to marry you, Adam. He said that I was going to marry him instead, that very day. That he needed a young, pretty, trophy wife. One who could be controlled, manipulated, counted on to keep her silence when necessary, and capable of producing an heir, which was his main goal. He made it sound as if it had already been decided. As if there was no question of my refusing him. He said he’d gone over all of his options and had chosen me. That I should thank my lucky stars. That I was about to become Quinn’s newest millionaire.”
She lifted her head, staring up at the dark, splintering beams that crisscrossed above. A swallow swooped and dived, and she never even blinked. “I laughed at him. Thought he was joking, at first. I hadn’t seen him in all that time, not since I was fourteen years old. But then I realized he was serious, and I asked him how he planned to make me do such a thing. Why I would even consider marrying a man I didn’t even know, much less love—a man old enough to be my father—when my beloved was even now waiting at the chapel for me.”
Slowly, she lowered her head.
“And he said that if you didn’t do what he wanted,” Adam filled in slowly, “he would turn you in for an accident that had happened all those years earlier.” He shook his head. “Did you really think it would be that big a deal? That you’d go to jail over a teenage lapse in judgment?”
“Of course not. And that’s exactly what I told him.” She turned then, and seemingly by sheer force of will, she faced him. “And then he told me the rest.” Her knees bent just a little, but she snapped them straight again. “The people in the other car were not okay, Adam. Joseph told me they were at the time just to make sure I’d go along with what he wanted. So he’d be able to hold it over my head later. He did that, you know. Collected things like that…things he could use to own the souls of the people who had been unlucky enough to cross his path. Some he never used. Some came in handy later. Years later, in my case.”
Adam blinked, staring back at her as intensely as she was staring at him. “The people in the other car…were hurt?”
Unblinking, chin quivering, she whispered, “Dead. They were dead.”
Adam’s eyes slammed closed, even as he instinctively reached for her. His hands closed on her shoulders, offering comfort, support. “My God,” he whispered. “Oh, my God.”
Gently she took his hands away. “Joseph said I would go to prison if he turned me in. He’d kept the evidence. Photos somehow taken at the scene without my knowledge. God knows I was so shaken at the time that I wouldn’t have noticed Phillip snapping them, anyway. The documentation of the quick repairs made to my father’s car. His own testimony as an eyewitness.”
Adam lowered his head. So she’d chosen to break his heart, desert him and marry a man she didn’t love just to avoid prosecution. Hardly a noble motive. But honest, at least. He wouldn’t have expected it of her.
“I told him to go ahead. Told him I didn’t care if I ended up in prison, that I wouldn’t leave you standing at the altar without a bride. I couldn’t bear to do that to you.”
Slowly, Adam’s head came up. “But you did do that to me.”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. Because he told me the rest of it then. He told me my relationship with you was over anyway. That even if I refused him, I’d never have you. That you’d hate me before that day was out, one way or another. Either because I stood you up, or because you learned what I had done.”
“And you believed him? You believed I’d hate
you because of an accident that happened when you were barely out of middle school?”
She held his gaze for a long moment; then her face crumpled, and she squeezed her eyes tight. Tears worked through anyway. “I believed him because he told me the names of the people in the other car. The people my…my carelessness, my recklessness, had—had—had destroyed.” Sobs came like hiccups now. Her chest rose and fell in staccato breaths, and her words came in broken whispers. “They were…they were….” Head down, palms to temples, eyes tight. “Orrin and Maria Brand.”
Adam didn’t hear her. He just kept looking at her, while the words she’d spoken took the slow path to his brain. To his awareness. To his conscious mind. And then he interpreted them. And every ounce of blood seemed to drain to his toes.
“My parents?” he whispered. “My parents? Oh, my God, Kirsten, it was you? You killed my mother and father?” His legs went out from under him. His backside slammed down onto a bale of hay, and his head spun. He couldn’t look at her. She was rushing on, spinning explanations.
“I never knew, Adam. I would never have kept it from you if I’d known.”
He sat there, head in his hands, stunned and blinking in shock, as a swirling storm of memories attacked him from every direction.
“I never would have let Joseph cover up the accident if I had known that people had been hurt…that people had…had been killed.” Kirsten paced away, pushing her hands through her hair. “But I didn’t know. Joseph…he lied. He cajoled and convinced me that his way was for the best. I was just young enough and naive enough to let myself be convinced. Because it was easier that way. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. Adam. And I’ve been regretting it ever since.”
He didn’t look up when she paused, though he could feel her eyes on him. She came closer. He felt her. She put a hand on his shoulder.
He flinched away from her touch, and he heard the pained gasp that was her reaction.
Lone Star Lonely Page 13
