According to Matthew

by Jackie Barbosa

  "I'll be okay. I just need some time. And I need some sleep."

  "All right. I'll go. But if you don't look better next week..."

  He stood up, shaking his head. "Fuck, I'm glad I've never been in love. Luke's pussy-whipped, and you're ... I don't know, pussy-demolished."

  "Yeah," I slurred. "But better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

  Damn stupid thing to say. It was a complete and total lie, and the fucker who'd thought it up was either a raging idiot or total loser, or both.

  Mark snorted. "If it's all the same to you, I think I'll just keep having mindless, meaningless sex."

  I was starting to drift off into a boozy haze, but I was conscious enough to say, "You should be so lucky."

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  66

  According to Matthew [The Gospel of Love 2]

  by Jackie Barbosa

  Chapter Eleven

  The following Friday morning, I sat at my mother's dining room table while she puttered in the kitchen pouring coffee and arranging food on plates.

  "It's okay, Mom. I already ate breakfast."

  She carried a mug and a plate heaped with toast, eggs, and sausage and placed them on the table in front of me.

  "Don't be ridiculous. You don't look like you've eaten properly for at least a week."

  I expelled a long, slow breath. It was true. I'd been living on alcohol and cheap microwave burritos—the kind with a long and unpronounceable ingredient list—for nearly two weeks. The scent of real food, of my mother's home cooking, almost made me dizzy.

  I took several bites and sighed with pleasure, then quickly devoured the rest. When I was finished, I asked, "So, what did you need me to fix for you?"

  She'd called me the night before, saying she had a few things that needed repairs she couldn't take care of on her own. Since my father's death, I had become my mother's de facto handyman. Although any of my brothers could have done most of the odd jobs she needed help with, she seemed to think the architect could handle anything related to a building better than anyone else. And because she'd seemed in a hurry, I'd taken the day off to accommodate her.

  She smiled over the rim of her cup. "I need you to fix my son."

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  "What?" I blinked, sure I must have heard her wrong. I wracked my brain. What household appliance rhymed with

  "son"?

  "Mark called me," she said simply, leaving me to imagine what he'd told her.

  My mother took several more sips of her coffee then added, "He's worried about you."

  "I'm fine, Mom. Mark's overreacting." It wasn't a lie. I was fine, just having to start the process of life without Casey all over again. But I'd done it once, and I could do it again.

  Admittedly, I was doing it with the help of a lot more alcohol this time than I had the first, but it was none of Mark's damn business if I chose to medicate the pain with an over-the-counter option. The doctor in him was probably just irritated because I wouldn't let him prescribe me Prozac.

  My mother chuckled. "Mark doesn't overreact. If anything, he under-reacts. Which you know as well as I do. And that makes me think there's something to worry about." She got up from her seat and removed my now-empty plate, taking it to the sink and rinsing it. The silence stretched between us as she turned off the water, opened the dishwasher, and put the plate inside it.

  I wasn't copping to anything, damn it. Why couldn't my family stop meddling and let me get over this in my own way, in my own damn time? Couldn't they see that stretching this out only made it harder?

  The dishwasher door smacked shut. "Casey Franklin isn't married," she said conversationally, as if she were remarking on the weather.

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  I turned to stare at her. She stood on the other side of the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room, drying her hands on a towel.

  "What?" I was beginning to feel like a parrot, dumbly repeating the same word over and over.

  "I saw the article in the paper the other day. Even though I always hoped the two of you would get back together, I called her to offer my congratulations. Imagine my surprise when she told me she had been planning to get a divorce, but then discovered the marriage was never valid in the first place."

  I jumped up from my chair, almost knocking over my coffee cup. "What?" Definitely a parrot.

  My mother's features—still remarkably youthful and unlined despite the rigors of raising four rambunctious boys and the premature death of her beloved husband—didn't betray any emotion, but her brown eyes studied me with a hard edge, carefully gauging my reactions.

  "Yes, isn't it funny?" Her tone was breezy. "Apparently, they both thought it was legitimate, but it turns out, the minister who performed the ceremony wasn't actually ordained, and he never sent in the certificate, so the marriage was never registered."

  I dropped back into my chair, confused and dumbfounded, a strange form of relief washing over me.

  Casey wasn't married after all. Had never been married.

  But that didn't change anything, did it? She'd thought she was married but never had the courage or the honesty to tell 69

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  me. Maybe she hadn't been lying or committing adultery in fact, but she certainly had been doing so in intention.

  "She also told me she loves you," my mother said softly.

  "And that she hoped one day you'd be able to forgive her, even if you couldn't love her."

  A low, painful ache blossomed in my chest, the sensation I'd been deliberately avoiding since I'd left her at Lincoln's apartment.

  "It's not that I don't love her, Mom. I do." Although I wish to God I didn't. "It's that I don't see how I can ever trust her again. She lied to me for five years." I banged my fist against the table for emphasis.

  My mother walked around the counter and sat in the chair next to me, placing her hand over my clenched fist. "You have every right to be angry and upset. But you can't let one mistake define everything. Everyone makes mistakes. Even your mother."

  I tweaked my mouth skeptically. "I suppose now you're going to try to tell me you were married when you met Dad and you didn't tell him. I won't believe it, you know."

  My parents had had what amounted to the perfect marriage. Although I had seen them argue with one another on more than one occasion, even their most heated discussions had been tempered by the obvious respect and love they had for one another. I'd often imagined Casey and I had the same kind of relationship—one in which I'd never be alone because she'd never keep anything from me and I'd never keep anything from her. Now, I knew that had been an illusion, and it hurt like the worst son-of-a-bitch ever.

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  She laughed. "No, I wasn't married, but I was engaged."

  "And Dad found out?"

  Her expression sobered, and she nodded. "But not until several months after we were married and I was pregnant."

  I frowned. "But ... Luke wasn't born until you and Dad had been married for almost two years."

  A wistful smile crossed her face. "I know. I miscarried a month later."

  "Okay, so Dad found out after you got married that you'd been engaged to someone else. I guess that's bad, but it's a lot different than hiding a marriage, even one that turned out not to be real."

  "The thing is..." She cleared her throat, her cheeks turning a little pink. "I'm sure you boys all imagine that back in your parents' day, everyone waited until they were married to sleep together. But, well ... we weren't any better at waiting back then than your generation is. And when I discovered I was pregnant so soon after we married, I was terrified." She looked away, her voice traili
ng off.

  My eyes rounded with horror. "You mean ... you thought?"

  I couldn't actually say the words.

  She nodded. "It was possible. There wasn't any overlap, you understand, but ... your father was very persuasive and he convinced me to marry him—and to sleep with him—rather quickly. Back in those days, we weren't nearly as good at dating pregnancies, either. It wasn't as if I could have gone to the doctor and had an ultrasound to find out exactly how far along I was. I just had to make my best guess of when I'd gotten pregnant." She sighed. "In any event, I didn't tell your 71

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  father. I was terrified of how he'd react. What would he think if he knew I'd been engaged to someone else, and that the baby I was carrying might not be his?"

  "So what happened?" I asked, shocked and transfixed by this glimpse into my parents' life I'd never imagined. "How did he find out?"

  "When I miscarried, I did so rather spectacularly. There was quite a lot of blood, and I had to be rushed to the hospital. My former fiancé was a decent fellow, and even though I'd jilted him, he was worried about me. He and your father ran into each other in the waiting room, and the rest, as they say, was history."

  I took a shallow breath. "So, what did Dad do when he found out?"

  "Well, at first, he was furious. And when he realized that the baby might not have been his..." She shook her head. "I cried that night in the hospital after he left, sure he was going to divorce me."

  "Why didn't he?" I would have.

  She smiled. "Because he realized that I was young and scared and a little foolish, but he loved me anyway. And maybe because he realized that trust is one of the few things in life that can only be repaired by starting over. The only way to rebuild it is to give it a second chance."

  Damn. I'd never have guessed my parents had such a dirty skeleton in their closet. But it wasn't the same. Not at all.

  "This is different, Mom. Casey didn't just keep this secret from me; she kept it from her father and her whole family.

  And she kept it from me because she was afraid her father 72

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  would find out. What's more, he's never wanted her to marry me. I'm not good for his image because I'm not black. I ruin his perfect family." I shook my head. "How can we ever be happy with him between us?"

  "You haven't seen today's paper yet, have you?"

  I shook my head. Since my last nasty shock, I'd given up reading the newspaper.

  She reached behind her and grabbed something from the stool behind her—the newspaper, I realized. With a disorienting sense of déjà vu, I took it from her and unfolded it to read the headline:

  ALDERMAN'S DAUGHTER THROWS SUPPORT

  BEHIND RIVAL, CITING AIDE'S MISCONDUCT

  My mouth went dry. Casey had split with her father.

  Sacrificed her relationship with him. Publicly. Cruelly.

  Because of me. To prove to me that she could.

  And I couldn't let her do that. Could I?

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  73

  According to Matthew [The Gospel of Love 2]

  by Jackie Barbosa

  Chapter Twelve

  I leaned against the doorframe of Casey's office, admiring the view. She was bent over the filing cabinet behind her desk with her back to me, providing me with a fabulous view of her glorious ass encased in a short, fitted, black skirt. I flashed back instantly to the morning two weeks ago when I'd finally fucked that beautiful butt for the first time. My thickening cock urged me to walk up behind her and press up against her, but the one remaining rational sliver of my brain forced me to hold my ground.

  Instead, I licked my suddenly dry lips and said, "Hey, stranger."

  Yeah, real original.

  She jumped at the sound of my voice, then paused before straightening up and turning to face me. Her mouth dropped slightly open, and her thick-lashed eyes rounded as she said my name on a hushed whisper. "Matthew. What are you doing here?"

  What was I doing here? I didn't know, exactly. I'd come because I couldn't stand the thought of her cutting ties with her father—and by extension with her entire family—just to prove to me that she could stand up to him. If this was some grand gesture she'd made on my account, I needed to tell her it had been wasted.

  And yet, a part of me was secretly pleased that she had gone so far to show me she loved me.

  So I hedged.

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  "I saw today's paper."

  She tipped her head to one side and pursed her lips. "And you came here to gloat, I suppose?"

  Ouch. That wasn't the response I'd expected.

  "Not at all," I said, wincing at the flat, emotionless tone of her voice. "Why would you think that?"

  "Isn't it what you've always wanted? For me to be free from my dad?"

  I opened my mouth to deny it, then shut it again as guilt stabbed through me. She was right. It was what I'd wanted for years.

  "Not like this," I said at last. "You didn't have to do this."

  Her lips pressed together in a tight line. "Yes, I did." She expelled a long, slow sigh. "I had to stop lying to myself. All these years, I made excuses for him, for the way he used people. For the way he used me."

  I stared at her. "You mean ... you mean, you didn't—" I broke off. I couldn't bring myself to say what I'd been thinking because it suddenly sounded shallow and vain, even to me.

  She stared at me. "You thought I did this for you?"

  My expression must have conveyed my guilt, because she laughed, and the sound was hollow.

  "I had to do it because I realized, however much I might love him, my father's basically a con artist. He just happened to use his skills to gain political power instead of to part people from their money. And for him, it was never really about doing right for his constituents, but about doing right for Everett Franklin." Her voice broke on the last words, and 75

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  her eyes glistened with tears. "He swore up and down he didn't know his campaign manager set Lincoln up, but in the end, I just couldn't believe him."

  I tried to process this flood of information and what it might mean to any future I might have—or not have—with Casey, and failed. If she hadn't broken with her father in a last-ditch effort to get me back, did she even want me back?

  Maybe my refusal to forgive her had hurt her even worse than her lie of omission had hurt me.

  God, was there anything here that could be saved?

  "So, what will you do now?" I finally asked.

  She shrugged. "I don't know. Even without my father, I still have plenty of clients here, but I'm thinking about the possibility of moving my base of operations and opening an office somewhere else, maybe in D.C. or L.A. I could start over without questions about my relationship with my dad following me like they will here."

  The thought of her moving away sent a cold chill over me.

  I couldn't let that happen. Life without Casey had sucked and would always suck, but my misery would be ten times worse if she was a thousand miles away. Even during those five months we'd been separated, I'd been able to see her on TV, to know she was all right even if I wasn't.

  Without conscious thought, I crossed the space between us and wrapped my hands around her upper arms. "You can't do that, Case."

  She looked up at me, searching my eyes for several slow, aching moments. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to kiss her.

  I wanted to hold her and never let her go.

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  "Why not?"

  "Because I love you."

  "I know. I love you, too." She sighed. "But
that's never been the issue, has it? It's never been enough for you."

  Apprehension coiled in my stomach, a snake preparing to strike a stinging blow. "No, but we can get married now. My mother told me your marriage to Linc was never valid."

  She shook her head. "No, we can't."

  The anger that had been simmering beneath my anxiety boiled up. "Why the hell not? What's your excuse now? You love me but you can't marry me. What kind of shit is that?"

  She gently pulled away and gestured around the room. At her desk piled high with books and file folders and papers. At the tops of the filing cabinets and the chair in the corner, all of them stacked to the verge of toppling over with ... stuff.

  "Look around you, Matty. I love you, but I love my job, too. I can't give it up. It's what I do, who I am."

  I wrinkled my forehead, confused. "Who said you had to give it up?"

  "No one, but I'm not stupid. I know what you want, and I know I can't give it to you."

  "And what, exactly, do you think I want?"

  "You want to marry someone like your mom, someone who'll cook and clean house and stay home with the kids while you bring home the bacon. And I'll never be that kind of wife, that kind of mother."

  I opened my mouth to tell her she was wrong, that I wanted her, that if I'd wanted to marry someone like my 77

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  mother, I'd damn well have fallen in love with someone like my mother, but Casey cut me off.

  "I didn't want to admit it to myself, but part of the reason I never tried to get a divorce was that being married protected me from getting married. All these years, you never asked me even to move in with you ... I thought maybe you didn't want to get married. Or at least if you did, you didn't want to marry someone like me. And after I got over being hurt by that, I was grateful. Because even though it meant I might lose you one day, it also meant I didn't have to change. That I could keep being—oh!" She broke off with a squeak as I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to my chest.