Mr. Imperfect

by Karina Bliss

  Kezia stifled a moan. It was too horrible to believe. Her mind scrambled for a reason to make it untrue. “But I never saw any marks on him.”

  “The beatings stopped when Christian was seventeen, big enough to fight back. Paul Kelly was a hell of a big man, built like an ox. They’d had a standoff apparently, and the boy said he’d kill Paul if he ever touched him again. Things had been quiet for over a year but that night Paul pushed his luck and gave the boy a whack. Christian said it was like a volcano erupting inside him. The next thing he knew Paul was on the floor covered in blood and he was running for help.”

  He blew a ring of smoke and paused to watch it dissipate. “He’d hit him a good one all right,” remarked Don with satisfaction. “When we got there, Paul was bleeding like a stuck pig but he’d recovered enough to shout that he was going to blow Christian’s head off at the first opportunity. I was all for calling the police but Christian swore me to secrecy. He left to see you then, and was gone by morning.”

  Kezia couldn’t hide her feelings, and the old man’s eyes softened. “I can’t believe the damn fool didn’t tell you.”

  “Did Nana know?”

  “Muriel thought she knew all his secrets but she didn’t know that one, and I never told her. It would have broken her heart thinking she’d failed him. You see, she found out the rest of his home situation when he was fourteen, but the boy begged her not to tell Child Protection Services. He said he’d managed for two years, was nearly a man.” Don snorted.

  “Anyway, in return for keeping his secret he had to accept some practical support and let her keep an eye on him. She used to say to me, ‘I’ve never met a kid so proud and so damn stubborn.’” Don’s gaze fell on Kezia. “That was why he gave her the IOU, so one day he could repay her in kind.”

  Her anguish must have been obvious because he patted her hand. “Honey, I think Christian’s independence was so ingrained he couldn’t tell all his secrets even if he wanted to.”

  Kezia couldn’t answer. Never come to the farm, promise me. Christian’s bandaged hand, shrugged off as a farm accident. She recalled his uncompromising mood that night driven not by arrogance but by desperation. With sickening clarity she saw their past for what it was—a wasteland of missed opportunities.

  Her pity died in the face of her anger. All those lost years they should have had together. If Christian had only trusted her. She stood. “We’ll let him make his own excuses, shall we?”

  Don jumped up and tossed his cigar into the flower bed. “Now, Kezia, remember we’re at a wedding.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, and he appeared even more alarmed. Oh, yes, Kezia Rose always cared.

  “Now you just stay here and calm down. I’ll fetch him out.”

  While Kezia waited, she paced the garden, back and forth, back and forth, kicking off her heels when they caught in the damp earth, too agitated to stop. She balled her hands into fists.

  But when a wary Christian finally arrived some ten minutes later, she was back sitting on the wall, legs crossed, sunglasses hiding her emotions. She didn’t bother with preambles. “Don told me that the night you left Waterview your father attacked you.”

  His face became expressionless. “Don likes to exaggerate, you know that.”

  Kezia got up and took off her sunglasses. “You beat the crap out of your father for beating the crap out of you.”

  Christian winced. “We had an altercation. Yes.”

  She came closer until only inches separated them. “Tell me the truth about your childhood right now or I swear I’ll make us this evening’s entertainment.”

  He shrugged. “My father was a mean drunk and my mother’s death made him meaner. The farm suffered; his health suffered, we had no money.” Christian’s tone was measured, almost indifferent, but Kezia watched his breathing change until it seemed he couldn’t get enough air. “I started stealing what I needed because I knew if the state got involved I’d be taken into care.”

  “Oh, Christian.” She watched the shields come up as he reacted to her pity.

  “Actually, I kind of liked the reputation I got as a bad boy. It beat being sad and pathetic.”

  The same damned pride that stopped him from telling her. “I can’t understand how you kept it secret so long.”

  “My father was careful where he hit me, so I could go to school and stay under the radar.” A half smile touched his lips. “Until Muriel caught me stealing eggs from her henhouse.”

  “But she didn’t know all the truth, did she?”

  “About the violence? No. In hindsight, I know she wouldn’t have turned me in. At the time, I didn’t trust her.”

  Trust. “Why didn’t you tell me that night?” she demanded. “You must have known it would have made a difference!”

  “I wanted you to choose me for love, not pity.” He made an impatient gesture when she tried to interrupt. “And don’t tell me pity doesn’t sway you. You spend your whole life following a kind heart.”

  If anything, the fact that he was so right and so very, very wrong heaped fuel on Kezia’s anger. “How dare you assume that responsibility. I deserved to know the facts, all of them, so I could make a real choice.”

  “What the hell do you want from me? An apology after fourteen years? Okay, I apologize.” His tone was bitterly sarcastic. “I’m sorry I wouldn’t allow my sordid past to cloud your judgment when I asked you to leave with me. I’m sorry your decision wasn’t in my favor but I learned to live with it, like I learned to live with my lousy childhood. Stop making such a big deal about a decision we both know you wouldn’t change. You told me so not two hours ago.”

  “I told you I looked for you the next day because I figured you had a right to the truth—”

  “Very noble,” he interrupted, but she talked over him.

  “Like I had a right to the truth, Christian, because of what we were to each other.”

  For the first time vulnerability flickered across his face and she realized she could destroy his peace of mind by telling him why she’d refused him. Like he’d just destroyed hers.

  The words trembled on her tongue. Did she love Christian enough to leave the truth unsaid?

  Yes. She did. Instead she said, “You know what hurts? That I never really knew you. You never trusted me enough to let me get that close.”

  He struck back with cool precision. “I always did have a good instinct for self-preservation.”

  Kezia buried her threatening tears under sarcasm. “Go back to the table and act like everything’s just fine—you’re good at that.” She bent to pick up her shoes, but he didn’t move. “Go!”

  She pretended to inspect the damage to her shoes until he went inside, then shoved them on, snatched up her bag and ran. At the entrance, she asked the doorman to call her a cab.

  “Where to, ma’am?”

  “The Waterview Hotel.” Only when the taxi was speeding away did she collapse against the seat, fragile and utterly exhausted. She would collect some clothes and drive back to Everton, hide out in a cheap motel until he left.

  She never wanted to see Christian again.

  CHRISTIAN SPEARED A PIECE of fresh asparagus, lifted it to his mouth and took a bite. It tasted like cardboard. Out of politeness he’d filled his plate when Bernice May had filled hers; now roast pork lay congealing in cold gravy while he toyed with the vegetables and made polite rejoinders to whoever spoke to him. Kezia still hadn’t come back and frankly he didn’t want her to. Enough already.

  “Yes, delicious,” he murmured to Bernice May who was cleansing her palate before dessert with a beer.

  “Kezia will miss out on ham if she doesn’t get a hurry on,” she said. “Don, you find her while I go save her a slab.”

  Christian dropped his knife and fork and reached for his water, trying to swallow past the tightness constricting his throat and chest. He hated what had just happened. Hated it.

  His father’s threats hadn’t driven him from Waterview that night—damn, h
e’d been living with those for years. It had been Don’s discovery of his secret. Even one other person knowing made it unmanageable.

  Seeing Kezia reel under the impact of the truth was worse than any physical blow of his father’s. It made him acknowledge his childhood after his mother died for what it was. Sordid. Heartrending. Unbearable. And maybe a childhood he deserved.

  The only honorable thing he’d ever done was keep the truth from Kezia that night. And he’d saved both of them a lot of grief. Clean, clear-cut choices. He’d lived by them; they’d saved his sanity.

  Feeling a tentative hand on his back, he swung around to see Don’s concerned face. More pity he couldn’t bear. “Sorry, Don, I’m needed urgently in Auckland,” he lied. “Will you tell Kezia goodbye when she shows?”

  “She’s already gone. Took a taxi fifteen minutes ago.” Don hesitated. “Look, why don’t you follow her and sort this out?”

  So she had no desire to see him, either.

  Inevitability washed over Christian. He and Kezia had come full circle. Ignoring Don’s suggestion, he pulled out his checkbook and wrote out an amount that had enough zeros in it to ensure he never had to come back. “Give this to Kez. Tell her to use it to finish the renovations properly and to develop all the initiatives we discussed.”

  When Don hesitated to take the check, he forced it into the old man’s hand. “Some things aren’t meant to be,” he said by way of apology. “This was one of them.”

  “I wish I hadn’t kept your damn secret,” grumbled Don, taking the check. “It only encouraged you to stay a loner.”

  Christian dropped a hand on his shoulder. “Give my farewells to the appropriate people, will you?” he asked, and left before Don could argue.

  In contrast to the noisy celebration behind him, the reception hall was dim and quiet. Christian strode through it and into the golden freedom outside, wrenching off his tie. But he still felt suffocated.

  To hell with it, once he was on the highway heading north he’d feel better. If he dropped by the hotel to collect his belongings he might run into Kezia and he couldn’t handle another scene. She could forward them later.

  Children were playing tag around the ornamental garden; one of them peeled off and raced toward him. John Jason. “Hey!”

  “Hey, yourself.” Christian kept walking and the little boy trotted alongside.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the city.” It occurred to Christian he wouldn’t see John Jason again and a sharp pang of regret stopped him.

  “Are you coming back?”

  Christian kept his answer deliberately vague. “Maybe one day.” Sorry, kid, I’m just not made that way.

  “You have to kiss me goodbye.” John Jason lifted his arms to be picked up. The boy smelled of talcum powder and strawberry shampoo but the cheek he presented was sticky with gravy. Christian kissed it anyway, then went to lower the child to the ground. Chubby arms wrapped around his neck. “Mummy said I mustn’t tell secrets, but I didn’t, did I?”

  “No, you didn’t,” Christian assured him. “I guessed, and then Auntie Kez told me.”

  Satisfied, the child allowed himself to be put down. “I ’spect she found it.” Christian, digging in his jacket pocket for the car keys, gave a preoccupied shrug. “They cry a lot,” John Jason insisted, “so it would be easy to find.”

  “What would?” The boy was obviously looking for some sort of reassurance so Christian tempered his impatience.

  “The baby,” said John Jason. “The baby Auntie Kezia lost.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  COUNTING TO SIXTY under her breath, Kezia swung the hose from the bean plants and watched the strawberry leaves bow under the arc of water. Shallow watering only encouraged roots to the surface. Damn Muriel’s indoctrination! She couldn’t leave without watering the dry garden.

  Her throat tightened and she lifted the hose and gulped at the streaming water, sending it splashing down her beautiful red dress. No, she couldn’t fall apart now. She turned the hose on the lettuces. Later.

  Later, when the solid walls of an anonymous motel muffled the sound.

  The lettuces grew waterlogged but Kezia didn’t notice, lost in a bitter truth. She wasn’t still single because she was discerning. It was because since Christian, she’d subconsciously dated men she didn’t love. Because if she didn’t love them, they couldn’t rip her heart out.

  She turned the hose on to the corn. How ironic that by dating playmates Christian had shown more self-awareness than she had. He knew he was damaged goods.

  Would our baby have lived if we’d trusted each other more? She bent to turn off the tap with exaggerated care. No, that was madness. Her unhappiness after he’d left hadn’t caused the miscarriage.

  Even with Christian’s revelation, three truths remained the same. They would have lost their baby. He hadn’t loved her enough. She hadn’t moved on with her life.

  But she would now.

  Turning, she walked smack into Christian’s broad chest. Terrified, her knees buckled and his hands closed around her arms.

  “You gave me such a fright,” she said weakly, and waited for him to release her.

  Instead his grip tightened. “The real reason you stayed. What was it?” Kezia went cold and still inside. He knew. And only one person could have told him.

  “What did Marion say?”

  “It was John Jason.”

  Kezia inhaled a sharp breath.

  The grip on her arms became painful. “He said you’d lost a baby. Was it fourteen years ago, Kez?”

  Very gently she shrugged out of his hold. “Yes.”

  Christian’s eyes closed briefly, then he walked to the other end of the garden. Kezia sank onto an iron-framed bench and waited. The sky had faded through the colors of sunset into night before he returned to sit beside her. “Tell me.”

  “I miscarried three weeks after you left. It wasn’t meant to be.” Our refrain. “Nobody’s fault,” she added softly, and a little of the torment left his face. “I hadn’t told Muriel and the miscarriage meant I never had to.” To Kezia’s surprise her voice caught on the next words. “Hardly a pregnancy at all really.”

  She thought she’d made her peace with those awful days when terror at the prospect of being a single mother had given way to a profound sadness that she had nothing left of Christian.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that night?” The words sounded wrenched from his heart. This was what she wanted to spare him, the final price of his secret.

  “You said you couldn’t imagine anything worse than having kids.”

  “Oh, God, Kez.” He still considered himself too scarred for fatherhood and the loss he felt for the baby frightened and confused him. “Even if it was true, you should have told me.”

  Her silence held some kind of accusation. “My secret has nothing to do with us. Damn it, I had a right to know, it would have changed everything.” No, he was digging himself into a bigger hole, reinforcing the case she’d made earlier.

  “I’d only just found out I was pregnant,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion. “Marion and I had been on the bus to Everton in the morning to buy the test. We sat outside the shop for twenty minutes before Marion gave up on me and went in and bought it. You see, I knew it would be positive even though we’d only been careless once.”

  She didn’t look at him, but he knew when she meant. “I was going to tell you that night but…” She shrugged. “Well, you know what happened next. After you stormed off I knew I should have told you, so the following day I went to the farm. You’d already gone and…” Her voice trailed off.

  “I’d already gone,” Christian echoed.

  HE SAT SILENT BESIDE HER, but Kezia sensed Christian’s monumental struggle against vulnerability, which his childhood had convinced him was a terrible thing. She knew he needed to lose that fight.

  She found herself praying as she waited, then icy cold reality doused her when he rose and walked away to the far
end of the garden, back into the safety of his shadows.

  That was when she knew she’d have to let him go.

  Christian had lost her because he hadn’t trusted her, but Kezia knew she’d been equally wary or she would have told him about the baby that night.

  She’d grown up in an environment where she had to earn love through acts of service, and Christian had never been dependent enough for her. Probably, she would have turned him down anyway, regardless of the baby, because she had no more trusted him to keep loving her than he had her.

  She still didn’t.

  Unable to bear the relentless waves of self-revelation any longer, she stood up. Christian looked back at her, his expression unreadable in the dusk. “Our child, what was it?”

  “Too early to tell.” Over time she thought she’d reached a stoic acceptance. But seeing the father of her child suffer the loss renewed her grief.

  “God, Kez, I’m so sorry.”

  For years she’d waited to hear those words, thinking they would heal her, make things right. But what she’d wanted wasn’t really an apology, what she’d wanted was happy-ever-after. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry, too.”

  His next question startled her. “Where do we go from here?”

  “This doesn’t change anything.” She couldn’t bring herself to suggest friendship. Better a clean break, a chance to move forward unencumbered by the past.

  “Doesn’t it?” He moved nearer and Kezia stepped back, came up hard against the garden bench.

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  Christian put a hand around her waist and pulled her to him. Kezia planted her hands against his chest. “It’s too late.” Under the fine cotton of his shirt, pliant muscle scorched her palms.

  “Then why do we still feel this?” Christian leaned into her restraining hands and brushed his lips along the curve of her clenched jaw. Warm lips on skin still cool from the hose water. Kezia dropped her hands and his mouth moved down to the pulse that leaped in her throat.