by Maisey Yates
They got into the car, and Danielle folded her arms tightly, leaning her head against the cold passenger-side window, her breath fanning out across the glass, leaving mist behind. She didn’t bother fighting the urge to trace a heart in it.
“Feeling that in character?” Joshua asked, his tone dry, as he put the car in Reverse and began to pull out of the driveway.
She stuck her tongue out and scribbled over the heart. “Not particularly. I don’t understand. Now that I’ve met them, I understand even less. Your sister grilled me the minute she got a chance to talk to me alone. Your father is worried about the situation. Your mother is trying to be supportive in spite of the fact that we are clearly the worst couple of all time. And you’re doing this why, Joshua? I don’t understand.”
She hadn’t meant to call him out in quite that way. After all, what did she care about his motivations? He was paying her. The fact that he was a rich, eccentric idiot kind of worked in her favor. But tonight had felt wrong. And while she was more into survival than into the nuances of right and wrong, the ruse was getting to her.
“I explained to you already,” he said, his tone so hard it elicited a small, plaintive cry from Riley in the back.
“Don’t wake up the baby,” she snapped.
“We really are a convincing couple,” he responded.
“Not to your sister. Who told me we didn’t make any sense together because you had never shown any interest in falling in love again.”
It was dark in the car, so she felt rather than saw the tension creep up his spine. It was in the way he shifted in his seat, how his fists rolled forward as he twisted his hands on the steering wheel.
“Well,” he said, “that’s the thing. They all know. Because family like mine doesn’t leave well enough alone. They want to know about all your injuries, all your scars, and then they obsess over the idea that they might be able to heal them. And they don’t listen when you tell them healing is not necessary.”
“Right,” she said, blowing out an exasperated breath. “Here’s the thing. I’m just a dumb bimbo you picked up through a newspaper ad who needed your money. So I don’t understand all this coded nonsense. Just tell me what’s going on. Especially if I’m going to spend more nights trying to alienate your family—who are basically a childhood sitcom fantasy of what a family should be.”
“I’ve done it before, Danielle. Love. It’s not worth it. Not considering how badly it hurts when it ends. But even more, it’s not worth it when you consider how badly you can hurt the other person.”
His words fell flat in the car, and she didn’t know how to respond to them. “I don’t...”
“Details aren’t important. You’ve been hurt before, haven’t you?”
He turned the car off the main road and headed up the long drive to his house. She took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“By Riley’s father?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly.”
“You didn’t love him?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t love him. But my mother kind of did a number on me. I do understand that love hurts. I also understand that a supportive family is not necessarily guaranteed.”
“Yeah,” Joshua said, “supportive family is great.” He put the car in Park and killed the engine before getting out and stalking toward the house.
Danielle frowned, then unbuckled quickly, getting out of the car and pushing the sleeves of Joshua’s jacket back so she could get Riley’s car seat out of the base. Then she headed up the stairs and into the house after him.
“And yet you are trying to hurt yours. So excuse me if I’m not making all the connections.”
“I’m not trying to hurt my family,” he said, turning around, pushing his hand through his blond hair. His blue eyes glittered, his jaw suddenly looking sharper, his cheekbones more hollow. “What I want is for them to leave well enough alone. My father doesn’t understand. He thinks all I need is to find somebody to love again and I’m going to be fixed. But there is no fixing this. There’s no fixing me. I don’t want it. And yeah, maybe this scheme is over the top, but don’t you think putting an ad in the paper looking for a wife for your son is over the top too? I’m not giving him back anything he didn’t dish out.”
“Maybe you could talk to him.”
“You think I haven’t talked to him? You think this was my first resort? You’re wrong about that. I tried reasonable discourse, but you can’t reason with an unreasonable man.”
“Yeah,” Danielle said, picking at the edge of her thumbnail. “He seemed like a real monster. What with the clear devotion to your mother, the fact that he raised all of you, that he supported you well enough that you could live in that house all your life and then go off to become more successful than he was.”
She set the car seat down on the couch and unbuckled it, lifting Riley into her arms and heading toward the stairs.
“We didn’t have anything when I was growing up,” he said, his tone flat and strange.
Danielle swallowed hard, lifting her hand to cradle Riley’s soft head. “I’m sorry. But unless you were homeless or were left alone while one of your parents went to work all day—and I mean alone, not with siblings—then we might have different definitions of nothing.”
“Fine,” he said. “We weren’t that poor. But we didn’t have anything extra, and there was definitely nothing to do around here but get into trouble when you didn’t have money.”
She blinked. “What kind of trouble?”
“The usual kind. Go out to the woods, get messed up, have sex.”
“Last I checked, condoms and drugs cost money.” She held on to Riley a little bit tighter. “Pretty sure you could have bought a movie ticket.”
He lifted his shoulder. “Look, we pooled our money. We did what we did. Didn’t worry about the future, didn’t worry about anything.”
“What changed?” Because obviously something had. He hadn’t stayed here. He hadn’t stayed aimless.
“One day I looked up and realized this was all I would ever have unless I changed something. Let me tell you, that’s pretty sobering. A future of farming, barely making it, barely scraping by? That’s what my dad had. And I hated it. I drank in the woods every night with my friends to avoid that reality. I didn’t want to have my dad’s life. So I made some changes. Not really soon enough to improve my grades or get myself a full scholarship, but I ended up moving to Seattle and getting myself an entry-level job with a PR firm.”
“You just moved? You didn’t know anybody?”
“No. I didn’t know anyone. But I met people. And, it turned out, I was good at meeting people. Which was interesting because you don’t meet very many new people in a small town that you’ve lived in your entire life. But in Seattle, no one knew me. No one knew who my father was, and no one had expectations for me. I was judged entirely on my own merit, and I could completely rewrite who I was. Not just some small-town deadbeat, but a young, bright kid who had a future in front of him.”
The way he told that story, the very idea of it, was tantalizing to Danielle. The idea of starting over. Having a clean slate. Of course, with a baby in tow, a change like that would be much more difficult. But her association with Joshua would allow her to make it happen.
It was...shocking to realize he’d had to start over once. Incredibly encouraging, even though she was feeling annoyed with him at the moment.
She leaned forward and absently pressed a kiss to Riley’s head. “That must’ve been incredible. And scary.”
“The only scary thing was the idea of going back to where I came from without changing anything. So I didn’t allow that to happen. I worked harder than everybody else. I set goals and I met them. And then I met Shannon.”
Something ugly twisted inside of Danielle’s stomach the moment he said the other woman’s name. For the life of her she could
n’t figure out why. She felt...curious. But in a desperate way. Like she needed to know everything about this other person. This person who had once shared Joshua’s life. This person who had undoubtedly made him the man standing in front of her. If she didn’t know about this woman, then she would never understand him.
“What, then? Who was Shannon?” Her desperation was evident in her words, and she didn’t bother hiding it.
“She was my girlfriend. For four years, while I was getting established in Seattle. We lived together. I was going to ask her to marry me.”
He looked away from her then, something in his blue eyes turning distant. “Then she found out she was pregnant, and I figured I could skip the elaborate proposal and move straight to the wedding.”
She knew him well enough to know this story wasn’t headed toward a happy ending. He didn’t have a wife. He didn’t have a child. In fact, she was willing to bet he’d never had a child. Based on the way he interacted with Riley. Or rather, the very practiced way he avoided interacting with Riley.
“That didn’t happen,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say, and part of her wanted to spare him having to tell the rest of the story. But, also, part of her needed to know.
“She wanted to plan the wedding. She wanted to wait until after the baby was born. You know, wedding dress sizes and stuff like that. So I agreed. She miscarried late, Danielle. Almost five months. It was...the most physically harrowing thing I’ve ever watched anyone go through. But the recovery was worse. And I didn’t know what to do. So I went back to work. We had a nice apartment, we had a view of the city, and if I worked, she didn’t have to. I could support her, I could buy her things. I could do my best to make her happy, keep her focused on the wedding.”
He had moved so quickly through the devastating, painful revelation of his lost baby that she barely had time to process it. But she also realized he had to tell the story this way. There was no point lingering on the details. It was simple fact. He had been with a woman he loved very much. He had intended to marry her, had been expecting a child with her. And they had lost the baby.
She held on a little bit more tightly to Riley.
“She kept getting worse. Emotionally. She moved into a different bedroom, then she didn’t get out of bed. She had a lot of pain. At first, I didn’t question it, because it seemed reasonable that she’d need pain medication after what she went through. But then she kept taking it. And I wondered if that was okay. We had a fight about it. She said it wasn’t right for me to question her pain—physical or otherwise—when all I did was work. And you know...I thought she was probably right. So I let it go. For a year, I let it go. And then I found out the situation with the prescription drugs was worse than I realized. But when I confronted Shannon, she just got angry.”
It was so strange for Danielle to imagine what he was telling her. This whole other life he’d had. In a city where he had lived with a woman and loved her. Where he had dreamed of having a family. Of having a child. Where he had buried himself in work to avoid dealing with the pain of loss, while the woman he loved lost herself in a different way.
The tale seemed so far removed from the man he was now. From this place, from that hard set to his jaw, that sharp glitter in his eye, the way he held his shoulders straight. She couldn’t imagine this man feeling at a loss. Feeling helpless.
“She got involved with another man, someone I worked with. Maybe it started before she left me, but I’m not entirely sure. All I know is she wasn’t sleeping with me at the time, so even if she was with him before she moved out, it hardly felt like cheating. And anyway, the affair wasn’t really the important part. That guy was into recreational drug use. It’s how he functioned. And he made it all available to her.”
“That’s...that’s awful, Joshua. I know how bad that stuff can be. I’ve seen it.”
He shook his head. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? To have somebody come into your life who’s beautiful, happy, and to watch her leave your life as something else entirely. Broken, an addict. I ruined her.”
Danielle took a step back, feeling as though she had been struck by the impact of his words. “No, you didn’t. It was drugs. It was...”
“I wasn’t there for her. I didn’t know how to be. I didn’t like hard things, Danielle. I never did. I didn’t want to stay in Copper Ridge and work the land—I didn’t want to deal with a lifetime of scraping by, because it was too hard.”
“Right. You’re so lazy that you moved to Seattle and started from scratch and worked your way to the highest ranks of the company? I don’t buy that.”
“There’s reward in that kind of work, though. And you don’t have to deal with your life when it gets bad. You just go work more. And you can tell yourself it’s fine because you’re making more money. Because you’re making your life easier, life for the other person easier, even while you let them sit on the couch slowly dying, waiting for you to help them. I convinced myself that what I was doing was important. It was the worst kind of narcissism, Danielle, and I’m not going to excuse it.”
“But that was... It was a unique circumstance. And you’re different. And...it’s not like every future relationship...”
“And here’s the problem. You don’t know me. You don’t even like me and yet you’re trying to fix this. You’re trying to convince me I should give relationships another try. It’s your first instinct, and you don’t even actually care. My father can’t stop any more than you could stop yourself just now. So I did this.” He gestured between the two of them. “I did this because he escalated it all the way to putting an ad in the paper. Because he won’t listen to me. Because he knows my ex is a junkie somewhere living on the damned street, and that I feel responsible for that, and still he wants me to live his life. This life here, where he’s never made a single mistake or let anyone down.”
Danielle had no idea what to say to that. She imagined that his dad had made mistakes. But what did she know? She only knew about absentee fathers and mothers who treated their children like afterthoughts.
Her arms were starting to ache. Her chest ached too. All of her ached.
“I’m going to take Riley up to bed,” she said, turning and heading up the stairs.
She didn’t look back, but she could hear the heavy footfalls behind her, and she knew he was following her. Even if she didn’t quite understand why.
She walked into her bedroom, and she left the door open. She crossed the space and set Riley down in the crib. He shifted for a moment, stretching his arms up above his head and kicking his feet out. But he didn’t wake up. She was sweaty from having his warm little body pressed against her chest, but she was grateful for that feeling now. Thinking about Joshua and his loss made her feel especially grateful.
Joshua was standing in the doorway, looking at her. “Did you still want to argue with me?”
She shook her head. “I never wanted to argue with you.”
She went to walk past him, but his big body blocked her path. She took a step toward him, and he refused to move, his blue eyes looking straight into hers.
“You seemed like you wanted to argue,” he responded.
“No,” she said, reaching up to press her hand against him, to push him out of the way. “I just wanted an explanation.”
The moment her hand made contact with his shoulder, something raced through her. Something electric. Thrilling. Something that reached back to that feeling, that tightening low in her stomach when he’d first mentioned Shannon.
The two feelings were connected.
Jealousy. That was what she felt. Attraction. That was what this was.
She looked up, his chin in her line of sight. She saw a dusting of golden whiskers, and they looked prickly. His chin looked strong. The two things in combination—the strength and the prickliness—made her want to reach out and touch him, to test both of those hyp
otheses and see if either was true.
Touching him was craziness. She knew it was. So she curled her fingers into a fist and lowered her hand back down to her side.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice rough. “After going through what you did, being pregnant. Being abandoned... You don’t want to jump right back into relationships, do you?”
He didn’t know the situation. And he didn’t know it because she had purposefully kept it from him. Still, because of the circumstances surrounding Riley’s birth, because of the way her mother had always conducted relationships with men, because of the way they had always ended, Danielle wanted to avoid romantic entanglements.
So she could find an honest answer in there somewhere.
“I don’t want to jump into anything,” she said, keeping her voice even. “But there’s a difference between being cautious and saying never.”
“Is there?”
He had dipped his head slightly, and he seemed to loom over her, to fill her vision, to fill her senses. When she breathed in, the air was scented with him. When she felt warm, the warmth was from his body.
Her lips suddenly felt dry, and she licked them. Then became more aware of them than she’d ever been in her entire life. They felt...obvious. Needy.
She was afraid she knew exactly what they were needy for.
His mouth. His kiss.
The taste of him. The feel of him.
She wondered if he was thinking of their kiss too. Of course, for him, a kiss was probably a commonplace event.
For her, it had been singular.
“You can’t honestly say you want to spend the rest of your life alone?”
“I’m only alone when I want to be,” he said, his voice husky. “There’s a big difference between wanting to share your life with somebody and wanting to share your bed sometimes.” He tilted his head to the side. “Tell me. Have you shared your bed with anyone since you were with him?”
