Dekker was waiting for her at the kitchen table. He had not helped himself to a beer, had not even taken off his jacket.
They looked at each other for a long, bleak moment. There were maybe four feet between them. But the look in his eyes told her it might as well have been a thousand miles.
Where have you been? she was thinking. What’s the matter? What has gone wrong? The questions echoed in her head, but somehow not a one of them made its way out her mouth.
He was the one who spoke first. “I have a few things to say. A little…explaining to do.”
She had to cough before she could get words out. “I…um, all right.”
He tipped his head at the chair across from him. “Will you sit down?”
She slid into the chair, folded her hands on the tabletop.
“Well,” he said, and cleared his throat.
She licked her lips, tightened her folded hands. She longed to tell him what was in her heart. But he had asked to go first. And she would give him that.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Where the hell to begin…”
“Just—”
“What?”
Her mouth felt parched. She had to force the words through all that dryness. “Go ahead. It doesn’t matter…where you start.”
“How about this afternoon?” His voice was hard, heavy with sarcasm. “How about that? How about Antonia Atwood, showing up here, proving that all you had to do was wait a little, and there would have been no threat to Sammy.”
She didn’t quite see what he was getting at. “All right,” she murmured. “What about Antonia? What about this afternoon.”
He made a low noise, one of pure impatience. “Oh, come on. You know what. This afternoon proved that we never needed to get married in the first place. And we wouldn’t have. If I hadn’t pushed you into it, it never would have happened. You would have had to get through a nerve-racking week or so. And then Antonia would have stood up to that husband of hers and everything would have worked out all by itself. But I couldn’t leave it, couldn’t let the problem take care of itself. I had to…turn your life upside down. And for what? It’s a very good question, don’t you think?”
She still didn’t know where he was leading her. But she could see very clearly that wherever—whatever it was—he was blaming himself.
“Dekker, you had no way of knowin’ what Antonia would do. And you did not push me into our marriage. I was willing, more than willing. We both know that I was.”
“Sure you were. Why wouldn’t you be? We’ve been…such good friends. So…close.”
“Why do you say it like that? Like there’s something wrong with what we have been to each other? There is nothing wrong with you and me, together. Our friendship has been one of the best and most important things in my life.”
“You trust me.”
“I do. Absolutely. With my life. You know that.”
“Well, yes I do know that. And I have to tell you, I lied in that message I left for you this afternoon.”
“You lied…”
“That’s right. I haven’t really been at the agency. I’ve been at my apartment. Sitting. And thinking. All afternoon. Into the evening…”
“Thinking about what?”
He looked at her, a hard, unhappy look. And then, abruptly, he stood. “Look. What’s the point of this? We don’t really need to go into all the gory details.”
“Yes, we—”
“No. We don’t. The deal is, you don’t need to be married to me anymore. The deal is, you never did.”
She stared up at him, her heart feeling as if it was just shriveling down to nothing inside her chest. “What are you telling me, Dekker?”
“I am telling you that I’m going to give you that divorce we talked about at the first. The divorce we agreed we would get when Robert Atwood was no longer a threat to you. I’m telling you that I’m setting you free. Right away.”
“But Dekker. I don’t want to be free.”
He stared at her with something that looked almost like pity. “Jo. You just don’t get it. You don’t even know…what you are. The kind of woman you are. The kind of man you deserve. Who have you been with? That idiot, Atwood. And me. You can do better. You will do better.”
She could not stay in that chair. She leaped to her feet. “I keep trying, trying to say it, to tell you how I really feel. I think I am sending out a very clear message. But somehow, you are not receiving. I will say it slowly. And I will say it clearly. Dekker, there is no one—no one—who is better than you.”
He only shook his head.
She felt as if she was slipping down a hill, grabbing at rocks and bushes, trying her hardest to halt the fall. And not succeeding. So she blurted it out. “Dekker, I love you. I love you with all of my heart. You are my husband. And I’m glad, so glad that you are. I don’t care how we got to it, what little lies we had to tell each other to give ourselves permission to take the big step. We’re married. I want us to stay that way. I love you and I don’t want anyone else.”
For half of an instant she thought she had him. Something like hope flared in those deep-blue eyes. But then hope faded. His eyes went flat. He spoke low. “You say that because it’s not in you to say anything else. You are loyal to a fault.”
“Dekker, I say it because it is the truth!”
“Don’t you get what I’m telling you? This whole thing, you and me, our wild time in Baja, I think…I wanted that. I think I wanted it bad. I think I’ve wanted it for a long time now, with you, and I’ve been looking for a way to give myself permission to have it.”
“So? What’s wrong with that?”
“I told you. You can do better. Damn it, I love you. I want the best for you.”
“You love me.” Her shriveled heart expanded to hard-beating life again. “You said it. You heard yourself. You admitted that you love me.”
“That is not the point.”
“Oh, yes. It is. It is exactly the point.” She started for him.
He threw up a warding-off hand. “Stay there. Don’t come any closer. I want you to have the best life can give you. And I am not it.”
She stayed where she was—but she spoke with the absolute conviction of the love that she bore him. “Oh, yes you are. There is no one better, truer, more right for me than you.”
He looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “What are you talking about? Look at my damn life. I mean, who the hell am I, anyway? I can’t help but wonder—and you should wonder, too. My ‘mother,’ in reality, was my kidnapper. In a way, my whole life has been a lie. I married a woman with serious emotional problems. And then, when things got tough, I turned my back on her. She committed suicide. And I almost gave up completely. I left the department, just walked away, kissed all my ambitions and dreams goodbye. I would probably be dead myself now, if not for you. I run a two-bit detective agency over a coin laundry in a badly maintained building downtown. And a few weeks ago I found out who my real family is, I found out I happen to be a very rich man. But that’s all I’ve got going for me, and that just dropped into my damn lap. I am a—”
That was it. All she could take. She cleared the two feet that stood between them and clapped her hand over his mouth. “You shut up, Dekker Sm—” she caught herself “—Dekker Bravo. I will not hear such things from you, such lies, such a terrible, cruel twisting of the truth. I am sorry, so sorry, about Stacey. About the hell she lived in, in her own mind. And the hell we both know she put you through. You could not have saved her. Nobody could have saved her—except Stacey herself. And she…well, she did not manage it. And that did almost kill you. Because you loved her. And you hurt for her, for all she was, for all she could have been, for all she could not get past.
“But what happened to Stacey was not your fault. And you only hurt yourself more, hurt everyone who loves you, by not letting her go, not forgiving yourself and getting on with your life.”
He grabbed her then, grabbed her by the arms and hauled her up ag
ainst him. His eyes burned into hers. “You can say that. You can say that, because—”
“Because it is true,” she said right into his face, pressing herself closer, harder, tighter to him than he was already holding her. “Because I love you, I love you with all I have got in me to love. I love you as my dearest, closest friend. As my husband, the one I want to share my life with. And as the lover who sets my body on fire.”
“Don’t,” he said, the word desperate, low, very rough. His hands hurt her, his fingers were like bands of steel on her arms.
And she didn’t care, she could take the pain. All she cared about was that he never, under any circumstances, let her go.
“Don’t?” She handed the word right back to him. “Don’t what? Don’t tell you the truth? Don’t ask you to stop lying, putting yourself down, trying to turn away from me and calling it for my own good? What are you saying, you are not good enough? Who has been the man in my family for ten years? Who shows up to fix the faucet when it won’t stop leaking? Who bails my crazy sisters out of jail? Who shows my little boy, by example, every day, what it is to be a man, to be the one we all can count on?”
“Jo, I—”
“Nope. Not. Wait. Oh, you have made me good and mad, Dekker Bravo. And as for your life being a lie, well, maybe Lorraine did keep a terrible secret from you. But everyone knows how much that woman loved you. She loved you more than her own life. And what about us, huh, what about all us Tillys and DuFraynes? What you have, with the family, well, that is no lie. You had a pretty good childhood, all in all. And I think I ought to know, bein’ as how I was there.”
“Jo…”
She realized she was crying. Crying. She couldn’t believe it. She never cried. The tears dribbled down her cheeks. She would have swiped the damn things away with a vengeance if he hadn’t had such a tight grip on her arms.
“And besides.” She had to pause to sniff good and hard. “Besides, poor Lorraine is like Stacey. She’s gone from us now. Time to forgive her. Time to move on. The sins of the past have been set right, I would say, as much as they ever can be.”
He said her name, again, in a whisper this time. And then he released his cruel grip on her arms. He cupped her face, hands gone suddenly so very tender, and rubbed at her tears with his thumbs. “Damn it…”
Oh, he was losing it. She could see it in those beautiful blue-black eyes. He was wanting her, she could feel that as she pressed herself so close against his body. He was…giving in, though he kept fighting it, giving in to love…
She stretched that little bit closer, just close enough to brush her lips against his. His breath caught.
She whispered against his mouth, “What are you talking about? Who do you think you are kidding? I deserve better, you say? Better than you? So what will that mean, then, if you do let me go? If we get that divorce and I start in with other men, trying to find with another what I’ve already got with you? Are you going to stand still for that, for some other guy putting his hands on me? Is that what you’re telling me, you’re going to sit by and watch me get what I deserve with some other man?”
He swore again, this time a word that burned her ears when she heard it.
She kept right after him, utterly shameless, pressing her breasts up to his chest, her hips to his thighs, letting the tears stream, unheeded down her cheeks. “Tell me, Dekker. Try to tell me that lie….”
That did it. His control broke. He took her mouth, hard. With a glad, triumphant cry, she parted her lips and sucked his tongue inside.
He wrapped his arms around her so tight, it knocked the breath from her body. Then he started walking her backward, across her kitchen floor. He turned into her bedroom, shoved the door shut with his heel.
His hands were all over her. And she gloried in every hungry, grasping touch. They tore at each other’s clothes, not bothering to take them off completely, only what they had to get rid of to get to each other.
He unhooked her bra, yanked her shirt up, latched that hot mouth of his onto her breast. She left him his jacket and his shirt, but went right to work unbuttoning his jeans, shoving them and his boxers down enough to free him.
The flared slacks she wore were something else again. They had to come all the way down and off, along with her panties.
She felt the air against the flesh of her legs. She was naked from waist to ankles, though her shoes and socks were still on.
He lifted her. She went with a glad cry, wrapping her legs around him, sliding her wetness down onto him, taking him inside.
He groaned. She took his mouth, took that groan into herself. He surged upward, filling her.
She stilled, opened her eyes, saw his eyes gleaming at her through the gloom of her dark bedroom. “Say it,” she commanded. “Say you love me. Say it now.”
He swore again.
She did not waver. “Say it.”
He groaned again. And he gave her what she wanted. “I love you.” He swore once more. “Love you, love you, love you, Jo…”
“Say you’ll stay with me. Never leave me. Be my husband. Forever. As long we both have breath in our bodies, you will be mine and I will be yours.”
“Jo…” He pressed up into her.
She shook her head, refusing to move with him. “I know it. I know it already. You are mine and you are not going to leave me. Because I know you. You wouldn’t…do this, with me, now. Under no circumstances, but most especially not like this, without any protection. You wouldn’t. Unless you had completely surrendered. Unless you finally understood exactly where you belong.”
“You are killing me…”
“No. I am loving you. And I…I want you to—I beg you to—say it.” He shifted beneath her, just the tiniest bit. “No! Don’t you move. Not until you say it.”
He made a guttural sound, something dragged up from the depths of him.
Tenderly she put her hand across his mouth. “Oh, say it. Please, please say it…”
He moaned.
“Yes. You can. You can say it to me….”
“I will…never leave you. I will…be your husband…”
“Forever.”
“Forever. As long as we both have breath in our bodies…I am yours, Jo. Always. I am yours….”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, yes…that’s it. That is exactly it.”
He pushed into her, hard.
“Yes! Oh, Dekker, yes…”
And the rest was pure magic. Hard and frantic. Wild and wet and fine.
When at last he slumped, spent, against the door, she whispered her love tenderly. He whispered his back to her.
He staggered to the bed with her and carefully laid her down.
They were naked in no time. He came into her waiting arms. She pulled the covers over them. They lay awake for another hour or two, whispering softly, sharing secrets and plans.
And then, wrapped up close and warm, together in the truest sense—man and wife, passionate lovers, the very best of friends—they drifted off to sleep.
They bought a seven-bedroom house, right next to Mesta Park in Heritage Hills. It was a beautiful old place with lots of interesting woodwork and lustrous hardwood floors, high ceilings and crown moldings and fine beveled glass in the windows.
The yard was a good size, had a pool and a brick fence around the perimeter, with an iron gate across the wide driveway. The fence and the gate went a long way toward discouraging the prying eyes of the press. And anyone the fence and gate didn’t take care of, Dekker’s pricey security system did.
In April, they threw a big party, for family near and far. It was a housewarming and also an opportunity to renew their wedding vows.
Bravos came from all over—Emma, Jonas and Mandy from Los Angeles, of course. And Marsh Bravo—Dekker and Jonas’s cousin—and Marsh’s family, too. They lived in Norman, just a twenty-minute drive from Oklahoma City. Marsh was the evil Blake’s son, the one who had found the first clues to the terrible deed his father had done. And there were more. Some
second cousins, from Florida and from Northern California—a pair of sisters, with their husbands and children. And from Wyoming, three other second cousins, and their wives and sons and daughters, as well.
There were a lot of Tillys, of course. And all the usual DuFraynes. And Antonia and Robert Atwood. Antonia positively glowed, and Robert stayed close to her, clearly smitten in spite of himself with his newly confident wife.
After a particularly gruesome binge around Christmastime, Uncle Hubert had joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He was sticking with it, too, attending meetings regularly, drinking only ginger ale at social occasions. So Joleen didn’t have to worry about taking care of him as the party progressed.
But there were plenty of other crises to deal with. Niki had found her first boyfriend. They were having some kind of fight. Niki kept bursting into tears at regular intervals. And DeDe was pregnant. She had trouble holding her food down, threw up on the back patio and then ran, mortified and sobbing, into the house. She locked herself in the upstairs bathroom and it took both Wayne and Joleen to coax her out.
Then there was Mama, who had a new boyfriend with whom she flirted and carried on in a shameless fashion. This was the third or fourth since the ice cream man back in October. They just never lasted. But Camilla claimed she was happy. And Joleen had to admit that she did seem to be, especially now that she and Antonia were so close. The boyfriends might come and go, but when Camilla Tilly found a true woman friend, it was always for life.
Dekker and Joleen renewed their vows after darkness fell, by the golden light of several rows of pretty paper lanterns strung from tree to tree, under the steady silver glow of a glorious full moon.
And as Dekker Bravo promised anew to love, honor and cherish Joleen for the rest of their lives, it came to him that the past truly had been put to rest. When he looked into his wife’s loving eyes, all doubt was vanquished. He knew exactly who he was.
The stolen Bravo Baby had found his way home at last.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-5718-8
The Marriage Conspiracy Page 19
