“Where’s that sister of mine?” he shouted as Shannon quickly stepped from the shadows to say hello.
“Hi, Ted. What’s up, big brother?” she said as he hurried toward her.
“What in the bloody hell are you doing hiding alone in the dark out here, sis?” he asked as she leaned in for an awkward two-cheek kiss.
God, she hated some of his fussy pretentiousness, Shannon thought, while he went through the motions of the ridiculous European custom and she tried not to cringe.
A second later, Nick stepped from the shadows saying with a tone that made clear he’d noticed Shannon’s attempt to hide her natural reaction to her older brother, “Not so alone, as you can see.”
It was like being in the presence of angry, territorial beasts, Shannon thought, except without all the snarling and aggression. Ted was being his usual sanctimonious self while Nick was clearly playing his well-deserved alpha-male card. She was impressed that he knew without being told that her brother was a control freak who thought he knew so much better than everyone else on the planet.
Ted’s shocked expression said it all as he took in Nick’s imposing appearance and his sister’s presence by the big man’s side.
Nick didn’t care who this guy was, he didn’t like his look or the way that Shannon kept her distance. He could see why they’d never been close, concluding it had a lot more to do with the man being an ass than the simple fact that he was so much older than her. He’d been in far too many boardrooms and business meetings through the years not to recognize somebody as full of their own importance as this fellow was.
“Ted, this is Nicholas Barrett” After a brief pause for good measure she added, “My fiancé”.
“Your what?” he bellowed. “I didn’t realize you were even seeing somebody. When did all this happen? Don’t you think it’s a little awkward unveiling a secret fiancé at mom and dad’s party?”
The man was a train wreck of negativity and Nick didn’t like him one bit.
“Hardly a secret, Theodore,” Shannon bit out in a tone that said even more than the way she spit out her brother’s formal name.
As if on cue, Ted’s unctuous wife, Jane, appeared in the fray, trying to decipher what all the kerfuffle was about.
“What’s going on, Ted?” she asked before she made out Shannon’s presence on the terrace.
“Oh my god, Jane! The prodigal daughter has returned home and chosen this very moment to produce a fiancé to ruin my parents’ night!” he cried.
And just like that, she’d had her fill of his sibling judgment. “Okay, Ted,” Shannon snapped, “that’s quite enough. They are my parents, too, and nobody’s night has been ruined except yours, of course. I am sorry that my appearance as the quote, unquote ‘prodigal daughter’ as you say, has upset you, but in the words of my generation, ‘tough titties, pal.’”
Nick almost laughed as his little one rose to the occasion, as he knew she could, promptly putting her shithead brother in his place.
Jane looked stunned when she finally saw Nick and Shannon standing there. “A fiancé, you say?”
Facing Shannon, she pretty much said the same thing her husband had although with a somewhat more polite tone. “This is sudden, my dear. I didn’t realize you were involved with anyone, Shannon.”
Sighing deeply, Shannon tried a half-smile and made an attempt to introduce Nick to her sister-in-law.
“Not so sudden, Jane,” she said. “Nick and I are, well…we were friends a long time ago. We’ve recently reconnected, and there you have it. You guys need to calm down. I’ve just become engaged, am at a reunion of sorts, and have brought my fiancé to meet the family. Where’s the big deal in that?”
To say the conversation went from sibling snark to atomic explosion a nanosecond later wasn’t doing the moment justice. A light bulb figuratively lit up over Jane’s head as she snapped frowning eyes at Shannon and Nick, pursing her thin lips and looking less friendly by the heartbeat.
Casting Shannon a withering look, Jane hissed, “Not sudden, you say? Why am I not surprised to hear that?”
“Ted!” she cried at her husband. “It’s him. How can it not be, your sister being the fool she is!”
Ted’s resentment toward her was nothing compared to the anger evident on his face when he focused burning eyes on Shannon and the man at her side.
“That’s what this is, isn’t it, Shannon? This is the man who got you in all that trouble, isn’t it? The man who left you on your own after the accident so your brother and I had to play caretaker!” The woman was all but screaming now, making Shannon cringe as each vicious word flew at her.
Wait! What? Nick’s mind screamed. Accident? Trouble? What in the hell was going on here?
“How dumb can one girl be? Bringing him here like this.” Jane snarled.
Nick was suddenly a statue, unable to move, and unless he got control of himself and started breathing, he was about to hit the floor from oxygen starvation. What the hell had that viper-tongued woman just said? Had he heard her correctly when she said he’d gotten Shannon in trouble?
A black hole was opening up in his gut while a fear so strong that his knees almost buckled rocked Nick to the core.
In a voice he barely recognized, Nick croaked out a strangled plea made up of just one word that said everything, “Shannon?”
Oh my god, no! Shannon’s mind screamed. This can’t be happening. Damn Jane and her big mouth.
Nick was her first priority, so she turned close to him and touched his arm to reassure him, saying, “It’s not what you think, Nick. Okay, it probably is what you think, but I can explain.”
“Is that woman saying what I think she’s saying?”
In one final desperate attempt at denial, as she clung to the hope that her privacy had been respected, Shannon glared at her sister-in-law and said, “I’m not sure what Jane thinks she knows. There was a car accident a few weeks after I returned to Boston. Got a good thump on my head, along with a few other issues, and since I’d been staying at Ted and Jane’s, they were more or less forced to take on my convalescence. I hadn’t realized till now how much they resented the intrusion in their lives.”
Shannon hoped her comments were enough to deflect Jane from any further damage with more comments.
“Oh, give it up, sister-in-law. Did you really think that Ted wouldn’t find out the truth? You were a basket case, with a concussion being the least of your worries. He doesn’t know, does he? You haven’t even told him,” she said with disgust. “Getting a twenty-year old college student pregnant,” ugh, she bit out as she glared at Nick.
Next thing Shannon knew, her parents appeared out of nowhere, apparently having been in the shadows the whole time, listening to the awful sibling confrontation.
The expression on the faces of her older parents didn’t help Shannon’s growing hysteria bank off any.
“Is this true, daughter?” her mother barked.
“Shannon, explain yourself.” her father snapped as he turned cross eyes her way.
Could time stand still? Was there a pause button she could push to give herself the time to gather her emotions and not make this any worse? Shannon could feel Nick standing like a stone monolith at her shoulder. Shit.
Ted and his uptight wife were tittering quietly to each other, shooting looks of contempt her way. The sight of her parents, though, faces brimming with disappointment, stiffened her spine. Time to put her big-girl knickers on.
“Mom, Dad. It’s alright,” Shannon said quietly with a trembling smile.
Reaching for Nick’s hand, she stepped a bit closer to him, sending a clear message of where her loyalties were.
“Nick and I need to talk. Would you take Ted and get him a bourbon, Dad?” she asked sweetly while nodding reassuringly in her father’s direction. “I think he needs it!”
Looked again at her mother she attempted a calm smile, “Mom, I love you. Trust me. Everything will be fine.”
As the four retreat
ed back inside to the lively celebration going on around them, Shannon’s mom hesitated at the last second.
Before pulling the French doors shut, leaving them alone on the darkened terrace, she smiled at her daughter. “I’m glad, you know,” she said. “Glad that your head was full of fanciful, romantic notions as a young girl. They made you brave, my only daughter.” Looking from Shannon to Nick and back again, she chirped a final, “Use your head and your heart, Shannon.”
* * *
Considering the import of her mother’s words, Shannon knew there was a message in there. It’s how her mother was. She wanted her to think and to feel. It was the first time that Shannon could ever recall her mom approving of the fancy-filled rose-colored glasses that had so marked her youth. She was letting her know that her romantic visions were okay and also to be brave.
Nick’s hand was cold as ice, reminding Shannon she couldn’t be a coward and that she had to do as he had done for her. Explain everything. Honestly. It was her turn in the batter’s box with the whole game riding on how she handled the next ten minutes.
Drawing her quiet, maybe too quiet, giant of a man deeper into the private shadows to a small loveseat bench, Shannon pushed him to sit since he was not making any attempt to act on his own. When she slid to his side, still clutching his hand like it was an anchor in a storm, the look of shock, confusion, and fear on his face slammed into her heart.
There was no way to dress up what she had to say, so she took the band-aid approach—rip off the truth quickly and accept the pain so the healing can begin.
“I had a miscarriage.”
Her previous words to Nick when she’d said it wasn’t what he thought as she tried to explain Jane’s accusation circled in his brain. She had a miscarriage, but it wasn’t what he thought? Oh, holy god. Did that mean it wasn’t his? Had she found comfort after the painful way he’d thrown her aside in somebody else’s arms? He thought he might throw up.
“Was it mine?” he asked in an anguished whisper that tore through Shannon’s soul. Every horrible thing he was feeling right now, she understood. She’d been there herself and remembered with vivid clarity that feeling of being gutted, of having your heart quite literally ripped from your chest, and how the overwhelming feeling of helpless loss froze the soul. Paybacks were a bitch, and she wanted no part of this one, that particular emotional debt having been paid in full.
“Yes, it was yours. Could only ever have been yours. I’ve never been with anyone but you. Look at how we are together, Nick. I couldn’t ever be that way with anyone else!” she cried, shuddering at the thought.
Okay. Let in some oxygen, his mind screamed. So it was his, but still, she’d said it wasn’t what he thought. What the fuck did that mean? How many other options were there beyond parentage? Nick’s mind searched for answers but came up empty, firing on every cylinder all over the emotional map.
Had she known when they’d talked that last time? Jesus, he felt sick. He had been a vicious, cruel prick as she cried and silently took everything he’d thrown at her while he deliberately set about destroying their love. Had she known then that he’d gotten her pregnant? The thought of Shannon with his child in her belly while he hurt her so badly made him wish for a quick death to escape the horror seeping into his veins.
For once, Shannon had no problem reading the thoughts flashing across Nick’s mind. A grimace he let loose was like a road sign, letting her know what former moment along their journey together he was revisiting in his mind.
“I never knew, Nick. Didn’t have even the slightest clue, I swear.”
She squeezed his hand where it lay limp and lifeless in her grasp. Nick’s anguished eyes searched hers for more. Shannon sighed and squeezed a little stronger.
“None of the Western women had regular cycles while we were in the middle of nowhere. Everyone manipulated their menses with the pill or an implant. It was one of the things the project recommended for all females since running out to the drug store for tampons every few weeks was not on the agenda. There was no way for me to know when I’d missed a period.”
Nick nodded but didn’t say anything. His face told her he was struggling to grasp everything that was being thrown at him.
“Finding myself traveling back to the states a month after you left was a fluke. One of the ambassador’s daughters needed a multi-lingual chaperone to get her home safely when an urgent medical procedure was needed and I got the nod. The trip from where we were in Africa to Washington, D.C., was grueling, and I was not in the best of shape after the long journey.”
“You were by yourself,” he mused out loud, lost in his memories of that time.
“Yes. After we’d…parted,” she said diplomatically, “I went back to Boston and tried to put my life in order. That’s really how I came to be staying with Ted. I still had another semester in school and no place to live until the term started, so necessity forced me to crash there. It was only supposed to be for a week or two while I lined up somewhere else, but one day…”
Shannon stopped altogether and tried to control the rush of emotion flooding her chest. This was the part of that dreadful time that she tried so hard to avoid. Her own personal redaction of an event she wanted to ignore the existence of.
Coughing to clear her thickening throat, she continued, but in a much quieter voice.
“One day I was driving when a sudden searing pain exploded in my abdomen. I must have blacked out because the next thing I knew I was in hospital with an intern telling me I was lucky to have only banged into a tree at a relatively low speed. Concussion and a bump on the head. I thought that was it until the doctor arrived and filled in the blanks. Shortened version—cyst erupted. Lost consciousness. Sorry but they couldn’t save the pregnancy.”
“You hadn’t known,” Nick muttered, letting the pieces fall into place.
“No, Nick. I hadn’t any idea. What they said saying didn’t make sense. The whole you’ve had a miscarriage thing didn’t seem real. How could you lose something you hadn’t known existed?”
“Was it the anxiety, Shannon? Had that caused…”
“Oh my god, Nick, no!” she cried. The doctor assured me over and over it was nothing like that. Even if I had known, there would have been no way to predict the ruptured cyst. All I remember is an agonizing pain and then nothing. Apparently there was internal bleeding, shock. I was only about nine weeks along, and well…there wasn’t anything to be done.”
She let a few moments of silence hang between them before continuing.
“It took me a while after that to pull myself together. Everything that had happened and all that I’d felt and experienced kept piling up until it was just too much. Remember what you told me about losing yourself for a while, drinking too much? Well, it was like that, only without the drinking.”
“No wonder you were so angry and bitter at first. Why didn’t you tell me this right away, Shannon?”
“I couldn’t. How do you say, ‘Hey I was pregnant, only I didn’t know I was pregnant, and by the way, I had a miscarriage. Pass the mashed potatoes, please?’ I didn’t think anyone knew. It was one of those deep, dark secrets we keep buried in our hearts, Nick. Maybe it would have been different had I been aware, but to be told a baby I hadn’t known about wasn’t going to be was beyond what I could handle.”
They sat in silence for a bit, while Shannon replayed over and over the series of events that had nearly destroyed her.
Nick was desperately trying to come to grips with all that he’d learned in the last half hour. He looked at the woman by his side. The woman he loved and adored beyond measure. Knowing now what he didn’t know then, Nick was astounded that she’d let him back in at all. He’d always loved her, and at a time when he should have been protecting her and taking care of her, he had cast her away. Even the bullshit he’d fed himself all these years about having sacrificed his happiness to protect her didn’t assuage his guilt.
“I don’t understand why you’re still here,
Shannon. Maybe it would have been better for you to run screaming from me. I let you down. Horribly. In the worst way a man can let down the woman he loves. How can you forgive what I’ve done?” he asked in anguish. “All this time, wasted. And for what? So you could be left alone to grieve something I singlehandedly destroyed?”
He lifted her hands to his mouth, pressing desperate kisses to her trembling fingers. “I am sorry, Shannon. More sorry than you could ever imagine.”
She loved him so much. That he so easily shared his emotions with her was a balm for her soul. He was crushed, and she knew it would be some time before he recovered from the shock of what he’d been told, but there was no way he was getting away from her now. Not ever again.
“I’m here, you silly, because I love you.”
He raised tear-filled eyes to hers. Was that hope she saw mixed in with his fear and pain?
“Unless you can tell me you don’t want me anymore, I am sticking by your side forever and always, Nicholas Barrett. You know everything now. There isn’t anything left in the shadows to prevent us from leaving the past in the past.”
It was impossible to know who made the first move, but seconds later she was crushed in his arms as they kissed with a tenderness that filled her heart to bursting. She put a hand at his nape and opened her mouth to give him access while he swiped his tongue around hers in a kiss that meant more than any other ever had.
A long time later, with Shannon nestled securely in his arms, a position he decided was exactly where she should be, Nick whispered softly in her ear, “Are we alright, little one?”
“Yes, my love, we are more than alright, and as soon as you can wave that magic Barrett wand and hopefully speed up the red tape, I intend to make an honest man of you. Will you marry me, Nick? Can we get started right away on the white picket fence and the mini-van loaded with car seats?”
Eight years of loneliness melted away along with a whole host of ghosts and regrets, leaving them both looking forward instead of running from the past.
Love Redone Page 40
