by D L Lane
Tears burst from her, “I have to tell Ho-Howie I can’t have him do-doing the yar-yard work any-anymore.”
“Aw…Princess. Settle down now.” Her Dad took a seat next to her, placing his big palm on her back and started rubbing circles between her tense shoulder blades. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“No, Daddy. It-it’s not go-going to be o-okay!”
When she heard, “Danny, don’t worry about Howie. I made sure he was taken care of,” body rocking sobs hit her.
“Y-you should-shouldn’t have done tha-that, Gage.”
“Danny. Don’t cry.” He took a seat on the other side of her, his hand coming to her knee and squeezing. “Please.”
Gripping the bottom of her shirt, because she needed to hold onto something, tears streamed down her face before she started on her word-vomit.
“I can’t keep him on, I can’t pay Mrs. Beil, need to te-tell her, I’ll ha-have to sto-stop our yearly con-contract with the pool gu-guys. The fune-funeral home. Mar-Marcus always paid th-the utility bi-bills and I-I…”
That was all the blubbering, borderline, nonsensical words she could manage before the waves of gray started overtaking her vision. She tried to take a breath as the lightheadedness struck, along with grief, mortification, and a million other emotions. They all won the battle, and Danica blacked out.
Chapter Sixty-One
When Danica opened her eyes, it took her a minute to figure out she was cradled in someone’s arms before she shifted her gaze.
“Hi,” he said.
She was looking into stunning silver eyes. Gage’s eyes, and for a moment, just a single moment in time, she was fine. Then her reality came back, as well as a thought—a lightning strike.
“I need to get up!”
“Danica—”
“No. Help me get up.” Her voice was manic, she realized, but she couldn’t focus on that or anything else at the moment.
With an exasperated sigh, Gage complied and helped her.
When she got to her feet, Danica noticed everyone—her mother, her sister, Mason, and her dad were there. But she made tracks to Marcus’ office, all of them trailing behind her one by one.
Once inside her husband’s private sanctuary, she went to the far wall where a Monet hung, ran her fingertips down the side of it until she hit the little latch, and swung the door hidden by the painting open, to reveal a safe.
Trying to be careful, though her movements were more jerky than smooth, she punched in the combination to release the door, took a breath, then opened it. When her eyes focused in on the contents, her legs about gave out again, but this time it wasn’t with heart-wrenching panic, but of relief, as she gazed at the five half-inch bundles of cash. Grabbing one, she looked at the top bill. It’s a hundred. Which meant, she had ten-thousand dollars in her hand, and another forty sitting on the shelf inside the safe.
While that was a lot of money, it wasn’t going to keep her, although she didn’t want to be kept. Her husband was the one who didn’t want her to work, insisting his wife never would. But she would find a job doing something. What that would be was another problem to solve at another time. Right then, Danica needed to focus on what she could do. She could pay the funeral home, and everyone else.
A little ray of hope lit, her mind became clearer. She had a lot of stuff. She didn’t need it. The paintings in her husband’s office were worth a small fortune on their own. Jillian dealt in art; she could call her bestie about selling them for her. And her jewelry... Danica glanced at the sparkling ring on her finger. All but for her wedding rings, she didn’t need any of the other expensive things. Never did. Marcus was the one who’d insisted on her having them.
I’ll sell them, too.
“Honey,” Breck said, voice weary as she stepped up to her. “Are you okay?”
Danica realized she was staring into the safe while her mind was working overtime at the beginning of a problem-solving plan.
Gaze sliding over to meet her sister’s worried green eyes, she said, “Not yet, but I think I’m going to be.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
It took Gage a little while to convince Danica’s family to go home for the evening, assuring him he wasn’t leaving and would make sure she and the twins were all right.
“We still need to finish our discussion, G,” Mason had said.
They had started talking about the past—as in his and Danica’s—while they were hauling gym equipment into the garage earlier, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Howie. Then more disruptions by a phone call Mason took, followed by a call on his cell which he needed to deal with, and then two more calls he made. One to Dixie, telling her he wouldn’t be back in the office until Monday, and another to his mother to see if she would take care of his fish for him.
“We will, brother,” Gage was able to assure Mason eventually.
“Talk about what?” Breck had asked him.
“Nothing you need to worry about, babe.” Mason leaned over and placed a soft kiss to her lips, doing that thing he did well—distracting his wife.
But, thankfully, they all left a little over an hour ago, and the house was blessedly quiet.
“Danny?” he called, stepping into the twin’s bedroom, where she was getting them ready for bed.
“Yes?”
“I need to take a shower. Will you be okay with the babies, or do you need my help?”
Glancing back at him, she smiled. Not her best or brightest, but it was a smile. “Sure, Gage. I do it all the time.”
That made him scowl. Hadn’t Marcus helped her?
Deciding she wasn’t going to do anything by herself any longer, he went to the bookcase, grabbed a diaper, then stepped over to Aaron who was lying on his back, playing with a toy on the changing table.
“What are you doing, Gage?”
“I’m going to help,” he said.
She was snapping Ari’s jumper thingy. “I’ll take care of him in just a second.”
“I’ve got it.”
“You know how to change a diaper?”
One side of his mouth quirked up. “I learned this morning.”
“You did?”
“I only wasted three, but after that, I got the hang of it. Isn’t that right, buddy?” He tickled Aaron’s tummy, making the boy giggle.
Danica chuckled, and the sound was phenomenal. “You’re good with them, you know. Have you ever thought about having children of your own?”
“No,” he said as he pulled Aaron’s tiny pants off his legs.
“Why not? You’d be a great father.”
Gage paused a moment, wondering if she could handle hearing the truth, then decided he wasn’t going to tell her anything but the truth. He stopped what he was doing to meet her curious gaze. “After the whole Jenny thing, I knew I wouldn’t have any children of my own.”
The curiousness he witnessed earlier turned into… not anger, but sadness he thought as Danny’s face fell. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
“The thing is, we do, Danny. We’ve always needed to talk about it.”
She placed a sweet kiss to her daughter’s cheek, put Ari in the crib, turned on a butterfly mobile, then stepped up beside him.
“Danica?”
“Let me get my son settled. Go on and take your shower.”
“No.” He put a hand on her arm, stopping her. “You started this conversation, and we are going to finish it.”
Her blue eyes snapped celestial fire as she looked at him, but her voice was low as she said, “Go, Gage.”
“Not happening.”
“Aaron can’t just lay half-undressed on the changing table.”
“I agree. Let’s get the little guy ready for bed.”
Quietly, the two of them worked together to change the boy’s diaper and his clothes, Gage handing things over like a surgeon to a nurse in an operating room, until Danica picked Aaron up. She kissed his cheek, placed him in his crib, turned on his mobile, flipped on the n
ight light, and said, “Goodnight, Ari, and Aaron. Mommy loves you,” and out the door she went.
With a sigh, Gage ran his fingers through his hair. “Night, you two. Sweet dreams.”
He closed the door to their room behind him and went looking for Danica, seeing the back of her escape into the master suite.
Well, if she thought that would stop him, she was wrong.
Upping his stride, he stopped her from closing her bedroom door with a palm. “We’re not done talking, Danny.”
“I am.”
“I’m not.” Stepping inside, Gage shut that door behind him, enclosing them in.
“Gage—”
“Nope. You asked me a question, and I’m going to answer you fully. So take a seat, or stand there with your arms crossed glowering at me, but either way, you will listen.”
With a huff of air, Danny dropped her arms, spun around, stomped to a chair in the corner, and took a seat.
He didn’t like the distance, so he went to her, knelt beside her, and said, “I told you a long time ago Justin wasn’t mine, but you stormed off before I could say much more.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Too bad, because we are talking about it.” Reaching out, Gage took her chin, turning her head toward him. “I made a huge mistake. I admitted that to you then, and I’m admitting it to you now. If I could go back in time and change my behavior when it came to Jenny, I would, but I can’t. What I did was wrong. I shouldn’t have—”
“Had sex with her multiple times?”
“No. I shouldn’t have. But my regrets don’t really change anything, do they?”
“They don’t.”
“Look,” Gage said, gazing into her wounded eyes, a wound Marcus wasn’t responsible for, but he was. “I came to tell you Justin wasn’t my child that day because I was hoping we could work things out. That maybe, in time, you could forgive me, and we could, at the very least, get our friendship back. But what I wanted was more than a friendship. And we were more than friends Danny. You know it, and I know it.”
She closed her eyes, shutting herself off from him.
“Look at me.”
The stubborn woman shook her blonde head.
“Please?”
Finally, she complied.
“Admit to me we were more than friends.”
“Gage…I.”
“Say the words, Danny.”
“We—” She worked her bottom lip over with her teeth.
“Give me the truth. Give yourself the truth.”
Danica balled her fist in her lap.
Gage placed his palm overtop the tight knot. “Say it.”
She blew out a breath, tipped her head back, exposing the smooth span of her throat, then whispered, “I loved you, Gage. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I was just a silly girl, but I was in love with you.”
He closed his eyes, hearing the finality of past tense, and breathed through the pain. “And I broke you. I broke us. I mangled your love.”
“When you told me about Jenny being pregnant, you devastated me in ways I have never fully recovered from. So, when you came to me and said her baby wasn’t yours, the damage was already done. You slept with her, did things with her. I wanted to do those things with you, and that wasn’t going to go away for me.”
Looking into her face, he whispered, “I’m so, so sorry I hurt you, Danica. You were the last person I ever wanted to cause pain.”
“Whether you meant to do it or not, you wrecked me, Gage. The kind that, well, I don’t know I have the words to explain.”
“You don’t need to explain. I already know. Shattering you killed me. It still does.” Gage stared at her, her beautiful face, the slope of her nose, the line of her lips, the way her golden hair framed her cheeks. “You asked me why I didn’t want children.”
Danica shook her head.
But he gripped her hand and confessed, “I didn’t want them because I couldn’t have them with you.”
Chapter Sixty-Three
“I didn’t want them because I couldn’t have them with you.”
Gage’s soft words had become a broken record, Danica playing them over and over in her mind as she sat in her bedroom, staring off into the distance. That meant he had loved her once; however, she wasn’t sure if knowing that made things better or worse. When they were growing up, he had moments where she thought maybe, just maybe, he did think of her as something more than a little sister to protect, then he would do something to make her change her mind, only to make her change it again. But, if she would have known, without a shadow of a doubt, he loved her… Would that have made a difference back then?
Probably not. Hearing he had been with Jenny would have crushed her just the same, because regardless of knowing how he had felt, she knew what she felt.
Listening to the quiet, she finally pulled herself out of the stupor Gage’s confession had put her in, her mind clicking over to the bathroom in the guest suite. The last time J.J. had come to stay, she’d used up all the towels, and Danica knew she hadn’t restocked the linen closet in there.
Jumping up from her spot, she went into her en suite, grabbed an arm full of folded, clean towels, and headed for the guest room. Gage was more than likely in the shower, so she’d slip in, put the towels on the foot of the bed, knock on the door to the bathroom to tell him she’d left them for him, and go.
Danica might be caught in a tangle of emotions that both her husband and Gage had put her in, but she wasn’t a bad hostess.
Armed with fresh bath towels, she tapped lightly on the closed door, didn’t hear anything, so she went in.
The lamplight on the nightstand was on, shining down on a black gun, which she would need to talk to him about. Danica didn’t want firearms around the babies.
Her attention shifted to Gage’s cell phone and wallet placed beside the scary weapon, then over to a big black duffle bag open, and a scatter of clothes on the bed that had been made, but not very well.
She grinned, remembering his bedroom back in the day being a huge mess. This wasn’t that bad in comparison she figured as she went to place the stack of towels on the foot of the bed.
Danica paused when she noticed the bathroom door open, steam coming out. But what held her in place was the mist swirling around Gage like something you would see in a movie dream sequence.
She should go. She really should, but Danica couldn’t locate her legs—she was frozen there.
With his back to the door, a blue towel wrapped around his lean hips, low enough it showed off the two dimples on the small of his back, he scrubbed another towel through his wet, raven-black hair. Then some of the vapor lifted.
Danica’s eyes widened, and not at the magnificent, seriously muscled body, but by the mass of crinkled, discolored skin covering the entire span of his shoulder blades, continuing up into his hairline on the back of his neck.
Oh, Lord. Gage has been through so much. Thank you for sparing his life. Continue to help and to heal him.
Her heart, if it hadn’t already been wounded, would have broken open and bled out at seeing what was usually hidden by his clothing—scars she’d never seen on him before.
Perhaps she’d made a sound, she didn’t know, but something snagged his attention, making him turn to face her, the towels she held tumbling from her hold. “Gawonii… your back. Does it still hurt?”
Gage stalked forward. “What are you doing?”
“Towels,” Danica managed, her eyes lifting from the deep V-shape on his lower abdomen, to writing. Writing that sidetracked her from the previous question she’d asked.
Slowly, she reached out and touched the dark ink imprinted in his skin. “You have a tattoo,” she whispered as she tilted her head, trying to understand what she was looking at.
His hand grabbed hers, putting a halt to her tracing fingertip.
Lifting her eyes to his, Danica said, “Let me see.”
He just stared at her for a long moment.
<
br /> “Gage?”
When he closed his eyes, his long, dark lashes sent spiky shadows across the tops of his sculpted cheekbones.
“Please, Gawonii. Let me see.”
Slowly, his eyelids lifted, and he let go of her hand, never saying a word.
Danica went back to tracing the ink. It was a capital D, but it looked exactly like her handwriting. And around that, it read, “A dream within a dream.”
“The poem. Do you remember it?”
His question drew her gaze up to his face. “Yes.”
“The day you read that to me, I couldn’t pull my eyes from you. You were so beautiful.”
“I, I—”
“I had this tattoo designed a long time ago. I had something with your signature on it,” he said, “so I asked the artist to ink the D in the spot where the baseball that would have hurt you broke my ribs instead.”
“You—” Danica’s jaw dropped, her head spinning at this newest revelation.
“I loved you, Danica Dawn.” Gage framed her face with his large palms, looking directly into her eyes. “I’m still in love with you.”
~
Kiss her, kiss her, kiss her, ran through Gage’s head in wild abandon, but he couldn’t. Not yet. Danica wasn’t ready to go there. He knew that, but his body? Well, that was a whole different issue.
“Danny,” he whispered, trying to keep himself in check, “it’s getting late, and I need to get dressed.”
He dropped his hands from her face and took a significant step back, but she took a step forward.
“You should go,” he said.
“Don’t.”
Gage quirked a brow. “Don’t do what?”
“Don’t pull me in, then push me away. We’ve already been there, done that. So let’s… Let’s not do it anymore.”
“You don’t get it.”
She frowned. “I guess not. So, tell me.”
“If you don’t leave, I’m going to do something we will both regret.”
