“Why?”
“Well, nursing homes aren’t always suitable.”
“No. I mean, why does Clayton pay for him to live here?”
Maggie looked from me to Bea and back to me. “Dale is Clayton’s father.”
20
CLAYTON
The buzzer went off in my condo, and it was such an unfamiliar sound that it took me a second to recognize it.
“Yes?” I said when I pushed the button near the door to my suite.
“You have a guest,” the doorman said.
“There must be a mistake. I’m not expecting anyone.”
“Veronica King,” he said, and I swear to God, the thrill that went through me. It was almost embarrassing.
“Send her up.”
I’d sent her the codes last week. Why wasn’t she using them and coming straight up? She was the kind of person who would have them locked down in her memory.
I opened the door to my penthouse and waited for the elevator to bing and open. When it did, and I got a good look at Veronica’s face, I realized why she wasn’t using the codes.
Something had happened. Something big. And bad.
She wasn’t here as my lover and would-be fiancée.
She was here to get some answers.
“Hello Veronica,” I said.
“Clayton.”
“You seem—”
“Upset? Yeah, upset is a word I would use. Confused, that works, too. I would even go so far as to say pissed. I am pissed, Clayton.”
I stood back to let her in and she stormed by me, bringing the smell of fire and brimstone with her. Dread settled in around me, but with it was a kind of awe. I could not pretend that I didn’t like her like this. Her hands so firmly on the reins of herself.
But considering I was the thing she was charging at, I knew enough to be worried.
Briefly I thought of the letter to Dylan, though there was no way she’d found out. Should she, that would be a problem. Madison had been right about that.
I shut the door behind her and followed her into the kitchen where she turned to face me. Her eyes shot off sparks and her skin was flushed.
Anger suited her.
“What’s happened?” I asked. I found myself sitting down in my calm, surrounding myself with it, another skill from my childhood. I’d used my calm as a buffer against my father’s rage. Not that it had helped, but if I screamed back at him, things got bloodier. Faster.
“Bea and I went out to the cabin.”
Cabin? I thought.
“Your cabin!”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know, Clayton. To see why you wanted that land so badly?”
“If you had asked—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t make my not asking the problem here.”
I nodded.
“Maggie was there, she was the first thing I saw, and you know what I thought?” she asked. Oh, it broke my heart knowing what she’d thought.
“Maggie’s an employee,” I said. “A highly trained nurse. That’s all.”
“Yeah, I know. The conclusions I jumped to are on me. Totally. And I have to work on that. I didn’t even realize my dad left these scars on me. But the last thing I expected was your father.”
“Dale,” I corrected, a knee-jerk reaction. A protection mechanism I was exceedingly careful with.
“He’s not your father?”
“That man you met today. Sweet guy? Stroke survivor? Yeah, that…” This sounded stupid, even to my own ears. I looked away from Veronica, stepped into the dining room and the work I had spread out on my table.
“Don’t.” She caught me as I walked by. “Don’t pretend this is nothing. Don’t go do something else like what we’re talking about doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t,” I said, though I hadn’t meant to. “I’ve spent six years making sure it doesn’t matter.”
“Things don’t work that way,” she said. “I spent five years trying to pretend you didn’t matter, but look at us now.”
I sighed and pushed my hands into my pockets because I wanted to touch her. I wanted to touch her so we could stop talking about this. I’d picked up condoms on my way home and all I wanted to do was make love to her.
Distract her until she stopped caring about this.
“Clayton,” she said. “Tell me what the hell is going on.”
Right. Answers. Truth. No lies. That had never seemed so hard before.
“Dale is my father. He had a stroke six years ago and it erased…him.” That was literally the best way I could explain it. “He has no memories of me. Of his past up to the afternoon he had the stroke. Except of my mother.”
“Oh, my God, Clayton. That must have been so hard.”
My laugh was more bitter than I wanted it to be. “It was a gift. A gift I never saw coming.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she whispered. “You lost your father.”
My back teeth clenched hard, biting back the words that sought to get out.
She didn’t need to know the truth about my father. About my childhood. What good would that do? Those memories? That life? It was like a disease. I didn’t want her pity.
“Clayton,” she breathed, like she knew how hard it was. She touched my face and I flinched.
“I used to…” I swallowed and my mouth tasted like bile. “I used to take money out of his paycheck. Not a lot. Not enough that he’d notice. But just a couple of bucks every week. Kept it in a roll in the toe of an old gym shoe.”
“What was the money for?”
“A bike.” I blew out a long breath. “So I could ride the hell away from him.”
I could feel her attention like a cold breeze on a hot day.
“He was a drunk. A mean one who made his point with his fists. And he didn’t like me much. There were nights I was sure he wanted to kill me.”
Veronica looked at me with her mouth agape. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and I shrugged.
“We’d come to a kind of…agreement. After years of dog fights. Hank let us stay in the cabin for as long as I worked for him. But once I started moving up and making real money I left him there. And…we never talked. Or saw each other. And then he had the stroke in a bar in Dusty Creek. Some drinking buddy of his got him to the hospital. When I got there…it was done. Over. He was gone. And Dale was there. And he was sweet and kind. He…could play chess. Inexplicably, he liked me.”
“That must have been so hard,” she said.
“You’re not listening if you think that.”
“No. I’m listening. And I hear you. You still had all these bad memories and after his stroke you were the only one who had them. “
She was right. So right it hurt. “Those aren’t memories anyone needs.”
“When my mom died, Bea was too young to really remember her. And Dad, I don’t know if it was just easier for him to pretend like he didn’t remember, or that…Mom never existed at all, but he didn’t talk about it. So I was all alone with those memories, and it got to the point that I started to wonder if what I remembered was real. Or if it was something I’d made up to feel better. Like…a bedtime story.”
Veronica’s words rang a distant bell for me. A long-hidden and never-thought-about-if-I-could-help-it truth. About memory and what could be built on top of it.
“No part of my childhood was a bedtime story. A nightmare, maybe.”
I turned away or tried to; Veronica wouldn’t let me. She grabbed my shoulders and held me still. “You should have told me.”
“Maybe,” I said, which was really as much as I could give her.
“No. You should have told me.”
I shook my head.
“Stop. You should have told me.”
“About what?” I finally asked. “What part of this do you want to know about? On which date do I tell you the shitty story about my dad shooting my dog? Or the time he broke my eardrum and I had to walk five miles to the hospital?”
&
nbsp; The memories were coming up out of nowhere. A geyser of shit I’d tried to forget about.
“I loved you, Clayton.”
I shook my head. That was somehow worse than talking about my father and Dale.
“Stop.”
“Do you think I’m lying?” she asked, and when I looked at her I saw the truth she was trying to tell me.
“No,” I said. “But you loved what I showed you. And I never showed you that. Since I was sixteen I’ve been burying that life. That person. Who I am now is built on the grave of who I was.”
She sucked in a breath. “I did that, too,” she whispered. “I built a whole new life on top of the girl I’d been.”
I stepped back like I’d been slapped. I’d done to her what my father did to me. Forced her underground. To hide and rebuild into something else. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.”
This was why she would never love me. And why I could never ask her to.
“Bea thinks I’m crazy for even thinking about marrying you,” she said.
“Bea’s probably right.”
“But the more I know about you…the more I want to know. The more I want. Period.”
These words crackled inside of me. Embers catching fire. “More.”
“Yeah,” she said and stepped forward. “More truth. Fewer secrets. More you. Less…the you that you want me to see. More reality. Less lies. If we’re going to stand a chance, you have to tell me these things. The good and the bad.”
It should have been easy. For any other man standing in front of the woman he loved, it should have been a goddamn relief to put down the show. The pretense.
But there was part of me that believed that all I was was the pretense. All I was was the show. The scaffolding and walls I’d set up around the boy I’d been. I wasn’t sure who I was inside this shell.
It was easier when she touched me. That day on her couch, playing strip conversation, that had felt good. Right. I’d been closer to…me…than I’d been in years.
And now, with her fury like smoke in the air, she was standing so close I could feel her body breathe. She was standing so close I could smell her. Roses and dogs and Texas wind.
Ronnie.
It was easy to kiss her. She put up no fight. It was easy to pull off our clothes. She helped, her fingers making short work of my belt. My zipper. She pushed my shirt up over my head. It was easy to walk her back to my bedroom, to lay her out across my mattress.
She was beautiful. In my bed. My life. Now that she was here, I couldn’t imagine losing her again.
The words I love you almost fell out of my mouth. To stop them I kissed her. I filled my mouth with her. My head. She became, in that moment, the only thing that mattered.
“Tell me,” she breathed, her body slick and shaking beneath mine. “Tell me you bought condoms.”
I laughed against her skin. “I bought condoms,” I said.
“Hurry,” she said. “Just…hurry.”
“In a second,” I told her. This. The sex. This was how I’d won her. How I’d showed her what we could be like. What I could give her. When we were in bed, there was no part of me that remembered being scared or alone. When we were in bed, I was Clayton fucking Rorick and I made her come better than anyone ever had.
I parted her legs, looking down at her, looking over every inch of the body I’d already memorized.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Staking my claim.”
“Don’t—”
“Shhhh,” I said. “I’m very busy.”
I cupped her full breasts, licked her pink nipples until they were hard in my mouth, and I sucked on them until she moaned and whimpered beneath me. Her belly was soft and her skin was perfection and I kissed my way down her body to the beautiful curls between her legs. I spread her wide and I…owned her. I owned her the only way she’d ever let me.
I tongued her and ate her and I made her wet and messy. I made her scream and cry and sweat into my sheets.
But it still wasn’t enough.
“Tell me,” I said, rolling the condom over my dick so hard it hurt.
“More, Clayton. More.”
“Beg me.”
“Please! Oh, my God, please.”
I wish I could say that I kept my shit together. That I made her come a thousand more times. But I was so far gone for her. I eased my cock into the sweetest pussy I’ve ever known and I was done. It was clumsy and wild and far removed from the way it had ever been between us before. I felt naked and sure that she could tell I was a mess. A fumbling boy.
But she had her arms and legs wrapped around me so tight. So strong. In that bliss, that pure physical moment, there was no her. And no me.
There was us.
And it was how I wanted it to be. Forever.
VERONICA
His breath was a damp plume against my shoulder, his hand pressed wide and flat against my hip. I could feel his heartbeat in his palm. Or maybe it was mine.
The edges right now were really, really blurry.
And I felt no need to clarify them.
Maybe, if this was going to work, I needed to get used to this.
And so did he.
“You okay?” he asked, and I almost laughed. Never had the answer been quite so much yes as it was right now.
“I am. You?”
“I…don’t know.”
I propped my head up on his chest, my hands under my chin. I didn’t say anything. I just gave him time, and after a while the words started coming.
“Your dad gave me a summer job when I was sixteen. Working at the office in the city. I took the bus at 5 a.m. to get there. I had one tie. One shirt. One pair of pants. At lunch I told people I was going to go for a walk, because I never brought a lunch with me and didn’t have money to eat out.”
It was odd how I could imagine that. A proud young version of Clayton, telling minor lies to protect himself.
“When people asked about my dad I told them he was a high school football coach.”
“Really?”
“Like on that Friday Night Lights show.”
“You wanted your dad to be Coach Taylor?”
Bea and Sabrina had been all about Tim Riggins, which I got, but I’d wanted to do bad, bad things to Coach Taylor.
It occurred to me suddenly that my daddy issues might just have manifested in a different way.
But now didn’t seem like the time to talk about that.
“He was just the opposite of my dad. And then…I just kind of kept telling these stories about who I was and where I came from. I was an A student and wrestled Varsity. My mom worked at a nursing home. I had a baby brother. They were easier things to say than the truth. When people asked about my family, they didn’t want to hear about my dad passing out in the bathroom. Shooting my dog because he was barking at night. My sister that left and never came back.” He shook his head. “There were so many lies.“
“They weren’t lies,” I said. “Not…really. They were wishes.”
He looked at me so long, so carefully. “That’s exactly what they were,” he finally said. “But then I got promoted at King Industries. And promoted again. And again. And your dad was an asshole, I can’t deny that, but he took an interest in me and he saw something in me that my dad never could.”
It was bittersweet that my father could be so good to him and shit to me.
“But it was nice. I wish I’d been stronger, for your sake. But what your dad gave me, I soaked up. It mattered to me, even when I knew what he was doing to you and your sisters. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for all of that.”
“Stay here,” I said.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
I shook my head. I could barely walk after what we’d just done. I’d need some Gatorade and some protein if I had to drive a car anytime soon. “I’ll be right back.”
Naked—which was kind of a big deal for me—I walked from the bedroom back into the living are
a where I found my purse on the kitchen island.
The watch was in my purse. I’d put it in there after the funeral. Because I didn’t know what else to do with it. I’d tucked it in one of the dumb outer pockets where no one ever put anything except their own cell phone when they wanted to make themselves crazy.
I grabbed the watch, sent up a quick prayer that I wasn’t making the mistake of a lifetime, and walked back into the bedroom.
Clayton lay there, above the covers like he had no shame and, really…why would he? The guy was perfect. A metabolic miracle. Tall and lean without trying too hard. I saw, in a sudden moment of clarity, the physical resemblance between him and Dale. A certain rawboned lankiness.
“Everything okay?” he asked, propping himself up on his elbow.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, stark fucking naked at the foot of the bed. “About the difference between the truth and no lies.”
“Yeah?” he said.
“And no lies isn’t the truth. It’s the difference between vulnerable and protected. And I’m a big fan of protection. But if you’re always protecting yourself you can’t actually ever be vulnerable. And if you’re not vulnerable you’re not telling the truth.”
He sat up, his eyes wide, like he knew I was doing something…big. Something scary and real.
I pulled my hand out from behind my back and showed him the watch. “When I gave this to you five years ago, I was being honest. I was being vulnerable. And I want to give it to you again.”
“Veronica,” he breathed. He pushed himself up to the end of the bed. “You don’t have to—”
“I know,” I said. “I know I don’t have to. But that’s what gifts are. They are the things you do and the things you give because you want to. And I want to give you this.”
I grabbed his hand and opened his fist. And he wasn’t fighting me, but he wasn’t taking the gift the way I’d expected him to.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I choose you.”
There. The words were out.
He grabbed me by the waist and pulled me down onto the bed, rolling us until he was over me.
The Tycoon Page 16
