Redemption Bay_Contemporary Romance

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “Yes. I took McKenzie out, along with a couple of boys she’s watching for a friend. We had a picnic dinner and fished a little.”

  “Any luck?”

  He could tell by the edgy emotions in her eyes that she had some ulterior motive there that had nothing to do with talking about fishing. “I didn’t have any, but one of the boys caught a nice-sized lake trout. They’re taking it to a neighbor.”

  “Oh, how nice. What a generous, kind woman she seems to be.”

  “Yes.” He could feel her searching look, but to his relief, she didn’t press him about his relationship with McKenzie. He wasn’t sure how he would answer her if she did.

  “That boat is so beautiful. I can’t get over it. The Delphine model was always one of my favorites. It was one of your grandfather’s, too. My father, I mean. He was so proud to have worked on them at the boatworks.”

  She didn’t talk about her father often, who died when he was five or six. He had a few vague memories of the guy, mostly as a stern man who didn’t seem to laugh much.

  Her family had been poor, bordering on destitute—especially with seven children. His grandfather had been a part-time pastor paid a pittance by his small congregation and had supplemented the family’s income by taking a job at the boatworks, as his father had done before him.

  He should offer to take her out on the boat while he was still in town. The thought came to him out of the blue, shocking the hell out of him. Before he could act on it, McKenzie’s lights came on. A few moments later, she walked out onto the terrace, most likely looking for her dog.

  He could see when she spotted his mother. Her mouth made a little O and she gave him a meaningful look as she waved.

  “Hello,” she called. “Sorry to bother you. I’m just looking for my dog. Looks like she’s here. Rika, come on, girl.”

  The cinnamon poodle nudged Hondo one last time before she turned and bounded up the steps to her person.

  “Sorry. I’ll get out of your way. Good night.”

  She wasn’t exactly subtle, his McKenzie. She wanted him to find peace with his mother and she obviously didn’t think he could achieve that with her there. He watched her go back inside, trying hard not to notice those tan shorts and her long, lusciously tawny legs.

  “So,” Lydia said slowly, drawing his attention back abruptly. “Mayor Shaw. Every time I see you, it seems you’re with her or you’ve just been with her. Is something going on there?”

  He felt that little tug in his chest again, the one he didn’t want to think about yet. “She’s a friend.”

  “I like her very much,” Lydia offered, “and not only because she was a good friend to Lily. She seems like a lovely person.”

  Yes. She was. “I like her, too,” he answered. Because he wasn’t quite ready to accept how much he liked her—or, for that matter, to talk about her with his mother, of all people—he quickly changed the subject.

  “Somehow I don’t believe you came here to talk about boats or about my temporary neighbor. Perhaps you could tell me your real reason.”

  Lydia gave a nervous laugh. “Maybe I just wanted to stop and chat with my son.”

  “Oh?”

  She seemed to grow increasingly flustered. “This is stupid. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  Guilt pinched at him for not making this easier. She obviously had an agenda, something she wanted to discuss, and he was making the conversation unnecessarily confrontational. He remembered what McKenzie had said and resolved to try harder.

  “If you want to chat, we can chat. I’d like to wash up first. I smell like trout.”

  She blinked a little, obviously caught off guard. “I... No. Of course not. I’ll just stay out here on the swing. These summer evenings by the lake are too rare and beautiful to waste and you have such a spectacular view here.”

  “Can I bring you something?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Hondo will keep you company.”

  He headed inside and scrubbed his face and hands, even changing into a clean shirt that didn’t smell like lake water. On impulse, he grabbed a longneck beer for him and poured a glass of wine for her.

  When he walked outside, twilight had descended in all its summer magic. He found his mother on the swing, gazing up at the dark silhouette of the Redemption Mountains across the bay.

  He handed her the glass. “I know you said you didn’t need anything but I remembered white wine is your favorite. A friend of mine has a winery in Sonoma and she keeps me well-supplied.”

  “Thank you.” She took the glass and took a rather large gulp of it.

  Why was she so nervous? He could tell she was uneasy about being here. Her face seemed unnaturally pale and her gaze seemed to bounce from the lake to the mountains to him and then back, as if she couldn’t quite figure out where to settle.

  “Is something wrong?” he finally asked.

  “This is hard. So much harder than I thought it would be.”

  He didn’t press her, only sat beside her in silence. She would eventually get around to it, he figured.

  “I suppose first I should ask if you would mind if I started...seeing someone.”

  This startled a laugh out of him. “Seriously? You’ve been divorced for fifteen years. Joe’s been gone for five. I guess it’s time, if you’re sure you’re ready. Is this a general question or are we talking about someone in particular?”

  “Someone in particular,” she said.

  He couldn’t see her features clearly in the pale light but he somehow had the impression she was blushing. “Anyone I know?”

  She was quiet for a long time. “Russell,” she finally said. “Dr. Warrick.”

  Ben supposed he wasn’t really surprised, especially when he recalled the doctor’s probing questions the day Ben returned to Haven Point.

  Doc Warrick had been a constant presence in their lives when Ben lived at home. As Lily’s primary care physician, he had been there every step of his sister’s difficult journey.

  “He’s a good man,” Ben said. “I’ve always respected him very much.”

  Lydia made a small sound and then to his great horror and astonishment, she burst into tears.

  Tears. His mother. Two things he didn’t know how to deal with separately. Throw them together, and it was like a hot, steaming pile of stress suddenly tossed into his lap.

  “I don’t understand. I only said he’s a good man. Why would that possibly make you cry?”

  Lydia sniffled. “Did you...ever make a decision you thought was exactly the right choice in the moment, the only choice, but later you realized what a mess you had made of things?”

  He could think of plenty of decisions that had gone south but nothing that would have made him burst into tears.

  Her question was apparently rhetorical.

  “I did that,” she said, without waiting for him to respond. “To you. To myself. Even to your...to Joe.”

  He raised his eyebrows, aware he hadn’t heard her use his father’s name in a long, long time.

  She sniffled a little more but seemed to gain control over her emotions after strenuous effort. “I need to tell you the truth. Russell isn’t sure he wants me to. I think he’s afraid of what you’ll think of both of us—of what you’ll think of me, in particular. I have kept this secret for all these years. That should be enough, isn’t it?”

  He had no idea what she was talking about—and suddenly he wasn’t so sure he wanted to know. He had the strangest feeling that something significant was about to happen, as if he was teetering on the edge of something and only needed a push to go tumbling over.

  Lydia pulled her sweater more tightly around herself and released a ragged little breath.

  “Okay. I just have to say it. There’s no other way.” She paused
and finally turned to meet his gaze. “Son, I don’t know how to tell you this but Joe Kilpatrick is not your father.”

  The words seemed to come from far away, as if he were hearing them on a loudspeaker that wasn’t quite turned up high enough. He stared at her, unable to process what he had just heard.

  Joe Kilpatrick is not your father.

  Even the echo of the words in his head didn’t make sense.

  “I know what you must be thinking,” Lydia went on in a rush, “and you’re absolutely right. I should have told you a long time ago. I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve wanted to but... How does a mother find those words, especially to her grown son, whom she loves more than anything?”

  He still felt as if he were out on the Delphine, only this time a typhoon had blown through Lake Haven and the boat was rocking wildly, tossing him from stern to aft and back again.

  A million thoughts raced through his head, foremost among them one central concept.

  Of course Joe Kilpatrick was not his father.

  He thought of how Joe seemed to despise him, how before Ben had left Snow Angel Cove, the man could barely look at him except to spew ugly cruelty—the same man who had once patiently baited his hook the same way he had done for Caleb and Luke that evening.

  “Did he know? He must have known.”

  “Not at first. Oh, Ben. It’s such a long and ugly story.”

  He barely heard her, still trying to absorb the ripples of shock that radiated around and through him.

  While most of him was still reeling, a tiny corner of his brain must have been working feverishly to make the connection. He combed back over what she had said, that Dr. Warrick hadn’t wanted her to tell him.

  The pieces suddenly all clicked into place. He knew it was true, even as his mind couldn’t absorb one more stunning revelation.

  “Dr. Warrick,” he said as a statement, not a question. What would be the point of asking?

  She gave a gasping sort of sob, but nodded. “Yes,” she whispered. “The boy I loved since I was just a girl.”

  “You loved someone else but you married Joe Kilpatrick, anyway?”

  “That’s the difficult choice I was talking about.”

  She was shaking, he realized. The chains of the swing trembled a little, like the effects of aftershocks.

  “Let’s go inside, where it’s a little warmer,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No. I’m all right. To tell you the truth, it’s...easier out here, where I can pretend you can’t see me in the dark.”

  He couldn’t see much of her, just vague shadows and hollows. Perhaps it was better this way.

  Joe Kilpatrick was not his father.

  He felt as if some arduous weight had been lifted from him—though, oddly, he couldn’t exactly say the emotion coursing through him was relief.

  “What happened?”

  “Russell and I fell in love the summer before my senior year of high school, though I secretly had loved him far longer than that. Forever, it seems like. He had just started his first year of medical school. The army was paying for it and he was so busy, but he still wrote to me throughout that whole last year I was in school and would call me sometimes from a pay phone on campus. He was the one bright spot in my life. My mother was dying of an aggressive cancer and my family was struggling. We didn’t have much money and little health insurance. My dad hardly slept, he was so worried about how he was going to take care of a dying wife and all her medical bills, work his job at the boatworks and take care of all of us.”

  She rarely talked about her mother’s death. He only remembered her crying and going to the cemetery a few times a year, on her mother’s birthday and on Mother’s Day.

  “After my mom finally died in April of that year, I knew I had to go to work to help out. I left school early, against my father’s wishes, and was lucky enough to be hired as personal secretary to Mr. Kilpatrick, Joseph Senior, even though my only experience was high school typing class.”

  In her lap, her fingers twisted together as if she were ghost knitting.

  “He was a good man who had sympathy for my family’s situation. I’m sure that’s the only reason he hired me.” Her teeth flashed a little in the darkness as she gave a slight smile. “Oh, and he liked pretty girls, too. That probably didn’t hurt—not that he ever was the sort to do anything more than tease. He was a good man, Joe Senior.”

  She swallowed.

  “I met your...Joe Junior, after I’d been there a week. He was five years older than me and had been away at college and I guess he took an instant liking to me. Like Joe Sr., he also liked pretty girls.”

  Her mouth tightened a little and he felt an echo of an old fury. Joe had cheated on the marriage and made no secret of it.

  “Joe asked me out a few times and I went, even though I told him I had a boyfriend.”

  “So why go at all?”

  “My father encouraged me to go out with him. Joe Jr. was his boss’s son and would one day run the company. What father wouldn’t want his daughter to go out with him? Beyond that, Joe Sr. made no secret that he wanted his son to date me. And Joe was...very sweet to me, in those first difficult weeks after my mother died. He had lost his own mother when he was a teenager and he understood what I was going through. He was here, Russell wasn’t. Though my heart belonged to someone else, I really liked Joe. He was different then.”

  She was quiet, then let out a soft, regretful sigh. “At the beginning of that summer, Russell came home for ten days before he had to go back and spend the summer at some army training in Georgia. We...spent every moment we could together during that time when I wasn’t working or helping out at home. I think we both faced the fact that this tiny window of time was all we would ever have. The night before he left, he told me emphatically that...he didn’t want me to wait for him. He was just at the beginning of his medical training, with many years to go and then his military obligation after that, which would possibly take him overseas. He knew I wasn’t in a position at the time to leave Haven Point and my family to follow him, not while things were such a mess.”

  A breeze twirled through, rattling the leaves of the big cottonwood nearby.

  “I was completely heartbroken, as only an eighteen-year-old girl can be, especially after he wrote me a letter a few weeks later carefully outlining all the sound reasons he wanted me to move on and date someone else. He specifically mentioned Joe as a good prospect for me.”

  “Joe.”

  “Yes. Ironic, isn’t it?” She gave a ragged-sounding laugh. “In retrospect, I wonder what would have happened if I had thrown good sense to the wind and gone with him, anyway. My family would have survived without me. My sisters were there to help with the younger siblings, after all. But I suppose some narcissistic part of me was certain they couldn’t get along unless I was there.”

  He remembered her spending a great deal of time with his uncles and aunts. The youngest, Aunt Mary, was only three years older than he was. That made a great deal more sense now.

  “I did as he said,” his mother went on. “I started dating Joe again right after Russell left town. I was hurt and, I’ll admit, a little angry that he was pushing me toward someone else. After only a short time, Joe started pressuring me to marry him. Joe Sr. had already had one massive heart attack and doctors said he could have another one anytime. I think he wanted to see Joe settled before he died.”

  She released a heavy breath and, as if by force of will, stilled the nervous movements of her fingers, clasping them together tightly now on her lap. “A short time after Russ left, I...started to suspect I might be pregnant. I...knew the baby had to be his, since I hadn’t given in yet to Joe’s pressure to...well, you can imagine. It was a terrible time. I cried for days, desperate and afraid. I was eighteen, remember, and a good girl. At least I’d always
tried to be. A naive preacher’s daughter. I knew I couldn’t raise a baby by myself, nor could I put my father through what he would have seen as a shameful situation, not when my mother had barely been gone four months.

  “I... When Joe asked me to marry him the next time, it seemed the logical decision. He told me he loved me and I liked him very much and was certain I could fall in love with him. When I finally said yes, Joe was so happy and Joe Sr. was absolutely over the moon. He agreed to set up a trust to pay for all my siblings’ college educations. Joe even promised I could continue to help my father out in the evenings and the little ones could even come to Snow Angel Cove, this huge house, to stay if they wanted. It seemed perfect, except for one thing. Joe wasn’t Russell.”

  She gave another shuddery sort of sob. Was she crying? It was too dark to tell. He couldn’t see the reflection of tears in the moonlight.

  “Because of Joe Sr.’s health issues, Joe didn’t want to wait so we were married only a month after he asked me. We...had been together a few times in that month and when I told him a few weeks later I thought I was pregnant, he was ecstatic that we would be starting a family right away. He adored you from the very beginning. I never wanted to tell him the truth.”

  His only good memories of his father had been those early years. Playing catch in the backyard, horsey rides through the big house, then real horseback rides when he was a little older. Boat rides and fishing trips and long drives in the car.

  Somehow, those good memories made everything that came after so much harder.

  “He must have found out, didn’t he? That’s when everything changed.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “He found out. After you were born, we tried right away to have more children. Both of us wanted several because we loved you so much, but month after month I didn’t become pregnant, despite how easy things seemed with you. Finally, after four long years, I became pregnant with Lily. When she was nearly six, doctors began to suspect something was wrong. She wasn’t breathing normally and always had a terrible cough and after testing, they diagnosed the cystic fibrosis. It was a relatively late diagnosis for CF. Now, thank heavens, they screen infants, but not when she was born. We had no idea.”