When we turned onto Victory Drive, I looked over at him and saw tears rolling down his face. He told me if anyone asked, we’d been in a car accident and he finally looked at me for the first time since I’d been thrown out of the suite. He said ‘no one can ever know about this, Trip.’ He made me swear not to discuss any of it with anyone. Mama…Vi…you. I told him that it was madness, that we needed to at least tell you. But he wouldn’t budge. So I promised him.”
Trip was quiet for a long time, but I could tell he wasn’t finished with his story. Just when I was sure I was mistaken and debating on what to say, he spoke. “He wasn’t the same after that night. I never saw him smile after that. He quit going to social events altogether, and one night at the yacht club, his lawyer let it slip that he was skipping board meetings. I tried to talk to him about it and thought I got through when he made an appointment with the law firm. I figured it was a consult about a divorce. My guess is that was probably when he changed his will. Cosmo was so stinking busy opening Imogene’s that she didn’t notice a thing, and I couldn’t think of a way to point out his…deterioration without breaking my word and violating his trust.”
“You should have tried harder.” Sam’s voice sounded especially deep and thick. It frightened me, but not half as much as the shattered expression he was trying hard to hide.
Trip tossed his tux jacket onto the ground like it was a candy wrapper and ran both hands through his hair. “Jesus, Sam. Do you think I don’t get that? Do you think I haven’t reexamined my inaction from all angles while I got shitfaced at every fucking bar in Savannah? You have no fucking idea how much I regret my choices. I’m pretty Goddamned aware that I screwed up every single thing in my life!”
At some point during his story, I’d started crying, but I didn’t realize it until that moment when I sniffed loudly. Sam’s blue eyes swept over me, but they didn’t seem to actually see me. His thoughts appeared to be a thousand miles away. Trip looked like he was about to fall apart completely. I crossed to Trip and put my hands on his shoulders. He regarded me uncomfortably, like I was about to dole out some punishment to him. It seemed like he was about to dissolve into tears right along with me.
“You need to quit punishing yourself. He was your father, and he asked you to keep a secret. I’m sure he had his reasons, but it wasn’t fair for him to do that to you.” I turned so that I could look at them both as I continued to speak. “Parents are just people, guys. They screw up all the time. It’s an ugly truth that’s hard to face, no matter how old you are. He shouldn’t have asked you to cover it up in the first place. He really should have confronted your mom.”
“This is not Daddy’s fault,” Sam snapped at me and then paused and barked out a semi hysterical laugh. “I guess I really shouldn’t call him that anymore, huh?”
I turned away from Trip and tried to reach out to Sam. I wanted to wrap my arms around him, to hold him and comfort him. He moved away from me again, but I was done playing at that point. I launched myself into his personal space and took his face in my hands, forcing him to look at me. I could feel him trembling beneath my palms, and the dead look in his eyes made me afraid enough to tremble right along with him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sam. Your father didn’t want you to know about it. He obviously loved you very much.”
Neither of them spoke after that. Trip stared at the ground, his hands on his hips. Sam looked away from me, still leaning against the rail as if we were discussing Georgia’s odds against Florida State. I saw right through his act, and for the first time since we’d met, I wished I wasn’t so intuitive about him. That I couldn’t peek behind that curtain of his. It was too damned hard to watch him hurting. My heart went out to them both. To Trip, for the lives he’d destroyed simply trying to do right by his dad. And to Sam, for the unimaginable loss of his entire reality, the veritable collapse of his identity.
Sam shook his head slowly, his eyes darting back and forth as if reviewing a transcript of the scene Trip had just described to us.
“I think I could use some time alone,” Sam murmured, and he pushed off from the rail and took off, but not in the direction of the hotel. At first I just watched him go. His pace was moderate, but he seemed to be fixated on the ground in front of him, as if putting one foot in front of the other took incredible focus. My instincts told me not to let him wander off alone, and this time I wasn’t going to ignore my hunch. I hurriedly picked up my discarded shoes and went after him.
As I chased after Sam, I heard Trip mumble to himself behind me. He sounded as bad as he looked. “I could really use a shot of Patrón.”
I didn’t even turn around. I felt awful ditching him like that, but my heart said Sam needed me more.
Why is he being such an incomprehensible prick?
Dash had been in rare form from the instant we arrived at the Marriot. I leveled with him on the ride over that Imogene was hosting the gala, and as with all things remotely related to Reg, Dash had immediately sprouted a giant chip on his shoulder.
“Wanna do a body shot, Vi?” Dash grinned hazily at me. I watched as he and Hank snickered and downed one more shot of tequila. Suppressing a sigh, I glanced at the clock on my phone. It was only nine o’ clock, and he was already trashed. I saw the fabulous Jayse Monroe leave our table and saddle up to his cute little boyfriend. Dash nodded to them and mumbled something to Hank. Hank erupted in an angry laughing-at-you-not-with-you cackle. My face burned right along with my insides. I glared at Dash, but it was a pointless exercise. He continued to ignore me.
I really had the overwhelming urge to slap the hell out of him for telling Reg to ‘go have a drink.’ No matter what Dash thought of him, Reg was the father of my child, and I wanted him to get better. I needed him to be well. And it seemed like he really was on the mend, which made me proud and made me want to rip my hair out at the same time.
I had to ask myself, why now? Why had he managed to cobble his shit together after all this time? And right when I was fixin’ to marry another man! Seriously? What was it about Annie that was so damn special that she was able to pull him back from the precipice when I’d fought tooth and nail to do so and failed so spectacularly? Oh sure, she was pretty, but so the fuck am I, dammit! I suppose the most appropriate question was this: what was it about me that had made it so easy for him to remain punch drunk and absent from my and Maisie’s lives for so long?
Every time I tucked my daughter in at night…when I sang her lullabies….whenever I looked at her angelic little face, I encountered Reg’s beautiful blue eyes. She was the spitting image of him and looking at her continued to further fracture my battered heart each and every day. I’d resigned myself a long time ago to the fact that I would never be over him, but that I would never be able to let him back in.
Never.
So why the hell was it that I could not stop staring at him in that amazing black tuxedo that fit him like a glove? Why did my heart have to race like the Kentucky fucking Derby when his eyes found mine across the crowded dance floor? Why did some primal part of my soul splinter when he’d grabbed Dash for being rough with me? And why on earth was I sitting here wishing it were him at my side instead of my fiancé?
Calm down, Violet. It’s just Reg. Remember?
Yes, I did remember. I remembered all too well. As if I’d ever be able to forget a single instant since the moment we met. Since that day, every millimeter of him was burned into my memory as if by a scalding brand.
“Violet, this is my brother, Trip.” Sam’s simple introduction that sunny morning at the sidewalk café was almost an afterthought. Sam had been preoccupied, waving to someone passing on the sidewalk. He hadn’t even glanced in my direction as his brother took a seat next to me. But Reg was looking at me. Into me. And that’s all it took. One look from those crystal blue eyes and I was a goner. Don’t get me wrong: Sam was very handsome and amusing as hell, but Reg? His smile was molten sunshine, and when he took my hand to shake it, his touch was like lightning, and I was the rod.
“Trip?” I remember wrinkling my nose at the silly moniker, and his crooked smile in response nearly made me come undone right then and there.
“It’s not my given name.” He responded, and his smirk immediately drove me crazy. I barely noticed when Sam excused himself to go say hello to an old friend and left us alone. The tension in our silence was raw and wanting. “Trip” put a long black cigarette to his lips, looking a lot like the leading man in some old black and white movie. He flipped open his zippo, and I have to admit I was ready to jump him right then and there.
“Well? What the hell is your name?” I asked, waiting for him to finish his drag. He exhaled through his nostrils, immediately seeming even more devilish. He leaned back in his chair and seemed to chew on the inside of his lip as if having an internal debate. I reached out and plucked the cigarette from his fingers, placing it to my mouth. Though I wasn’t a smoker, I’d done my time as an angsty teenage girl during my stint in boarding school, so inhaling wasn’t much of a problem. I relished the panty-dropping smile that spread across his lips like wildfire. When he sat forward and slipped his arm over the back of my chair, I tried not to sigh out loud.
“Reginald Jefferson Beaumont, the Third.” He drawled with fake flourish, and I couldn’t contain a giggle at how completely ridiculous his real name was.
“Well that’s fairly horrific.” I recall batting my eyelashes at him and shamelessly flipping my hair, which I’ve since chopped off. I crossed my legs and leaned toward him, pretending to survey his features judgmentally. In reality, I just couldn’t stop myself from inching as close to him as was publically acceptable. His near black hair and ivory skin contrasted dramatically, giving him an exotic appearance. “You look like a Reg to me. Yep. It suits you.”
His eyebrow twitched as my bare legs seemed to momentarily distract him. His eyes, framed with those stunning dark lashes took the scenic route as they trailed slowly all the back up to mine. “All right. Reg it is.”
He had me fatally hooked, and I was inexplicably okay with that.
Sam had managed to get over me quickly enough, though a couple of days after the café introduction, the two of them had a terrible row. An actual physical fight…like a couple of hooligans straight out of a Jerry Springer episode. I was so pissed at their brutish bullshit that I nearly walked away from both of them. Oh, who the hell am I kidding? I couldn’t have walked away from Reg any more than a moth can stop itself from flying directly into a flamethrower.
So as you might imagine, an evening of watching him lead Annie merrily around the dance floor had been a bit like having bamboo shoved underneath my freshly painted fingernails. And Dashul could evidently sense this because he was doing an Oscar-worthy impression of Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.
Or Reginald Jefferson Beaumont III.
Honestly, Dash’s behavior tonight had been an anomaly. We’d been seeing each other for almost ten months, and he truly was a good man. He worked hard and laughed easily. He respected his parents and was generous to his church. He treated me very well, and was nothing short of spectacular with Maisie Mae. Frankly, Dash’s only real flaw was that he wasn’t Reg.
You’d think that would have been a relief, considering the speed with which our short marriage had dissolved from every girl’s fairytale into an abysmal nightmare.
We were amazing in the beginning. Since we were both still in school, we had to make do with phone dates and stolen, sheet-tangling weekends. He made me believe in true love. Believe me when I say I know how ridiculous that sounds. While my sorority sisters were listening to silly love songs and trying to land a husband, I rolled my eyes at them and plotted to take over the world. But meeting Reg finally enlightened me about what all those starry-eyed songwriters were tapping into.
We’d talk until sunrise about anything and everything. God, I still get butterflies when I hear “At Last,” which was his ringtone in those early days. And anytime anyone mentions Wormsloe Plantation, I break out in a sweat. Reg took me on a picnic there. After a sordid and dirty bit of misbehavior off in the woods (the kind that left me with tree bark burns for days), he took me for a stroll down The Avenue of the Oaks. He explained that he wanted to paint me there, to immortalize the day. Then he pulled out the most beautiful ring I’d ever seen and slid it on my finger. I have to confess, I still keep it in a bedside table. I pull it out and stare at it more often than I care to admit.
Reg always nailed those big moments. The grand gestures, so to speak. I learned way too late that marriage, like ballet, is not ‘in position,’ it’s ‘in transition.’ It’s those little day-in, day-out moments that truly matter the most. They’re what build a firm and reliable foundation. I was just too stubborn to throw in the damned towel. And I loved him enough to believe we could glue the broken pieces back together again. Come to think of it, I always questioned what I was taught in dance class, too. I think I was sixteen when I burned my tutu on my instructor’s front lawn.
I could’ve put up with other women making a play for him. It happened with appalling regularity, especially when he was drinking. Everywhere we went, they were all over him. Could you blame them? He had so much money it was criminal, and he was…well…Reg. I’d have been a fool to think he’d ever walk around in public without women making passes at him. Whether or not I was present really didn’t seem to factor into that equation. There were countless nights that he never made it home. I tried not to think about it too much.
I was more than capable of dealing with his moody, dark periods when he’d lock himself in his studio for days on end. Not eating, not showering…just drinking bottle after bottle of Johnny Walker and painting insane pictures that scared the hell out of me. It was no picnic calling 911 when he grabbed the wrong glass, guzzling three fingers of paint thinner before realizing his mistake. But after all, I had agreed to ‘in sickness and in health.’ I sent him to rehab and kept a stiff upper lip like a good wife should.
But I could not live with having to protect my child from her own father. I believe with all my heart that Reg would have rather have chopped off his right hand than harm a hair on Maisie’s head, but oftentimes Reg wasn’t the one flying the plane. More often than not, Johnny Walker had the controls, or at least was acting as his co-pilot.
So when Sam hauled him away to rehab for the second time, I contacted my lawyer. Night after night, I cried myself to sleep and every time Maisie asked where her daddy was, I had to have the nanny read her a story while I hid in my room and privately broke down.
So it was fate’s cruel joke that he arrived at the gala looking so together and at peace while I clung tenaciously to my dignity. After all, I had divorced him. And with damn good reason. And yet I was miserable on a level that was positively indescribable.
Dash planted a kiss on my cheek that was a little too hard and entirely too wet. “We’re gonna go see if Hank won the trip to Bermuda that he bid on.”
I simply nodded and produced a polite smile. As I watched them stumble away I scanned the crowd, searching for Sam. I had to talk to someone. Sam would listen, and he would get it. He always did.
I saw no sign of him, but I did see Reg. He had his jacket flung carelessly over his shoulder, and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his black silk shirt. He was devastatingly handsome as always, but it was the sorrow in his eyes that had my undivided attention. I felt my pulse quicken when I watched him stalk diagonally across the ballroom. I couldn’t quite tell if he was angry or sad, but his gait was rapid and purposeful.
And he was hurrying in the direction of the bar.
That tiresome slut Marybeth Dutton tried to place herself in his path, but he completely ignored her as if she were some sort of specter. Just three feet short of his destination, he came to an abrupt halt and dramatically spun on his heel. For a full minute he stood in what appeared to be silent contemplation, as if weighing the pros and cons of launching into a stupendous bender.
I fought hard to stay planted in my seat,
but I just couldn’t resist the pull of him. As I drifted in his direction I felt like my limbs were no longer under my control. In moments I was at his side. I placed my hand on his arm. His skin felt almost feverish, and he jumped at my touch.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” As soon as it came out of my mouth I wanted to die.
Baby?
Dammit, Violet. Pull yourself together.
Fortunately, whatever had upset Reg also seemed to have affected his hearing. He said nothing at first, and I watched as he lifted his gaze to the stars shining down on us through the glass ceiling. And when his hand covered mine, I couldn’t pull away. I mutely stared at his familiar features and when his gaze shifted to me, I searched his red rimmed eyes. They felt as if they were caressing me.
“I’m sorry, Vi. For all of it. All I ever wanted was to give you the world. And I just kept failing you. I understand that you can’t forgive me. I’ll never be able to forgive myself. I just needed you to hear me say the words.”
I closed my eyes, unable to bear the agony on his face. I was terrified to the core that he’d see mine reflected back at him and know just how much power he still had over me. My lungs seemed to be failing me, along with my voice. I felt his finger tip trail down the nape of my neck and my eyelids felt weighty as I reluctantly opened them.
“I’ve made so many stupid mistakes, Violet. But none of ‘em as big as lettin’ you go.”
My lips parted and I finally inhaled as if to speak, but I couldn’t find the words. I wanted to hit him, to cry, to throw myself into his arms and kiss him until our lips were bruised. But I just stood there like a damned ice sculpture, unable to move, but slowly melting into nothingness.
Reg nodded as if understanding my silence. With one last resigned look, he touched my cheek and disappeared into the crowd.
Crazy Love Page 14
