Meant To Be

by Неизвестно

  "Oh, you are so in denial," I said with a chuckle. "You want to prove you don’t have feelings for me? Fine. I’m game."

  He threw me an apprehensive look.

  "Kiss me," I baited. "Purely a physical thing—no feeling, no depth. Just a quick peck on the lips, but no more. Superficial, meaningless. Go ahead."

  His face reddened. "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because," he responded, pausing a second to complete the thought, "because I’m not attracted to you."

  I laughed out loud. "Right."

  I closed the distance between us.

  He didn’t move.

  "I know you want to kiss me," I said, moving close. My voice dropped to a whisper. "You want to do a whole lot more than that."

  He growled low in his throat, but his eyes were definitely smiling at me now. "You’re impossible," he muttered.

  "And you," I responded, putting my hands around his neck, "are a chicken."

  His eyes narrowed. "So this is your plan to bring me down? Some childish dare?"

  I smiled and fell against him. "Bwock. Bwock."

  His resolve lasted all of two seconds. His arms swept me up in one vehement motion, pulling me tight against him as he leaned down and pressed his lips to mine. His kiss came with a passion stronger than any I had ever experienced, and his ardor, combined with his physical strength, could easily have been overpowering. Yet every aspect of his touch showed a loving, conscious tenderness. His feelings for me were evident in every movement of his soft lips, every caress of his callused hands on my back, and I drank in his attention as if I were starving—returning his enthusiasm in kind; daring, even, to clamor for more.

  But I didn’t get it. When he seemed to feel I had been thoroughly kissed, he set me away from him with a thump. "There," he said breathlessly. "I suppose I failed the test."

  Being separated so abruptly was agony. But I smiled coyly back at him. "Hmm," I murmured, considering. "No. I’m afraid that was only a D minus. You’d better try again."

  He narrowed his eyes playfully and growled at me again. A second later, my feet left the floor.

  This time, he failed with flying colors.

  Chapter 30

  "You wouldn’t think I’d have to say this in a practically deserted inn," Tia proclaimed with mock irritation as she burst into the hall through the front door, "but for God’s sake, get a room!"

  She brushed roughly past us, her eyes rolling. "Anyone in the parking lot can see right through that window—I’ve been cooling my heels for five minutes waiting for one of you to come up for air. Sheesh! What are you, professional divers?"

  I giggled under my breath and straightened, but Fletcher was reluctant to release me. "Go away, Tia," he ordered gruffly.

  "Sorry, brother dear, but I live here, too," she retorted, making her way down the hall and tossing her purse on the counter. "Sort of, anyway."

  Reluctantly, I extracted myself from his grasp. I threaded my fingers through his and drew us both into the common room. My heart was beating wildly, and I wanted nothing more than to follow Tia’s advice. But there would be plenty of time.

  Tia looked us over with a devious sparkle in her eye. "You owe me money," she informed her brother.

  "Oh?" he replied without interest.

  "I told you you wouldn’t last a year," she said smartly. "Now pay up."

  He flashed a wicked grin. "Oh no, you didn’t. You said I wouldn’t last six months."

  Tia’s smirk faded.

  "So in fact," he continued, "you owe me money. Thanks for the reminder."

  She humphed. "Yes, well. About that—"

  "Let me guess. The I.O.U.’s in the mail."

  She smiled innocently. "We’ll negotiate later. Right now, I’d like for both of you to sit down. There are some things I need to tell you."

  A pregnant pause followed, and as I looked into Tia’s flustered and excited face, I felt a strong urge to flee. She had found out something—something more about the past. And whatever it was, I wanted nothing to do with it. I was happy now, and I wanted to stay that way.

  "No!" I protested. The sharpness of my tone surprised me, and I lowered my voice. "No, Tia. Please. You can tell Fletcher whatever it is, but I’m done. All right?"

  Fletcher stepped behind me and pulled me to him, crossing his arms over me protectively. "Jake Kozen was here," he explained. "He’s safely behind bars now, but it’s been a rough morning."

  Tia paled. Her eyes filled with dismay. "Oh, Meara," she said in a whisper. "I’m so sorry. I had no idea. Are you all right?"

  I nodded.

  "Then I absolutely have to tell you," she insisted. "You don’t have to worry about that sonuvabitch anymore. No matter what he says, he is not your birth father."

  My eyes widened. "He admitted that. But how did you know?"

  She studied me for a moment, seeming to debate within herself. "I know you’ve been hit with a lot lately, Meara," she said delicately. "We all have. But I’ve been able to fill in most of the missing pieces about what went on between my parents and your birth mother, and I really think the healthiest thing would be for the three of us to just get it out in the open and deal with it—once and for all. So please, will you hear me out?"

  I wavered. I was afraid. Afraid that picking apart any more of the unknown could only bring me down from the ethereal plane I had so miraculously just landed on. I didn’t want to think about my past anymore. What I wanted was to be alone with Fletcher—reveling in the present.

  I opened my mouth to say so, but nothing came out. Tia’s dark, caring eyes bored into mine, begging. Please trust me, they said. I wouldn’t do this if it weren’t important. To all of us.

  My innate desire to please surged on strong, and I let out my breath with a sigh. "All right," I answered.

  ***

  I sank onto one of the couches by the fireplace, letting the steam from a hot cup of tea rise onto my nose and chin. Fletcher had insisted that Tia wasn’t telling me anything until we had all had a drink and something to eat, but it was obvious that his primary intent was to get his sister aside long enough for him to explain what had happened with Jake. I didn’t mind the delay—he was correct in assuming that I didn’t feel much like telling her myself.

  He was standing only ten feet away now, clearing off the meager spread of fruit and crackers we had all just silently indulged in. He had been staying close, watching me with worried eyes. But close wasn’t close enough—not now that I’d had a taste of his unfettered affection. Admiring him from a distance was torture.

  I watched him as he moved toward me, and the look in my eyes seemed to please him. He dropped onto the couch beside me, enveloped me with an arm, and kissed me softly on the temple. Tia sat down across from us, her expression troubled. She had responded to the tale of Jake’s attack with nothing less than horror, but hearing it had not dissuaded her from her mission of enlightening me. If anything, it seemed to have galvanized her.

  I took a breath and sat up straighter. Tia had my best interests at heart, I did believe that. But I wanted this over with. "So go ahead," I prompted, resolute. "You went to see the private investigator. Why did your father hire him? Did it have something to do with Sheila?"

  Tia exhaled slowly. "I think we should start at the beginning." She looked at her brother. "I talked to Grandma this morning. She said to tell you hello."

  Fletcher’s eyebrows rose. "You thought Grandma would know something about Meara?"

  "No. I realized that they had moved to Altoona before Meara would have come here. But I did think Grandma might remember something about Sheila." She turned her attention back to me. "When we realized you weren’t here as a foster child, we all assumed that Mom must have taken you in because she and Sheila were friends. But the more I thought about that, the less sense it made."

  My limbs went cold. No. One of the things that had made me happiest, amidst all the gloom of the past, was thinking that Sheila and I had been friends of the
family. It was important to me. "I really don’t think I want to hear this, Tia," I said with apprehension. "Can’t I just—"

  "It’s all right, Meara," she broke in gently, sitting forward. "I promise. Once you see everything in perspective, I’m sure you’ll be fine with it. Just bear with me."

  I took in a deep breath. Then I nodded.

  She turned to her brother. "It was the yearbook that bothered me. I just couldn’t see Mom being chummy with a beauty queen—you know how cynical she always was about the whole Maple Queen thing. And then there were the pictures, or lack thereof. Sheila was a pretty, senior girl in a very small class—how could she accidentally get left out of all the candid shots?

  Fletcher sighed. "Mom was editor of the yearbook."

  "Exactly," Tia agreed. "And in the perfect position to make sure a classmate she didn’t care for got omitted. Except for the Maple Queen coverage, of course. Even the editor in chief couldn’t suppress news that big."

  I looked from one sibling to the other, a new fear eroding my insides. "But what would your mother have had against Sheila?" I asked, my voice quavering. I knew I sounded as insecure as a child, but I couldn’t help it. I knew it shouldn't matter, but I wanted desperately to believe that my birth mother really had been a good person.

  Tia’s eyes held mine. I looked in their sympathetic depths, and realized she understood. "It wasn’t that Sheila did anything wrong," she said softly, smiling a little. "But a feud between her and my mother was inevitable, under the circumstances."

  She turned back to her brother. "I asked Grandma if she could remember Dad ever being friends with one of the Maple Queens. That’s all I told her. Right away, she chuckled to herself and said yes—that a Turkeyfoot girl he used to date had been Maple Queen. She thought her name was Shelly."

  Fletcher blinked. "But I thought Mom and Dad—"

  Tia waved a hand dismissively. "Yes, well, we were a little naïve about that. Mom and Dad might have been childhood sweethearts, but they weren’t together every second. According to Grandma, they broke up and got together again pretty frequently when they were young."

  "So," I broke in, feeling better, "your mother was jealous of Sheila because she and your father dated."

  Tia nodded. "Actually, it was a bit more involved than that. Grandma thought Dad was really getting serious about ‘Shelly’—they were together through most of their senior year. But it turns out she broke his heart. Sheila skipped town right after graduation—she wanted to be an actress so badly she left her mother and ran off to New York by herself, even though she was only eighteen. Mom and Dad got back together again, as per their pattern, and the rest is history."

  "But Sheila came back," I pointed out. "And then they all became friends?"

  Tia didn’t answer, but looked at me with an expression that indicated there was considerably more I didn’t know. "I can’t say Mom and Sheila were ever buddies," she explained. "But Sheila and Dad did stay friends, even after he got married. That’s why, when Sheila started having problems with Jake, she brought you to him for help—not Mom."

  I digested the thought. Rosemary had kept me here because Mitchell had asked her to. And she must have been kind to me, despite her feelings about my birth mother. If she hadn’t, my flashes of memory from the white house wouldn’t all be so wonderfully pleasant.

  "So after Mom died," Fletcher stated, "Dad took up with Sheila again." His voice was strained, and I could feel his muscles tensing. "I suppose they had been keeping in touch."

  "No," I said quickly, worried about what Fletcher might be thinking. "The woman who’d been in prison with Sheila said she never had any visitors. At least not in the five years she knew her."

  Tia nodded in agreement. "Dad and Sheila had nothing to do with each other after the night she shot Jake, Fletch. Up until this year, Dad had no idea where Sheila even was. That’s why he hired the private investigator. To find her."

  He stared at his sister pensively a moment, then pulled his arm from around my shoulders and sat up. "But that doesn’t sound like Dad at all. If Sheila was any kind of friend to him, he wouldn’t have just washed his hands of her. He had to understand why she shot Jake."

  Tia looked uncomfortable. "That’s just it, Fletch. He didn’t understand. Sheila, like many battered women, went out of her way to hide the fact that she was being abused. I don’t know what she told Dad to convince him to let Meara live with us, but he had no idea Jake was violent. Mom didn’t either. She figured out everything, of course, the night of the shooting, but she didn’t tell Dad. She told him the same story she told the judge—that Sheila had shot her husband without provocation, in cold blood."

  Fletcher’s eyes widened. He rose with a jerk.

  "Fletch," Tia said sternly, rising with him. "Please sit down. Let me finish."

  "How could she do that?" he protested, his deep voice angry. "She was so jealous of a high school crush that she let Dad think his ex was a trigger-happy maniac? Why couldn’t she trust him with the truth?"

  "Fletch," Tia said again, her tone even firmer. "Don’t judge Mom. Let me finish."

  The siblings exchanged a glare. Fletcher exhaled, then dropped back down beside me. Tia watched him another moment, then sat herself. "After I talked to Grandma, I went to see the private investigator at his office. I was hoping he would confirm for me that Dad had hired him to find Sheila. He wouldn’t tell me a thing when I first asked him—he said his work was a hundred percent confidential. But after I convinced him that Dad had passed away, as had Sheila, and that they had left their children with a long list of thorny unanswered questions, he seemed to take pity on me." She cleared her throat. "And I suppose the outrageous sum of money I offered him didn’t hurt either."

  She cast a sheepish glance at her brother. "By the way, Fletch—"

  He grumbled. "Fine, fine, I’ll cover it. What else did the man say?"

  She blew out a breath. "He had a tremendous amount to say, because Dad being Dad, he talked the poor man’s ear off every time they met—never mind that he was paying by the hour. As you probably figured out from the letter, Mom didn’t tell Dad about any of this until right before she died, and her confession really threw him for a loop. Apparently, he felt there was no one else he could talk to."

  "What do you mean?" Fletcher asked. "He had us, didn’t he?"

  Tia’s expression saddened. "Not really. I’m sure you and I were the last people he thought he could face."

  Fletcher’s brow creased.

  Tia sighed. "Fletch," she began heavily, "I know that the letter Mom wrote made it sound as though she’d been unfaithful. But that wasn’t the case. She was talking about Dad. She was talking about something that happened ages ago, when they still teenagers, just a couple months after they got married."

  Fletcher paled.

  My heart thumped in my chest. "No," I whispered, horrified. "Not Sheila."

  "Yes," Tia answered, seeming to make an effort not to sound ashamed. She cast a concerned glance at her brother, but he hadn’t moved.

  "They were only teenagers," she repeated firmly. "And we need to remember that. Furthermore, both of them were in very difficult situations at the time. Sheila had come back from New York disillusioned and penniless, only to find her mother dying of cancer. She had no other family, and she and her mother had moved around so much when she was growing up that she had few friends. She was devastated—desperate for solace. And Dad was the closest thing to a real friend she’d ever had."

  Fletcher rose. I watched his feet walk away. Tia looked up at him worriedly.

  "Fletch," she said, her voice softer. "I’m not saying that what Dad did was right, but could you at least try to understand what he was going through? No matter what our parents told us, their marriage started out horribly. You know what a perfectionist Mom was. You also know that she was a control freak—no one any less easy-going than Dad could possibly have tolerated her. Getting married so young was her idea—she pressured him into it, but then
once she had him, she felt trapped. So she pushed him away on purpose, half-hoping he would ask for a divorce. When Dad ran into Sheila, he and Mom were living at opposite ends of the house."

  Fletcher was somewhere behind me, and I felt his absence at my side like a vacuum. I wanted to go to him, but I couldn’t seem to move.

  "But they worked through it," Tia emphasized. "Dad admitted everything; he regretted it deeply. For Mom, the shock of thinking she might lose Dad to someone else made her see how much she really did love him. She took responsibility for her own immature actions, and they both committed themselves to making the marriage work. They matured, their marriage matured, they became parents, and life went on."

  She paused. I found the strength to turn around in my seat, to look for Fletcher, and was surprised to find him standing behind me, his eyes mirroring the same, sympathetic apprehension that were in my own. I smiled with relief. He was all right. He might be upset about his father—but at the moment, incredibly, he seemed more worried about me.

  He returned my smile, and as I leaned back on the couch, he laid his hands supportively on my shoulders.

  Tia watched us silently, and I perceived that she, too, was surprised by the mildness of Fletcher’s reaction. For a moment her eyes seemed moist, but then she cleared her throat and continued.

  "I suspected that there might be something between Dad and Sheila because of something Mom told me once—something about working through disappointments. So I asked Grandma about it this morning, and God bless her, she was honest with me. She told me the story I just told you, except that when Dad told her about it ages ago, he didn’t mention who the other woman was.

  She blew out a breath. "But he did tell the P.I. about it. Apparently, when on the clock, James P. is one sympathetic listener."

  I took a quick inventory of my waffling feelings. I wasn’t happy about what had happened between Mitchell and Sheila, but if Tia and Fletcher could accept it without resentment or shame, so should I. Sheila had been a good person, and so had Mitchell. They had been young, and they had made a mistake. But they had stayed friends. That meant something.