Megan lifted a satin teddy–a fucking teddy!–from her suitcase and folded it into one of the drawers. “Right. No girlfriends, just random hook–ups for, how long? Almost ten years?” She shook her head, her long hair rippling with the movement. “You never had a relationship with anyone because you were so worried I might become attached to someone who’d leave. Well, except for Taylor. You’re so stupid in love with her, you may have screwed stuff up by just being…” she shrugged, “…a man.”
Sin frowned at her, stung. “Hey, why are you bein’ so mean to your old man?”
Closing the drawer, she crossed the room to stand directly in front of him, her face so sad and hopeful that he wanted to flinch. “You think I don’t know how much you sacrificed for me, Dad? I’ve never heard you talk about anyone the way you talk about Taylor.” She leaned up to kiss his cheek. “I think it’s time you did something for yourself. Go after her,” she urged as she stepped back. “And don’t let your pride get in the way, okay? Sometimes you have to do stupid things for love.”
There was a ring of something poignant in her words, as though she’d learned them the hard way, but Sin was already too fucking freaked about the shit he’d seen coming out of her bag to stick around and ask questions that’d lead to him developing an ulcer. He kissed her forehead and left the room, wondering how the hell he was going to do something stupid for Taylor because he’d just gotten the blessings of the one person he loved as much as her.
First, he just had to find out where Taylor had gone so he could finally come clean with her.
Chapter Eight
Taylor ended up at her parents’ house, not to talk, but to bury her head under the hood of her dad’s rundown 1978 El Camino. It was the first car she and her dad had worked on together. They didn’t go at it like gangbusters, didn’t work on it constantly. It was their project, but more importantly, it was Taylor’s therapy. Any time she felt lost and confused, she went to work on the engine, which was a complete mess and had been from the first day her dad brought it home.
She’d just begun to remove the pistons from the engine when she heard the shuffle of footsteps in the garage. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw her dad strolling into the building in a pair of t–shirt, overalls and work boots. Henry Guillory was beginning to stoop with age, but he didn’t let being seventy–two and retired slow him down. He still went to the store as frequently as his wife would let him, cut his own grass, tended his vegetable garden and worked on his daughters’ cars.
“Hey, cher,“ he called when he entered the garage, coming over to hug her. Taylor sank into her dad’s embrace, letting the familiar scents of motor oil, Old Spice and earth wash over her. “Your mama said she saw you come in here and thought you might need someone to talk to.”
See? Everyone in the family knew when Taylor was having problems, she headed for the nearest combustible engine to hammer them out.
But there was no way she was going to tell him about what was going on with Sin. The ache in her chest pulsed as though to remind her just how much he’d hurt her through his lies of omission. Her dad would be livid and probably threaten to tan Sin’s hide for hurting his little girl. She could just see that confrontation, squeezing her eyes shut to erase it from her mind. No, she’d figure this out herself. Figure out what she wanted.
She’d almost stupidly told Sin she loved him back in the break room before his daughter showed up. Her cheeks burned at the thought and she pressed one of them harder into her dad’s shoulder as though that would erase the blush. If she’d have told Sin… Would he have looked at her with horror and then pity? God forbid.
Dad let her go with a soft kiss to her temple. “You workin’ on Jerry?” he asked with a twinkle in his faded brown eyes. “Must be serious problems this time.”
Taylor made a face and turned back to the engine. “I don’t really want to talk about this, Dad.”
He made a humming sound in the back of his throat, his work–roughened hands sliding over the tools she’d laid out to start her work. “Ever since you were a little girl, you always came to me with your troubles,” he said more to himself than to her. “Drove your mama crazy, it did, when Logan and Devon would yammer her ear off about boys and lord knows what else.”
Taylor grinned, remembering how many times she’d escaped from the house when Devon and Logan were having one of their dramas. She’d always headed for the garage where Dad tended to hide, the two of them too cowardly to be caught up in the wails and tears that often accompanied boyfriend trouble.
Once again, her dad showed how in tune they were by saying, “Always with the boys, those two. Dates and dances.” He shook his head, moving around the engine block to face her across their ongoing project. “Never had that problem with you though. You were always with the boys, but you were always roughhousing with them,” he said proudly. “Remember when that Jeremy boy was sayin’ things about Logan? You bloodied his nose.”
This time Taylor laughed. Yeah, she’d always tended to be rougher than Logan and Devon, quick to act out with her fists than burst into tears. Then why are you acting like a drama queen now a little voice asked curiously. Taylor paused in the act of reaching for a wrench. The question may as well have been a light bulb going off in her head. She wasn’t girlie like her sisters. She’d always faced every problem head–on once she decided on a plan. She didn’t cry and mope and dive face–first into ice cream.
“So I guess what I’m gettin’ at is, why you ain’t bloodying Sinclair Rivas’ nose?” Dad asked, as he leaned on the edge of the car.
Taylor’s gaze jumped from the wrench to her dad’s concerned face. “W–What?”
He sighed. “Cher, I may have spent more time in this garage avoiding your sisters when they were havin’ relationship problems, but I know when one of my girls is havin’ a heart crisis. Just hoped you, out of the three of my daughters, wouldn’t have to experience anything but happiness, yeah?” Dad nodded and straightened. “C’mon, let’s talk.”
Dragging her feet the way she had when she was six and got in trouble at school for punching Joe Mimnaugh in the eye for calling Devon sugar booger, Taylor made her way to the worn sofa her mom had threatened to burn on more than one occasion. She sat next to her dad and stared at her feet, not sure what to say. She couldn’t exactly tell him she’d had wild sex with Sin all night on Friday. He’d have a heart attack.
“You love that boy,” he said, kickstarting their heart–to–heart. He lifted one hand when she would’ve protested, weakly mind you. “I can tell, you know. You love cars, but you don’t love them so much that you’d spend all your time at a shop unless there was another draw other than the cars.”
Taylor’s cheeks heated. She shrugged. “I do like him. Or I did,” she muttered darkly.
“Ah, what’d he do?”
And just like that, it poured out of her in a big, fat rush of words. “I really lo–like him, a lot. We’ve known each other a long time, we’ve talked about almost everything. I thought I knew him,” she paused, her breath hitching as the hurt returned tenfold. “And then when I was ready to…tell him how I felt, I found out he has a daughter who’s only a little younger than me. A daughter he never told anyone about as far as I know.” Her chin quivered, but Taylor forced it to stop. She wasn’t going to cry. She friggin’ hated crying. “Even worse, right before she showed up, I thought he was about to tell me he wanted…” She shrugged. “I thought he wanted more from us than just friendship and now I don’t know what to do because he’s a liar.”
“Hm,” Dad said, as he stared at her.
Taylor crossed her arms over her chest, feeling like a kid again under that unwavering gaze. Why did she suddenly feel guilty?
“Cher, you know men…we make mistakes.” That was all he said.
Eyes wide and mouth agape, Taylor didn’t know what to say. “This isn’t just like a little mistake, Dad. It’s…huge. I mean, I thought we were friends. You tell friends things about yourself. I told
him just about everything there is to know about me, but not in all that time did he say, ’Well I have a daughter who’s probably only a few years younger than you.’”
“What would you have done if he had told you?”
Taylor blinked. “I…” She frowned, really thinking about it. What would she have done if Sin suddenly told her he was a father? She’d have flipped out.
“Men do things that don’t make sense to women,” her dad stated sagely. He even nodded. “It makes sense to us when we do it and, if asked, we’d probably have a damn good reason for it, but being put on the spot makes a man defensive. ’Specially when it’s their womenfolk askin’ them if they’re out of their minds or makin’ ’em think they did something stupid.” His accent thickened as he really got into his diatribe.
He sighed. “Basically, cher, sometimes men do stupid things. And sometimes we even know they’re stupid, but that don’t mean we shouldn’t be offered forgiveness for it. Most of the time, when we do those things, it’s because we’re trying to protect those we love.”
Her mind was clicking away, recalling how uneasy Sin had been when Megan came into the room. Almost as though he’d been expecting Taylor to, what throw it in his face? Scream at him or something? He’d definitely seemed defensive. She’d seen it as him trying to hide his relationship with what she’d thought was his girlfriend. She shook her head. God, she was getting herself all confused, but one thing was clear.
“Did Mom fuss you for climbing the eight foot ladder to clean the gutters again?”
The way his jaw set was answer enough. Then he relaxed. “I’m givin’ her time to cool off before I tell her I’m sorry,” he muttered. “Probably the same way this boy is goin’ to do the same to you when he can pull his head out of his ass.” Dad eyed her. “And if he doesn’t, you let me know and I’ll take care of that lickety–split.”
About an hour later, Taylor slumped on a stool at Rockin’ Robbie’s. She didn’t know why she’d come here but when her dad finally girded his loins to go and beg her mother for forgiveness, Taylor had gone back to the scene of the crime. Just like the stupid villains did in movies.
“I don’t normally see you here this early,” Robbie said, curiosity clear in his voice as he cleaned the same spot he’d been wiping for the last twenty minutes as he fished for information. “So uh…you and Sin, huh?”
She shook her head, not even bothering to lift her chin off her hand first. “No. We’re just friends,” she mumbled.
“Oh.” He kept wiping and wiping, the silence between them dragging.
Taylor didn’t even know why she was here. Taylor didn’t even know why she was here. It wasn’t as though she was trying to drown her sorrows. She shook her head and sipped the Roy Rogers she’d ordered instead of her usual beer. In fact, she was going to lay off all alcoholic beverages for the rest of her life after the trouble it’d gotten her into last time.
It wasn’t the beer that got you in trouble. It was your hormones.
Taylor curled her lip at her inner voice.
“So, uh, if you’re not with Sin,” Robbie said tentatively, his wiping slowing down as though he couldn’t manage to talk and clean at the same time. Or at least not as vigorously. “I was just wonderin’ if you’d like to go to dinner with me sometime this week,” he finished in a rush.
That managed to prod Taylor into dropping her elbow off the bar to stare at the bartender in shock. She’d been coming to Robbie’s since she turned eighteen and, in all that time, he’d never once hinted that he wanted to do anything more than serve her drinks. But there was no mistaking the masculine appreciation in his eyes.
“What?” she asked, mouth hanging open.
“Dinner with me. Thursday night?”
Taylor looked around the bar, which had its fair share of patrons at two–thirty on a Monday afternoon, but no one was paying them any attention. Turning back to the bar, she caught Robbie checking out her chest and almost fell off her stool. Had she entered an alternate universe or something, where men checked out her body and handsome bartenders asked her for a date?
“Um,” she stalled, not sure what to say. She so didn’t want to be with anyone at the moment. “I’m sorry, but I–”
She heard the door of the bar open, allowing a bright shaft of light to illuminate the gloom for a brief moment before it closed again, but she didn’t turn around. Robbie, however, stood up and dropped his gaze back to the bar top, moving away from her an inch at a time.
Wondering what had gotten into him, Taylor was about to ask him if he was okay when she sensed rather than saw a big, male body plant itself on the stool to her right. The hair on the back of her neck stood straight up and she knew without looking that it was Sin. The liar.
Neither of them spoke for what felt like years to Taylor, but couldn’t have been more than five minutes. She didn’t want to talk to him, not when she now knew how little regard he had for her. However, the longer the silence stretched between them the more she wanted to rip him a new one for lying by omission for so long.
Just when she decided to launch the first volley of what she suspected would’ve been a fight that would go down in the books as the bloodiest in the history of the town, Sin spoke. “I have a daughter,” he said softly. “Megan. She’s the most important thing in my world, always has been, and I’ve done everything I could think of to make her happy.”
His words were quiet, but his voice was fierce, forcing Taylor to look at him to see his expression. He was looking directly at her, intensity blazing in his silver eyes.
“Her mother was a girl I was stupid crazy for when I was sixteen. It was lust on my side, greed on hers. She thought a rich boy like me would make a good baby daddy and got pregnant thinking she’d jumped on the gravy train.” His lips twisted in a smile that made her chest hurt for him. “I was still crazy about her when my parents kicked me out of their house. They didn’t want a bastard tainting their good name. I quit school and got a job to help Maria out. She wanted us to get married, supposedly so Megan could have my name, but I thinks she never gave up on the hope that my folks would relent and she’d be invited to the country club or some shit.” He shrugged.
Taylor stared at him. Nothing she’d ever witnessed since she’d known Sin would’ve led her to believe he came from money, not that it would’ve mattered to her. She’d been drawn to the man beneath the mechanic’s coveralls, not the business owner, even though she strongly admired entrepreneurs like her dad.
“The minute I held Megan in my arms, I knew everything I did from that moment on had to be for her,” he continued when she didn’t say anything. “She was so tiny, Taylor. This little bitty thing with thick, black hair and a face I fell in love with the minute she blinked up at me.” He shook his head, a small smile lighting his face. “There’s just something so empowering and weakening about holding your child in your arms. On one hand it’s a miracle to have created something so perfect but, on the other hand, you’re terrified of fucking up.”
“Devon said almost the exact same thing when she had Edward,” Taylor offered.
“By the time Megan was four months old, Maria had latched onto a new guy and I never felt so thankful for anything in my entire life. I’d fallen out of my infatuation with her even before she gave birth, but for Megan’s sake, I did whatever I could to make their lives easier. Sent money, took Megan for long weekends even though I lived in this little shithole apartment. I didn’t care. I didn’t want my kid going to some babysitter who might hurt her.” He raised his hand to Robbie, who hurried over with a bottle of Sin’s regular brew. The bartender cast Taylor a speculative glance before moving along.
“Did she marry?” Taylor asked, despite her own decision to stay out of Sin’s life and business. But she’d never seen this side of him, the loving father whose face almost melted at the thought of his child. It touched her in ways she really didn’t need to be feeling at the moment.
He took a sip of beer. “Yeah, Maria’s be
en married six times since Megan was about a year old.”
“Holy shit,” she breathed, eyes wide.
Sin chuckled, but it was a sad sound. “Yeah. She switches out husbands the way most people change cars. I could care less what she does, but what I resented was the way it tore Megan up. She’d get attached to her new stepfathers only to lose them when Maria started her shit. And it was all the time. If it wasn’t a new husband, it was Maria’s new boyfriend, whoever. She’d parade them in and out of Megan’s life and I swore I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t let her get attached to a woman I was with who might take off because they didn’t like the way I folded my socks or some shit.” He scrubbed his hand over his face with a heavy sigh. “It didn’t matter to me because I kept everything casual anyway. I didn’t want, or need, anyone else in my life. Megan was it for me.”
Taylor tried to ignore the way his words hurt her and turned her attention back to her glass of Coke and grenadine. She actually wanted to slap Megan’s mother for being such a flighty bitch.
“Then I met you.”
Her breath caught in her throat and she lost the urge to look away from him. God, talk about a sucker punch. He was looking at her like he cared about her as more than a friend, or a fuck buddy.
“Honestly did my best to stay away from you, babe. Did a damn good job of it too until the other night.” His eyes were liquid mercury and hotter than the sun, as though he was reliving what they’d done together that one night. “You make me crazy, you know. I don’t normally throw women over my shoulder in the middle of grocery stores.”
“W–What are you trying to say?” Taylor asked in a reedy whisper.
He shrugged and took another sip of beer. “I’m saying I want to see where this leads, you and me.” His jaw bunched a bit before he gritted out, “And I love you, dammit.” Her eyes were about to pop out of her head, they were stretched so wide. He barked out a harsh laugh. “Don’t look so shocked, babe. You’re the perfect fucking woman for me, too good for damn sure, but I can’t let you go. I won’t let you go.”
Brought to His Knees-Tough Guys Laid Low By Love Page 44
