Max was excited to see the familiar tin, but Jonathan was stunned. He looked up at me. “How did you get Cleo’s cookies?”
This drew Alex’s attention as he glanced our direction. His brow furrowed as he spotted the tin, and the cookies inside. Anyone who had ever had them knew that they were Cleo’s specialty. His eyes met mine as he likewise waited for an answer.
“I went to the house over the weekend,” I supplied, although I felt decidedly put on the spot as I did so, like I had been caught doing something wrong. Perhaps it was the stunned, betrayed expression on Alex’s face as he tried to piece together the eventful weekend. “Your father asked me to come get my things, and I thought it was high time that I did so.”
“Oh,” Jonathan said softly as he looked down at the cookies. “So I guess that means you’re never going back.”
Alex was quiet as his eyes scanned my face. I met his glance. “That’s exactly what it means.”
“Oh,” Jonathan said again, his enthusiasm zapped just like a popped balloon. He barely touched lunch, and didn’t eat one cookie, before we retreated back to the library for the rest of our lessons that day.
My spirit was equally low. I couldn’t get that look on Alex’s face out of my mind. I hadn’t brought it up to him because it was far more important to me to spend what precious little time we had together focused on each other. Had that been a mistake? I wasn’t hiding anything.
Was I?
After I started Jonathan on his reading assignment, I excused myself to find Alex. The sooner we could talk about it, the better. I wanted no secrets or misunderstandings. This was my chance to get it right, and Alex was far too important to me to make any stupid mistakes.
I finally tracked him down in the media room, where he had stripped down to jeans and muscle shirt, and was moving furniture around like they were light as a feather. My tummy tightened as I watched those strong, defined biceps curl with such quiet strength. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“You were right,” he said without looking me in the eye. “This room isn’t as comfortable as the family room. Need to make it more kid friendly.”
I nodded as I shut the door behind me and walked over to where he stood. “Maybe even dog friendly.”
He looked down at my face. “What do you mean?”
“Yoda. He doesn’t get any real human interaction at the house without Jonathan there. And Jonathan spends more time here than anywhere else. I was thinking maybe he could come stay with us.”
He lifted another leather love seat out of the way. “One of the things you talked about with Drew, I take it.”
“Yeah,” I answered quietly. He didn’t even turn to face me. “I was going to tell you.”
He nodded as he surveyed the room, his hands on his hips. “Or not,” he said with a shrug. “It’s not like you owe me any explanations, Rachel.”
My heart sunk. He sounded so hurt. Like a lost little boy trying to keep a stiff upper lip. “You know that’s not how I want it.”
He still couldn’t look me in the eye. “And how do you want it?”
“I think I proved that over the weekend. I told you. I made my choice. And it was you.”
“After you saw Drew,” he clarified. “No doubt he was bragging on and on about how he planned to move Olivia right into your spot, should you reconsider vacating it.” I didn’t confirm his comment, but I knew he could tell just from the look on my face. “Yet you made no mention of any of this, whatsoever, to me. What, exactly, happened at his house?”
My arms crossed in front of me. “What are you saying, Alex?”
“I’m not saying anything,” he grunted as he lifted another love seat toward the corner of the room. “Like I said, you owe me nothing.”
That was it. I walked over to where he stood and turned him to face me. “Stop, look at me.” His eyes were bright when they finally met mine. “I gave myself to you because I wanted to. I know now that you are everything that I have wanted or needed. And yeah, maybe it took going back to that cold, empty mansion to figure that out. To see the difference in what is real and what is fantasy. I was an idiot, Alex. You said it many times yourself. I saw Drew as the man I wanted him to be, not the man he was. And that was my mistake. But that part of my life is over. I knew it the minute I left that driveway. This is the life I want. To be here with you and Millicent and Max. That is why I was finally able to give myself to you in every way that counts. I wasn’t going to wait one more day, or one more minute. That’s why I didn’t tell you. It just didn’t matter.”
He didn’t say anything at first. I could tell he was dissecting everything to see if I was telling him the truth. He scanned my face for any hint of deception. “I want to believe you,” he finally said softly. “But I’ve been on the losing end of this kind of thing before. If you went back to him now,” he started, but couldn’t even utter the words of how awful that would be.
I slipped my arms around his waist and pulled his rigid body close to mine. “You’re not some consolation prize, Alex. You’re the gold medal. You always have been.” My eyes locked with his. “I love you.”
He sighed as he slumped into my arms. “God, Rachel,” he muttered as his arms tightened around my waist.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I should have told you.”
“You can tell me anything,” he said. “Even if it’s goodbye.”
I held him tighter. I had no plans of ever doing that. I even broke our unspoken rule about public displays of affection as I kissed him hard, to show him how committed I was to him. He grabbed me in a fevered embrace that branded me as his woman from head to toe.
He dragged his mouth away and pulled back. “I should probably finish this.”
I didn’t like his pulling away but I knew he had to process things for himself. “Yeah. I should get back to Jonathan.” I was at the door before he said anything.
“I love you, too,” he said without looking at me. “More than you know.”
“We have plenty of time for you to show me,” I promised. His eyes finally met mine and he offered a small smile before he went back to his task.
With a sigh, I escaped back to the library.
Alex left by late afternoon and hadn’t returned by dinnertime, which meant both boys were subdued. Millicent and I shared silent glances, but no one at the table really said anything. After dinner, the boys retired to the family room to watch a movie, and I went back to the media room, which had been completely emptied of furniture. I decided to vacuum the room and leave it clean for however Alex had decided to repurpose it. Jonathan found me dusting and cleaning when he came looking for me after Max had gone on to bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Alex wants to change up the media room,” I said from where I sat cross-legged in front of the control panel with all the electronics and storage. I was so desperate to keep preoccupied that I had resorted to alphabetizing the movies and games. They were sprawled out in piles in front of me. “Make it more kid friendly,” I added with a smile.
Jonathan sat next to me, taking the video games and separating them by game system format. “You like it here, huh?”
I nodded. “Very much. Don’t you?”
He nodded. “It’s cool spending time where my dad used to stay as a kid. Hard to imagine it, though.”
I laughed. “It is.”
“Do you hate him?”
His candid question took me off guard. “Why would you ask that?”
He shrugged. “I know you left because you were mad at him. He lied to you. He hurt you,” he added softly.
I sighed. “It’s all complicated grown-up stuff,” I dismissed.
“Just like everything else that controls my life,” he shot back. “Maybe one day I’ll be old enough to ask why.”
“I guess I deserved that,” I muttered as I set aside a pile of cases. “I don’t hate your father, Jonathan. I did. For a very long time. For hurting me. For hurting you. For trying to force wha
t should always come naturally. Staying here, spending time with your uncle and learning about their past… I guess I’ve come to feel sorry for him mostly. It wasn’t that long ago when he was a hurt little boy himself. The reason he does the things he does is because he was taught to. A lot of it probably isn’t really even his fault.”
“So you’ve forgiven him?”
My eyebrow arched. “Have you?”
Those big eyes were so bright and so blue. “That’s what love does, right?”
My mouth thinned in a hard line. “There are some things even love can’t do, Jonathan. And some things even the most loving heart can’t forgive.”
“You don’t believe that,” he argued.
“Yeah,” I confirmed quietly. “I do.” I resumed my filing as I went on. “You want an adult story? Here’s one. Once upon there was a girl named Rachel, who married her college sweetheart mere weeks after they started dating. Weeks later, she was pregnant – but her fairy tale prince wasn’t happy about it. In fact, he pretty much made her feel like crap about it for the next five years of her life. He wanted nothing to do with the baby he helped create. Instead he wanted to be what he had always been: young, and handsome, and free. So he spent lots of time with other women who made him feel that way.”
Jonathan’s gaze dropped to the floor. I already knew he had a ringside seat to a similar situation with his own parents, but I was almost completely certain no one had ever talked to him about it so he could see things from their point of view.
Yet I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“The day the baby prince fell into the hot tub that would rob him of his life, the fairy prince was romancing another girl right in their home, and never even heard him fall in. Rachel discovered her dead marriage and her brain-dead child all on the same day.”
He glanced back up at me and watched emotions march across my ravaged face as I finally finished my tale. “For that week afterwards, Zach and Rachel said nothing to each other. There was nothing left to say. She had moved in with her best friend and her family, while Zach moved his new girlfriend into the home Rachel had spent years building. When the doctors confirmed there was no hope for the sleeping little prince, it was Rachel who had to sign the consent form to take him off of life support, virtually killing the last shred of hope she had at a normal life and a normal family. Zach wasn’t even at the hospital.” Tears streaked down my face. “Rachel’s best friend was the one that helped her organize the funeral and the burial, none of which Zach attended at all. There were flowers and casseroles and sympathy cards… but the only thing Rachel got from the father of her dead child were divorce papers, and a box of Jason’s belongings tossed into a couple of bins.”
By this time, Jonathan was crying, too. I wiped my eyes with the backs of my shaking hands. “Two weeks after their divorce was final, he married this other girl. Ten months after that, she gave birth to twins; identical boys so he can always have a spare,” I added bitterly. “So you see, Jonathan, there are some things love can’t forgive.”
Jonathan scooted over to throw his arms around my neck, and we rocked together as we cried. “I’m sorry, Rachel,” he said into my neck.
“Me, too,” I said. When he finally broke his hold, I gathered him into my lap. “So as you can see, what your dad did was more than a simple lie. And while I can understand why he did the things he did and made the choices he made, there’s no way I could ever trust him again, with anything. Not if I can’t trust him with that.” I shuddered as I remembered the bombshell Alex had dropped on me that day in court. Unlike what Zach had done, which was a tragic accident caused by thoughtless and neglect, Drew knew exactly what he was doing even before we met. It made the betrayal worse, somehow.
“I can’t go back, Jonathan. Not to the girl I was when I married Zach, nor the person I was when I came out here last year. And you know what? I wouldn’t even want to.” I tightened my arms around him. “Maybe that’s the point of pain… to nudge you in the direction you need to go.”
“So you need to be here?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I answered. “Maybe I’m here for Max… or even Alex… you wanted us to get along before, remember?”
He nodded. “I just want to go back to the way things were.”
“I know,” I said as I cuddled him close. “But as long as you’re looking back, you can never move forward, right?”
He sat quietly for a moment before he looked around at our stacks of media cases with a wry grin. “We made a mess.”
I laughed. “We certainly did.”
His eyes met mine. “But a mess can always be cleaned. Right, Rachel?”
I cupped his head in my hands and kissed his nose. “Right.”
Twenty minutes later he shuffled off to bed, while I stored the rest of our organized media. I lingered longer than necessary, hoping maybe Alex would come back. But it stayed so quiet in the empty room I could almost hear the second hand on my watch ticking away. I pulled myself to my feet with a grunt and headed upstairs.
My phone remained silent. I never even heard when Alex got back that night. Thanks to our previous nights of fun, I was exhausted and konked out just shy of the eleven o’clock news. My eyes didn’t open again until daybreak. I checked my phone, still no word from Alex. I tried not to panic.
Millicent, the boys, and I all sat down to breakfast by eight. I followed Jonathan to the library by nine, and by noon there was still no sign of Alex. I decided to get out of the house before it drove me insane. We packed a picnic lunch and rode the horses out toward the fruit trees, where we ate under their shade. Jonathan didn’t mention Alex’s absence, but then again with Alex’s travel and extensive track schedule, it wasn’t that uncommon for him to be gone. He was one of the hardest working rich people I knew, often matching Drew’s efforts step for step.
He just usually was much better balancing his status as a single parent.
I didn’t start to worry until dinner came and went without any sign of him. Millicent just smiled and patted my arm and told me that he had texted her and he was called away on business, that he would return by the end of the week.
Yet he didn’t call me.
He must have been really hurt.
I decided to give him the space he obviously needed, and concentrated instead on Jonathan’s studies. Millicent and I both overcompensated, going into overdrive with new things to do. On Wednesday we took the kids to the beach, where we spent the entire day building castles and searching for seashells. Max created his own bottle of sunshine with sand and shells, and he squealed with delight when we found a perfect sand dollar.
We ate fresh seafood at a seaside café just as the sun went down, affording us a gorgeous coastal sunset. We took plenty of photos and laughed more than any of us had all week. But nothing brightened our mood quite like returning to the house and seeing Alex’s beat up old truck out front. Max broke out into a run as he headed into the house, and I had to fight hard to keep from doing the same.
Alex met us in the foyer, looking so handsome I thought my heart might explode. He was once again close enough to touch, and looked so real and solid it was all I could do not to throw myself in his arms. My smile said it all. And nothing filled my heart with joy like seeing him return it.
He swooped Max into his arms and ruffled Jonathan’s hair. Millicent kissed him on the cheek, so I got brave enough to reach up and do likewise. His eyes were dark with emotion as he pulled back. “Come on. I have a surprise.”
“Your being home is the best surprise,” I said. “Right, guys?”
Max nodded enthusiastically as he wrapped his arms around his dad’s neck. “I missed you, Daddy!”
Alex kissed him. “And I missed you, buddy,” he said. “I missed all of you. But I had a special mission,” he added with a wink over his shoulder as we headed back toward the media room. “I finally figured out what this stale ol’ theater room was missing.” He set Max on his feet before he swung open the double doors. “A
crowd.”
My brow furrowed as we stepped into the room, which was now devoid of any furniture. Instead it was filled with colorful bean bags, throw pillows and gaming chairs, all of which were filled with the familiar faces of my best friend, Nancy Gilbert, her husband, Greg, and their four kids. I let out a scream as I flew into Nancy’s arms, and my Texas family all embraced me at once with a jumble of excited words and laughter. “What are you doing here?” I managed. I had no idea they were even planning a trip.
Nancy grinned. “Alex made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.”
Again my brow furrowed as I glanced back at Alex, who stood there with that insufferable grin. “What good is money if you can’t make people happy?” he shrugged.
I ran into his arms and gave him a big hug anyway. He held me close and it felt more like home than ever.
I quickly made all the introductions. Max and Jonathan were particularly interested in the kids their own age. Melissa, the eldest, had just turned eleven. Close on her heels was ten-year-old Becca. Nancy and Greg tried once again for a son a couple years later, when eight-year-old Allison was born. Their little prince, Benji, didn’t come along until two years after that, when Nancy finally shut down the factory for good.
They were beside themselves to be in California, much less a palatial country home. When Jonathan suggested they go see the horses, all the kids jumped at the chance. Millicent assured all the adults she would supervise, but Greg thought it would be a fine idea as well, so Alex also tagged along as their official host. They led the boisterous group outside and toward the stables.
Nancy reached for another hug. “I can’t believe I’m actually here!”
“Me either!” I laughed as I held her tight.
“That’s quite a man you have there,” she said with that knowing glint in her eye. I knew that Alex likely never said a word, but my eagle-eyed friend wouldn’t have missed what was written between the lines. “He called us over the weekend, just to see if we were able to make the trip. We told him sure, but it would have to be fast. Greg had to be back at work early August. By Tuesday he was on our front doorstep with four round-trip tickets. I don’t think I’ve ever packed so fast before.”
Entangled: Book 2 of the Fullerton Family Saga Page 14
