“Tricia?”
“Huh?”
“You were miles away. Everything okay?” I rolled from my back to my side and saw him standing naked and deliciously sexy, with his bed tousled hair and his arms above his head holding the doorframe.
“Sorry, I was just a little spaced out.”
“I asked if you wanted to get in the shower with me?”
“Sure, I think we’d better get a move on or Erin and Ryder will think we’re not going to surface again today.”
James chuckled. “Maybe they’ve been more successful than we’ve been at christening the bed.”
“Don’t, I can’t cope with that picture, she’s my child.” I admonished him for putting that thought in my head. I shuffled my way off the bed and padded over toward him. Slipping my arms around his waist, I leaned my cheek against his warm chest and inhaled his manly scent, his arms automatically came down around my shoulders and his two large hands reached down and grabbed my ass.
“You’re fucking delicious,” he whispered, as he dipped his head close to my ear. A shiver rolled down my spine and goosebumps radiated over my skin. “I love how you respond to me. You just got wet again, right?” he asked, poking fun at how it never took much to respond to his touch.
“As wet as you are hard,” I affirmed, feeling his firm cock pressing lightly against my stomach. Grabbing me tightly to his chest, he ground himself against me.
“It’s your fault. You control my body, turning my most innocent of words into carnal thoughts.”
“You’re welcome,” I teased. A sharp crack sounded out in the room and I yelled when my left ass cheek stung.
“Ow,” I hissed, but before I could say anything else, he lifted me up, wrapped my legs around his waist, and buried his face in my neck.
Heat rose from within and I moaned as he turned me around, slid a hand under my ass and slipped his fingers through my folds. “My tongue needs to be in here to taste you,” he muttered, as we headed toward the shower.
Chapter Nineteen
“That was the best burrito,” Ryder admitted, as he wiped his smooth jawline and mouth with his white cotton napkin, “and that chef needs to teach our cook at home how to make that salsa,” he added.
We were all stuffed with food and had postponed dessert for that moment. The waitstaff transferred our drinks into the great room for us. The moon was high in the sky, casting a perfect reflection of it in the lake outside the window. It looked picture perfect.
Erin moved her red wine to an end table next to the couch and sat down. “Would it be okay if I put my feet up?” she asked James.
“Make yourself at home.”
Erin curled her legs under her bottom on the couch and sighed. “This is so peaceful. I never get tired of having nothing to do.” Turning to me she smiled. “When James suggested spending a few days away with you, I racked my brain for what I should bring. I thought it may be good to see some of my past, so I brought my hard drive. It has all the old photographs my parents kept over the years. No pressure, but I wondered whether you’d like to see some of my major milestones.”
“I’m glad you said that because I have something I need to share with you, too,” I told her, following her lead. I was glad she had prompted us sharing after my discussion with James about the letters Dad found.
“Shall I show you the pool and the gym, Ryder? Do you work out much?” James prompted, giving them both an excuse to leave us alone.
“That would be great. Yeah, I have to work out most days. I have a gym in my apartment, but sometimes my schedule doesn’t let me do much.”
Standing up, James gestured with his arm to which of the three sets of double doors in the room they should take. “We’ll leave you two to talk and catch up for a couple of hours.”
After they’d left the room, Erin gave me a serious look. “I hate that James thinks he needs to run off all the time. If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here together.”
“He’s polite to a fault, but he understands how delicate this situation is for us both. I’ve never known a man who is so considerate. He only wants us to be happy.”
“I am happy. Very happy. Meeting you has been an amazing experience, I’m so glad I found you.”
My heart squeezed with words I had never dared dream I’d hear. “You have no idea what it means to me to hear you say that. I never thought this day would ever come. In the few fleeting moments I’d ever dared to think of you finding me, those scenarios never brought such a positive result.”
We both stopped and stared at one another again, like we were trying to absorb how we felt, and I figured that neither of us had the words to express how surreal our situation was.
“Before you say what you have to say, there is something you need to know,” I said, seriously. “Last week, Marnie was cleaning out my parents’ attic and my dad joined her. He found a locked box of my mother’s. It was full of letters … from your mom to mine … he doesn’t know what they mean yet.” Erin’s jaw dropped in shock. I instantly reached over and took her hand in mine, wanting to comfort her. “That came as much of a shock to me as it obviously has to you.”
“I had no idea my mom wrote to yours. What did they say?”
“I have them here, on the laptop. As you know, my dad has no clue I had a baby, but now with the letters... I don’t know what he’ll think. I was going to tell him anyway, but we just need to give him some—”
“It’s fine. I’m sorry for your loss,” she replied quickly.
I ignored her comment because the more I thought about my mom the angrier I felt. “Thankfully, James thought on his feet and quickly scanned the letters before Marnie returned them to the house. James put everything in his cloud for me. Do you want to see them?”
“Of course, I do. My whole childhood I thought I knew exactly who my parents were, what they stood for… all those lectures about honesty and being true to myself, and there they were spinning the biggest single lie of my life to me.”
“I had expected you to be so angry with me.”
“No, curious about my story. My mom told me how young you were, and I was a sixteen-year-old girl once, too. I’d have died going through what you had to at any age. But then having to live with it afterward, that must have been horrific for you. I admire your strength. Despite all that heartache you went on with your life, and look at you now. James is an amazing man and you totally deserve him.”
“You are so gracious, Erin. I’m not sure I’d have felt as benevolent toward my birth mother if I’d been adopted. As for James … there are times when I feel I don’t deserve him, but I fight that feeling because not having him in my life isn’t an option anymore.”
“That man adores you, and you him. You complement each other beautifully.”
Hearing someone who hardly knew me, who should have been angry with me, tell me she approved of the man I loved, was the greatest gift I could have ever been given.
“So where are these pictures?” Erin asked eagerly. James had already pre-empted our conversation and had left his laptop on the large cabinet by the window.
Sitting next to her, I opened the laptop, and the nervous anxiety I felt returned in the form of another adrenaline burst, because Erin could fill in the gaps to what wasn’t in the letters.
“These are from shortly after you were born, and they date roughly every six months until a couple of years ago, we think.”
“That would have been around the time my mom fell ill for the last time, she couldn’t do much for the last year or so.” Erin began to read and with each letter she read, I carefully studied her reaction. A smile spread on her lips when she held a picture of herself in a Snow White dress. “This was during a weekend at Disney World.”
With another she frowned when she told me the puppy she was holding had died when she was eleven. She cringed, embarrassed at one of her in a high school picture wearing braces. There were times when she cried, and I noted she had reacted much in the same way a
s I had toward some of the images.
When she reached the last one, she looked at me with her tear-stained face. I had begun to cry as well when I saw fresh tears in her eyes, and her face conveyed every feeling inside her from pain, hurt, and sorrow until her jaw clenched in anger and she finally looked up at me, disappointed.
“This last one was right before my mom became really ill. I think she was moved to the hospice for her care around the same time. I had no idea she was ill until she called to tell me she was there. Her cancer was so advanced, but she lingered on. It was when she was at the hospice, I found out about you, the adoption … the lies …”
I squeezed her hand and sat quietly, while she recovered from her own personal hell and considered how devastating and confusing it must have felt for her to find out her life had been fabricated, and she’d had no idea I’d existed until her mother was dying.
“Erin, each of us can only view this experience from our own perspective. I always knew you were out there, but it must have been horrendous for you. Knowing your adopted mom wrote to my mom, and kept her updated on your progress…” I choked, “I can’t begin to express the level of betrayal I’m carrying in regard to my mom. All those years she kept tabs on your progress and I was never allowed to mention you existed…” My breath hitched, and I couldn’t continue for a moment when my tears fell, despite me trying to stay strong.
Erin squeezed my hand. “It’s obvious to me, those two women, my mom and yours … my grandmother, I suppose, came to some agreement to which they both kept. They were both cruel in their own ways. From my mom’s perspective, I guess she only told me to rid herself of guilt … about lying about who my father was and then the adoption. I guess it was her deathbed confession, otherwise I may never have been any the wiser.”
I nodded, turned, and hugged her tight. “Erin, I can never make up for all—”
“Stop. I don’t want you to think like that. What happened was tragic, but I have a whole new family now, when I was an only child. My mom had a cousin, who had a husband and daughter, but I don’t remember much about them, I was very small when they came to the house. Mom told me she’d died around the time she got sick. I tried to trace the husband and daughter without any luck. My dad was an only child; so on my end there’s no one else. To know I have you and James… Marnie and her husband… a granddad, who has no idea…” she trailed off.
“He will know about you, Erin—if he doesn’t know already,” I replied, nodding at the laptop where she’d read the letters. “It’s just with Mom passing … he needs a little time, honey. But we must tell him. Like I’ve said before, I will never deny you again.”
The beaming smile she gave me said it all, and I figured my guardian angel had perhaps turned up, albeit thirty years too late. Part of me wondered if the universe had decided I’d paid my dues for the horrible thing I had done.
The innocent baby I’d given up had come back into my life and had found it in her heart to forgive me. By doing that, she in turn had helped put another piece in the puzzle to helping me heal myself.
“All right, my turn. I’ve got pictures of the house I grew up in and from a few other key moments as I grew up. I figured it may help you to know I had quite a privileged upbringing. I’ve also included pictures of some of my friends, my first love, and my senior prom dress pictures. However, I’d put them together before I knew anything about the letters, so if you think it’s too much we don’t have to—”
“No, I want to see them … I want you to fill in as much as is humanly possible from our time apart. Nothing can make up for me not being there, but at least I’ll have images in my head for some of those key times in your life I’ve always imagined in my mind.”
Smiling warmly, she leaned down and lifted her purse. Taking a small case from inside it she pulled out a flash drive. “Would James mind if we use his laptop?”
“Not at all, he doesn’t use this one for work.”
Erin grinned nervously as she inserted the flash drive and pulled up the files. My heart raced and my body buzzed in anticipation, but when she began to narrate each picture for me, I laughed more than I cried. She had obviously chosen the pictures carefully because they had been mainly just her and her friends doing weird and wacky things.
There were times when I’d asked her to wait while I absorbed the image on screen and committed it to my memory. The images filled in so many blanks from those times when I had wondered what she’d been doing.
The home she had lived in was beautiful with a homey vibe, and it was clear from pictures of her bedroom over the years, she had wanted for nothing.
There were many more photographs where Erin beamed happily during big days out. Summer camp images of groups of smiling kids on idyllic lakeside settings, pretty much like the gorgeous place James had brought us to relive the time we’d missed.
Thoughts turned to my own upbringing, and it warmed me to know she had been in a far better place than if she’d been with me around my mother. At least Erin had been given a good grounding and a lovingly blissful existence until her father had fallen ill.
“So that’s all the ones I put together of me. There are a few of my parents and their families, if you want to see those.”
I had, the empty faces of the people who had been her protectors instead of me were suddenly all important. Not knowing what they had looked like had been something else which had tortured me.
“All right, this was me about six weeks old, I think, when I was christened. That’s Mom, Dad, and my godparents, Maureen and Colin McLean. They were our next-door neighbors, and their daughter, Kelsie, is still my closest friend.”
I stared past the godparents and studied the other two strangers in the picture, Erin’s parents, and felt disappointed by their appearance.
They looked like ordinary, familiar-looking, nondescript regular people of average height, both with mousy brown hair. Yet there was something extraordinary about them, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I decided I had thought that way because they had given my daughter a home.
An unsettled feeling washed over me, and I wondered if the dissatisfaction I felt was because they weren’t a shiny beautiful couple, who would have stood out in the picture like my daughter had done in every one of hers.
Several photos included them with their growing adopted daughter through her early years, but one stopped my heart. Hearing my breath hitch, Erin turned, looking confused toward me before looking back at the screen.
“Wow, I’ve never looked at this closely before, but my mom’s cousin’s daughter really looks like me.”
Blood swished in my ears and my heart stuttered erratically, making my lips and fingertips tingle from shock, which had overtaken my whole body.
“Mom, are you all right? Mom?”
“Hey, baby, there you are,” James cooed softly. “You checked out on us for a few minutes. Are you okay?” I stared at him, feeling glazed for a few moments, before my eyes began to move and I found Erin standing in Ryder’s arms looking distressed.
“What happened?” I asked groggily.
“You passed out,” James informed me. Instantly the memory of the picture Erin had shown me came flooding back.”
“Thank goodness you’re all right. You gave me a heck of a fright. One minute we were looking at photographs and the next you’d rolled forward, knocked the laptop off my knees, and kept falling forward until you hit the floor,” Erin added, and I heard how shaken up she sounded.
“You’re not hurting anywhere, are you?” James asked, touching various points on my body from my shoulders and wrists to my knees.
I shook my head and a wave of nausea made me inhale a deep breath. “That photo?” I muttered, my heart pounding in my chest when I remembered what had caused me to faint in the first place.
“It’s okay we don’t have to look—”
“I need to see it again,” I snapped gruffly, cutting Erin off. Glancing from me to James, I saw concern flash in the si
lent communication which passed between them, and I knew they were both considering whether she should show it to me again.
James crouched in front of me.
“What did you see?” he asked, concerned. Neither he nor Erin had any idea what had shocked me so badly I had passed out. Grabbing the laptop from the floor, James sat next to me. When he opened the screen the same photo I’d been staring at became visible again.
“I’m lost … no … idea what … to think,” I stuttered, staring at the picture as the immeasurable weight of betrayal stole my thoughts. James leaned forward and took a long look at the image. Dragging his eyes from the screen he looked at me and shook his head.
“Can you fill me in, because I’m not sure what I’m seeing?” James said.
I knew he saw me and my parents, but he had no idea who the others were. Wrapping his arms around me, he held me close and cradled my head.
“What? What is it?” Erin asked.
All I could do in that moment was sit and blink, my mind in a total meltdown as I tried to get my head around the people in the picture.
James leaned back and stared me with a pleading look, and I knew neither he nor Erin understood what I saw in its entirety.
“That’s me and my parents.” I choked as soon as the words were out, and I sobbed into my hands.
“Yeah …” I see that.” James replied.
Erin had already taken the laptop and was staring into the picture, her index finger and thumb tugging worriedly at her bottom lip.
“This is Erin’s photograph.” I announced. James blinked, assimilating that information.
“That’s Elizabeth, my mom’s cousin I told you about. She came to visit that one time with her husband, Les, and her daughter, Patty. All I have of her is this photograph, but I was too young to remember them … she’s the cousin of my mom’s that I told you about, who died—” Erin explained.
Resist Me (Unchained Attraction Book 4) Page 14
