by Marie Force
“So it’s happened before?” David asked.
Owen nodded. Too many times to count.
“Because there was no sign of a head injury, I gave her a shot for the pain that should ensure that she sleeps through the night. I’ll see her at the clinic in the morning.”
Of course there was no head injury, Owen thought. The general was strategic about where he aimed his blows so no one would ever know they were there. “Thank you, David. Send me the bill.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m happy to help.” He handed Owen a card. “My cell number is on there. Call if you need me during the night.”
Overwhelmed by the support, Owen said, “I appreciate that.”
Evan walked David out and returned a minute later.
“Is there anything I can do, O?” Evan asked.
“Go on home,” Owen said. “Thanks for your help.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind hanging out.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“Take my car, Ev,” Laura said. “I’ll get it tomorrow.”
“No worries,” Evan said. “I can walk. It’s not far to the pharmacy.” He crossed the room to give Owen a hug, and then turned to hug his cousin. “Call me if you need anything.”
“I will,” Owen said.
When they were alone, Owen glanced at Laura, knowing he should at least try to explain.
“Not tonight,” she said firmly. “Not ever if you don’t want to.”
The sudden surge of tears took him by surprise. He would’ve thought he’d exhausted his lifetime supply many years ago.
She wrapped her arms around him and held on tight until he had expended decades worth of grief and helpless rage. And then she urged him to stretch out on the sofa and snuggled up to him.
Embarrassed to have broken down in front of her, he rubbed his face as bone-deep weariness set in. “You should go up to bed. You need your rest.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“I have to stay down here in case she needs me.”
“I know.”
“Laura—”
She rested a finger on his lips. “Shh. I’m not leaving you alone. Not now, not ever. Close your eyes and try to get some rest.”
“I’m nothing like him. I’d never—”
“Owen! My God, do you honestly think you have to tell me that?”
“I wanted you to know because of the baby.”
“Owen, please. . .”
The brush of her lips against his neck registered at the same moment he felt new dampness on his face. He hated that he’d made her cry.
“You could never hurt me or the baby,” she said softly. “Never.”
“I’m sorry to drag you into this. I didn’t want you to know.”
She turned his face, forcing him to meet her gaze. “I love you. I love everything about you. Everything.” Her sweet, gentle kiss was nearly his undoing. “Close your eyes. It’s okay. I’m here, and I love you. Always.”
Owen released a deep breath and closed his eyes. Wrapped in her love, he was able to quiet his mind and sleep.
Chapter 21
Grace was asleep when Evan got home. Sitting in the dark for a long time, he downed two beers before he felt calm enough to crawl into bed beside her. He lay awake for a long time, staring up at the ceiling as he tried to process everything that had happened. With his entire body vibrating with tension, he’d about given up on sleep when Grace turned over and snuggled up to him.
Evan put his arm around her and drew her in close, taking comfort from her presence.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
“I don’t get it.”
“What, honey?”
“How a guy can beat the shit out of the woman he supposedly loves.”
“Oh no. Owen’s mom?”
Evan nodded. “Apparently, it’s been going on for years with her—and the kids when they lived at home. Owen grew up in the midst of a nightmare.”
“Did you know about it when you guys were younger?”
“He only told me recently.”
“Poor Owen. He’s such a nice guy.”
“How does a man do that to the people he loves? I’ll never understand it.”
Grace’s lips were soft and sweet on his chest as she kissed her way to his lips. “You can’t understand because Big Mac McCarthy was your father, and he raised you and your brothers along with Joe and Luke to be the kind of men who worship the women they love.”
“I’m ashamed to admit that I never knew how truly lucky I was to grow up the way I did until recently. Knowing what Owen went through, and you and Stephanie and Maddie. . . We were so very blessed.”
“Yes, you were, and now some very lucky women are benefitting from the most excellent way Big Mac McCarthy raised his boys.”
He could feel her smile in the dark as she continued to rain kisses upon his face.
“I want to help Owen, but I don’t know how.”
“Just be there for him. That’s all you can do. Take your cues from him.”
She was right, as usual. “Owen’s not interested in the recording studio,” Evan said as he arranged her on top of him and closed his eyes, absorbed in her sweet love. He had no idea how he’d ever survived without her.
Focusing her attention on his eyelids and then the tip of his nose, she said, “You don’t need him to do it. I have no doubt you can make a huge success of it all by yourself.”
He ran his hands over the silky skin on her back. Until he met her, he hadn’t known skin could be so soft. “You have such faith in me, Grace. It humbles me. It truly does.”
“There’s nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it,” she said as her lips finally reached his mouth.
Anchoring her with his hand buried in her hair, he devoured her with his lips and tongue.
Shifting her hips ever so slightly, she nudged at his erect cock and sunk down on him, making him gasp from the pleasure that zinged through him. For someone so new at sex and love, she was damned good at it.
“Love you so much, Gracie,” he said, his voice raspy as he fought a losing battle against the seductive movements of her hips.
She bent over him, sending her hair cascading over his face in a silky rain shower. “I love you more.”
Gripping her hips, he rolled them over in a smooth move that took her by surprise. “Not possible,” he said as he thrust into her with increasing urgency.
She wrapped her arms and legs around him and held on tight for the ride. “Let’s call this one a draw.”
“You got it, baby.”
Laura woke to the sound of quiet moaning. At some point, Owen had arranged her so she was sleeping on top of him with his arms wrapped tightly around her.
Moving carefully so as not to disturb him, she worked her way free of his embrace.
He muttered in his sleep but didn’t wake up.
She smoothed a hand over his hair and kissed his forehead before she went to check on Sarah.
With the light from the hallway to guide her, Laura approached the bed. “Sarah?” When Owen’s mother didn’t answer, Laura realized she was murmuring and weeping in her sleep. Heartbroken for her, Laura took a tissue from the box on the bedside table and wiped the tears from Sarah’s cheeks.
Owen came into the room. “Is she okay?”
“I thought she was awake, but she’s dreaming.”
“Nightmares, no doubt,” he said gruffly.
The pain she heard in his voice hurt her, too. “Let’s leave her be. David said the medication would ensure that she sleeps all night.”
They returned to the sitting room, but Owen stopped her from proceeding to the sofa. “I have an idea.” Using the pillows from both sofas, he built them a bed on the floor in front of the fireplace.
While he lit the fire to warm the room, she went upstairs to get another blanket and some pillows. She took advantage of the opportunity to change into pajamas and brush her teeth. With h
er hands braced on the sink, she took a brief moment to gather the fortitude to see him through this crisis.
She was still coming to grips with what she’d learned about him and his family. No wonder he rarely speaks of his childhood. The thought of what he’d endured had her on the verge of tears, but she fought through the emotion, wanting to be as strong for him as he’d been for her.
“Whatever he needs,” she whispered. He’d been there for her in every possible way in the months they’d known each other, and she wanted nothing more than to return the favor.
Carrying the blanket and pillows she went downstairs to find that he had changed, too, into a pair of flannel pajama pants that hung low on his lean hips. The firelight cast a warm glow on his chest, giving the light dusting of hair a golden hue.
He took the pillows from her and helped her spread the blanket over the sofa pillows. With the bed made, they stretched out together and pulled a second blanket over them. He reached for her, and she settled into his embrace as if they’d been sleeping together forever.
She ran her hand over his chest and belly, hoping to soothe and comfort.
He released an unsteady laugh and stopped the movement of her hand.
“Oh, sorry.”
Bringing her hand to his lips, he pressed a kiss to the back of it. “Don’t be sorry. I love when you touch me. I love it a little too much, if you catch my drift.”
Laura smiled and turned her face up to kiss him.
“If you weren’t here, I’d be going crazy right now,” he said. “Whenever this happens, I fight my own battles with rage.”
“That’s only natural, Owen. Of course you’re angry. Anyone would be.”
“It goes so far beyond angry. I hate him. I want him to die in some awful, painful way. When we were kids, he would drag us all to church every week and knock us around afterward if we dared to move during the service. I used to pray that he would die. I prayed he’d get hit by a car or get cancer or get shot when he was deployed. But none of that happened, and after a while, I stopped believing in God.”
Listening to him, she ached for the boy he’d once been and the man he was now, still so full of pain.
“I was five the first time he hit me. I said something he didn’t like. I think it was about lima beans, and he slapped me right across the face at the dinner table. I went flying out of the chair and my head hit the wall. That’s my very first memory. I was in kindergarten and had to stay home from school for a week because my face was bruised. After that he got smart about hitting in places that were less visible.”
Laura blinked back the tears, imagining the shock of a five-year-old when one of the two people he trusted to love and care for him betrayed him so completely. “What did your mother do?”
“Nothing.”
Astounded, Laura tried to find the words. “I don’t understand. How could she do nothing when he hit her child?”
“I didn’t understand for a long time, either. It took years for me to get that she was terrified of what he’d do to her if she dared to question him. By then she had three children, including three-year-old twins, and no way to support us without him. We were living in Washington, D.C, at the time, far away from her family in Rhode Island. She had no way out, so she kept her mouth shut, tended to the surface wounds and focused on surviving each day. It took a very, very long time for me to understand that pretending it wasn’t happening was her way of coping.”
Laura wanted to tell him to stop, that he didn’t have to put himself through this, but she sensed he needed to get it out, so she kept quiet and let him talk.
“By the time I was ten, I was getting between him and the siblings that continued to arrive on a regular schedule. I got so I could tell when he was about to blow. A vein in his forehead would bulge, and that was my signal to get the other kids the hell out of there.”
“So you took the beatings for them.”
“As often as I could. Sometimes I wasn’t home. . .”
He blamed himself for the times he’d been unable to protect the others. “It wasn’t your fault, Owen.”
“I know that now. Took years of therapy to get me there, though.”
The spark of humor she heard in his voice was a small comfort, knowing his father had failed to break his spirit entirely.
“No one ever stepped in to help you? Surely, people knew what was going on.”
“Everyone knew. But he was a rising star in the air force and outranked most of the people who knew. No one wanted to get on his bad side, so they kept quiet. It wasn’t like it is now with mandatory reporting and teachers on the lookout for abused kids. Back then, people turned away from things they didn’t want to see. The closest we came to going public was when I was in tenth grade, and he broke my arm.”
Laura gasped. “Oh, God. Owen. . . God.”
“He made up a big story about me falling off the top bunk. I could tell the doctor didn’t believe him. He managed to get me alone when I went for the X-ray, and he asked me, point blank, if someone had hurt me. He was a young officer in the medical corps. I remember him vividly, as if it was yesterday. I wanted so badly to tell him, but I didn’t believe he stood a chance against my father, who could squash him like a bug.”
Owen released an ironic laugh. “I was concerned about ruining his career before it got started, so I told him it happened the way my father said it did. I’ve thought so many times about what might’ve been different for all of us if I’d had the guts to tell that doctor the truth.”
“You were a frightened child navigating a nightmare,” Laura said. “You can’t hold yourself responsible for not stopping it.”
“Again, I know that now, but at the time, I felt like the biggest coward on the face of the earth. And my father knew. He knew that doctor had his number, and he knew I’d been too afraid to tell the truth. He got off on that.”
“Sick, sadistic, son of a bitch,” Laura said.
Owen laughed and hugged her tighter, his lips brushing her forehead. “If we weren’t talking about him, I’d think my princess’s dirty mouth was insanely sexy.”
“I’ll share some more of my naughty words with you at a more appropriate time.”
“I’ll look forward to that.” He ran his hand over her back, in a gesture that comforted and soothed her. Wasn’t that just like him, to worry about comforting her while dealing with his own nightmare? “The only respite we ever got was the summers we spent here with our grandparents. Gram could never understand why we cried for days when it was time to go home.”
“So even she didn’t know?”
“He warned us about talking about our family’s business to ‘outsiders’ and the dire consequences our mother would face if we ‘talked out of school’. That was one of his favorite expressions. Since she was stuck at home with him while we were here, we kept quiet. Now we know Gram had her suspicions something was off, but after it all came out later, she said if she’d known how far off it really was, she would’ve shot him herself and borne his dire consequences.”
“From the little I know of her from our phone calls, I have no doubt she would’ve done it.”
“Oh I know she would’ve. She loves us like nobody’s business. If it weren’t for her and Gramps and those summers we spent here we’d all be in the loony bin.”
“It must’ve been so tough to go home at the end of the summer.”
“It was horrible. We had this period of total normalcy every year, and we lived for it. Other than his deployments that got more infrequent the higher up he got, it was our only break from the insanity.” Owen’s fingers slid through her hair absently, as if he needed to touch her. “I was offered a couple of scholarships to college, and my father wrangled me an appointment to West Point.”
“I thought you didn’t go to college.”
“I didn’t. I refused to go, which led to his never-ending belief that I’m good for nothing along with another violent confrontation. But I wasn’t a little kid anymore. I’d gr
own into a man when he wasn’t paying attention, and I laid him out flat. Knocked him right out cold.”
“Oh my God. What did he do?”
“He called the cops and pressed charges against me.”
Laura sat right up and looked him in the eye. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Smiling at her choice of words, he said, “I wish I was. I was eighteen at the time, so I was charged with felony assault, which was later whittled down to a misdemeanor, but it’s still on my record. He saw to it that I spent a few nights in jail, too. I lost my appointment to West Point, which further infuriated him. Of course, he took no responsibility whatsoever for his own role in the incident.”
Laura had never heard anything so outrageous in her life. “What about the scholarships?”
“As much as I wanted out of there, I turned them all down.”
“Why?”
His small smile conveyed a world of meaning.
“Your siblings,” she said as understanding dawned on her. She resettled her head on his chest. “You couldn’t leave them.”
“Righto. I did what I could for them until he kicked me out of the house when I was twenty. He was getting tired of not being able to pound on anyone because I was always interfering. After I knocked him out, he knew better than to screw with me. I took my sisters Julia and Katie, with me. They’re the twins, and they were eighteen at the time. We got jobs and our own place, and the others spent as much time with us as they could. We thought about reporting him to the authorities, but we were always afraid he’d wriggle out it because of his standing in the community and things would be even worse for the others. So we kept quiet and did what we could for the younger ones. When he was transferred to Ft. Hood in Texas, we went with them, doing everything we could for the four still stuck at home. Our imperfect system was working pretty well until the youngest one, Jeff, tried to kill himself when he was fourteen.”
“Jesus,” Laura said.
“Long story short, he made it very clear he would try again until he was successful unless we got him out of that house. That’s when we finally told my grandparents what’d been going on. They retired and moved to Florida. My father fought it tooth and nail, but Jeff went to live with them, and the rest of us were finally free. Everyone except my mother, that is.”
