One Warm Winter

by Jamie Pope

  “Cullen!” They heard Jack’s voice from the front of the house. Jack never came to visit them here.

  “We’re back here.”

  Jack appeared, followed by King and Darby. All three men looked proud of themselves. “We did it.”

  “Did what?” Wyn asked.

  “We found your sister. She’s alive. She’s been looking for you too.”

  “What?” Wyn sat there stunned. Her head was swirling with thoughts. She had a sister.

  Who was alive. Someone else she shared her genes with.

  “She lives in South Carolina with her husband and children. She’s about to have another baby.”

  “My sister?” She shook her head, trying to process this information.

  “Her name is Sunny,” Darby informed her. “You two look alike.” He bent down in front of her and took her hand. “You’re right: Grace was the one who tried to kidnap you when you were a girl.”

  “Grace?” She frowned, not sure she was understanding him.

  “That’s your birth mother’s name. I thought Cullen told you.”

  “I didn’t know.” She didn’t know he knew her name.

  “Oh . . .” Darby paused for a moment. “Your father came and took her away before the police could come. There has been no trace of her ever since, but we believe she is alive.”

  “How . . .” She blinked at them, still not sure she was hearing them correctly. “You know who I am?”

  Jack nodded. “You look much different than you did when you were a kid. You’re gorgeous. I would have never recognized you.”

  She turned to Cullen. “You told them everything?”

  “I had to,” he said softly. “I needed help.”

  “You needed help?” She couldn’t describe how she was feeling in that moment. There were too many feelings battling inside her, but she felt blindsided.

  “Could you excuse us, lads?” Cullen stood up and shook each one of their hands. “Thank you for everything. I truly appreciate it.”

  The men took that as their cue to leave, each one of them giving Cullen an uneasy look as they went. Wyn sat where she was. She was shaking. She balled her hands into tight fists and buried them in her lap, but it didn’t stop her from vibrating. She felt so many things in that moment, but the thing that was rising in her throat, burning in her chest, was anger. She was tremendously angry.

  “Wyn . . .”

  “You made me lie to them for months. I had to hide who I was. Watch what I said and you told them?”

  “I had to. I wanted to find your mother. I didn’t want this to be a mystery for your entire life.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me? Why couldn’t we have discussed it? You kept it from me! Instead of allowing me to be a part of the process, you let your friends work in secret. Darby has seen a picture of my sister before I have. King knew I had nieces and nephews before I did. Jack knew my mother’s name. I knew nothing! How could you?”

  “I did it for you.”

  “You did what for me? Made me a liar? Did you tell them we were a sham too? That you told me I couldn’t tell them the truth because you told me they wouldn’t handle it well? That my presence in their world would be an invasion of their life? You made me feel like I would be a burden and then you go and tell them like it was nothing.”

  “We aren’t a sham,” he said fiercely.

  “What we are is based on a lie.”

  “What we are will always be rooted in a lie. If they knew about your mother or not it wouldn’t have changed anything. The way I feel about you has never been a lie.”

  “But how do we know if it is real? What’s to say that if I had come here as your principal, instead of your pretend girlfriend, if things would have gone down the same way?”

  “There’s always been that connection there. You know there has.”

  “Why couldn’t you just have told me? I don’t understand. What reason did you have to keep this from me?”

  “I wanted to respect your privacy. I didn’t think they would burst in here to tell you. I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

  “That’s not a good answer.” She shook her head. “If they didn’t tell me, I’m not sure you would have.”

  “You think I would keep that from you?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know why you kept this from me.”

  “I have never lied to you.”

  “An omission is still a lie. You made me lie. You made me leave my home. You didn’t trust me with my own information about myself. You’ve treated me like I am a helpless idiot that needed to be rescued.”

  His face went to stone. “I don’t know what to say. There was no malice in what I did.”

  “I want to go home. I’m tired of being here. I’m tired of not living my life and doing everything that you say.”

  “I was only trying to keep you safe. It was my job, Wyn.”

  “It is your job. You work for my father. I keep forgetting that. He pays you. He probably told you to keep the information from me. He sure as hell didn’t want me digging. You conned me. You probably seduced me to distract me.”

  “Stop!” he yelled at her. He never raised his voice, but he yelled at her and it made her pause. “Don’t say something you can’t take back. Do not question my character.”

  “I want to see my sister.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I want to go home now.”

  He nodded. “You’ll be stateside before dark.”

  Chapter 18

  The flight back to the States was one of the longest Cullen had ever experienced. Not because the length of the time in the air, but because of the deafening, overwhelming silence from Wynter. He had been trying to protect her, but he had miscalculated. He didn’t know why he didn’t tell her that he was letting his friends search for information about her. He didn’t know why he didn’t have a conversation with her about it first. She would have agreed. Finding out who she had come from was that important to her. But he didn’t include her in her own life and now she wasn’t speaking to him. She could barely look at him.

  It was painful. It made him wonder if he had kept things from her on purpose, sheltered her for his selfish reasons instead of for her interest. The headlines in the papers stopped weeks ago. No new letters had emerged. All was quiet. She could have gone back to her life sooner, but she was with him. Consoling him after the death of his father. He allowed her to do so even though he wasn’t sad, even though he had felt free after finally saying what he needed to say to him. But he loved her attention, the fact that she loved him and wasn’t afraid to tell him. Tell him every day. As many times as he needed to hear it. He had been happy in those two weeks, the happiest he had been since he was a small boy.

  He had taken her back to D.C. To her home that had set empty for months. The weather had begun to change. It wasn’t so icy cold. Spring was in the air and D.C. had a quiet beauty about it that he had forgotten about in their time away. There was no swarm of reporters waiting outside her door to question her. It was as if life had returned to how it was the day before the news broke.

  “Wynter?” Her back was to him as she went through the mail that had accumulated in the time she was gone. She was staring at one letter for a long time. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said without looking up at him. “A job offer. I get them sometimes.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  “When are you going to speak to me?” He was tired of her silent treatment. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. She should know him well enough to know that.

  “How long have they been searching?”

  He hesitated before he answered. “I asked Darby to help first. The boys didn’t join in until later. I needed Jack, since he had more connections to your world than anyone else does.”

  “How long?”

  “About a month. Maybe a little more.”

  The hurt flashed in her eyes. “Before you made love to me for the first time?�
�

  “Yes. But what does it matter?”

  “You kept pushing me away. All those weeks. And then one night you give in. What changed? Did you realize I was getting bored there? You knew you needed to do something to keep me away from my life until my father figured out what he was going to do about the person who was leaking the letters. He told you to do what you had to do to keep me from digging and you found the only thing you knew would make me stay. You used my feelings against me.”

  He slammed his fist on the table, fed up with her accusations. She jumped and for a moment he felt guilty for scaring her, for losing his temper, but she was going too far. “I know you’re upset with me, but if you ever think that I would reveal things to you that I have never told another soul just to keep you occupied, then you don’t know me at all. Then you lied to me about loving me. I don’t know much about love, but I didn’t think you were supposed to turn your back at the first time things go wrong.”

  “You don’t get to lecture me about love. My whole life is a lie. One that my parents created. I had to find out about it on the car radio. They won’t even speak to me about it. They have made the decision that I don’t need to know. That I’m not important enough to be let in on the plan. And then you do the same thing. You left me out. You treated me like a child. Like I wasn’t important. Like it wasn’t my life. I trusted you. With everything. You’re the only one . . .” Her voice broke. Her eyes filled with tears. “You did to me what my parents did to me. I never expected that from you. And it makes me question everything.” She paused for a moment. “If the people I love do this to me, then how can I trust anyone else?”

  Realization washed over him. “I understand.” He stepped forward and placed his hand on her cheek. “I’m sorry, love. I don’t know what else to say besides that. I’m just . . . I’m sorry.”

  She turned away from his touch. “Can I have the information about my sister? I want to call her.”

  He nodded and went to his bag to pull the folder of information his friends had collected. They had been incredibly thorough. They had learned what he should have, but he had been too distracted, too wrapped up in her. This is why he had stayed away from love for so long. He knew he couldn’t be good at his job and be there for someone else like he needed to be, like he wanted to be. But he had also never run into a person like Wynter before and he had hurt her. Unintentionally, but he had hurt her. Treated her like a child, protected her from the one thing that she didn’t need to be protected from: Her life.

  He handed her the folder and watched her as she walked to the couch. She sat down, placing the folder in her lap. She placed her hands on top of it, maybe to stop them from trembling. “You don’t have to be here for this,” she said, looking up at him.

  “Are you telling me to go?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “I’m telling you that your duty to me is over. I suppose I would have never found out anything without your friends and I am grateful for that, but you don’t have to be here. You can go back to whatever life you had before this happened, or whatever life you had planned for after this came to an end.”

  “I’m not leaving.” He sat in the armchair across from the couch.

  She just looked at him for a long moment before she opened the folder. He didn’t know what that meant, but he kept watching her, unable to take his eyes off her. “She was in foster care,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Found locked in a closet. Never adopted.” She choked on the words, her tears streaming down her cheeks. “Grace locked her in a closet? I don’t think I can read anymore. How can someone do that to a child? How could my father fall for someone who would hurt a little child?”

  “It’s probably not as black-and-white as it seems. From what I understand, your sister seems very happy.”

  “On the surface, maybe. If I have learned anything these past few months, I have learned not to trust appearances. I need to speak to her. I hope she wants to speak to me.”

  Cullen pulled out his cell phone and gave it to her. “She will.” Wynter took a deep breath before she began dialing the number at the top of the page.

  She hit the speaker button and placed it on the table, her hands trembling too much to hold the phone. He wanted to go to her, wrap his arm around her, but he wasn’t sure she would accept it, so he sat in his spot, waiting with bated breath for her sister to pick up.

  She finally did. “Hello, Sunny. I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Wynter Bates—”

  There was a sharp intake of breath. “My sister.”

  “You know?”

  “I’ve been searching for you for a long time. Our private detective found you late last year, but then our son got sick and the scandal broke and I wasn’t sure what to do anymore.”

  “I want to meet you. Is that okay with you?”

  “Of course,” Sunny answered quickly. “Where are you?”

  “In D.C. But I’ll come to wherever you are.”

  “You don’t have to come to me. I’m in Maryland visiting my mother-in-law. I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

  Wynter gave her the address and disconnected. She sat back, placing her hands on her face. She was going through a tremendous amount and once again Cullen felt inadequate. He could physically protect her, but he could not stop her anguish.

  “What can I do for you, Wynter?”

  She removed her hands from her face and looked up at him. “My long-lost sister is coming. What does one serve a sister who was purposely kept from you for most of your life?”

  “Cake?”

  She smiled for the briefest of moments. It was gone too quickly, but he loved her smile. He knew he wouldn’t be a whole man if he never got to see it again.

  Chapter 19

  Wynter had gone to bed early the night before. She was exhausted and thought she would be happy to be back in her own bed after all those months, but she didn’t sleep at all. She was nervous about meeting her sister. She didn’t read more than the first paragraph of the thick folder that Cullen’s friends had put together for her. She didn’t want to look at her picture or learn about her story by viewing words on a page. There were so many questions she had and they floated in her head all night. But she had one feeling that penetrated it all: Her bed was empty. Cullen wasn’t there. He had been with her every night since his birthday. She had grown used to falling asleep after his lovemaking. She was used to waking up with his warm, hard body beside her. The bed, the pillow, the sheets had smelled like him, like his soap and his skin.

  She missed him. Intensely. How could she, when she was so upset with him?

  She was angry that he didn’t let her know his plans. She was annoyed that he had made her lie all those months for nothing. But she might have let it go easier if she knew he loved her. He never said it. She thought she felt it. Felt it in the way he looked at her, in the way he treated her, in the way he respected her. But she could have been swept away. In the romance of it all. In the setting of the islands. In the seclusion. She had no idea what was next for them. Even before this happened, she was questioning that. She wished she could be one of those people who could be calm and go with the flow, but she couldn’t.

  Her entire life had been knocked off-balance. Her past was a lie. She wanted to know the direction of her future. But the timing was off. He had worked for her father. He’d had such a difficult life. Maybe she was just meant to have those few months with him. Maybe it was time for her life to take a new direction. She had gotten that job offer. It wasn’t the first time she had received it. It was in Charleston, heading up a small linguistics department that specialized in created languages for movies and television shows. It would be a change for her. She needed a change. She had promised herself she wasn’t going to go back to the life she had before everything blew up.

  She got dressed, not in the clothes she had worn on the island, but back into her normal clothing. It felt odd at first. No more brightly colored patterns. No skin showing. No sun streaming in throug
h the windows or the faint smell of ocean water drifting through the air.

  She went downstairs to see Cullen was there already. He had taken her to the store last night and it nearly felt that they had slipped back into the same pattern they had before they had gone to St. Thomas. He was her security once again. Silent. There to do as she asked, but there was a deeper layer to it. The knowledge that they had known each other’s bodies, each other’s secrets.

  And now he was in her kitchen, standing there shirtless, boiling a pot of water for tea. She was surprised. She had thought he would have gone back to his apartment across the street last night, but she hadn’t heard him leave.

  “Good morning, love,” he said softly. His deep, Irish-accented voice still made her heady. “How did you sleep?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I know. You got up three times.”

  “Where did you sleep last night?”

  “The guest room.” His eyes passed her over.

  “Your hair is straight again.”

  “Yes.” She self-consciously touched it. “It was a losing battle in all that humidity.”

  He nodded. “Your father is back in town. He called me this morning. He said he put a stop to the leak.”

  Her entire body snapped to attention. “Oh? Did he tell you anything else?”

  “No. But I didn’t tell him anything else either.”

  “He doesn’t know I’m back?”

  “He still thinks you’re hidden away on an island. He’s currently in his office, working to salvage his election campaign.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. I’m here for you. Not for him. Never for him.”

  He stepped forward and touched her cheek. This time she didn’t turn away, but she didn’t allow herself to lean into his touch like her body wanted her to.

  “They’ll be here soon. You probably shouldn’t be shirtless in my kitchen.”

  “It doesn’t take me that long to get ready. I was going to help you set up first.”

  “Having you shirtless in my kitchen will be more of a distraction than a help. I’m mad at you, but I still enjoy the sight of you.”