I loosened my hold on him. “How long did it last?’
More shame filled his eyes. “On and off for five years. She didn’t want to continue the secret. Neither did I. Days before I took her to the DoubleTree she broke it off, then I came to her and showed her a fresh set of divorce papers I planned to issue your mother. That was the only thing that made her go with me. Seeing the evidence that I was serious about us.”
As he spoke, something sharp tugged on my heart.
I understood what he was saying. I did, but all of it just landed him in the prime suspect seat for being with her.
“Dad… this doesn’t look good.”
“I know kid. I know.”
I sat with him for a while, the two of us in silence until the guard came to get me. I promised to come back first thing.
As I was leaving I spotted a familiar head of dark velvet hair swooped to the side as the young woman it belonged to leaned against the wall in the foyer.
Lana.
It was Lana. She lifted her head when she saw me and rushed into my arms.
I held her, grateful for her presence. Grateful she was here and with me.
“He didn’t do it Ryan,” she gushed, pulling back so she could look at me. “I know he didn’t. The same way I always knew in my heart that my mother didn’t kill herself I know your father didn’t kill her.”
“Thank you… He would never have hurt her.”
“I know. I know.”
Another burden eased off my shoulders, hearing her say that.
I knew dad was innocent.
It meant so much more to hear her say it too.
But what did we do now?
Where did I go from here?
Chapter 22
Lana
We entered Ryan’s house and he turned on the lights.
It felt strange being back here when just hours ago I’d left in such a massive state of confusion.
Feeling overwhelmed, I’d gone to the cemetery, found Mama’s grave and cried until my soul stopped weeping.
I’d felt guilty for not being back, because I actually did feel close to her. If such a thing were possible I felt the warmth of her. The glow that always came from her was there.
When I left I went back to my place to think.
That was when I got the phone call.
Detective Gracen called me. When he told me Mr. O’Shea had been arrested and there was enough evidence to bring him in for suspicion of murdering Mama I didn’t believe it.
And it wasn’t because I was a fool trying to hold on to a façade. I knew it in my heart.
It was the way he always looked at her, with so much love in his eyes.
Then I got confirmation of it when Ryan filled me in on the missing pieces.
Could I be surprised when he’d told me his father had an affair with my mother?
No, not so much.
It was that way Mr. O’Shea always looked at her. I’d seen him many times and then there was the way he was willing to do anything for her, and for me.
As a child I saw him as this kind person who wanted to make us happy, and he was. He still was. But it was still a mess.
What a tangle of mess.
What a damn tangle of knots tighter than macramé.
Secrets, lies, more secrets and more lies.
Skeletons were falling out of the closet whispering secrets from their lips.
I felt soon the whispers would become deafening. Soon the whispers would become screams.
It reminded me of my own secret.
As I was at Mama’s grave, all the words of inspiration everyone had filled me with over the weeks came to me. The conclusion I came to was: Think of what you want most.
Ryan walked over to the fireplace and rested his hand on the river rocks that decorated the outside of the mantel piece.
I gazed at him and knew I had the answer.
What I wanted most was him.
Same answer as always.
With everything happening I just wanted to leave it all outside like it never happened, and just be us. The way we used to be.
I walked over to him and for the first time noticed the broken glass on the floor.
He saw me looking and shook his head. “I was frustrated.”
“It’s okay.”
I slipped my arms around him and rested my head on his chest, listening to the steady rhythm of his heart.
“Lana, I’m sorry about the horrible day we’ve had. It has been too much for you. Maybe you should have your space. Time away from me.”
I lifted my head and stared at the glorious blue of his eyes. Shaking my head I stood on my toes and kissed him.
“I think seventeen years was enough space. It was such a long time and I was so lost without you.” I bit the edge of my lip to stop myself from crying again. No more tears tonight.
“Me too.” He nodded and I saw it all over his face. I could just imagine what it must have been like for him to be with Tiffany and find out their son wasn’t his.
The thing was, it was just the sort of thing Tiffany would do, exactly the sort of thing.
“We have each other,” I promised.
“Do we Lana? My father is in jail on suspicion of murdering your mother. How the hell do I get around that? So many secrets, even us.”
I grimaced to think about it again. Of what his mother did to me.
I exhaled the thought and kissed him, giving him a kiss that spoke of how I felt. When he cupped my face the kiss turned greedy, then needy.
I needed him. Wanted him.
Had to have him.
In one swoop he picked me up and carried me up the stairs to the bedroom.
He set me down on the bed and we wrestled with the tangle of clothes until we were both naked. All the while he kissed me, all over, caressing my skin with the sweetness of his lips and the tenderness of his love.
I remember the first time we had sex, and I remembered the first time we made love. Two different things with different emotions, both representative of us.
Of who we were, what we were and what we wanted to be.
Right now was a combo of both.
As he stripped off his clothes too, parted my thighs and slid into me to start the wild sexual rhythm we both needed, the rawness of sex took over.
But… as he smoothed his hand over mine and pressed his forehead against mine while we moved, the purity of love flowed through us like a living force of energy.
Transcendental energy that lulled to the highest state of bliss and ecstasy.
That was what it felt like.
That was what we were. Always.
Always and again he gave me the answer to what I wanted most.
Had to be a reason why I kept getting the same answer. Had to be a reason why it had never changed.
So I should stop asking the question and accept the answer.
I had to be with him.
Even if I owned the whole fashion world empire and I were the only person on earth designing clothes it wouldn’t make me happy. I was a fool to think I was living before.
I valued my accomplishments and valued the journey I’d made to get as far as I had. However, there was no substitute for what I experienced with the man I’d lost seventeen years ago.
* * *
Later that night I lay in his arms.
Neither of us spoke and I knew what he was thinking. He was worried about his father. I was too. I truly was, mainly because of Detective Gracen. If he was sure what hope did we have with our own beliefs?
So many things coursed through my mind. There was one thing I should do though, or at least the prelude to it.
I ran my fingers over Ryan’s chest. He responded by catching my hand and bringing it to his lips to kiss my knuckles.
I straightened up and looked at him.
“Where you go I will follow,” I breathed and he straightened up.
“What?”
“Where you go, I will follow,” I repeate
d with a little smile. It was a thing we used to say to each other.
Our relationship went through different stages. There was the first part where he’d been this badass guy I shouldn’t have liked, who put me through hell when he was teasing me and when he wasn’t. I called that the kissing phase. It was the part where I wasn’t sure if he was just playing with my emotions. Then he told me he was mine and it all changed. We became the couple.
The guy and the girl who were always together and couldn’t get enough of each other.
Wherever he went I followed. Wherever I went he followed me too.
I gave him another smile.
“Lana I dare not think of what that means. I know what I want you to mean.”
“It means what it always meant Ryan. It never changed. When you came to my office in LA and I saw you, I couldn’t believe I’d lived so long without you in my life. Coming back home here to the past has told me that I can’t be without you. I don’t want to.” That was a truth I’d been trying to escape for years.
He leaned forward and kissed me.
“I love you,” he whispered against my lips.
I didn’t think that being told those words by the same man seventeen years later would have even more of an effect than when I heard them the first time.
I never knew.
I never knew.
I also never knew that the love I felt for him could have surpassed what I already felt.
“I love you too. I love you Ryan. I love you. I never stopped. Not once. Not even a little bit. Never.” My throat closed up when I cast my mind back to when I’d left.
He cupped my face when he saw my anguish. “Princess… please, please tell me what happened…Why’d you leave? Why? It doesn’t fit. You would have contacted me or something. You wouldn’t have just left me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you even more. There’s been enough pain today with your father. Enough secrets.” Now wasn’t the time to add his mother to the mix.
He shook his head though. “This isn’t about me. It’s been about you all along. My girl disappeared seventeen years ago and I didn’t know what happened to her. There’s not much left in this world to hurt me, other than keeping the truth no matter what it is, Lana. All of this has been about damn secrets and lies. No more, so please… tell me.”
“I don’t know where to start.” I closed my eyes and my stomach knotted.
The slight caress of his finger on my cheek made me open my eyes to gaze at him.
He dropped his hand to his lap and shuffled to face me.
“Start from the beginning…We’d sat in bed just like this… at my parents’ house. It was morning. You’d been crying and because you weren’t eating I said I’d go get you a bagel. I got it for you and I started talking about New York to distract you. Do you remember?” He nodded, looking at me with wide expectant eyes.
“I remember. You got me the bagel and I started to nibble on it and I said Mama liked bagels. Then I started to cry again.”
“Then I said, she wanted me to make sure you ate. She’d want me to take care of you so I helped you eat it. You wanted to get some stuff in town to travel with. I thought you needed some time to be alone so I allowed you to go.”
“I said I’ll see you at three and…” This was it…
The moment of truth. More than a reckoning.
“And what, princess?”
“I got back to the house to grab the last of my things. Your mother was waiting for me in my room.”
The minute I said that he tensed and narrowed his eyes at me.
“My… mother?”
“Your mother. She said she heard us talking and knew we’d been together. She knew we were planning to leave for New York and you weren’t going back to college.” I stopped.
He was looking at me with such great intensity that it made me more anxious. Made me more nervous to tell him.
Now that I’d started talking, started the process of revealing what happened, I couldn’t exactly stop. I had to look away from him as I continued.
“She was packing up all my stuff in a bag. Wasn’t much because a lot of my important stuff was already in New York. I asked her what she was doing and she asked me if I thought the maid’s daughter was good enough for her son, and didn’t I think you deserved someone better than me. She said… you’d worked hard to get to where you were and you deserved a life in a profession you wanted. Something you could hold high as an achievement...” I stopped to take a breath, but continued to look away from him. This was difficult. “She didn’t think a tramp like me would understand. After all, my mother and I were like trash and she did us a favor when she gave my mother a job. She told me to get out of her house. Take my things and leave, take my things and leave and never come back. Never look back. And if I tried to contact you or anyone she’d destroy me. She’d do everything in her power to destroy me.”
I’d said enough for him to understand what happened. It was a good summary with the main points that elicited the reaction I’d expected from him.
He stood up, almost bolting up out of the bed.
It was the abrupt action that made me look up at him.
Ryan was actually shaking.
The shock on his face turned his skin pale and his eyes wide with terror.
“What are you telling me Lana?” His voice quivered.
I stared at him head on and hugged my knees to my chest.
“You know, at first I felt like a coward when I grabbed that bag and left.” I hugged my knees tighter.
“I wished you’d come to me.”
I shook my head. “No… Ryan. I wouldn’t have. It wasn’t the threat to destroy me that made me leave. It was the fact that I thought I wasn’t good enough for you. I was already worried that you were throwing your life away for me, and that confirmed it.”
“That wasn’t true.”
I raised my shoulders into a shrug. “Ryan, at the time I was too weak to fight or believe anything else. I’d just lost my mom and I was about to lose you too. Everything. I thought if I left you’d be who you were supposed to be. I thought that you’d become a successful lawyer and do everything you actually did. And I was right, you did it. You became that guy she wanted you to be. I knew that you loved me and when it came to me you’d always put me first, even when it could cost you. So I left.” The tears slowly found their way down my cheeks.
He came over to me, dropped to his knees like he did the other day and took my hands.
“God… Lana… I’m so sorry.” The sadness in his eyes gripped me. “I would never have guessed it was her. Nothing was further from the truth. It was me who wasn’t good enough for you. You know what I’m like. I’m gifted to be good at a lot of stuff so it was a given that what I’m doing now would be successful. That had nothing to do with you going or staying.”
“I just wanted to do what was right. I didn’t want to stand in the way of your success.”
“All I wanted was you. All I needed was you. That was all.” He nodded with conviction, then a hardness I’d never seen before filled his eyes. “All that time we looked for you she … My mother told me you went to Charlotte. She said you went to see a friend. So that was the first place I went after searching for you all day.”
“That’s what she told you?” The hardness filled me too.
“That is what she told me. All the while she knew what she’d done. She acted like she was helping Dad and me search for you, saying how she couldn’t believe you would just leave and not say anything. She didn’t know why.”
I held my tongue because now wasn’t the time for me to talk.
“My… mother lied?” His eyes searched mine and I almost felt guilty for the nod of confirmation I gave him.
Chapter 23
Ryan
We parked on the driveway at the mansion and just sat in the car.
Ten minutes had passed and we were both still here sitting side by side.
Tension thickened the atmosphere b
etween us and around us.
It would be Lana’s first time back here in seventeen years. First time back since Mom threw her out.
I was still trying to wrap my head around that as well as other things.
I was here to see her, and Lana was with me.
There was so much to work out here and I wasn’t sure what to pick at first.
What Mom did to Lana, what Tiffany said about Mom, or…what Dad said about the affair.
The common denominator in everything was Mom.
Dad said he didn’t think Mom knew about him and Amelia, but I knew different. After all wasn’t I the one who saw her watching them that night in the library all those years ago.
She was watching them.
She knew what was happening, what was going on.
It was clear she knew. Thinking back now I could tell she knew from the manner in which she’d moved that night. That was why she was watching.
I’d sat here in the car stewing in anger. What Lana had told me about Mom was enough for me to cut my mother off. But… there was a feeling in my heart that whispered disaster.
It told me it was waiting.
Power was the key here.
It was the key in this whole scenario. Power to be able to do anything and have the resources to do it. My parents had it.
My mother had it.
I unhooked my seat belt. It was time. Time to talk to Mom.
I looked over at Lana who’d glanced at me as I undid the belt.
“I’m ready,” I told her. “Ready to see her.”
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