Secrets of the Riverview Inn Page 14

  He heard her gasp. She came down the steps and he braced himself for her touch, locked himself down tight, tautened every muscle, hid away his heart. But it wasn’t enough. He felt her hand on his arm in his gut, in his scrotum and brain, through his blood.

  “Please, Max. Tell me what happened.”

  Oh God, those eyes. She was killing him with those eyes, eviscerating him. Forcing him into the light and away from his solitude. He wanted to resist this urge to let every ghost and skeleton out of his head, but he couldn’t.

  Suddenly, after two years, after knowing this woman a week, he wanted to tell her. Everything.

  “I thought it was a pretty awful way to become a hero, so I left the force.”

  Don’t do it, he told himself in a last-ditch effort to keep himself removed, even as the words formed on his lips. “But I’m not like your ex-husband. You have to trust me.”

  “I’m all out of trust,” she told him.

  “You weren’t last night,” he said. “When you told me about your folks,” he clarified at the expression on her face. He understood sex often wasn’t about trust. She’d as much as said that last night. What had happened between them was about forgetting. “And when you told me about your husband—that took trust. Like it or not, you trust me.”

  She shook her head. “That makes it worse, Max. You’re right, I did trust you, knowing I shouldn’t, knowing it would probably bite me in the ass. And you lied.”

  Her pain radiated to him, stroked him with cold fingers. He nodded.

  “Maybe, I should leave you two alone,” Gabe said, stepping back toward the kitchen, just as the door to the spa opened and JoBeth entered the dining room.

  She looked slightly drugged and Max wondered if that was a testament to Delia’s work. “Well, hello,” she said brightly into the charged atmosphere.

  “JoBeth, why don’t you come with me to the kitchen?” Gabe said, taking her under his arm. “We’ll make you a post-massage smoothie.”

  But slowly, because Max never claimed to be the smartest man in the room, two plus two finally equaled four in his head.

  “How did you find out I was a cop?” he asked Delia, and JoBeth paused. Gabe turned, his brow furrowed.

  “She told me,” Delia said, pointing at JoBeth, who blinked wide-eyed at Max.

  Gabe, Max knew, had been looking for reasons not to like this woman since she’d brought up postpartum depression in front of Alice.

  “How do you know about Max’s career?” Gabe asked. “It wasn’t national news. It barely got regional coverage.”

  JoBeth seemed to be gathering herself for some storm. Her smile faded and her face was taut, her whole body vibrating. Suddenly, with instincts that came with being shot, Max wanted to leave the room. Right now. Because something big was about to happen and he already felt overloaded.

  “I should have been honest with you from the start,” she said. “I’m not who you think I am—”

  The front door opened and a cold draft blew across the room.

  “Whew,” Patrick Mitchell said from behind him. “It’s a nightmare out there.”

  JoBeth seemed to crumple. Melt. Her face folded into lines of grief and pain. “Patrick,” she whispered.

  “Iris?” Patrick asked, his voice ravaged. “Boys? What the hell is your mother doing here?”

  11

  “Mother?” Gabe asked, his tone so cold it chilled Iris’s stomach. It was as she’d feared. The men in the room regarded her with such hate that frostbite settled into her bones.

  She nodded, unable to talk. Unable to take her eyes off her husband. He was thicker through the chest, grayer in the temples. He still wore the old blue work pants he’d worn every day of his life, but the look in his eye…

  Her breath caught on a sob. It wasn’t love, the look in his eyes, but it wasn’t hate.

  Hi, baby, she wanted to say as if he’d come in from work and it was thirty years ago. He’d take off his coat, pull her into his arms for what wasn’t so much a hug as it was a chance to lean on each other. A few minutes of bearing each other’s physical load at the end of long days.

  I’ve missed you, she thought, unable to look away. Wishing she never had, wishing she’d never so much as blinked when she was with these men. The years and regrets, her fears and anxieties fell down on her, crushing her with their weight and suffocating presence.

  She felt their hate like rocks thrown at her and she gathered herself to run. “This was a mistake, a terrible mistake,” she said, shaking her head.

  But then, Patrick, unsolicited and unexpected, nodded. A brief dip in his chin. A light in his wet eyes. Whether it was in agreement or approval of something, of her being here, or her missing him or understanding how she felt—didn’t really matter. It was enough.

  Don’t leave, his eyes said. Not again. Not yet.

  The rocks cleared momentarily and she could breathe.

  “Get out,” Gabe said. “Pack up and go. We don’t want you here.”

  The look in Gabe’s eyes was all hatred, and all directed at her. She wavered under the intensity and felt herself diminishing, evaporating. Burning to smoke.

  “Don’t speak for me, son,” Patrick said, and Iris could have kissed him. “I’d like to hear what she has to say.”

  “She’s not staying, Dad.” Gabe shook his head. “We told you that months ago. We don’t want to see her.”

  “You don’t want to ask her some questions?” Patrick said.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” she said, her voice a gruff croak. “To answer everything. To explain or—”

  “Explain?” Gabe cried, his face creased with outrage and horror. “How the hell are you going to explain this? You left us. Walked out. In the middle of the night like we meant nothing to you—”

  “That’s not true.” She fought the painful tears clawing up her throat. “I know it’s hard for you to believe this now, but you were my life. My world—”

  “You’ve got a terrible way of showing it.” Gabe’s laugh was sharp and brutal.

  She turned to gauge the hate in Max’s eyes only to find his eyes totally shuttered. There was no hate. No anger. No love. No nothing and that, perhaps, was the most chilling of all.

  “Max?” she whispered, worried about her sensitive boy with his dark eyes and darker shadows.

  “Trust me,” Gabe said, deflecting her attention from Max as he had when they were kids. “He doesn’t want you here any more than I do.”

  “I just want to try and explain.” It sounded awful to her own ears, weak and stupid. All of her speeches, the thirty years of good solid reasons she’d compiled, vanished under her tongue and all she had were these stupid clichés and platitudes.

  “We don’t want to hear it,” Gabe stated.

  “Yes.” Patrick laughed nearly incredulously. “We do.”

  “No. She left thirty years ago and never wrote to us, never tried to come back. I’m not about to open my arms to her and pretend she didn’t totally abandon us,” Gabe said.

  Iris turned to Patrick to see if he would feed her to the dogs on this or take up his share of the blame.

  “That’s not exactly true, Gabe,” Patrick said.

  Patrick finally shut the door behind him, and the cold wind stopped sweeping across her body.

  “It’s time we all had a talk,” Patrick said.

  Max finally moved. He walked right past her and didn’t look at her, didn’t seem to notice when she reached out to him, desperate to touch one of them. To feel one of her boys in her lonely arms. But he moved too fast and she was far too scared.

  “Where are you going?” Patrick asked.

  “Out,” Max said, and even Gabe looked surprised.

  “Son—” Patrick said.

  Max turned and finally looked at her—his expression utterly unreadable. “Stay. Go.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Then he left, the kitchen door swinging behind him.

  Delia, still on the stairs, gas
ped and stared wide-eyed at all of them for a minute.

  “Are you going to go after him?” Delia asked Gabe, and Iris could tell by the look in her eyes, the worry in her voice, that something had happened between the fierce redhead and her son. She was glad that her little boy had a protector.

  “Who is she?” Patrick asked, pointing to Delia. Gabe simply scrubbed at his face with his hands.

  “I want you out,” Gabe finally said to Iris.

  She felt Patrick behind her, three feet away, just as she’d felt him in those letters he’d written her years ago and then again just a few months ago.

  “I’ve paid up for two weeks,” she said, straightening her spine. “I’m not leaving a minute before then.”

  Gabe’s eyes narrowed and he shook his head. “You pick a real strange time to be strong,” he said, cutting her to the core. “We needed a mom thirty years ago. We don’t need you now.”

  He left, heading upstairs, stomping past Delia, who waited a mere moment then went upstairs, too.

  It was only Iris and Patrick in the shadowed room and she found her strength ebbing. The emotions took too much from her, and she pulled out a chair and sat before she fell down in front of him.

  “So,” he said, skewering her with his hard voice and ice blue eyes. He crossed his arms over his chest and she realized whatever support she might have from him was for the benefit of the boys. The united front he’d always believed parenting should be. Still the same man, despite what she’d done to him. Married to an absentee wife for thirty years. Raising those boys on his own without the help of a mate.

  The pain of tears in her throat returned.

  “So,” she whispered, wondering where they could possibly go from here.

  “I just threatened our lawyer, trying to get your address from him,” he said.

  “That’s where you’ve been?” she asked.

  “He didn’t budge, though,” he said. “I waved my fist in his face and he didn’t even give me a state. Apparently, our lawyer has more of a right to know where you’ve been than I do.”

  “I knew you’d try to find me,” she said. “If you knew.”

  “And that would be wrong?” he cried, his temper catching in his throat. “A husband shouldn’t know?”

  “I didn’t want you to,” she said, looking at her hands, unable to tell him the whole story.

  “All right, how about now? Can you tell me now? Where the hell have you been?” he asked.

  The timer on her watch beeped and she turned it off without looking.

  “I have to take my medication, Patrick,” she said, and he threw his hands in the air.

  “I’ll be right back. Wait for me,” she said, standing on wooden legs.

  “That’s all I’ve ever done, Iris,” he said, and collapsed into a chair.

  Delia opened the door to her room and found Josie on her stomach at the foot of the bed watching MTV. Delia never let Josie watch that garbage and Josie, when caught watching it, usually had the good grace to switch to another channel. But now she just kept watching the gyrating half-naked bodies.

  “Turn that off,” Delia snapped, feeling stretched too thin by all that had happened. Josie, with no real speed, reached for the remote and flicked the channel to some sitcom.

  Delia leaned against the door. Her heart beat so hard it was a wonder she wasn’t bouncing off the oak panel.

  What is wrong with that family? she wondered, aghast at what she’d seen. How could Max possibly walk away from what had happened in that room? From his mother? She could barely walk away and Iris wasn’t her mother.

  “Mom?” Josie asked, propping herself up on her elbows. “What’s wrong?”

  “What isn’t?” she muttered.

  “Are we leaving?” Josie asked. Delia heard dread in her daughter’s voice, and she wanted to scream. She couldn’t stay on top of what her daughter wanted—there was no tracking mechanism anymore. She was a mystery.

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “Well, where would we go?”

  Delia let her head fall back against the door with a thunk. “Good question.”

  “Mom?” Her little girl’s voice was ripe with a thousand terrible things. Worry, a preadolescent ennui and a pleading that had not been there. An indication that her loyalties had shifted or were shifting, or were utterly cast adrift and she was sinking fast.

  I did that, Delia told herself. I did that to my little girl.

  “It’s okay, Jos,” she said, forcing herself to smile. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Why are you acting so weird?”

  “Max and Gabe’s mom is here.”

  “She came back? When?”

  “JoBeth is their mom.”

  Josie’s mouth fell open. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows yet.”

  “Where’s Max?”

  She heard the solid thunk of an ax hitting wood outside. “I think he’s outside.”

  Josie blinked at her as if to say, Well? Aren’t you going to do something?

  Delia’s heart and conscience were telling her the same thing. She wanted to shrug away that feeling, ignore it and concentrate on her own little tragedies.

  But she remembered him on the stairs, lost and alone, wounded by the past, raw from the present, hurt by her.

  I didn’t want you to feel that way about me…

  And now his mother was here.

  She shook her head. How could he possibly handle all of this alone?

  Josie lay back down on her bed, her attention seemingly returned back to the canned laughter on the television.

  Delia bit her lip and battled down her stupid instincts to go to him. She had the worst instincts in the world, they shouldn’t be listened to. After all these years of listening to her parents, of marrying Jared, of not even seeing that Max was a cop, for crying out loud, it should be clear to her now that her instincts were to be ignored. Second-guessed. Snuffed out.

  But she couldn’t.

  She’d been right about him being one of the good guys.

  The urge to find Max and talk to him, when his family was clearly going to let him go out to his shed or fort or whatever the hell it was and hide, was amazingly strong.

  She felt him out there like some magnetic pull on her internal compass.

  Despite his act in the dining room, Max was in pain. And his loved ones were going to let him stay out there and bleed.

  Hoping sense would be knocked through her skull, she banged her head against the door one more time. It didn’t work.

  Finding out he was a cop had seemed, on top of their intimacies, like the worst betrayal.

  She knew they weren’t friends. Exactly.

  Or lovers. Really.

  They were something in the middle, stuck in limbo. Feeling too much for the wrong person at the wrong time. But she knew, even if he didn’t, that if she left now, without saying anything, without talking to him about what had just happened, it would be the betrayal.

  She doubted he’d see the situation that way, but she had to look at herself in the mirror every day and in order to do that, her heart was telling her, she had to deal with Max.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said. Her daughter waved without turning and Delia ducked out the door.

  The muscles of his shoulder screamed every time he lifted the ax. He was squeezing the handle too hard and that pressure was locking down every muscle in his arms and back.

  Still, he kept working.

  The blazing pain in his flesh occupied him. Distracted him. Kept him from thinking about what would happen when he stopped working and the blazing pain in his flesh became a rotting ache in his heart.

  Mom.

  No. Don’t think.

  Lift. Swing. Split.

  He kicked the split log into the pile at his left and picked up another section of trunk from the birch tree he’d cleared a week ago.

  A week ago when he’d been working to avoid Delia. H
ell, what was happening here?

  No. Don’t think.

  Lift. Swing. Split.

  He worked until his hands blistered and the pain in his shoulder seared down his back. Still, his brain kept spinning.

  He should have known. JoBeth or Iris or whatever her name was, looked like him. Same dark features. Same dark eyes. That was why she had seemed so familiar. He saw shades of her every time he used a mirror to shave.

  “Max?”

  He spun and his shoulder screamed in fury as the ax slid out of his useless grip onto the snow.

  It was Delia, of course. Red hair, blue eyes showcasing nothing but pity in them. Of course, she would pity him, after all she’d seen today. To not only find out the truth about him being a cop, but also to witness his mother’s glorious homecoming.

  It was pitiful. He was pitiful.

  “Go away,” he said. She bunched her hands in her pockets and shifted her meager weight, as if to say I’m not going anywhere.

  “Suit yourself,” he finally said. He rubbed his wrist and forearm, shaking out the pins-and-needles sensation.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I thought you were leaving.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  His heart leaped with an ecstatic glee that he ruthlessly tamped out.

  “Your life isn’t dramatic enough—you now want front-row seats to this circus?”

  She shook her head, the long waves of her hair falling over her shoulder and he remembered touching that hair, sliding his fingers through its texture. That was only last night, but it seemed like a million years ago.

  “I’m fine,” he told her, and turned away to start stacking wood, because he wasn’t fine and he didn’t want to look at her and fall apart.

  She came up beside him and started helping him. Grabbing wood and tossing it into one of the two wheelbarrows he’d brought to the clearing earlier that day.

  He could smell the scent of the lotion she used during massages—citrus and something sweet. Something dizzying.

  “You don’t trust me, remember? I lied to you,” he reminded her, trying to thrust her out of his clearing and his life.

  She blinked those big blue eyes at him, taking his abuse the way his brother and father did.