Calling Kupid (Kupid's Cove Book 1) (20 page)

She shrugged one shoulder and her robe slipped off it, leaving it bare to my touch just as a knock rapped on the door. I pointed at the bathroom. “Please go put something on under that robe while I get the door, or I might not be able to maintain my sanity while we talk.”

She did as I asked, but I could tell by her body language she would rather stay. I pulled the revolver from my pants pocket and went to the door, looking through the peephole. The young man on the other side was dressed in what looked like a room service uniform. While he could be an imposter, I had no real way to know, so I kept the gun to my side and opened the door. He pushed the small cart into the room, setting everything up before turning back to the door. “Is there anything else we can get for you, Mr. Campbell?” he asked, standing in front of me.

I slipped the gun into my pocket and shook my head, handing him a twenty with the other hand. “That should do it. We’ll leave the cart in the hall when we’re finished. We’ll be turning in after we eat.”

“Of course, Mr. Campbell. Please let us know if you need anything or if something isn’t to your liking.”

I opened the door for him and promised I would before locking all the deadbolts again. I set the trays on the table and took the lids off, storing them on the bottom of the cart then poured the wine into our glasses. The bathroom door opened and I looked towards it.

“You can come out now,” I called.

She walked into the room, still wearing nothing but the robe. I tried not to groan when I helped her sit and the front gaped open, giving me an ample view of the gifts that awaited me underneath.

“You didn’t put on any clothes,” I groaned.

She picked up her wine glass, taking a solid swallow of it. “No, I thought you were just saying that to get me out of the room, you know, in case…”

“In case the room service guy wasn’t really the room service guy?” I asked and she nodded.

I took the revolver from my pocket and set it on the nightstand then took my place at the table.

“Luckily for us, he was the room service guy.” I winked and she smiled, taking in the table.

“He didn’t bring cheese and crackers,” she raised a brow and lifted her glass of wine towards me.

“We haven’t eaten a decent meal in over twenty-four hours. I wasn’t about to feed you cheese and crackers. You’ll enjoy the taste of the tropics with pineapple glazed chicken and grilled zucchini a whole lot more.”

She picked up her knife and cut a piece, running it through the glaze on the plate. “My mother made the best glazed chicken.” She put the piece in her mouth and chewed, her eyes going closed and her head nodding. After she had swallowed it and taken a sip of wine, she smiled. “Hers was good, but this is island wonderful.”

I took a bite of mine, happy she was enjoying the selection I made.

“I was always grateful my mom taught Freddie and I how to cook. I think sometimes in my generation girls are pushed towards all these other activities outside the home and never learn the things that are important for self-sufficiency.”

“You lived with Winifred for a while, right?” I asked between bites.

“Several years, actually. After her parents were killed by a hit man, my mom and I moved in with her.”

I set my wine glass down slowly. “A hit man?”

She nodded, stabbing a piece of zucchini. “A real life hit man, not a very good one, but one all the same. It all sounds rather novelish, doesn’t it?”

I laughed and nodded my head a little. “It sounds a lot novelish. Why was he not a good hit man? Wait, first question, why did he kill her parents?”

“Winifred’s father was a very well-known antiquities dealer from Greece. They lived in Minnesota, but he imported all kinds of things from Greece. He had a business associate, his accountant I believe, in Greece who didn’t like the fact that he didn’t make as much as the boss, so he hired a hit man to take him out. He tried to make it look like a mugging gone wrong, but the guy he hired wasn’t very smart. He stopped at a bar on the way out of town and the police caught up with him there.”

She finished the wine in her glass and set it down, her eyes going down to her fork where she pushed the last piece of her chicken around on her plate.

“I take it Winifred wasn’t with them when this happened?”

She shook her head. “No, she stayed home with me because it was finals. Her parents were going to Greece for their anniversary, so she told them to enjoy a vacation alone. She had no idea it would be the last time she saw them.”

“That’s tragic,” I said, watching her closely. What had been light dinner conversation had become heavy when she said three words. “Why did your face fall and your appetite disappear with the words ‘mugging gone wrong'?”

“Because four years later my mother died from a mugging gone wrong,” she whispered.

She stood by the window looking out at the moon as it shone down on the ocean. She had been standing there quietly for almost five minutes. I was silent, determined to give her however much time she needed to tell this story. I was finishing my glass of wine when she spoke again.

“I was away at college and she was living in Winifred’s house. She was a romance writer.”

I stood and went over to her, laying my hands on her shoulders. “I didn’t know that. How cool is that?”

She nodded, but didn’t turn to look at me.

“She published over thirty novels before she passed away. She was actually leaving the local office store in Rochester with her newest manuscript when they attacked her. That was back in the day when you had to print off your manuscript at a copy place.”

I nodded and she swallowed, her eyes trained not on something out the window, but on something in her mind.

“It was late and from what the police tell me she was dragged into an alley by a guy trying to join a gang. He was supposed to mug someone as part of his initiation. When he got her into the alley the gang upped the ante. They told him he was guaranteed membership if he raped and killed her.”

“Oh, Katie,” I sighed, kissing her temple. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

“He didn’t do it. I guess he got scared and wanted to let my mom go. They said if he didn’t kill her they would because she knew who they were, then they would kill him. He let go of my mom and ran. He went to the cops, but by the time they got there, she was dead. She had been stabbed multiple times in the stomach. She bled out in a back alley, alone.”

I wrapped her in my arms and rocked her, not even sure what to say to someone with that kind of loss in her life. I had lost my mother, but I had time to come to terms with it.

“They called me at college and I came back home. I took care of her business, and eventually went back to school. I should have stayed in Snowberry, but going to Brigham Young was the only way I was going to be able to afford law school.”

I held her and stroked her hair. “Katie love, you wouldn’t have been able to stop it even if you had been in Snowberry.”

She nodded against my chest. “I know; I guess I felt guilty for not being with her in general. She had suffered enough in her life. I couldn’t understand why it had to end that way.”

“Your brother and father.” She nodded again. I led her to the bed and helped her up on it, tucking her legs under the covers and sitting by her. “You said your brother died in an accident, but I don’t know how your dad died.”

“My brother’s accident wasn’t really an accident, at least I don’t think it was. My brother was gay, Gideon. He was a confused, sad, scared young boy who got in his car after the church deserted him and, in my opinion, ended his life. There is no other explanation for hitting a brick wall going over one hundred miles an hour. They determined he hadn’t had a medical event nor was there any problem with the car. The problem was with this heart. It was shattered after what he heard from people that were supposed to care about him. They told him that he wasn’t fit to be in the home of his creator, so I truly believe he went to find out.”

I took her hand and held it in mine. “I love you, Katie,” I whispered, kissing her hand.

She smiled through her tears, but didn’t say it back. Her chin was trembling too much for her to speak.

“They excommunicated him didn’t they?” She nodded her head angrily, but still didn’t speak. “Excommunication from the Mormon Church isn’t forever. He would have had the chance to become a member again.”

“Not if he didn’t denounce homosexuality and live by the code of the Mormon Church. My brother was born gay, Gideon. No amount of praying was going to take that away.”

“You’re right, of course. I didn’t think that out before I spoke.”

She shrugged. “It was so humiliating that my father killed himself just a few months later.”

My shoulders slumped and I flipped my legs across the bed so I could pull her to me, resting her on my chest.

“I found him hanging in the shed outback by the rope my brother always used when he was roping pretend steers.”

“Sweet Jesus,” I whispered, rubbing her arm as she trembled in mine.

“When my brother died we were in the middle of proceedings to decide if the rest of us would be excommunicated as well for supporting him. After Jimmy died, the church dropped the trial. They allowed us to continue as members, but we were shunned by the congregation. My father couldn’t deal with that, so instead of finding a new church home, or talking to someone about it, he ended his life, too. That left my mom and me alone to fend for ourselves.”

“You must have still been a member of the church if you went to Brigham Young,” I said, trying to sort through the complicated history.

“I was, until the day I graduated. If I was a member of the Mormon Church, my tuition was marginal and my scholarship covered everything. I didn’t live on campus, so I had to pay for room and board, but that was all I had to worry about.”

“Why didn’t you live on campus?” I asked surprised.

“I told you, Gideon, we were shunned. It was easier to live off campus and pay for it than to live under their watchful eye, waiting for me to mess up.”

“So when you graduated you left the church?”

She half-snorted half-laughed. “No, I left the church when they excommunicated my mother for writing erotic romance novels, at least I did in my heart. I maintained my enrollment simply so I could finish my degree. Once I graduated I never looked back.”

“Wait, they excommunicated your mother, too?”

“You betcha. The kind of books she wrote were far too risqué. She had to do what she had to do in order to survive. My mother didn’t have a college degree, Gideon. When my dad died, he left her nothing, there was no life insurance or savings. We lived with Freddie to save money on rent and mom worked as a cook at a restaurant. When she wasn’t working, she wrote. It didn’t take her long to figure out the most popular genre and she catered to it. She was an excellent writer, but in the eyes of the church…”

“She was sinning.”

“Yup,” she agreed, popping the ‘p.’

“I’m a little bit surprised you have any faith at all. Most people who have gone through what you have, wouldn’t believe.”

“There was a time when I was very adrift, but once I moved back to Snowberry I started attending the non-dominational church in the basement of the community center. I would sit in the back, hoping no one noticed me, and pray for an hour. It was the only place I allowed myself to pray. I wanted to believe if I prayed in a church He wouldn’t have a choice but to listen.”

“Why did you think He wouldn’t listen if you prayed at home?”

“Because I wasn’t praying as much as I was yelling,” she whispered. “I was yelling at him for taking away everyone I ever loved and giving me nothing in return.”

“Do you still feel that way?”

She shook her head no. “Not anymore, but it took a long time for me to feel loved again. It was probably two months after I started going to church when the minister pointed me out. He asked me to come up to the front with him. I was embarrassed, because everyone knew me, I mean I grew up in the town, but I went up there anyway. He took my hand and said that he felt as if I was there for a reason, that I was there for them to be my family. That morning the whole congregation prayed the Lord’s Prayer with me and for the next week, a meal came to my door each night. I shared it with whoever had brought it and they prayed with me. Saturday night the minister was the one to show up at my door with a pizza. We talked for a long time that night about my loss of faith not actually being a loss of faith. He said my faith was strong, but my heart was weak.” She laughed remembering the words. “He had no idea just how true that was. I know he didn’t mean it in a physical sense, but it was when I began to see that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

“Job, right?”

“Yes, Job, but that wasn’t really the meaning of the verse, but it’s still really, really true. He took my entire family from me, but I looked out into the congregation that Sunday and saw a new one. I’d never been accepted socially in Snowberry, first because I was the obscure Mormon girl. People didn’t know what to say or how to act around me. After the accident I was the shunned Mormon girl whose brother and father killed themselves, and whose mother wrote smut. I mean, geez, if the Mormons shunned her she must really be bad.”

I shook my head. “Snowberry doesn’t understand the Mormon culture, that’s all. They had nothing against you.”

“I would agree with you, but then I can’t say I understand the Mormon culture, either. I don’t begrudge them their beliefs, but when they hurt other children of the God they say they are serving then they aren’t my beliefs, let’s leave it at that.”

She clammed up and refused to look at me. I bent down and looked up at her, so I could see her face. “They aren’t my beliefs, either. You aren’t going to offend me for being honest. Like I told you, I found my faith, but I didn’t find it in a church building. I found it only by the insistence of the woman who birthed me, and in the eyes of the woman I should never have let go. Sometimes the Lord taketh in order to giveth.”

She shrugged. “I guess. Sometimes I think what happens in life is just life and the only thing we can do is go to Him for comfort.”

“Does He give you comfort when you go to Him?”

“Every time, but usually He also scolds me for trying to lie to him about what I’m feeling.”

I smiled and rubbed her cheek. “Something tells me that change of heart you had in the bathroom yesterday had something to do with Him.”

She gazed up at me and I soaked up the look in her eyes. They were honest in a way I suspected I might never see again.

“You’d be right. He told me I loved you, but I was too afraid to get my heart broken again to admit it.”

“That’s the part I’m still having a hard time figuring out. Why do you think that I’m going to break your heart? Nothing that happened in your family was your fault.”

She covered her mouth with her hand and it was shaking. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why she was so upset, so I waited for her to explain it to me. She squeezed her eyes shut and a tear squeezed out between the lashes. I rubbed her arm, letting her know I was there, but not interrupting whatever it was that she was trying to fight to bring to the surface.

“Remember when you said you wouldn’t have sex with me all those months ago because I couldn’t tell you if I was on birth control?” she asked, her voice shaking as she spoke.

“Yes, I remember.”

She undid the belt around the robe and pulled it open. There was a rather long scar just below her belly button. I traced it with my finger, completely ignoring the fact that she was naked beneath the robe.

“They took my uterus right before they placed my new heart valve. I…I didn’t have a choice. I can’t give you children, Gideon,” she cried.

I looked up and saw in her eyes that what she just told me was the real reason she was trying to keep me at arm’s length. Whether she loved me or not, she couldn’t give me a child.

“If you fall in love with me you’re the last of the Armstrong line. I can’t ask you to give up the chance to have children just because I can’t. I can’t ask anyone to do that.”

I pulled her onto my lap and held her to me, forcing myself to keep from holding her so tightly I hurt her.

“Katie, it’s too late, sweetheart. I’m already in love with you. The fact that you can’t give me a child has absolutely no bearing on that whatsoever.”

She shook her head frantically. “Don’t say that. You don’t mean it. You just think you do. A few years from now, you’ll want a child. You’ll start to resent me for not being able to give you one.”

I held her face and kissed her lips, tasting the saltiness of her tears. “Tell me why they took your uterus.”

“I never started my, um,” she paused and swallowed, waving her hand a little.

“Your period?”

She nodded quickly. “Right, that. At first, they added it to the list of side effects from my heart problem, but they did an ultrasound just to be sure. They discovered that my uterus was misshapen. The doctors were relatively sure I would never get pregnant, but if I did it would have been disastrous.”