No Longer Mine (20 page)
Authors: Shiloh Walker
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Contemporary Romance
“And when all was said and done, I was
relieved
.
I was tired of trying to help her, tired of listening to her cry about how rough she had it, sitting at home day after day. Tired of her pretending Abby didn’t exist.
I just didn’t care.”
It was late. Over an hour had passed since he had seen Nikki enter the restaurant. In halting tones he spoke of the fight that last day on her mountain, the one that had sent her away.
And when he finished, he sat back and looked at the woman he had hoped, had planned, would take Nikki’s place. How in the hell had he even thought it would work? He’d been trapped in one loveless marriage already. And he had almost walked right into another one.
“I went to her house about a week later to apologize and see if I could salvage anything. But she was already gone. I kept waiting, certain she would come back. I had this little speech all laid out in my mind. I went up twice a week that first month, but she was never there. Her father wouldn’t tell me a damn thing, and her brothers would just as soon rearrange my face as look at me.” He leaned back in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck, closing his eyes against the tension headache that had formed ages ago. “I kept waiting for her to show up so I could apologize. I had no right to demand a damn thing from her, no right to say anything I said. I had to apologize,” he rasped, staring into the understanding eyes across from him. “I had to. It was eating me up inside. But I never got the chance.”
Finally, he fell silent, staring at the melting candles. His untouched meal lay cold before him. The perfect night he had planned lay in shambles. But he should have known better.
Leanne opened her mouth to speak and then closed it, pursing her lips and staring blindly into her wineglass. Wade realized he had hurt another woman he cared about, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
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Finally, after eons of silence, Leanne looked up at him and forced a smile.
“Not much for the relationship thing, are you, Wade?”
“No.” His eyes dropped, unable to look into that indigo gaze and see the hurt she was trying so hard to hide. “Leanne, I’m sorry. I never—”
“Wade,” Leanne interrupted. “Don’t, okay? No real harm done. And I was asking for it anyway. I could tell you had somebody else in your heart, but I just kept pushing it. I kept telling myself you’d get over whoever it was, but I ought to know better. Love isn’t like the flu. It isn’t something you can get over.”
Morosely, rubbing his heart with the heel of his hand, Wade muttered, “It’s more like cancer. The incurable kind.”
Leanne chuckled softly. “I don’t think it’s always that bad, Wade. You’ve just had a couple of rough roads. Maybe it’ll get better.”
Yeah. And maybe there is a blizzard raging in hell right this moment
,
Wade thought dourly. But he didn’t say anything.
Shortly after that, they were outside, heading to Wade’s truck.
“I guess I’m kind of surprised to see her back here,” he said as he helped Leanne into the truck. He remained at the open door, staring thoughtfully into the night. “She must like New York for her to stay there so long. I halfway expected her to stay there. There sure as hell isn’t much to hold her here.” Frowning, Leanne shot him a look. “She’s lived here for almost five years, Wade. She’s made her home here. Her family’s here. Her little boy is here.” She wasn’t looking at him as she fished around for her seatbelt. Her words were delivered in an almost offhand manner.
It might have been comical, the way he froze in mid-action. His hand hovered an inch from the door.
The ground seemed to drop out from under him and time stood still. Frozen in place, he attempted several times to work his mouth but found his couldn’t speak.
Little boy.
Little boy.
Wade hadn’t heard her right. Before his vocal cords could relax enough for him to speak, Leanne gave him a questioning look.
“Are you okay?” she asked, but he couldn’t hear, just saw her lips move.
“What…” His voice wasn’t even a whisper. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“What…did…you…say?”
Leanne stared at him, aghast. Her creamy complexion paled, twin flags of red riding high on her cheekbones. There was no way. He had to have known. But his pole-axed expression, the gray cast to his skin said otherwise. “You didn’t know,” she murmured, her eyes wide and confused.
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“Didn’t know what?” he asked, but before she could reply, voices intruded. Like a wolf scenting wounded prey, he whirled, eyes narrowing as a slim figure moved across the parking lot. “Didn’t know what?” he repeated softly, staring at Nicole as if just that alone would tell him what he wanted to know.
Nicole came to a halt thirty feet away, her eyes colliding with his. They rested on him, then on Leanne for a brief moment before she turned away.
“If you aren’t going to tell me, then I guess I’ll go ask her,” he said, his voice sharp.
“This isn’t the right time, Wade. Damn it, I thought you knew. I’m not the person who should be telling you,” Leanne said softly, her eyes locking on his as she caught his arm.
“You’re right. The right time would have been
months
ago,” he snarled, jerking his arm free. “And she should have told me.” He started in the direction Nikki had headed.
“No,” Leanne snarled, releasing the seatbelt and jumping from the car, forced into action as she remembered the desolate look on Nikki’s face moments earlier. The look would haunt her until the day she died. Much like the look that had been on Nicole’s face when Leanne had revealed that Jason was gone.
She caught up with him when he was halfway to where Nikki and her family had parked. Seizing his arm, she put all her weight into slowing him down.
“Damn it, Wade. Let her go.”
“Tell me,” he said once again, his voice whisper soft.
A car door slammed shut and Leanne’s head whipped around, following the taillights of a classic Mustang. Gone. Nikki was gone. She breathed a sigh of relief and turned her head to Wade, wishing to God she had never laid eyes on him.
As she remained silent, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, Wade cupped her shoulders, drew her closer to him. Leaning down, he repeated a second time, “Tell me. Now, Leanne. Or I’ll chase her down and have her tell me.”
Leanne shrugged away his hands, turning away from him. The cold winter wind blew across the parking lot, cutting through her coat like it wasn’t there. It settled deep inside her, making her feel as though she would never be warm again. The bitter hot taste of grief welled up in her throat until speech was nearly impossible. This wasn’t her story to tell.
Finally, she softly said, “I met Nikki in the grocery store a couple of years ago. She had this little boy with her.” Her voice trailed off as she remembered those wide, innocent brown eyes, that sweet laugh silenced forever.
Wade’s eyes were sharper than shards of glass as he caught hold of her chin, forcing her to look at him. “I haven’t seen that little boy. I’ve been here for
months
and I’ve never seen him.” Leanne closed her eyes, shook her head. “You aren’t listening,” she whispered, her voice breaking.
“About two weeks after that, I saw her again. This time in the ER. She was comatose. One of her brothers was with her, and he was pretty banged up but nothing serious.
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“And her little boy was in the morgue. He was killed when a drunk driver ran them off the road by her dad’s home.”
Wade wasn’t even aware she was still speaking. The tragic story fell on unheeding ears. All he could think was that somebody else had touched her, held her in the night, loved her. While he had scorned the touch of his wife, clinging to his memories of Nikki, she had been with another man. She had given herself to somebody else, given what was
his
.
Had born another man’s child, probably that faceless high-society bastard he had imagined her with.
He could almost see it. Some rich New Yorker had met up with her when she hit it big, had wined and dined her, taken her to some penthouse, lain with her on silk sheets.
His stomach revolted at the thought, acid burning bitterly at the back of this throat. But somewhere inside, he clung to hope. Maybe…
His vision faded to gray before coming back into sharp focus, the edges gone eerily red. “You take me to the grave,” he rasped, shoving Leanne toward the truck. “Now.”
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Chapter Fifteen
JASON CHRISTIAN KLINE
BORN MAY 11, 2006 DIED SEPTEMBER 2, 2007
Beloved Son
I’ll Be With You Always, Until the End of Time.
The date was all wrong. Only by a month, a handful of weeks, but it might as well have been six months or a year. She hadn’t even waited a damn month, if that. Wade ran it through his head, hoping against hope. But it wouldn’t work out. Pregnancy lasted nine months. That last frantic coupling in the woods couldn’t have done it.
It had happened after that. And that meant the boy couldn’t have been his.
Not even a damn month.
Her voice hesitant, soft, Leanne asked, “When…when did you two break up?” Bitterly, Wade replied, “Not soon enough. She didn’t wait very long though, a month at most.” She had gone straight to another man and yet she had been punishing him all this time. “Bitch,” he breathed out, hands clenching and unclenching, a vein throbbing at his right temple.
All the times she had pulled back, had thrown Jamie in his face, rushed back at him. All this time he had thought she had been mourning what they had lost, had been too afraid to get involved and feared being hurt. She had been mourning all right, but not over him. She’d been mourning the loss of some other guy’s kid.
And his little girl. She had done the unforgivable, had hurt Abby. The cool answers, the distance she had insisted on keeping between them, the reluctance to talk to her, touch her. It had all affected his baby, even though Abby had tried hard not to let it show.
In the back of his mind, a voice whispered,
She told you time and again to leave her alone. To let her
go. Told you, warned you—she wasn’t who she used to be.
The memory of her voice echoed in his mind.
Sooner or later you’ll figure out I’m not who I used to
be and I’m not somebody you want to be around. Certainly not somebody you want your daughter around.
She had been warning him but he hadn’t listened. Those words played over and over in his mind.
But they were drowned out by the louder refrain of his bruised heart and pride. It kept replaying other words she had spoken.
No Longer Mine
I can’t look at you without thinking about Jamie. About what you did.
There was an aching, gaping hole inside him and a rage so hot, so burning, it all but incapacitated him.
How many times had she twisted the knife in his gut? Jerked the past up and stabbed him with it? His guilt had been choking him for months, and every time he looked at her, saw the shadow she’d become, it got worse. But Nikki wasn’t still hurting over him. She was mourning a child…and using him as her fucking punching bag. Him, and Abby too.
She would pay, damn it. For every time she had twisted his heart inside his chest, for every time she had put even a flicker of hurt or disappointment in Abby’s eyes, for every slur she had made against his wife.
He hadn’t even realized he had spoken aloud until a palm smacked up against his chest. He almost didn’t recognize the livid face practically nose to nose with his. Leanne’s voice rang out in the quiet cemetery as she shouted, “Pay?
Pay?
Damn you, she has paid! She lost everything she held dear. That little boy was her entire life and he’s gone.”
“My little girl is my life,” Wade rasped. “She hurt her. She called my wife a whore, treated me like shit and made me think she’d spent the past five years in hell because of what I’d done, but it
wasn’t me
.
She treated Abby like she had the plague, treated me like dirt.” Leanne was practically shaking with anger and with shock. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing or what she was seeing. The man before her seemed like a stranger, someone she didn’t know. Eyes wide with disappointment and disillusionment, she bitterly whispered, “You cold-hearted bastard. That little boy was her reason for living. I took care of her after the accident. She was in a coma for nearly a week. And when she woke up, she was empty inside. There was
nothing
there.
“You think about how you would feel if the reason you had for living was suddenly ripped away,” she whispered, her own heart aching at the memory of those grief-stricken, desolate eyes she had faced, eyes that haunted Leanne day after day. “
Ripped
away, not stolen like you were. Jason didn’t abandon her or leave, but was ripped away for no reason. Everything just suddenly gone, with no hope of ever getting it back.
“She’s never completely healed from it. Her grief damn near killed her,” Leanne said roughly, trembling inside from the force of her emotions. “She had to bury her own child, Wade.
That is a price no parent should ever be asked to pay.”
But he barely even registered her words. His fury, his jealousy, his pain deafened and blinded him.
Blind fury fueled him, kept him running for the next few weeks. The house was placed on the market and he gave his two weeks notice. His old job back in Louisville had been promised to him and they would stay with his folks until he found a new home for him and Abby.
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All the while, Wade tortured himself with images of Nikki and the father of the baby. He didn’t think about the boy, didn’t think of the tiny little grave on the hillside. Didn’t think about the accident that should have killed her as well.
