Redemption Bay (Haven Point Book 2) (Contemporary Romance) (11 page)

She was a good leader, he thought. Calm in a crisis, supportive and encouraging. He wouldn’t mind having her on his team at Caine Tech—if not for this inconvenient heat that sizzled under his skin when she was near.

“I’ve got to run,” she said after she hung up. “I’m really sorry.”

He rose from the bleachers and reached a hand to help her up. “No problem. I’ll walk you back to the city offices.”

“That’s really not necessary if you want to stay here and watch the races a little longer. We can meet up for the barbecue later.”

“I’ll walk you back,” he said firmly. He
also
was used to being in charge, which made him wonder what the two of them would be like in the bedroom—not exactly the appropriate image when his mother was sitting a few feet away.

“I’m sorry you have to go,” Lydia said, with a disappointed look.

“It can’t be helped,” Ben said. “Goodbye. It was good to see you.”

It wasn’t a lie, he was a little surprised to realize. She looked fresh and lovely in the afternoon sun, so confident and happy that he still had a hard time reconciling her to the woman who had been beaten to dust—emotionally, not physically—by his bastard of a father.

He leaned in and kissed his mother’s cheek, then his aunt’s, and finally shook hands with his uncle and Russ Warrick.

“Lovely to see you, my dear.” Lydia smiled at McKenzie and clasped one of her hands in both of her own. “We must go to lunch before I go back to San Diego next month.”

“Yes. I would enjoy that.”

“And you.” She gave him a steady look. “You still haven’t told me when we can get together for dinner before you leave.”

He couldn’t avoid it, he knew, so he might as well quit trying. Maybe it wouldn’t be as awkward and uncomfortable as he feared—at least if he could figure out a way to drag McKenzie along. Somehow she made everything seem more palatable.

“What about next Friday night? I’m supposed to be leaving the day after that.”

“Perfect. It’s a date.”

She looked painfully happy at the prospect and he tried not to let that fill him with guilt as he and McKenzie headed off on the trail around the lake that led them back downtown.

CHAPTER NINE

L
YDIA
WATCHED
HER
SON
walk away, so tall and handsome, along with that sweet McKenzie Shaw. They were talking as they walked, Ben’s head down to hear what McKenzie was saying. Though she couldn’t see his face, she sensed he was smiling, something he did far too seldom.

She didn’t think she was imagining the little hint of sizzle between them, like a pot of water just beginning a low boil.

How long had
that
been going on? She had no idea. She and her son lived completely different lives, bifurcated by history and pain and all the mistakes she had made. He answered her calls and her emails but was always careful to keep a safe, protective distance between them.

She sighed as the color and beauty of the day seemed to leach away a little, like sheets left too long to flap under the sun. She had been so looking forward to this day, ever since Russ asked her to spend it with him. She had dressed and put on her makeup and fixed her hair, as giddy as she had been at seventeen whenever he would come home from college to take her out.

This had seemed the chance for a new start between them. He had mourned his dear wife for a year and she had been alone for so very long.

He had even kissed her cheek when he picked her up, a casual, friendly sort of gesture that had still made her shiver.

For the first time in forever, she had started to let herself dream again, to imagine having someone in her life. Not just anyone, but Russ. The man she had loved since she was a young, silly girl, enamored of an older college boy.

Now, seeing Ben, she was reminded again of all the secrets and lies between them.

Her breathing suddenly felt ragged and tight and emotions crowded her throat.

She and Russ could never be together. She had ruined any chance of that by the foolish choices she had made so long ago.

She wrapped her arms around herself, chilled suddenly, though the July sun was warm on her shoulders.

“Are you all right?”

He was so concerned, so solicitous, and she felt tiny and worthless in contrast.

“Do you mind taking me home? I’m sorry. I suddenly have a terrible headache. I’m not sure if it’s the sun or the excitement or perhaps the noise, but my head is killing me.”

Disappointment flickered in his eyes but he hid it quickly. He had become very good at hiding his emotions from her over the years. Had he just become better at it or was she merely worse at reading him?

“I don’t mind at all. Are you all right to walk to the car or would you like me to go get it and pick you up here?”

“I can walk. Thank you.”

“A little movement might help you feel better.”

He rose and helped her up from the uncomfortable metal bleachers, then tucked her arm in the crook of his elbow and strolled toward his luxury SUV, parked a block away.

Feeling perfectly wretched, she said little as they walked along the busy sidewalk. He seemed lost in thought as well, his mouth tight. He was probably regretting ever asking her out. A fine date she made, turning into a mess after only a few hours.

He settled her into the passenger seat, then drove back through the Lake Haven Days crowds, along the lake toward Shelter Springs and her condo.

“Ben looks good, doesn’t he?” Russ said.

She didn’t like talking about her son with him, for a hundred different reasons. “Yes. He has grown into a fine man,” she answered, her voice rather more short than she intended.

He
was
a fine man, not because of anything his mother had done. She hadn’t protected him when she should have. She hadn’t given him the safe, warm childhood every boy deserved. Instead, she had put him in a terrible situation, one filled with uncertainty and pain.

Russ was quiet for a long moment, then he gave a heavy sigh, a sound so full of sorrow that she looked away from the road and her own grim thoughts.

“You’re never going to tell me the truth, are you?”

Her heart began to pound as she took in the suddenly harsh lines of his face. No. He couldn’t...

“I...don’t know what you mean,” she began.

“Lydia. For the love of God. Enough.”

Though his voice was low, it vibrated with emotion, a fierce, barely controlled anger she had never heard before.

No, she had heard it, she suddenly realized. It had been there for a long time, simmering just below the surface like the churning, superheated waters of a dormant geyser, waiting to burst free.

An instant later, Russ turned into a small empty scenic pullout on the road, with a few picnic tables and a trash can. Across the lake, the Redemption Mountains rose in all their amazing beauty, jagged and raw—exactly like her nerves.

No. Not now. Were they really going to have this conversation now? She couldn’t do it, not after all the years of lies and secrets.

He put the Range Rover in Park but didn’t turn off the engine. The air-conditioning blew on her and she was suddenly so very cold, she was afraid she would turn to pure ice.

“For more than twenty years, I’ve been trying to convince myself you would tell me eventually.”

“T-twenty years?” Dear God. Had he known that whole time?

“I was certain you would tell me, when you thought the time was right. I knew you had your reasons for keeping the secret and I had to respect your wishes. Maybe it was better not to have it out in the open between them. I thought for sure you would tell me after Lily died, then again after your divorce. Then Joe died and I thought,
surely she’ll tell me now.
Even last year when you came to Joanie’s funeral, I was certain at last you would tell me. Today, just now, I’ve finally faced the truth that you never planned to tell me anything. If you had your way, you would go to your grave with this always between us.”

The headache she had been halfway pretending earlier growled to life in actuality, pulsing through the veins of her temples as if it had a life and a heartbeat of its own.

How had she made such a huge mess of her life and that of others? So many lives had been damaged, some irreparably, because she had once been so very weak and afraid.

She tried one more time, clinging to the pretense that had sustained her all this time.

“I...don’t know what you’re—”

“Shut up. Just shut up. No more!”

The geyser burst through the thin surface, hot and bubbly, terrifying and beautiful at the same time.

She had a flashback to the last half of her marriage, to all those times she had cowered like the weak, pitiful creature she had been as Joe spewed venom and anger and filth at her.

Whore. Bitch. Slut.

She wrapped her arms tightly around herself. Though she wanted to shrink back against the seat, to become small and invisible and meaningless, she had come too far to sink into old habits. She forced herself to straighten her spine and face him head-on.

“Please don’t speak to me like that,” she said.

To his very great credit, he looked sick, his skin suddenly pasty and his eyes haunted.

“I’m sorry. You’re... I shouldn’t have... I’m sorry. I’m just... I’m so tired of the lies, Lydia. Please. For once, in thirty-five years, don’t you think I deserve the truth?”

He was still handsome. Noble, even, though that seemed a ridiculous word to use for a man in the twenty-first century. Age had been extraordinarily kind to him. He hadn’t gained a paunch, his bearing was still tall and straight, his features even stronger than they had been when he was a young man.

She had loved him for so very long but she had never been worthy of him. She had let fear make every decision for her and now he would hate her, as she deserved.

She had a sudden flashback to another summer afternoon, the two of them hiking up into the Redemptions with a couple of blankets in a bedroll, a canteen and the eager thrill of anticipation shivering through their veins. All they wanted was a place to be alone together and they had found it in a beautiful secluded clearing. She had loved him more than she ever believed possible and with every ounce of her heart, she had given herself to him in those beautiful fumbling moments before he left.

Now she drew in a shaky breath and wiped away a tear she hadn’t even realized had escaped.

“How long have you known?” she asked quietly.

“Oh, no. I’m not going to let you talk around the subject. Say it, Lydia. For once, just say it. I deserve to hear you tell me the truth in your own words, after all these years.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you. Ben is yours.” The words seemed strange, rusty after all these years of being buried so deeply inside. “I was pregnant when you left that last time. I was pregnant two months later when I married Joe. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

As she had feared, throwing the words into the open between them gave them power and weight, made them more real and terrifying.

“How?” he demanded. “We were only together a handful of times and we were...careful.”

“Not careful enough, apparently. And you’re the physician. You know it only takes once.”

She had always thought it must have happened that last magical night before he left, when her heart had been aching. She had wanted their relationship to go on forever but even then she had known it must end. He was obligated to the army, for medical school first and then his obligatory service with them.

She couldn’t follow him, as much as they both had wanted that. How could she? Her mother had just died a few months earlier and her father was struggling so much with her six younger siblings. Daddy not only needed her income as a secretary at the boatworks but he also needed her help in the evenings with the others while he worked the night shift and took care of the small needy flock of his Baptist congregation.

“When did you figure it out?” she asked.

“Lily,” he answered.

The single word clarified everything. When Lily was first diagnosed with cystic fibrosis around age six, they had pursued genetic testing. As part of that, Ben’s blood was tested as well to see if he was a carrier of the condition.

Everything had changed. That was when Joe had found out Ben wasn’t his, too, when their semblance of a happy home had disintegrated into accusations and bitter betrayal.

She should have realized Russ would know. Though he hadn’t performed the genetic testing—that had been done at the children’s hospital in Boise—as Lily’s primary care physician, he would have had access to all her records.

“All these years,” she whispered. “More than two decades.”

“Forever,” he answered and she had to close her eyes at the pain in his voice.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Lyddie?”

“I didn’t know myself until I was more than a month along. That was a few weeks after the letter from you, if you’ll recall, telling me in no uncertain terms to date someone else and move on with my life.”

“I remember.”

“I didn’t want to date anyone else. I only wanted you. But when Joe started asking me out—the son of my boss—I didn’t know how to tell him no. We had only gone out a few times when he...told me he was falling in love with me. I wanted to break things off. It was too fast, too soon, and I wasn’t ready. My heart was still yours. Then I found out I was pregnant.”

Her heart pulsed with remembered terror. “You have to realize the position I was in. The daughter of a Baptist minister, alone and frightened.”

“Lyddie.”

“I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t kill our baby, even though that would have been the...logical choice. I thought about running away, going somewhere far away where no one knew me and giving up the child for adoption, but I didn’t know if I could do that to my daddy, who was still grieving and lost, struggling with all those kids.”

She gazed out the window at the mountains and the lake, this place she loved. She couldn’t look at Russ while she told him the next part. “Around that time, Joe started begging me to marry him. His father was pressuring him to settle down because of his health issues, so that Joe could take over at Kilpatrick’s. It seemed the perfect solution. I finally agreed and he was...so happy. I just felt sick at what I had done—lies upon lies upon lies—but by that time, I didn’t know how to get out of it.”

She twisted her hands together in her lap. “We had Ben seven and a half months after we were married. He was small for his age, I guess, though you’d never know now by looking at him, and Joe never realized he was full term. As I held my baby and saw how proud and pleased Joe was, I resolved I would be a good wife, to make up for my terrible deception. I was. I promise. Though some part of my heart always belonged to you, I tried to love my husband and make Snow Angel Cove a home for us.”

“And then Lily was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “Everything changed the year she turned six, when we received the diagnosis. Ben was ten. By then, you had returned to town and opened your practice. It was so hard not to tell you. I wanted to, a hundred times, but you had married Joan and the two of you were obviously happy. She was pregnant with your second child and I couldn’t see ruining more lives.”

“And your marriage to Joe? How was it?”

It was a question she didn’t want to answer. By necessity, she had become an intensely private person and didn’t even like looking at these facets of her life
herself
, let alone sharing them with him.

Though she had tried to love her husband, she had never quite been able to pull it off. She had pretended as best she could but when one person loved the other more, things never turned out well. Joe must have sensed the truth. Eventually he started pulling away, finding passion with other women, which made her even less able to care for him.

“We were falling apart, even before Lily’s diagnosis,” she admitted quietly. “And then...well, things went sharply downhill.”

She drew in a breath, fighting down emotions that clawed at her chest to be free.

“The worst was Ben. He and Joe had always had a...great relationship. Joe would take him fishing, they would go out on the boats, they would go on camping trips. Joe took such pride that Ben was a natural athlete, good at baseball and basketball and soccer. And he was so very smart, always with his nose in a book. When he found out after Lily’s diagnosis that Ben couldn’t possibly be his, it was like Joe turned off every positive emotion he had ever felt toward him. He became cold and harsh, yelling at him over the smallest infraction. I know it was...bewildering and hurtful for Ben, to go from having a father’s love to losing it overnight. He had to stand by and watch Joe give all that love and care to Lily and absolutely none to him.”