Straight from the Heart (14 page)

Rebecca couldn’t find it in her to condemn him; Jace had certainly done a good enough job of condemning himself. For once she didn’t try to sit in judgment. Jace had been through hell. He would go on paying for this mistake for the rest of his life. He didn’t need her to tell him he shouldn’t have let Casey Mercer get behind the wheel. In fact, she found she wanted to blame someone else. Why had the host of the party they’d been to let either one of them drive?

She was well aware of the fact that at some other point in time she would have jumped on her soapbox and harangued Jace. He was a star. He was in the public eye. He should have set a better example for the kids who looked up to him. But she had watched him struggle. She had seen him hurt. He was just a man, as vulnerable to making mistakes as any other man. Being a star didn’t make him immune or immortal. He was facing that truth now, and Rebecca’s heart ached with love for him.

Jace didn’t need her censure now. He needed her support and her love.

She reached out and took his hand, squeezing it as she gave him a game smile. “You can make it count, Jace,” she said softly.

Her strength pulled Jace’s out from under him. His face tightened as he turned more toward the window. He sniffed and swallowed hard. Strain shredded the soft fabric of his voice. “I never meant to hurt anybody. Not Casey, not you.”

“I know,” Rebecca whispered, coming out of her chair to put her arms around him. “I know.”

“Looks as though Muriel and Dad are out on the town,” Rebecca said as she glanced at the note Muriel had left on the heavy oak library table. A fat black-and-white cat pounced on the table, snatched the note from her hand, and dashed off with it. “It still surprises me, but I’m glad they’ve started seeing each other.” It was Jace’s doing, she reminded herself.

“Do you think they’re getting serious?” Jace asked as he glanced through his mail.

“I don’t know.” Like any child, small or grown, it was difficult for Rebecca to imagine her father in a romantic situation. “They have fun together.”

Jace gave her a sharp look as a thought suddenly occurred to him. “Who’s watching Justin?”

“He’s spending the weekend with a friend,” she said, trying not to feel too pleased with Jace’s concern.

Despite what she’d seen that afternoon, she still didn’t want to become too used to having Jace around. The fact remained that he wanted to return to Chicago. If his knee held up, he would be leaving, and changed or not, there was no guarantee he would come back.

“I’ve been working on a present for him,” Jace said, his expression softening into a genuine smile for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours.

Stepping over a pair of kittens wrestling in the middle of the hall, he led Rebecca back toward his rooms. She took pleasant note of the fact that the house no longer smelled musty and feline. The scent of potpourri hung in the air instead.

“It’s kind of a present for you too,” Jace said. “Wait here.”

Rebecca stopped where he instructed her, just outside the door to his sitting room. Seconds later she was confronted by a mechanical dog.

It was about the size of a beagle and ran on treads, the way Merlin the robot did. Its ears looked like miniature satellite dishes, its tail was an antenna. The thing may not have had fur or fleas, but it certainly did resemble a dog. Jace had carefully painted on big brown eyes and a happy mouth. He had even hung a collar around its neck. It stopped at Rebecca’s feet, bobbed its head, and barked at her from a little speaker set in its chest.

“Oh, Jace, it’s wonderful!” she exclaimed. She dropped down on her knees to get a closer look, but was careful not to touch it or make it go haywire. It extended a pink rubber tongue and licked her hand.

“Your father did the electrical and computer work,” Jace explained. “I designed the body and did the mechanics. It won’t make a mess on the rug or bite—not even someone who isn’t mechanical.”

Leaning against the doorjamb, automatically taking his weight off his healing knee, Jace worked the buttons and switches on the remote control panel. He put the little metal mongrel through its paces in the hall—running it backward and forward, making it bark and wag its tail. He showed her how it could retrieve a metal bone using the magnet in its nose.

Outraged, Muriel’s cats scattered in every direction, fleeing wild-eyed from the monster.

“I know it’s not as good as a real dog, but I thought it would do for a while,” Jace said. He directed the dog back into his room and turned it off, setting the remote control on an end table.

He was tempted to say his creation would do until he, Rebecca, and Justin officially became a family and moved into a house with a yard big enough to keep a dog outside. That was his dream, one he wanted very badly to realize—to be a father to Justin and a husband to Rebecca. But he held back from telling her.

After leaving the hospital neither one of them had said much. He had been deeply touched and given hope by her initial reaction to his story, but he kept telling himself that didn’t mean he was home free.

Rebecca went to kiss his cheek. She could hardly speak for the knot in her throat. How sweet of Jace to try to make a little boy’s dream come true. With everything else that was preying on his mind these days, she certainly wouldn’t have expected this. “Justin will love it. Thank you.”

Jace slipped his arms around her. “He’s a terrific kid. I’m crazy about him.”

“He thinks the world of you,” she said softly, focusing her gaze on a button on his dark blue shirt. She didn’t say it worried her that Justin had become so attached to him. What was the point? It would only hurt Jace’s feelings, and she would still have to deal with Justin’s disappointment when Jace went back to the big league.

“Becca,” Jace whispered, everything inside him going still with anticipation, “is Justin my son?”

Rebecca could feel the tension in him as he waited for her answer: it trembled in the muscles of his arms and vibrated subtly in the air around him. It seemed it was the day for revealing secrets. Jace had opened the door on his. He was asking her to do the same. She couldn’t deny him.

Actually, she found she wanted to tell him the truth, even though it hurt her to bring up that part of the past. She needed to share it with Jace. He was, as he had been so long ago, her friend…and more. Instinctively she knew he would understand in a way no one else ever had.

“Becca?”

“No,” she whispered, looking up into his indigo eyes with an expression that was akin to regret. “He’s not your son, Jace. He’s not mine either.”

Jace stared at her, confused. “What? What do you mean he’s not your son? You’re his mother.”

Rebecca moved out of his embrace to pace restlessly around the small room with its sinister-looking Victorian furniture. “No, I’m not—not biologically. My sister, Ellen, is his mother.” She laughed without a trace of humor. “That is to say, she gave birth to him.”

“Ellen?” That explained Justin’s resemblance to Becca. One of the few things Jace remembered about Rebecca’s younger sister was that she was nearly a carbon copy of Becca. And the boy’s blue eyes? Well, they were nothing more than a coincidence. Plenty of people had blue eyes. Hugh Bradshaw had blue eyes.

Jace suddenly felt a bit foolish for having been so sure he was Justin’s father. Foolish and sad. He felt as if he’d lost something that had never really been his. He tried to set his feelings aside as questions filled his head.

“Then where is she?” he asked. “Why does Justin call you Mom?”

Rebecca ran a hand through her hair and sighed tiredly. “Justin doesn’t know. I think a little boy would find it hard to understand why his mother would simply leave and never come back.”

It was impossible for her to say it and not sound bitter toward her sister. At the same time she was filled with such guilt, every inch of her body ached with it. The conflicting emotions brought tears up to sting her eyes.

Jace halted her pacing, gently taking hold of her shoulders and turning her to face him once more. “What happened?” he asked softly, then waited patiently for her to compose herself and her agitated thoughts.

“It was a few weeks after you left for Chicago,” she finally began. “Ellen was supposed to be getting ready to go back to college, something she wasn’t very enthusiastic about, but Dad insisted his daughters have a college education. Ellen wasn’t much of a student. It didn’t help matters that I had gone before her and graduated early.

“She came to see me at the hospital and told me she wasn’t going back to school because she was pregnant. We had a horrible fight about responsibility and letting Dad down. She said she didn’t care. She was sick of living in my shadow and never measuring up. In the end she left.”

“Where did she go?”

“We never knew. We didn’t hear from her for months, didn’t have any idea where she was, if she was alive or—When she came back, Justin couldn’t have been more than three or four days old. She handed him to me and said I would undoubtedly be a perfect mother since I was perfect at everything else.” She could still hear the resentment in her sister’s tone of voice. It still hurt. “We arranged for me to legally adopt Justin, then she left. We haven’t seen her since.”

“She’s never come back to see Justin?” Jace asked, incredulous at the thought that a mother could care so little about her child, especially a child he had become so attached to.

“Not once. She’s never so much as sent him a birthday card. She made it clear she wants nothing to do with him.”

“What about his father?”

Rebecca shook her head sadly. “We don’t know who he is. Ellen refused to tell anyone.”

She walked away from Jace and went to stand by the window, where crisp new curtains framed the view of a dark, rainy evening. Even though it wasn’t cold, she wrapped her arms around herself to ward off a chill.

“Legally, Justin is and always will be mine. Still, I shouldn’t have misled you, Jace. I like to pretend none of that trouble with Ellen ever happened, that Justin is my son and I’m his real mother. But someday I’m going to have to tell him.” Despair swelled inside her and choked her words in her throat as she said, “Then I won’t be able to pretend anymore.”

The tears that spilled from her eyes soaked into Jace’s dark blue shirt when he turned Rebecca and folded his arms around her. They soaked into his soul as well. He hurt for her, with her, because he loved her. He knew her pain and her uncertainties. All he wanted was to comfort and protect her.

“You’re his mother, Becca, in every way that counts.”

“Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had offered Ellen support that day she came to my office, instead of getting on my high horse. I drove my own sister away because I had to be judge and jury. Then there’s a selfish part of me that’s glad about what happened because it gave me Justin. I love him so much.”

She lifted her head, her emerald eyes glittering with tears and pain. Her soft, sweet mouth trembled with emotion. “Yesterday you asked me if I’d ever made a mistake. Jace, I’ve made so many…”

And she’d punished herself for every one of them. Over and over. Rebecca had never been as hard on anyone as she was on herself. Jace knew that. Her sense of perfection was tied in with her sense of duty and her sense of responsibility. Because she didn’t want to let anyone down, she didn’t allow herself to make mistakes.

Smiling tenderly, he brushed her tears away with his thumbs as he framed her face with his hands. “Making mistakes only proves you’re human, sweetheart. I couldn’t love you if you weren’t human. And I
do
love you, Becca.”

Jace lowered his head the two inches necessary to press his lips to hers. She tasted of tears and vulnerability. He drank in the taste and offered what strength he had left after a long and trying day. He offered comfort and consolation, empathy and understanding.

No one knew more about making mistakes than Jace did. One of the biggest he’d ever made was leaving Rebecca behind all those years ago. Now he kissed her in an effort to make the past go away, to take them to a place where nothing else mattered but their love.

Rebecca took what he offered gladly, greedily. Tonight it didn’t matter that the future was uncertain or the past full of hurt. She opened herself to Jace and the kind of magic only he could give her, holding nothing back in their kiss. She gave him everything she was, everything she had been.

“Stay with me tonight, Becca,” he murmured, holding her close and kissing the black hair that curtained her ear like a raven’s wing. “I need you. I need to hold you.”

Her heart beat with a sense of relief. The thought of going home to spend the night in a lonely bed made her shiver. There had been so many nights like that. She needed to be with Jace. Some higher power had made them soul mates. That had never been more clear to her than now, when they had both bared their most painful secrets.

“Say you’ll stay all night, Becca,” Jace whispered, his hands sliding over her supple back.

A smile curved Rebecca’s mouth upward ever so slightly as she looked at him. “I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble with Muriel.”

He smiled back and rubbed the tip of his aquiline nose against hers. “She doesn’t do a bed check.”

“Good,” she said, sobering. She ran a cool hand along the plane of his cheek, noting the lines of strain and experience that added character to his handsomeness. “Because I don’t plan on going anywhere until dawn.”

Moving into Jace’s bedroom, they shut the door in the faces of two curious tabbies that had wandered into the sitting room. In the back of her mind Rebecca registered the fact that the walls had been given a fresh coat of beige paint and the heavy green drapes had been replaced. But her attention was focused on Jace.

They had come together before out of desire. Their need now was different but no less intense. This need was one to comfort and be comforted, to give strength and take it.

They undressed each other slowly, kissing and caressing as they went. Jace sat on the bed as he undid the buttons that ran down the back of Rebecca’s white cotton blouse. His lips trailed down the valley of her spine, lingering just above the waistband of her skirt. He nibbled at the downy-soft flesh as his fingers dealt with a button and a zipper. Her breath fluttered in her throat at the feel of the gauzy skirt sliding down over her hips and thighs. Dizziness swirled in her head when his lips followed the descent of her white silk tap pants over the graceful line of her hip.