Take a Chance (16 page)

Emily Manning continued to stare at me. I wanted to accept that she was the woman in the photos I’d spent my childhood staring at and daydreaming about. But then that broke my heart even
more. The happy, vibrant woman was gone. This was what was left.

“She’s old enough to come see you now. Would you like that? If I brought her here with me sometimes?” Dad asked as he pulled the chair up beside her and held her hand in his.
“I think it would make you smile more. You know I love to see you smile.”

This wasn’t happening. I was asleep. Nothing seemed real.

“Come over here so she can see you better, Harlow. She doesn’t do well with far distances,” my dad said without taking his eyes off Emily’s face.

I was afraid to argue with him. It was obvious he would move heaven and earth to make sure she was happy. I sure didn’t want to be the one to upset her.

I walked over to her, and she followed my every move with her eyes. Her eyelashes batted quickly and she made a grunting noise.

“That’s close enough,” Dad said. “Don’t make her nervous.”

I stopped.

“She looks like you. Can you see that? She has your beautiful mouth and hands. And her hair—that’s all you. God knows mine is shit,” he told her affectionately.

Her body leaned over toward Dad. I wasn’t sure if she just slipped or if she was trying to get closer to him. “It’s okay. See, I have you right here with me. I wouldn’t
let anyone in here hurt you, would I? You know I take care of my favorite girl,” he said, pressing a kiss to her head.

The emotion in my chest exploded and I understood it now. This wasn’t about me. This wasn’t about what I had been denied. The bitterness of betrayal faded to sorrow in that moment.
Not for me—not because I hadn’t been given a chance to know my mom—but for my dad. Tears pricked my eyes and I knew I was going to cry. He was killing me. His devotion and obvious
love for her was breaking me in two.

“I need to go into the other room a moment,” I told him as my eyes filled with tears.

“Go on,” he said as he turned Emily back around to face him.

“We’re going to let her get a drink and rest. She’s traveled a long way to see you today,” I heard him explaining to her. Did she even understand him? Was he just talking
to her to make himself feel better because he missed her so much?

By the time I walked into the sitting room area, tears were streaming down my face. I covered my mouth to hold in the sound of my sobbing. My strong, hard, powerful father, who loved to tell the
world “fuck you” and live like he had no worries, was sitting in there holding my mother’s hand and treating her like a queen. As if she were the most precious thing in this
world. I had always known he loved her. He made sure everyone knew that the day he lost her marked him for life. But the scene I’d just witnessed? Oh, God, my heart hurt so much.

People saw him as a legend. He had it all. They worshipped him. Yet none of them knew. I hadn’t known. I had always seen him as strong and impossible to hurt. I knew that wasn’t true
anymore. That illusion was gone. My father hurt. He hurt more than I could have ever imagined.

I sank down onto the sofa and buried my face in my hands and cried. I cried for the woman in there whose life was cut too short. I cried for the little girl who never got to know her. But mostly
I cried for the man who would always love her, even if she would never again be the one he fell in love with.

T
he moment I got into the rental car my phone rang. I reached for it and saw Nan’s name on the screen. I started to ignore it but decided it
was time to deal with her. I wasn’t going to hide the fact I was seeing Harlow. Besides, she was with August.

“Yeah,” I said. She must’ve had some reason for calling, so I’d let her get that out.

“Where are you?” she demanded.

“Why?”

“Because Harlow’s gone, you’re gone, and Mase is gone. Where the fuck are you?”

“You need to keep up with your roomies better,” I drawled, bored already by this conversation.

I needed a cigarette whenever I talked to her. I was doing good. I hadn’t had a smoke in two months. I wasn’t about to let Nan send me backpedaling.

“I don’t give a shit where those two are but I want to know if you’re with them. I won’t let that happen. Do you understand me?”

I understood that she was delusional, as always.

“Nannette, if I start sleeping in Harlow’s bed, there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it. So back the fuck off. It’s over. I’m tired of being your
backup.”

The boiling rage implicit in her silence made me smile. I liked pissing her off.

For so long I had just wanted to make her smile. I had wanted to save her from herself. But she’d made sure to destroy all those feelings in me. Sleeping with one man after another and
rubbing it in my face, then calling me the moment she needed someone. I had let her use me, and slowly it had eaten away at me. Being needed was something I thought I wanted. I thought it would
make me feel like I had a purpose. What I hadn’t realized was I had become Nan’s bitch. That was a sour pill to swallow. Backing out of her life hadn’t been easy, but once I had
managed to kill my feelings for her and accept that she was bitter and angry, and that I could never change that, I had been a happier person. Sleeping with her when I was drunk was just easy. I
knew what to expect in the morning. I knew I was no longer in danger of falling in love with her.

“Is this because I’m screwing around with August? You’re being childish. I told you I just wanted to do the friends with benefits thing for a while. I don’t like serious,
and you wanted serious.”

I’d been fucking insane. She’d saved us both from hell—I should thank her for that.

“I’m bored, Nannette. The benefits thing is over. We’re in the past. I don’t want it from you anymore. You can fuck whomever the hell you want to, and I’m okay with
that. Hell, if he needs a condom I’ll tell him where I left my stash.”

Nan squeaked in disbelief. “You think she’s sweet and pretty, but that’ll get old, too. She’s uptight and boring. When you’re done trying to fuck Harlow,
don’t come running back to me when you realize it wasn’t worth the effort.”

I didn’t take the bait. She was fishing. I wasn’t stupid and I wasn’t about to give her anything to throw in Harlow’s face later. Nan played games. Mean, brutal
games.

“Who I decide to spend time with is my business. I’m not yours, Nan. Never was. Now, if you’re done I have important things to get to.”

“Where are you?!” she screamed into the phone.

“Not in Rosemary,” I replied, then hung up the phone and dropped it. Nan had been a hard lesson to learn. She was the kind of girl her father had warned me about. Loving Nan would
only lead to disaster. Good thing I never really fell in love with her . . .

My phone rang again before I could think too much about Nan.

This time it was Rush.

“Hey,” I said, thankful for someone I could actually talk to.

“Just talked to Dad,” was his only reply.

“Yeah. It’s fucked up. I’m headed there now. She wanted to go alone but I want to be there when she leaves.”

“You and her talk things out before all this shit happened?”

We talked it out, all right. We talked it out in ways I hadn’t expected.

“Yeah, we did. We weren’t done but then Dean dropped this on her and she was gone.”

“I’m having a hard time believing this, and it ain’t even my momma. I can’t imagine Harlow is handling this well. She seems so breakable.”

I pushed back the possessiveness that rose up in me. Thinking about Harlow being breakable upset me. I didn’t want to think about that. Not when I wasn’t there to catch her.

“Not gonna lie. I’m pissed at your dad. He just blurted it out—no preparation or anything. That kind of shit needs to be eased into. He didn’t ease into it.”

Rush sighed. “Yeah, well, he’s not exactly good with words. He just says what he’s thinking.”

That excuse wasn’t enough for me. Dean was on my shit list.

“Nan is looking for you,” Rush said.

“She called me,” I replied. This was not something I wanted to talk about with him. Nan wasn’t one of my favorite people but she was still his family.

“She’ll eat Harlow alive. Be careful.”

Not what I expected him to say but I agreed.

“I know. I won’t let Harlow get hurt.”

“If you do then Kiro will never accept Nan. She needs him to accept her. She might not deserve it, but she needs it.”

I should have known his concern was more for Nan than Harlow.

“I won’t let her near Harlow,” was my only response.

“It would be nice if you wanted into the panties of someone who isn’t Kiro’s offspring. Less complicated.”

I just laughed. Yeah, it would be, but Harlow . . . well, she was Harlow.

“Y
ou can’t go in there looking like that,” Dad said as he entered the room. “You’ll scare her.”

I lifted my tear-streaked face to see my father. I would never see him the same way again. No matter how many girls he screwed around with and how many crude things he did or said. All I would
be able to see was the man in there holding my mother’s hand.

“I came here angry. At you. At Grandmama. But now, I’m just . . .” I shrugged. I couldn’t say heartbroken. I didn’t want him to know his pain had shattered my
heart.

“I was protecting her. You were a kid. You wouldn’t have been able to understand, and you would have upset her. I couldn’t let that happen, Harlow. I love you, kid. I’ve
always loved you. You are the only piece I have of the woman I met and fell completely in love with. But she’s still here, even if that spirit is gone. And I’ll protect her with my
life. She’ll always come first. Even before you.”

I just nodded, because I got it. Before I arrived, I’d thought there was nothing he could say that would prevent me from hating him. What I hadn’t expected was that all it would take
was to see him with her. He hadn’t needed to say a word to me.

“How often do you come see her?” I asked.

Dad walked over to the fireplace and leaned against the stone. “Three, four times a week.”

“And that’s why you left Vegas? Because you’re about to leave the States on tour?”

He frowned. “She doesn’t do well when I’m on tour. The doctors have to sedate her some days because she gets so agitated. She needs me. She may not be the woman, mentally, that
I fell in love with but her heart knows who I am. She wants me close. I can’t do that again. Seeing her smile when I walk into her room makes everything else less important.”

I would not cry again. He didn’t want my tears. I was sure he had cried enough for both of us over the years.

“The band needs you. Maybe you can just fly back a few times and visit so it makes it easier on her.”

He nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that. I just don’t know if it’ll be enough.”

I couldn’t stand here and tell him to sing for millions of strangers when his heart was in that room with my mother. It wasn’t my place. I didn’t understand his torment. I
never would. I hadn’t lived it.

“I know I can’t let the guys down. They need me. But this is my last tour. I’ve decided I can’t keep doing this. I want to be home. I want to be close to her.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I choked out because I didn’t know what else to say.

His eyes lifted from where he had fixed them on the floor and he looked at me.

“For what?”

I bit my lip and sucked in a sob and prayed no tears would fall. “For losing her.”

A sad smile touched his lips.

“I used to be sorry. Hell, I used to hate the world. I hated life. But then I’d see you and I knew I had to live. You shouldn’t have lived, but you did. She would want me to
live, for you. For the baby girl her love had saved. I also knew she wouldn’t want you in my life if I was going to continue being Kiro. She would want you to grow up in the house she grew up
in with the mother she adored. So I did what I knew she would want. And you grew up to be her spitting image, inside and out. I get accused of loving you more than my other kids, and I do. I
fucking do. You’re mine and Emmy’s. I didn’t love Georgianna—she was a groupie. I didn’t love Maryann—she was just a fling. So no, I don’t love their kids
the way I should. I only have one heart, and your mother takes up most of it. I don’t have a lot of room left for anyone else. You’re the only one I would even consider making room
for.”

I knew he loved Mase. The jury was still out on Nan. But I also knew he was trying to tell me that my mother was and would always be his heart.

I stood up and walked over to him. I wrapped my arms around his waist and laid my head on his chest. I didn’t say anything. I had no words.

His arms slowly came around me. “I never meant to hurt you by keeping her from you. But it’s what I had to do. I know you’re all grown up now, but when I look at you I still
see my little girl in pigtails. Every time I tried to tell you, I got high instead. I wasn’t brave enough to hurt you. I hope you can forgive me and your grandmama. She agreed with me that
you didn’t need to know about your mother until you were grown. You were sick, baby, and I knew I couldn’t lose you, too. That would have destroyed me.”

I tightened my hold on him and buried my face in his chest and sobbed quietly. I couldn’t hate him for this. It wasn’t fair, but I understood. “I love you,” I told
him.

“I love you, too. And that woman in there adored you. She never left your side when you were in the hospital. She believed you were our special gift. I remember the look on her face when
you took your first step. You were her angel from heaven, and when I lost her I knew I had to protect you.”

I closed my eyes tightly and fought off the tears. I wanted to get control of myself so I could go back in there and see her again. When my sobs finally eased and my tears dried up, I gazed up
at my dad. “Can I go back in there?”

He reached up and wiped my face then nodded. “Of course.”

A
phone call from Dean had gotten me past the large iron gates of Manor in the Hills. I didn’t intend to go inside. I just wanted to park and
wait on Harlow to come outside. She’d been here at least two hours by now. I closed the car door and stepped around the front of the car so I could see the front doors. When she came out, I
would be here.