The Real Father (Twins) (Harlequin Superromance No. 927) (11 page)

“Maybe it's because I haven't had any illusions
about my father in so long,” she finally said. “Not since I was a little girl. But Beau—” Her voice caught. “Beau was my magic. I guess I need to believe in that magic.”

He closed his eyes. “He was just a man, Molly. Grace was right about one thing. He wasn't really a saint. Surely you know that.”

“Of course I do.” She sounded sad, but strangely resigned. “I'm not really a fool, Jackson. And I'm not a starry-eyed teenager anymore. Since I've come home, I've seen a lot of things more clearly. I know Beau wasn't perfect. But he was… He's still—” She rubbed her arms with a rough impatience, apparently frustrated by her inability to find the right words. “You see, for me he'll always be—”

Jackson concentrated on breathing deeply, forcing himself to listen.

She shook her head and began again. “I guess I'm just trying to say that Beau will always be a part of me. He left his mark on my life, in so many profound and permanent ways.”

“Molly, listen to me,” Jackson said darkly, taking her wrist in his hand, as if he feared she would try to bolt. “You have to understand something. You have to accept that Beau was—”

“Mom? Jackson?” The sound of the dining room window being raised stopped Jackson cold. “Are you out there? Lavinia says if you don't come in right this very minute Consuelo is going to quit.”

Liza's clear, high voice, floating toward them from the open window, was full of teasing laughter. She sounded so much like Molly that for a moment
Jackson felt hopelessly snagged between the past and the present. Between the sweet, lonely little kid Molly had been, somehow finding magic wherever she could—and the sweet, brave woman she was today, still clinging to the dream that once she had known True Love.

Molly looked up at him trustingly. Her blond hair glimmered in the rising moonlight. “What, Jackson? Beau was what?”

And suddenly he knew he wouldn't tell her. Couldn't tell her the nasty truth—that there hadn't ever been a single ounce of sainthood running through the veins of either of the reckless, willful Forrest twins.

“Mom?”

Jackson swallowed past a jagged rock that had lodged in his throat.
We were bastards, Beau. Both of us.
Yet somehow here was Liza, this laughing, blue-eyed Forrest daughter, who had come into the world with all her mother's purity and none of her father's shame.

And as far as Jackson was concerned, even if he had to cut out his tongue to do it, she was going to stay that way.

 

“S
O YOU DO UNDERSTAND
why we can't stay, don't you, sweetheart?” Molly put down her red Magic Marker, which she had been using to draw roses all over Queen Willowsong's castle, and gazed somberly at her daughter.

“Sure.” Liza was propped up in bed, her sketch pad next to her. She was getting sleepy—Molly
could tell by the way she absently twisted a curl of hair around her index finger. “Your clients. And our apartment. And there was something else. Oh, yeah. Robin and Phyllis.”

Molly had to smile at the intense oversimplification that could boil a twenty-minute explanation down to three sentences. “Not just Robin and Phyllis,” she corrected, picking up a purple marker. “
All
our friends.”

“Yeah,” Liza agreed. “But my friends in Atlanta wouldn't really
miss
me, you know? Not the way Tommy would.”

“Why? Doesn't Tommy have any friends?” Molly looked up, genuinely surprised. “I thought he was like the ringleader of the whole class.”

“Oh, he's
popular,
” Liza said dismissively. “But that doesn't mean he has any friends. Not real friends. Not friends he can talk to.” She set her sketch pad on the floor carefully and snuggled down until she was up to her ears in comforter. She yawned again. “He can talk to me.”

“Well, maybe he can come to visit us.” Molly was concerned. In a way, this conversation had been less distressing than she had feared. Liza hadn't fussed or complained or begged. She had listened to her mother with her usual sensible equanimity. But Molly had the strange sense that Liza wasn't exactly accepting the inevitability of her decision, either. It was almost as if she were humoring her mother, as Liza believed that fate would somehow step in and see to it that they stayed here in Demery.

“And you do see about the clients, don't you,
honey? The landscaping business in Atlanta is my job. It's how I make the money that we live on.”

Liza smiled, nuzzling herself into a comfortable position on the pillow. “You'll have clients here too,” she said reasonably. “Mrs. Fowler, our librarian at school, said she wished you would help them make the front of the school prettier.”

Molly couldn't help chuckling. Schools were the same all over. “Yes, honey, but that would be for free. It wouldn't exactly be the kind of client that would pay our bills.”

“I know,” Liza said, unfazed. “But other people will look at the school and see what a good landscaper you are. And then
they
will pay you.”

Her eyes drifted shut. Capping her marker, Molly sat a moment just enjoying the sight of her beautiful little girl, who for a nine-year-old actually seemed to have a fairly clear idea of marketing and public relations.

Her heart ached with love for the shining blond hair, the imperfectly scrubbed fingernails, the charcoal-smudged cheek, where Liza had absently touched her pencil as she drew her pictures.

“And we can get a dog like Stewball,” Liza murmured, already half asleep, but continuing to make her case. “A dog is a very Willowsong kind of pet.”

Molly smoothed her daughter's hair, drawing comfort from the touch. Liza, her human touchstone. Because of this little girl, Molly would never really lose faith in Beau. He had been spoiled, of course. Selfish, sometimes. A little too arrogant, occasionally manipulative. But never cruel. Never really
bad.

Could a bad man have produced such a delightful, loving child? Never. Grace Pickens could pull out every shabby scrap of gossip she'd ever invented. As long as Liza's shining goodness was in front of her as proof, Molly would never stop loving Beau.

She knew things about Beau that no one, not even his twin brother, and certainly not that evil Grace Pickens, could possibly know.

Secret things. Gentle things.

She knew that, when he had made love to her that night, he had touched her with a reverence, a humility, she had never seen in him before. She had always known he would be a thrilling, powerful lover, but this—this passionate tenderness had been a stunningly beautiful surprise.

She wished that somehow she could say these things to Jackson. She wished she could make him see that, whatever small flaws Beau's nature had possessed, whatever small wounds he had inflicted on her through the years, everything had been erased that night.

Of course she couldn't tell anyone, least of all Jackson. She didn't even very often let herself think of it. It would be possible to drown in such memories, to sink so deep into the remembered passion that it would be impossible to surface. Impossible to accept love from anyone else.

But tonight, perhaps because of Grace Pickens, she needed to remember. Careful not to make too much noise, Molly put her castle picture on top of Liza's sketchbook and walked to the window.

The three golden moons floated over her shoulder,
swaying slightly as the heater vent blew warm air across their glittering surfaces. Flecks of twinkling gold light moved silently, reflected against the windowpane. Molly touched the cold glass with her fingertips, catching the gold on the backs of her hands.

The sight reminded her of Beau's ring. The Forrest ring, bequeathed to every eldest son for more than a hundred years. She had always loved that ring, not because it stood for wealth, but because it symbolized stability and continuity. It meant that the Forrest family had weathered wars and scandals, financial booms and crashes, births and deaths.

And through it all the ring had made its way unscathed. From father to son, over and over, the promise was unbroken.

Where was the ring now? she wondered. Jackson didn't wear it, though technically it was his. Technically Jackson had become the eldest son.

Oh, Beau…
She remembered the last time she had seen the ring, its complex facets winking like golden fire from the Cuspian moons. She had pressed Beau's hand against her cheek, begging his forgiveness, and she had felt the carved gold leaves press cold against her tear-warmed skin….

She had almost lost him that night. Back then, they had fought almost every time they met. It was always the same thing. She was too immature, too naive. Too virginal. Or—when he was very angry—too
frigid.

His contempt bruised her soul. But what else could she have expected? Beau was twenty-two years old, a rich, exciting young man who had just
graduated from college. Molly was only eighteen, a little local mouse not quite out of high school.

Oh, he loved her—he had told her so often and eloquently ever since she'd be fifteen years old. But he was a man, with a man's needs. He loved her. He needed her. But it was time for more.

Molly was afraid. Her mother's example was always before her. Molly's mother had, in her own teens, found herself pregnant. In her desperate grasp for respectability, she had married Molly's father, though she knew he had no desire to be a father, no desire to be a husband. No desire to be anything but a boisterous regular at the Proud Lion Pub, found nightly at the bar with a long-neck beer in one hand and long-legged beauty in the other.

And look what had happened to that marriage. Her father had ended up at the bottom of a bottle, and her mother had ended up wedded to resentment.

For years, only the fear of meeting that same fate had kept Molly from succumbing to Beau's expert seductions. She had begged for more time.

But that night she had run out of time.

The evening had started all right. Though he had hated the thought of hanging out with “adolescents,” he had finally agreed to escort her to her senior prom, and she was almost sick with excitement.

She would never forget a single detail. She had worn yellow silk—when they danced, it whispered things she couldn't quite hear. When she leaned into him, the fabric slipped across his crisp black tuxedo like liquid gold.

He had bought her a corsage of white orchids with yellow throats and a thick, sweet scent. When he had fixed it to her bodice, right in front of her parents, he had worked slowly, deliberately grazing the sharp point of the long florist's pin lightly across the exposed swell of her breast. The pin had left a small white line and a trail of shivering goose bumps in its path.

She had borrowed her mother's yellow topaz earrings. Once, while they danced, he had nibbled one of the small round studs right out of her ear and then, tossing back his head, he had grinned, displaying it like a pirate's prize, the jewel flashing between his teeth.

Everyone had envied her. Beau was everything the high school girls wanted in a man, everything the high school boys were not. Graceful, athletic, muscular, utterly charismatic. He flirted with all the pretty girls, and then, just when Molly was tense with insecurity, he danced with her. He kissed her neck and whispered how much he wanted her. Only her. But the next dance belonged to some other girl—what was he whispering now?—and fear set in again.

By the time the prom was over, Molly was weak with Beau's special mixture of pleasure and pain. She could see now what she hadn't understood then—that he had devoted the entire night to prepping her for surrender. Deliberately, much the way a chef tenderizes meat.

So sure was he of his technique that when Molly once again said no, he didn't even get angry. This
time, he was too clever for that. He knew what would work best.

Instead he killed her with kindness. He apologized for pushing. He knew that he was wrong for her, too mature for her. She needed someone her own age.
Just as he did.
For her own good, he ought never to see her again.

By the time he dropped her at the front door, she was nearly weeping with desolation. She begged, abandoning pride, but he was resolute. For her own good, he was leaving her. It was over.

She had spent two hours paralyzed on her bed, smelling crushed orchids and tasting the salt of her own tears. Through the walls she could hear the nightly argument between her parents, escalating fury on her father's part, dwindling whining from her mother. A pattern so familiar it had become a ritual.

But without Beau, it was suddenly unendurable. It was Beau who had made her feel protected, who had made her feel loved, who had made her believe that there was something worth living for.

Without Beau, there was nothing. Without Beau she couldn't survive.

And then, in one desperate flash of clarity, everything fell into place.

She didn't have to try to live without him.

All he wanted was a real woman, a woman who wasn't afraid to love him. Well, she could be that woman. She wasn't afraid anymore, not of that.

The only thing that scared her then was the idea of living without him.

S
TILL IN HER YELLOW SILK
,
she climbed out her window, down the thick, rough branches of the tree, and she made her way to Everspring. For once Molly was grateful to have a neurotic mother—she was able to pay for a cab with the emergency twenty-dollar bill her mother always made her tuck into her evening shoes.

But when she arrived, she felt paralyzed, confused, as if she'd awakened from a fugue state to find herself standing in front of Everspring. What now? The formal plantation looked forbidding at this hour, mausoleum gray under the crescent moon. It was too late to ring the bell—what would his mother think?

Then, like a miracle, she spied Beau's little red sports car. He had parked it on the grass, deep in the backyard, under the spreading arms of the biggest, oldest oak tree.

As she drew closer, she could see that Beau lay there, sprawled across the hood. A dozen beer bottles were scattered on the ground beside the car, winking in the starlight. He raised his arm slowly, laying it over his eyes as if the stars had given him
a headache. Molly saw the Forrest ring flash, bright and gold and reassuring.

She heard herself emit a small whimper of relief. He was still here—and he was alone. He hadn't really left her, hadn't gone out to find a more willing woman. Thank God, it wasn't too late.

She barely felt her feet touch the ground as she raced toward him. He rose at the sound of her approach, blinking as if he might have been sleeping. His hair was mussed, his gaze muddled from the liquor.

“Molly?” He tried to slide off the hood, but he was awkwardly arranged, and she reached him first.

“Wait. Please wait.” She pressed herself close to the car and reached her hands up to his chest, stalling his descent. His legs braced themselves on the fender, on either side of her, and he leaned back on the heels of his hands, steadying himself.

“Molly?” His voice was slurred. “What is it?”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm so sorry. I was wrong. You were right.” She couldn't think what else to say. She was afraid of words—he was so much better at them. Words had done her no good in the car, when he had been telling her goodbye.

“I love you,” she said desperately. “I love you so much.” She hated how her voice trembled. She didn't want to sound like a nervous teenager. She wanted to sound like a woman. She stood on her tiptoes and leaned into him, waiting for him to wrap his arms around her.

But he didn't. And she wasn't sure what her next move should be. How embarrassing not to know
how to initiate such things. But he had always been the pursuer. She had been focused on how to stop him from going too far.

She kissed him on the lips, hoping that he would understand. Perhaps he would just take over now….

But he was completely motionless, not even breathing. After a moment it felt ridiculous, as if she were kissing a statue, so she pulled back. She could hardly look at him.

“Molly.” He frowned, slowly shaking his head. “Molly, you're making a mistake—”

“No, I'm not!” Panic surged through her. Was he going to send her away? Back to that cramped, lonely and unloving house? He didn't understand. He thought it was the same naive little Molly out here, offering him more of her childish kisses, and he simply wasn't interested.

She had to prove that things were different. That
she
was different. Before she could lose her courage, she dropped her hand to his waistband. He had changed into a pair of weathered blue jeans, but he hadn't bothered with a belt, so it was easy to slip free the button and slide the zipper down.

He held his breath, still unmoving, but she knew what these changes in his body meant. She had finally done the right thing. He wanted her to touch him like this. He had often asked for it, but she had always been too afraid.

She was still afraid, but now mixed in with the fear was something that felt more like excitement. Something warm and breathless that made her heart beat very fast.

His breathing was rapid, shallow exhales of sweet, alcohol-tinged warmth, as if his heart were beating fast, too. She could feel his body swelling just under her hand, and, closing her eyes, she lowered her trembling fingers.

He lurched forward, pushing her aside roughly as he staggered down from the car. “No,” he said, the sound more moan than word. “I can't let you do this.”

He stumbled as far as the tree, pressed his back against the trunk, as if he needed its strength to hold him up, and with a groan slid slowly to the ground. He put his face in his hands. “Go away, Molly,” he muttered drunkenly into his fingers. “For God's sake, go away.”

Molly knew he didn't mean it. She had felt the hot thrust of his flesh, and she had felt the answering tingle in her own body. He wanted her,
needed
her, and for the first time she, too, understood what need felt like. It had talons, like hunger. Fire, like pain. Ripples, like fear. And a helpless, liquid sweetness, like love.

So she followed him. She knelt in front of him, her gold silk pooling around her on the thick spring grass.

“It's all right,” she said softly, kissing his hands, kissing the gold leaves of the Forrest ring. “Don't you see? It's different this time. This time I want it just as much as you do.”

He didn't answer. But he didn't need to. She knew what to do, though her hands still trembled as she peeled open the edges of his jeans. As she low
ered her head to the soft cotton beneath, her breath came so fast she wondered if she might faint.

But she didn't. She fumbled, but instinct guided her, instinct she hadn't even known she possessed. Her lips found him quickly, found the thick, thrilling, musky, rigid power of him. She caught her breath as she finally understood what was going to happen to her tonight. And then, breathing his name in whispering silence, she kissed him.

He shuddered, and one long, low animal sound tore from his throat. His hands fell away from his face, and his eyes were feverish in the starlight.

“Tell me I'm dreaming, Molly,” he said in a strange, harsh voice. “Tell me I'm drunk, and I am dreaming.”

She kissed him again, panting slightly against his skin from the strange, throbbing desire that was rising in her. “But you're not,” she whispered without lifting her head. He groaned once more, clutching at the soft blades of grass as she tentatively feathered her lips up and down the length of him, learning what made him swell and quiver. “This is not a dream.”

“It is, Molly, it is.” His voice was hot, and not his own. She could feel a thrumming in the muscles of his legs, as if he fought to maintain balance, as if he were afraid he might fall from this cushion of grass into some steep and fatal abyss. “You have always been my dream, Molly. My first, my last, my best, most beautiful dream.”

The tenderness in his voice drew tears, and they fell on her fingers as she loved him. And then some
how, with careful tension, he eased away from her touch. He rose onto his knees, and he touched her, too, gently moving aside yellow silk and ivory lace with reverent, knowing fingers.

For long, elastic minutes they touched, they trembled. His body molded itself to hers with great beauty and brief pain. His breath became hers, his rhythm became hers, and the night sky was barely large enough to contain the sweating, pulsing pleasure of it all.

And finally, arm and legs and silk and tears entangled, on a blanket of grass spread sweetly under the oak tree, they dreamed together as one.

 

I
N HIS ENTIRE CAREER
, Ross Riser had never spent more than ten minutes at a stretch inside the Radway art room. And that was not an accident. Ross Riser wasn't the indoorsy type. And he darn sure wasn't the artsy type.

It had always been like that. Although he could shoot a football like an arrow twenty-five yards to a downfield receiver he couldn't even see, although he could thread that spiraling pigskin neatly through the needle's eye of a dozen burly pass rushers, he couldn't take a pencil and draw a straight line on a piece of paper to save his life.

Face it, he was all major muscle mass and bulk energy. He didn't have one single solitary fine motor skill in his whole body.

But look at him now. His fingers were sticky with glue, and he was pretty damn sure he had silver
glitter in his hair.
In his hair, for God's sake!
What the hell had he been thinking?

He growled under his breath and fought the urge to kick something.

“Jeez,” Tommy Cheatwood said, leaning back in his chair and giving Ross a disgusted glare. “If I'd known you were going to make such a darn fuss about it, I wouldn't have said you could help.”

“I'm not making a fuss.” Ross returned the black look. “I just said I didn't see what was wrong with your project to start with. It looked okay to me. And considering how late this assignment is already—”

“I told you, I decided I wanted it to be an ice cave instead.” Tommy yanked up the tube of glue and squeezed it over the papier-mâché mounds that had just yesterday been a clumsy representation of the Rocky Mountains. The mountains had since been hollowed out into weird, spiky caves.

Tommy's plan was to affix tiny, diamond-shaped rhinestones to the surfaces, creating “ice,” and he had been given permission from the art teacher to use her room after school. Ross, stopping in after football practice, had seen Tommy there and, like a fool, had offered to help.

Tommy had seemed grateful, or so Ross had thought at first. But Tommy had put his coach in charge of the silver glitter, which Ross now believed might be part of some diabolical plot to humiliate him. Glitter was the most fiendish, uncooperative substance ever invented. It was like trying to catch smoke and glue it down. The damn stuff went ev
erywhere.
Everywhere.
He'd probably be sneezing glitter for a month.

“Besides, I already missed the science fair, so what difference does it make if I'm late one more day?” Tommy grimaced as the glue refused to squirt. He squeezed harder, grunting irritably. Suddenly the top of the tube popped off under the pressure, and about a cupful of thick, oozy paste flooded out like white lava.

“Damn!” he said explosively. It was all over his fingers. He wiped them on his blue jeans, smearing glue everywhere.

“Watch your language,” Ross cautioned automatically, but when he reached over to help, he knocked the shaker of glitter in his lap.
“Damn!”

The two gluey, glittery, exasperated males glared at each other across the table. For a moment the art room was as cold as any ice cave ever discovered. And then Tommy began to laugh.

“Man, you look pathetic,” he said. “You've got glitter all over your ears.”

Ross grinned. “You look pretty stupid yourself, Cheatwood. Your hair is glued to your eyebrow.”

Tommy reached up, found the mess, and made a retching sound. “Jeez. What a couple of losers we are.”

Ross tried to shake the glitter from his fingertips, but the stuff wouldn't budge. “I tell you, Tommy, I'd rather be
lost
in an ice cave than have to make one.”

“Think so? Ice caves are pretty dangerous,” Tommy said with a macabre glee in his voice. “And
freezing cold. They're actually inside glaciers, you know.”

Ross raised one eyebrow. “Yeah. Well, I'd still rather be lost in one.”

“Oh, yeah?” It had become a contest of wills. “Well, you could get impaled on a stalagmite. And sometimes the cave walls are too thin, and they come crashing down, burying you alive.”

Ross grinned. “Still.”

“Yeah, well, you know these caves were carved out by glacier meltwaters, and the water is still in there.” Tommy's eyes grew theatrically wide. “Sometimes there can be flash floods, and if you're in too deep you can't get out.”

“Hmm.” Ross pretended to consider. He knew better than to express any amazement that Tommy knew all the glaciological terminology. Clearly, for once, the kid had actually done some research. “Well, at least you don't die of shame. At least you don't die covered in silver glitter.”

Tommy laughed out loud and nodded, tacitly acknowledging defeat. “You got a point there, coach. You do look pretty dopey. I guess you wouldn't want my mom to see you now.”

“No, and you'd better not tell her about this, either, young man,” Ross said, pointing a silver finger at the little boy. Tommy just made a wrinkled, noncommittal face and tilted his head mischievously. But that was okay. For the first time, Ross felt absolutely no antagonism coming from the kid. That was real progress. It was worth filling every exposed orifice with glitter. Almost.

“So what got you interested in ice caves?” He tilted his chair onto its back legs and eyed Tommy comfortably. The kid had already resumed his work, placing rhinestones onto the cave walls as carefully as his ten thumbs would allow.

“I don't know. Liza was talking about them the other day. You know Liza Lorring? She gave me the idea, I guess.” Tommy scrutinized the caves, choosing the spot for his next rhinestone with the intensity of a surgeon deciding where to make his next cut. “I thought I might give it to her after I get my grade. That's why I'm using so much glitter. Liza is like
in love
with glitter.”

Ahh.
Ross finally understood. “So you and Liza are friends?” He made the question very casual, looking up only briefly, concentrating on picking tiny silver flecks out from under his fingernails. “She's a pretty cool kid?”

Tommy shrugged. “Well, she's a girl. But I guess she doesn't
completely
stink.”

Ross chuckled. “Except for the glitter.”

Looking up, Tommy offered Ross a man-to-man grin—and, for just a second, in that extraordinary smile Ross could glimpse the charismatic young heartbreaker Tommy was destined to become. Five years, maybe? God help the girls then. And every other boy who tried to compete with this cocky little charmer. Oh, yeah. Ross knew all about that.