The Seduction Of Claudia (30 page)

Claudia stood perfectly still, her expression closed, her arms crossed in front of her as she listened to him. Then she said, "But you kept saying, 'Patrick wouldn't do that'. It sounded to me like you were defending him and that you didn't believe me, though for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what you thought I had to gain by claiming that asshole as my biological father."

"Try to understand where I was coming from. Thirty odd years of knowing someone as well as you know your own parents and he turns out to be a total dirt bag? Not to mention how bizarre it is that I just happened to be in love with the dirt bag's illegitimate daughter," he finished. "Nobody – not even a Pulitzer Prize winning author – could make something like this up; this 'coincidence' of events is too bizarre to be real!"

He paced away from her, then turned back around.

"I will admit that I shouldn't have walked out on you right then, Claudia, but I just couldn't think with you screaming at me like you were. I needed a few minutes to think about it, to decide what to do. I wasn't gone very long before I figured all that out and then I came home and found you gone."

Claudia waited to hear what he had decided. Her heart had leapt when he said he was in love with 'the dirt bag's daughter'. She hoped he still was and would give her a second – no, it would be the third time for them – chance.

"I looked everywhere for you, called you a million times and couldn't reach you. I sat in front of your apartment thinking that you had to go out sometime and when you did, I'd be there to catch you. I even called that prick Peter to see if he had seen you," he became even more frustrated just telling her what he had done to try to find her.

She laughed a little at his last statement. Andrew and Peter had never gotten along. He must have been pretty desperate to reach her if he had called his archenemy.

"I was upset by the whole turn of events, too," she entreated, willing him to understand and forgive her, "Frankly, I expected you to be disgusted by me and I expected you to remain loyal to your family. I just had to get away – I couldn't just sit there and wait for you to come home and dump me."

"I see. So you assumed the very worst about me. That's just great. I'm glad we've established such a high level of trust in this relationship," he said acerbically. "Especially when I have never given you a reason not to trust me!"

"I know, Andrew. I should have known better. But I was upset, too, and you wouldn't be the first person I've known to judge me for who my father is or for being a bastard. My own mother treated my like shit every day of my life because of Patrick Gates!"

"But I didn't treat you like shit – I didn't judge you, Claudia, and I never have! You are the one who leapt to judgment about me when you assumed you knew what I was thinking or what I would do! I'm offended that you would think that I would ever be disgusted by you and that I would ever break up with you for something you had nothing to do with!"

He paced the length of the room, needing an outlet for his anger and frustration. He had never laid a hand on a woman and never would, but he thought he understood what drove weaker men to do it. He wanted to grab Claudia and shake some sense into her. Instead, he stopped pacing and faced her. There wasn't a modicum of calm left in him, so when he spoke, his voice betrayed the frustration he was feeling.

"I did everything I knew how to show you who I am and that I'm not like the other people who've hurt you, but you refused to see it. You're always so caught up with protecting yourself from so-called threats that you can't see what's right in front of you. I was offering you me, Claudia, but you obviously didn't want me!"

Past tense again, she thought. A lump grew in her throat. It was looking more and more like he had come to Paris to decide whether or not to end things with her. She had thought that the decision had been made in her favor after they had made love earlier in the day. But perhaps not. She gazed unseeingly into the middle distance. Her mind was curiously blank, as though her senses had been utterly overwhelmed by what Andrew was telling her and simply shut down.

When she didn't reply he continued in an impassioned tone, "We keep having this same argument and I'm sick of it. It's not normal for me to have to constantly prove myself to you when there has never been a breach of trust between us! I've never given you a single reason to doubt me, but you've never trusted me. And I don't think that's something I can deal with."

"I do trust you, Andrew," she said. "I always have."

"You show your trust for me by running away to protect yourself from me? By shutting yourself off from me? God, you're more tightly guarded than the Pentagon!"

Claudia lost her temper, "Andrew what do you want from me? Can't you see I'm trying? I'm doing the best I can!"

"No. I don't think you are. Your first instinct is to run away from me instead of running to me. I've tried and tried to get you to see that you can trust me and that I would never hurt you! You just can't see it, though, can you? You refuse to believe in me."

"Andrew, I do believe in you, but just try to understand!" she pleaded. "Imagine how I felt, finding out that Patrick Gates has been involved in your life since you were a baby, was more of a father to you than he was to me. I saw how close your family is and how that closeness and affection extended to Gates," she turned away from him. "I didn't think I stood a chance if you had to choose between me and your family..."

He walked over to her and took her by the shoulders, "Claudia, you need to learn to trust. You'll drive everyone who cares about you away if you don't overcome this insane need to protect yourself."

He let her go, but stood in front of her, waiting for her response. It was a long time coming. She refused to meet his eyes, stared into the fireplace.

"But this is different, Andrew. This situation with Gates isn't the same as keeping people at arms length. Gates is my biological father! He abandoned me, threw money at my mother to see that we stayed away from him. Yet, he loved you and you're not even his son. He loved his other children. But not me. All these years, I consoled myself with the thought that he was incapable of loving anyone. But then you kept telling me what a great guy he is and how great of a father he is to his kids and how great he is with you and your brother. It put a lie to the story I had made myself believe all my life. You need to understand that the stakes were a lot higher for me with this, Andrew. I felt like I had to run for my life, to preserve and protect what I had managed to build for myself and to put some distance between you and me."

"You were running for your life and that meant away from me..." Andrew said with bitter incredulity.

"Please try and see it from my point of view!"

"You are so stubborn. Can't you just say, 'I was wrong and I'm sorry'?"

His question took her aback. She knew she was wrong and she was definitely sorry for doubting him, because when she really thought about how well she knew Andrew, she knew in her heart of hearts that he wouldn't have dumped her. She was sorry she had left town so suddenly, without giving them a chance to work through the problem. She was sorry that her actions had seemingly put an end to their relationship because it was obvious that he didn't think of her in a positive light anymore. And, in her mind, she deserved to lose him. She had shown herself to be an extremely poor judge of his character. They had talked again and again about her needing to trust in him, but in the end, she had been the one to betray his trust.

"You're right. I was wrong and I'm very sorry for what I did," she quelled the urge to try to excuse or rationalize her behavior again. To do so would lessen the impact of her apology, which was truly from her heart. "Please forgive me, Andrew."

"I do forgive you," there was a 'but' hanging in the air, but he left it unspoken.

"Thank you. I probably don't deserve your forgiveness," she said formally and with a careful detachment as she reached down to pick up her coat and began to put it on. "Thank you for giving me a chance to apologize and for being gracious enough to accept my apology. Maybe I'll see you back in Boston? It's probably too soon for me to be 'just friends' with you, but... maybe we can try that later?"

Andrew flopped down in a chair and heaved an exasperated sigh. This woman would be the death of him.

"I don't want to be friends with you! Do you think I came all the way over here because I want to be friends? You're out of your mind!"

"Andrew, I honestly don't know why you came here. I thought maybe you wanted closure. Or maybe a 'hot fuck' – isn't that what you called it before? – or whatever," she sounded tired, run down. She rubbed her temples as though she had a headache.

"You idiot," he said, walking over to her. He removed her coat and tossed it on the floor again.

"I'm sick of taking that coat off of you. Leave it off, wouldja?" he said, once again only half-jokingly. "You're doing it again. You can't just leave, Claudia."

She looked into his eyes and saw frustration mixed with the heat and possessiveness that darkened them to deepest blue. The same dark heat that appeared in his eyes when they made love. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, feeling the easy slide of arousal that so typically occurred when he was near. She backed away from him a little so she could better see his face.

"What's going on?"

"What's going on is that I'm not letting you leave. We have a problem that needs to be dealt with, not run away from. So let's deal with it. Together."

"OK..." she said, not sure how they would resolve their problem in a way that they could both live with.

"But here's a new rule for future reference: don't go running off when we have an argument; stay and let's talk it out before you do anything rash."

"We have a future?" she asked hopefully. "You mean you liked my plan to deal with your family?"

"Hell, no."

Claudia's expression went totally blank with confusion.

"That plan sucks, baby. We're not even going down that road. When has avoidance and compartmentalizing ever solved any problem?"

She frowned, "Well, I don't see any other way. I can't be around Gates. You didn't see how he treated me. Like I was a piece of property or something. He offered memoney, Andrew," she shivered at the memory, "like I was some gold-digging whore! I can't just forget that or that he threw me away when I was born!"

"I don't expect you to forget that, Claudia. It's impossible for me to forget it, too. When you told me all about your childhood it made me so angry that whoever your father was would leave you at the mercy of your mother. I still really can't believe that that heinous individual is none other than my father's best friend."

He was quiet for a minute, thinking of the past, of all the happy occasions the Gatess and Conals had shared. They weren't real to him anymore, though. Gates was a fraud, had been keeping a terrible secret from all of them. He had had an ongoing affair with Claudia's mother, but had never had contact with his daughter. He had to have known that Marcheline was a selfish woman and that she would be an equally selfish mother. But he hadn't cared. He hadn't cared that he was betraying his wife and their three children, his closest friends or, worst of all, his daughter.

"Listen, I'll tell you just what I told Gates. You are my family. I loved Paddy," he said, "But, now that I know exactly who and what he is, I want nothing to do with him."

Claudia's mind had gotten hung up back where he said he had talked to Gates.

"You talked to Gates about me?" she asked tentatively, wringing her hands nervously.

"Yeah. I told him I knew everything. He tried to deny it at first. Then he tried to justify what he did in the most reprehensible way. I told him he was a liar, a hypocrite and a pretty sorry excuse for a human being."

"You did?!" alarm tinged her voice.

"Yeah, I did. I found out, too, that he and your mother never stopped seeing each other," he said quietly, not sure how Claudia would take the news.

"What?! You can't be serious... Maman always spoke of him so angrily. How could she be sleeping with him after what he did to us?"

"I am serious. I'm sorry if that hurts you. He told me that they had reached an 'understanding', a financial understanding from what I could tell. But he is oddly infatuated, almost obsessed, with your mother. When he talked about her, the look on his face was sort of dreamy and besotted. It was pretty creepy."

"This is unreal," Claudia walked away from him. She felt betrayed all over again. Her mother had been seeing Gates for all these years? A woman didn't have an affair for some thirty years and not develop some sort of feeling for her paramour. In typical fashion, her mother had put her own desires, her own feelings, before those of her daughter. She had known that, as a child, Claudia had longed for her father. Instead of making sure that Gates did the right thing or doing the right thing herself, Marcheline had sided with her lover, the deadbeat dad.

"I'm so tired of being hurt by my mother," she said sadly.

"I know, baby, and I'm so sorry she hurt you again. If you don't mind, can we talk about Marcheline a little later? Right now, I want you to know that I told Paddy to stay out of our lives, Claudia. If I never set eyes on him again, it will be too soon. You don't have to worry about seeing him. You won't. And if you do, I'll be there."

"But... What will your parents think? Do they know about Gates and me?"

"No, I haven't told them yet; we can tell them together. I can only guess at what they'll think, but I'm pretty sure that they'll side with us. When I called them to tell them I was coming here to bring you home after an argument, Mom wished me luck and told me how much she liked you and how she hoped to get to know you better. She dropped a very unsubtle hint about hoping to even out the family on a more permanent basis – a little more estrogen to balance out all the testosterone," he finished, referencing that his mother had raised two very masculine, mischievous sons who were the image of their father in looks and personality.