Untouched: 2 (Rough Boys) (18 page)

When she’d driven to the sitter’s house to pay her, Brady had begged to stay and Abby had agreed to let him help her around the house, then she’d bring him home in an hour.

Eva whipped open the door before Mason even reached it, a grin stretching her face and her heart pumping with love and affection for him.

Catching sight of his expression, her heart sank and continued right down to her feet. Her face and fingers tingled. What was wrong?

He brushed past her into the house without even meeting her gaze. She shut the door behind him and twisted her fingers together. Turning to face him, she quivered with terror. What was it? What?

His brow was drawn low and his face was mottled red with anger. “Where’s Brady?”

“At the sitter’s. What—?”

He waved a sheaf of papers in her face. “Know what these are?”

“N-no.”

He thrust them into her hands. One wafted to the floor. She tried to focus on the print but she already knew what they said. He’d discovered her secret. He knew.

Her hands trembled so violently, the papers rattled. “Mason—”

“You’ve been stealing from me, Eva! Christ!”

“It’s not what you think—”

“Not—? How can that be? It’s written right there!” He jabbed the papers and they fell out of her lax hands, floating to the floor around her feet.

Tears choked her and spurted from her eyes. “It isn’t. Mason, please.”

He made a sharp gesture with his hand and spun away from her. A sob rushed up her throat and she fought to hold it back. She had to make him understand.
Had to.

“All this time, you’ve been lying to me. Stealing money out from under my nose while rolling around with me in bed.”

No, not that.
She couldn’t stand for him to think she’d slept with him to distract him or even to make up for what she was doing.

“Mason, I can explain.”

“Explain what? That you’re not who I thought you were? While you were lying to me—stealing money and shooting deer off my land—”

Shock ripped through her.

“Yeah, that’s right, I saw the blood from that deer you shot, Eva. I knew you’d lied to me then.” He jammed a hand through his hair, sending the dark locks on end. His gaze snapped. “While you were embezzling and poaching, I was falling deep, deeply in love with you. Goddammit!”

He whirled away from her, hiding his devastated expression but she still saw it in the set of his shoulders. They hunched around his pain—pain he rightfully owned.

“Mason… Hear me, please. Let me try to explain.”

“Explain that you’re a con artist? That you’ve been sleeping with me, what? To make up for your treachery?”

Anger rose in her, a force bigger and brighter than anything she’d known before. That word “treachery” was one she associated with Bill. And this was all his fault. He’d stolen and she’d been paying. He’d taken the easy way out by putting a bullet through his brain and she was picking up the shattered pieces of their lives. Now he had completely annihilated her one chance at love.

She stumbled forward, slipping on the papers and righting herself before she toppled over. She reached for Mason but he jerked away.

Fury broke over her in waves. She balled her hands into fists and faced him fully, unleashing her anger. She bent and scooped up a handful of papers. Poking a finger at one, she screamed. “See that? It says there’s been a five hundred dollar deposit. Five hundred! Made by whom? By me, Mason. I’ve been putting money
into
the Dorsey account for years! Bill embezzled from your father and then took his life to escape his
treachery
.
So when I took money out, I was really withdrawing funds I’d put in!”

His expression grew stony, impenetrable. What could be going on behind those dark, steely eyes of his?

She didn’t care anymore. Anger mounted until she quaked all over. She threw the papers and they dropped softly to the carpet. She wished they were bricks. Stones. Anything hard.

“And I didn’t sleep with you to stop any guilt for what I was hiding, Mason. Yeah, that’s right. For the first time in my life, I felt a love bigger than anything in the world. You
were
my world. I loved Bill, but it was a comfortable love born from our teen years. Not the passionate ache between a man and woman like you and I have.”

She stalked across the room and grabbed Bill’s picture off the wall. She hurled it across the room. It hit the tile kitchen floor with a satisfying crash. Spinning back, she pierced Mason in her gaze.

“I was wrong to hide it from you, but dammit, I didn’t know what to do! Do you get that? I’ve been trying to pay back Dorsey Forestry for years, living on half pay, scrabbling. I couldn’t even… Get… A dinosaur… For my son!” She forced the words through her sobs.

He took a step toward her but she threw out her hands to ward him off.

Emotion raged in her, out of control. She picked up Brady’s brand-new Christmas pajamas he’d taken off that morning and hurled them to the floor. “I can’t buy my son apples! Can’t afford meat! The fucking porch is falling down and the roof sagging. But I’m trying to pay you back, Mason. And I’m sorry if I can’t make ends meet all the time. The money I took out was to pay the babysitter so I can continue working to
pay you back
!”

His features spasmed with pain. “Eva—” He reached out for her and she put more distance between them.

“Just get out, Mason. I swear I’ll find a way to pay you back if it kills me. I’ll sell the house and give the money to you! Don’t you worry. I won’t ever try to climb into your bed again.”

She turned and dropped her face into her hands, unable to hold back the sobs anymore. The world crumbled around her.

The thud of Mason’s boot sounded just behind her. She jerked farther away. Pain spread through her body and her heart bled. She just wanted to gather up Brady and run with him. Maybe go South to her mother’s. She wouldn’t need much—a couple of suitcases and a basket of toys would be sufficient.

I don’t have enough money for gas to get there.

Mason’s breathing was labored. “Fuck!” He stomped away from her. A second later she heard the door slam.

The roar of his truck engine sent her into a frenzy of action. She ran down the hall and into her bedroom. Ignoring the memories of the times she and Mason had shared there in the past week, she hauled two suitcases from under the bed and began to stuff her clothes into one.

* * * * *

The harsh glare of the desk lamps lit up the office. Mason reached into the filing cabinet by Eva’s desk and removed another file bulging with papers. With a sigh, he sank to the floor with his spine against her desk leg.

Every cell in his body ached for her. The vision of her pain flashed in and out of his mind repeatedly, flickering as if it were a neon sign.

The weight of her confessions pressed on him. As he sat here poring over the accounts, receipts and finally the bank statements she’d filed away, he felt less fury and more sadness.

He’d found nothing out of the ordinary with the accounts. Other than the bank statements that reflected her deposits and a few withdrawals—always in small amounts—everything was in perfect order.

Which meant she was telling the truth.

The papers fluttered and with shock, he watched his hand pulse up and down with unsteady nerves.

He dropped the file to his lap and dipped his face into his hands. Pain burned in his heart and knotted his stomach. Deep down, he felt responsible for her problems. Bill had created the original mess, but if Mason had paid her more…

Drawing a deep breath, he fought to see a path that would lead him and Eva away from the trouble. His father had always been a levelheaded man. He didn’t let passion rule. Mason hadn’t reacted well to the find at the bank and he regretted it deeply. How was he going to fix things with Eva?

Not by sitting here.

He abandoned the papers and jumped to his feet. A glance at the clock told him it was two o’clock in the morning—much too late to be barging in on her and waking up Brady. But what choice did Mason have? He had to talk to her.

Together they could get through this. She had to understand that now that he knew the details, he didn’t blame her. But could she forgive his accusations?

He prayed that she would.

First switching off the lamps, he then headed out the door and to his truck. His leg muscles burned to break into a run but he simply strode faster. The world glittered with ice. When his headlights brightened his property, snow swirled before the beams. On the distant shores of the wetland, the light glinted off the eyes of the pair of geese that had battened down for the winter.

Two are always better than one.

With that, he put his truck into gear and headed down the drive toward the main highway that would lead him to the love of his life, Eva.

If he could convince her he’d been an ass, she might stop and listen to what else he had to say—that he didn’t give a damn about the money Bill had embezzled, that he wasn’t going to sell out Dorsey Forestry but pour the love into it his father had. They’d pay out the settlement to Jack Caffrey and plow forward, picking up new contracts and hopefully digging themselves out of the financial trench.

But Mason only wanted this with Eva by his side.

He wished he had a ring to give her tonight.

The instant he pulled up before her house, he knew she wasn’t there. His heart plummeted to the soles of his boots. He jammed the truck into park and jumped out. Striding up to her dark house, he could sense there were no inhabitants within. Before he looked through the little garage window, he knew he wouldn’t find her car there.

Heart drumming wildly, he drove his knuckles into the wooden door. “Fuck!” Running up to the front porch, he leapt the stairs.

Ignoring the broken doorbell, he rapped loudly on the door. When no one answered, he tried the handle and of course found it locked. She wasn’t home. Gone. Taken Brady and left for where? She’d mentioned her mother in the South.

“Dammit!” Mason’s lungs seized and for a wild minute, he couldn’t even drag breath through them. His mind raced. Where was she? How was he going to find her? Her phone didn’t even work. Now he knew it had most likely been shut off because she couldn’t pay the bill. How could she, surviving on a measly half income?

He jerked into action. Running through the snow, he reached his truck. In seconds he was backing out as fast as possible and heading for town.

* * * * *

Eva looked into the rear view mirror at her sleeping son. He had protested loudly at being bundled into the car and driven from his home in the wee hours of the night. But after restlessly pacing her house for several hours, she simply couldn’t sit there another minute, yearning to go to Mason’s house to try to talk to him.

She clenched her fingers tighter around the steering wheel. She’d fucked everything up. What else was there to say? She could beg him to make him understand, but he’d taught her not to plead.

At this point, her pride was nonexistent. Coming clean about her lies had slaughtered any tenuous hold on control she’d had. Breaking down in front of him had been one of the worst moments of her life. Yet at the same time, it had been freeing. Simply sharing the burden that was in her heart, from the financial struggles to her sadness over not having a dinosaur for Brady, eased her a bit.

Now she’d just have to pick up the pieces of her shattered heart and try to make a new life for herself and her son. Her mother had been thrilled to hear she was on her way South. Eva planned to spend a week there, hunting for a job with health benefits and enough pay to allow her to continue to pay back Dorsey Forestry.

And she was going to spend some time licking her wounds.

Eventually she’d go back home to pack up the house and try to sell it, but it was going to be difficult in the dead of winter and in a bad market.

She focused on the ribbon of black road in front of her and drew a deep breath. By lunchtime she’d be in a new place, ready to settle into a new routine.

She glanced in the rearview mirror again. A headlight passed across Brady’s sleeping face and her heart warmed. He was losing his baby features and beneath the flesh she saw what would be Bill’s bone structure. The cut of his brow and his jaw reminded her so much of her first sweetheart.

Memories flicked through her mind like a slide show. Their times hadn’t all been bad. She had loved him. If he’d lived, however, she didn’t know if she would have been able to trust him again, or to overcome the fury she’d felt upon finding out about the embezzlement.

She sucked in a sharp breath. Her mouth popped open as she realized that for the first time in years, she no longer felt that all-consuming anger. Quickly she searched her heart for it and found only a small, bruised portion where it had once lived.

As she drove away from her hometown, her life and her lover, a sad smile stretched her lips.

In telling Mason about her hardships and lies, she’d also exorcised her demons.