Captivated (20 page)

And that pattern would repeat itself over and over again. For the rest of his life.

“It’s beautiful here,” Morgana said quietly from behind him.

He didn’t jolt. He just sighed. Nash supposed he should have expected her to follow him. And he supposed she would expect some sort of explanation.

He wondered how creative he might be. Should he tell her Leeanne was an old lover, someone he’d pushed aside who wouldn’t stay aside? Or maybe he’d weave some amusing tale about being blackmailed by the wife of a Mafia don, with whom he’d had a brief, torrid affair. That had a nice ring.

Or he could work on her sympathies and tell her Leeanne was a destitute widow—his best friend’s widow—who tapped him for cash now and again.

Hell, he could tell her it had been a call for the policemen’s fund. Anything. Anything but the bitter truth.

Her hand brushed his shoulder as she settled on the rock beside him. And demanded nothing. Said nothing. She only looked out over the bay, as he did. Waiting. Smelling of night. Of smoke and roses.

He had a terrible urge to simply turn and bury his face at her breast. Just to hold her and be held until all this helpless anger faded away.

And he knew that, no matter how clever he was, how glib, she would believe nothing but the truth.

“I like it here,” he said, as if several long, silent minutes hadn’t passed between her observation and his response. “In L.A. I looked out of my condo and saw another condo. I guess I didn’t realize I was feeling hemmed in until I moved here.”

“Everyone feels hemmed in from time to time, no matter where they live.” She laid a hand on his thigh. “When I’m feeling that way, I go to Ireland. Walk along an empty beach. When I do, I think of all the people who have walked there before, and will walk there again. Then it occurs to me that nothing is forever. No matter how bad, or how good, everything passes and moves on to another level.”

“‘All things change; nothing perishes,’” he mumbled.

She smiled. “Yes, I’d say that sums it up perfectly.” Reaching over, she cupped his face in her hands. Her eyes were soft and clear, and her voice was full of comfort ready to be offered. “Talk to me, Nash. I may not be able to help, but I can listen.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

Something else flicked into her eyes. Nash cursed himself when he recognized it as hurt.

“So, I’m welcome in your bed, but not into your mind.”

“Damn it, one has nothing to do with the other.” He wouldn’t be pushed, wouldn’t be prodded or maneuvered into revealing parts of himself he chose to keep hidden.

“I see.” Her hands dropped away from his face. For a moment she was tempted to help him, to spin a simple charm that would give him peace of mind. But it wasn’t right; it wouldn’t be real. And she knew using magic to change his feelings would only hurt them both. “All right, then. I’m going to go finish the marigolds.”

She rose. No recriminations, no heated words. He would have preferred them to this cool acceptance. As she took a step away, he grabbed her hand. She saw the war on his face, but offered nothing but silence.

“Leeanne’s my mother.”

His mother.

It was the anguish in his eyes that had Morgana masking her shock. She remembered how cold his voice had been when he spoke to Leeanne, how his face had fallen into hard, rigid lines. Yet the woman on the other end of the telephone line had been his mother.

What could make a man feel such distaste and dislike for the woman he owed his life to?

But the man was Nash. Because of that, she worked past her own deeply ingrained loyalty to family as she studied him.

Hurt, she realized. There had been as much hurt as anger in his voice, in his face, then. And now. She could see it plainly now that all the layers of arrogance, confidence, and ease had been stripped away. Her heart ached for him, but she knew that wouldn’t lessen his hurt. She wished she had Anastasia’s talent and could take on some of his pain.

Instead, she kept his hand in hers and sat beside him again. No, she was not an empath, but she could offer support, and love.

“Tell me.”

Where did he begin? Nash wondered. How could he explain to her what he had never been able to explain to himself?

He looked down at their joined hands, at the way her strong fingers entwined with his. She was offering support, understanding, when he hadn’t thought he needed any.

The feelings he’d always been reluctant to voice, refused to share, flowed out.

“I guess you’d have to know my grandmother. She was”—he searched for a polite way of putting it—“a
straight arrow. And she expected everyone to fly that same narrow course. If I had to choose one adjective, I’d go with intolerant. She’d been widowed when Leeanne was about ten. My grandfather’d had this insurance business, so she’d been left pretty well off. But she liked to scrape pennies. She was one of those people who didn’t have it in her to enjoy life.”

He fell silent, watching the gulls sweep over the water. When his hand moved restlessly in hers, Morgana said nothing, and waited.

“Anyway, it might sound kind of sad and poignant. The widow with two young girls to raise alone. Until you understand that she liked being in charge. Being the widow Kirkland and having no one to answer to but herself. I have to figure she was pretty rough on her daughters, holding holiness and sex over their heads like lightning bolts. It didn’t work very well with Leeanne. At seventeen she was pregnant and didn’t have a clue who the father might have been.”

He said it with a shrug in his voice, but Morgana saw beneath it. “You blame her for that?”

“For that?” He looked at her, his eyes dark. “No. Not for that. The old lady must have made her life hell for the best part of nine months. Depending on who you get it from, Leeanne was a poor, lonely girl punished ruthlessly for one little slip. Or my grandmother was this long-suffering saint who took her sinful daughter in. My own personal opinion is that we had two selfish women who didn’t give a damn about anyone but themselves.”

“She was only seventeen, Nash,” Morgana said quietly.

Anger carved his face into hard, unyielding lines. “That’s supposed to make it okay? She was only seventeen, so it’s okay that she bounced around so many guys she didn’t know who got her pregnant. She was only seventeen, so it’s okay that two days after she had me she took off, left me with that bitter old woman without a word, without a call or even a thought, for twenty-six years.”

The raw emotion in his voice squeezed her heart. She wanted to gather him close, hold him until the worst of it passed. But when she reached out, he jerked away, then stood.

“I need to walk.”

She made her decision quickly. She could either leave him to work off his pain alone, or she could share it with him. Before he could take three strides, she was beside him, taking his hand again.

“I’m sorry, Nash.”

He shook his head violently. The air he gulped in was as sweet as spring, and yet it burned like bile in his throat. “I’m sorry. No reason to take it out on you.”

She touched his cheek. “I can handle it.”

But he wasn’t sure he could. He’d never talked the whole business through before, not with anyone. Saying it all out loud left an ugly taste in his mouth, one he was afraid he’d never be rid of. He took another careful breath and started again.

“I stayed with my grandmother until I was five. My aunt, Carolyn, had married. He was in the army, a lifer. For the next few years I moved around with them, from base to base. He was a hard-nosed bastard—only tolerated me because Carolyn would cry and carry on when he got drunk and threatened to send me back.”

Morgana could imagine it all too clearly. The little boy in the empty middle, controlled by everyone, belonging to no one. “You hated it.”

“Yeah, I guess that hits the center. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I hated it. Looking back, I realize that Carolyn was as unstable as Leeanne, in her own way. One minute she’d fawn all over me, the next she’d ignore me. She wasn’t having any luck getting pregnant herself. Then, when I was about eight or nine, she found out she was going to have a kid of her own. So I got shipped back to my grandmother. Carolyn didn’t need a substitute anymore.”

Morgana felt her eyes fill with angry tears at the image of the child, helpless, innocent, being shuffled back and forth between people who knew nothing of love.

“She never looked at me like a person, you know? I was a mistake. That was the worst of it,” he said, as if to himself. “The way she drummed that point home. That every breath I took, every beat of my heart was only possible because some careless, rebellious girl had made a mistake.”

“No,” Morgana said, appalled. “She was wrong.”

“Yeah, maybe. But things like that stick with you. I heard a lot about the sins of the father, the evils of the flesh. I was lazy, intractable and wicked—one of her favorite words.” He sent Morgana a grim little smile. “But that was no more than she expected, seeing as how I’d been conceived.”

“She was a horrible woman,” Morgana bit out. “She didn’t deserve you.”

“Well, she’d have agreed with you on the second part. And she made me understand just how grateful I should be that she put food in my belly and a roof over my head. But I wasn’t feeling very grateful, and I ran away a lot. By the time I was twelve, I got slipped into the system. Foster homes.”

His shoulders moved restlessly, in a small outward showing of the turmoil within. He was pacing back and forth over the grounds, his stride lengthening as the memories worked on him.

“Some of them were okay. The ones that really wanted you. Others just wanted the check you brought in every month, but sometimes you got lucky and ended up in a real home. I spent one Christmas with this family, the Hendersons.” His voice changed, took on a hint of wonder. “They were great—treated me just like they treated their own kids. You could always smell cookies baking. They had the tree, the presents under it. All that colored paper and ribbon. Stockings hanging from the mantel. It really blew me away to see one with my name on it.

“They gave me a bike,” he said quietly. “Mr. Henderson bought it secondhand and took it down to the basement to fix it up. He painted it red. Bug-eyed, fire-engine red, and he’d polished all the chrome. He put a lot of time into making that bike something special. He showed me how to hook baseball cards on the spokes.”

He sent her a sheepish look that had Morgana tilting her head. “What?”

“Well, it was a really great bike, but I didn’t know how to ride. I’d never had a bike. Here I was, nearly twelve years old, and that bike might as well have been a Harley hog for all I knew.”

Morgana came staunchly to his defense. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Nash sent her an arch look. “Obviously you’ve never been an eleven-year-old boy. It’s pretty tough to handle the passage into manhood when you can’t handle a two-wheeler. So, I mooned over it, made excuses not
to ride it. I had homework, I’d twisted my ankle, it looked like rain. Thought I was pretty clever, but she—Mrs.
Henderson—saw right through me. One day she got me up early, before anyone else was awake, and took me out. She taught me. Held the back of the seat, ran along beside me. Made me laugh when I took a spill. And when I managed to wobble down the sidewalk on my own, she cried. Nobody’d ever . . .” He let his words trail off, embarrassed by the scope of emotion that memory evoked.

Tears burned the back of her throat. “They must have been wonderful people.”

“Yeah, they were. I had six months with them. Probably the best six months of my life.” He shook off the memory and went on. “Anyway, whenever I’d get too comfortable, my grandmother would yank the chain and pull me back. So I started counting the days until I was eighteen, when nobody could tell me where to live, or how. When I got free, I was damn well going to stay that way.”

“What did you do?”

“I wanted to eat, so I tried a couple of regular jobs.” He glanced at her, this time with a hint of humor in his eyes. “I sold insurance for a while.”

For the first time since he’d begun, she smiled. “I can’t picture it.”

“Neither could I. It didn’t last. I guess when it comes right down to it, I’ve got the old lady to thank for trying writing as a career. She used to whack me good whenever she caught me scribbling.”

“Excuse me.” Morgana was certain she must have misunderstood. “She hit you for writing?”

“She didn’t exactly understand the moral scope of vampire hunters,” he said dryly. “So, figuring it was the last thing she’d want me to do, I kept right on doing it. I moved to L.A., managed to finesse a low-level job with the special-effects guys. Then I worked as a script doctor, met the right people. Finally managed to sell
Shape Shifter
. My grandmother died while that was in production. I didn’t go to the funeral.”

“If you expect me to criticize you for that, I’ll have to disappoint you.”

“I don’t know what I expect,” he muttered. Stopping beneath a cypress, he turned to her. “I was twenty-six when the movie hit. It was . . . well, we’ll risk a bad pun and call it a howling success. Suddenly I was riding the wave. My next script was picked up. I got myself nominated for a Golden Globe. Then I started getting calls.
My aunt. She just needed a few bills to tide her over. Her husband had never risen above sergeant, and she had
three kids she wanted to send to college. Then Leeanne.”

He scrubbed his hands over his face, wishing he could scrub away the layers of resentment, of hurt, of memory.

“She called you,” Morgana prompted.

“Nope. She popped up on my doorstep one day. It would have been ludicrous if it hadn’t been so pathetic. This stranger, painted up like a Kewpie doll, standing at my front door telling me she was my mother. The worst part was that I could see me in her. The whole time she was standing there, pouring out the sad story of her life, I wanted to shut that door in her face. Bolt it. I could hear her telling me that I owed her, how having me had screwed up her life. How she was divorced for the second time and running on empty. So I wrote her out a check.”