It's Always Complicated (Her Billionaires Book 4) (27 page)

The pain gave him something to focus on.

“Is that why he looks so pale?” Mike asked.

She nodded.

“Is that why you’re here?”

A wistful smile twisted her lips. “We’re here because God told us to come, Mikey.”

God didn’t make you get in the truck and drive over a thousand miles
, he thought to himself. Tamping down the words took more effort than he expected, and reminded him of an entire adolescence spent shoving words back down his own throat. He knew they’d censored themselves in front of non-believers. Now the God talk would begin in earnest.

“Okay.”

“Your Pa was on the tractor and just collapsed. Thank God a farm hand, one of those nice college students from the organic farming internship program, found him before it was too late. We got him to the hospital and he spent a week there.”

“A week?” Mike knew they didn’t have insurance. His eyes took in all the grey hair, the long, deep wrinkles in Ma’s skin, and he realized they were well over sixty-five years old now. Probably had Medicare. As his mind darted to and fro to remove him from the tidal wave of emotions this stirred up, he realized he was grasping at silly details that didn’t matter.

“A week. That first night we nearly lost him. And you know what?” She reached for his hand. He could barely unroll his fist, her smooth, hardened palm so unfamiliar. They had never been a
physically
affectionate family. A hug at high school graduation was the last time he remembered his mother touching him. She hadn’t been there when Jill died to offer an embrace, a shoulder, an ear.

She hadn’t been there because she’d chosen to follow his father’s shunning.

“What?”

“Big Mike wanted one thing. You.”

“Me?”

“You. He said to call you. Wanted to see you before he died.”

“Jesus,” Mike whispered.

His ma didn’t realize that wasn’t a plea for help. “Oh, He’s the one who came. Must have been watching over your father with such love. By morning, Mike was mending just fine, and said not to call you. I begged. He wouldn’t relent.”

“Nothing’s really changed, I see,” Mike said.

She shook her head slowly, eyes darting up to watch his face. “Not between you two. No. You’re both stubborn mules.”

“I learned it from the best, Ma.”

“So I prayed on it. Stood up to your Pa, and you know I don’t do that. Not often enough, I think now,” Her face folded with pain. “I prayed and asked for guidance.” Her face lit up with joy. “And then I received it. A message from the divine.”

“A message?”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a well-worn envelope with a very familiar feminine scrawl on it. Laura’s handwriting stared up at him.

“Laura’s letter arrived the very next day.” Tears spilled over those sweet blue eyes. “My prayer was answered.”

Coincidence? That’s the word Mike would use. Prayer? That was Mary’s word. Semantics didn’t matter in the end, though. What mattered was that one act led to the same result:

Ma and Pa were here.

Her soft hand smelled like the same lotion she’d used since he could remember, the cheap store-brand hand cream she used every night before bed. His parents were creatures of habit. Same hand lotion. Same food brands. Same furniture they’d bought when he was a baby. Same farm that had been in the family for generations. Same newspaper. Same church. Same recipes.

Mike was anything but
same
. When he’d decided to go away to Boston to college he’d rocked their world in the worst way possible. Big Mike had nearly blocked it, insisting that his state university’s agriculture program was plenty fine. Mike had wanted more. Inventing a major he wanted that wasn’t offered locally, he’d reached out to a bunch of colleges in Boston and persisted, eventually getting a partial scholarship on a tiny basketball team. Big Mike respected money, and relented.

It was bad enough that Mike had broken his family’s sense of sameness, but coming out in a loving, permanent threesome with Dylan and Jill had broken his father in half. And the only way Mike and Mary Pine had known how to mend themselves was to make Mike
different
.

Too different to work with their need for
same
.

What do you do when one of these things is not like the other?

You throw it away. As long as you pretend everything is the same, in neat little orderly rows, and hold the truth aside like a piece of rubbish that needs to be discarded, you can prop up any myth.

Mike became nothing to them. No wonder he always fled when he couldn’t handle his emotions. Running away meant you weren’t there.

You were nothing.

And now his beloved wife’s letter was the answer to a prayer?

“Why didn’t you reach out to me? Thirteen years, Ma. Thirteen fucking years.”

“Mikey! That language!”

“I am a thirty-six-year-old man, Ma!” His good fist cracked against the bed railing. “I can say
fuck
if I please.”

Her lips pressed into a thin, white line.

“Especially,” he hissed, “when you act like it’s
my
fault thirteen years have gone by without contact.”

“You never reached out, either,” she said softly.

“When Pa tried to beat the shit out of me and Dylan had to hold him back, I got a pretty clear signal that you wanted nothing to do with me.”

Her lips remained pinched as she closed her eyes, brow furrowed with pain.

They both just breathed. Each inhale felt endless. Each exhale was torture. This was pointless. Laura’s outreach to his parents was a naive act. Nothing was going to change. Nothing had changed. The only difference between thirteen years ago and now was a little three-year-old girl with hair and eyes like Mike’s, and in his mother’s eyes that was the prize.

Jillian.

“You’re here because of the children, aren’t you?”

“I’m here because of my child.”

“And the grandkids. All three of them.”

“All three are yours?”

Oh, he knew what she meant, but he wasn’t going to play her game.

“Yes. All three. And any others we decide to have will be, too.”

“You want more?”

“We’re young, Ma. We’re not sure we’re done.”

“Hmph. I never imagined you with a big family, I guess. Not since...” Her voice trailed off.

“Not since I decided to live in a threesome with Dylan and Jill?”

She sighed. “You’re not making this easy.”

“Like Pa said, none of this is easy.” He rolled over out of instinct, trying to get comfortable, and felt a bone slip, groaning in pain.

“Do you need a nurse? A doctor? How bad is it? We came in here like a bull in a China shop and I never found out how you are.” Her brow creased, transporting Mike back to his childhood. A long time ago he made himself stop missing his parents. But when she looked at him with concern, it took him right back in time.

“Broke my arm in two places. A couple of ribs. Pulled muscles. I’ll be fine.” He stretched fully and felt his heels slip off the end of the bed.

“You were always like that. Fine. Just...fine. Never talked about your feelings, always went on those long runs. You were a good boy, Mikey.”

“I’m a good man, Ma.”

“I can see that. I can.”

His heart was breaking, one chamber beating so hard it was pulling the other three out of his body between his broken ribs, the gravity of hope yanking it toward his mother. He wanted to believe that they could reconcile. He wanted desperately to think that there could be some sort of love between him and his parents. Could thirteen years of scars be overcome and healed? Could they find a way to function without hurting each other and opening old wounds?

“MIKE!” A woman’s voice—not Laura’s—pierced the air outside. Footsteps, the swoosh of fabric curtains being pulled, and then, “MIKE BOURNHAM! Where is he?”

That must be Lydia. He frowned, then winced at the pain from a gash on his forehead. Bournham. He was the one who’d fallen as he’d tried to rescue Mike. Had something bad happened to him?

Too many thoughts. Too many emotions. His calves twitched, needing to run, but he couldn’t. He was stuck. He had to face this head-on.

“LYDIA!” someone called. That was Jeremy. The footsteps resumed, something beeped, doors clicked open, and then he heard nothing more.

Poor Bournham. Guilt washed over him. If the guy was worse off than he was, it was his fault.

“Who’s Mike Bournham?” Ma asked, genuinely unaware of who the man had been. She wasn’t the type to read about financial giants, even ex-financial giants.

“He’s the man who found me on shore,” Mike said weakly. Exhaustion roasted his bones like he was a pig on a spit over an open fire.

“Something happen to him?”

“He fell while he was rescuing me. Fell down the cliff.”

“Oh, dear!” Ma squeezed the ends of her fingers like she often did when nervous. “I hope he’s okay.”

Me too, Mike thought, but didn’t say. Guilt flowed through him, throbbing along with his pain.

“His best friend was there. The same rescue team that got me out. I’m sure he’s—”

“SEIZURE? What do you mean, he had a seizure?” a woman screamed from outside Mike’s room.

He slumped against the bed, not realizing his own effort to sit up while talking to his mom.

“Doesn’t sound fine,” Ma said.

Laura’s head popped around the corner, through the door. “I thought you’d be worried.” Her eyes caught Mike’s and he managed a weak grin. She was right.

“That’s Lydia,” Laura explained, eyes on him, walking around so he could see her. “She just arrived. Mike Bournham had a seizure en route to the hospital.”

His stomach clenched into a hot ball. “Fuck.”

“Mikey—” His mother pressed her lips together, but he ignored her.

“Is he okay?” Mike asked.

Laura gave him a sympathetic look. “No one knows. Lydia just found Jeremy and Mike’s team is working on him.”

“
Working
on him?” That sounded grim.

“He’s alive. It’s just, with seizures...”

A very tall, wet-haired doctor with familiar, kind brown eyes appeared behind Laura. “He seized in the ambulance right as we moved him into it, after Jeremy and Dylan got him up the cliff. His head wound’s bad. He stopped seizing and I just left. The doctors here can do a better job than I can,” Alex explained.

“You’re not much of a doctor if you go around saying that,” Mike whispered. “Where’s your God complex?”

Mike saw his mother’
s face twist with confusion
, while Laura and Alex shared a relieved look.

“Dylan has all the God complex anyone could possibly need,” Alex joked.

Laura pulled on him and said, “Let’s leave Mike and his mom alone.” Alex nodded and walked toward the door, Laura at his heels.

“Wait!” Ma exclaimed.

Just then, Mike’s Pa appeared, filling the doorway like a slimmer version of Paul Bunyan. Some part of Mike gave up, like a child releasing a tight ribbon attached to a balloon, winds too strong to make the struggle worthwhile.

Whatever rolled out in the next few minutes was coming, whether he liked it or not. Whether he was emotionally prepared or not. The truth would win out, ugly or beautiful.

Or both.

He couldn’t run away.

And so he just let it go, like Jillian’s favorite movie princess.

“We need to have our say,” Pa said quietly. “With all three of you in the room.”

Ma shot him a glare that made Mike smile. All the body reactions stored within him went haywire at once. Fear became amusement. Happiness became sarcasm. All his wires crossed each other and nothing made sense.

And that had to be alright.

Because Mike didn’t have a choice.

He couldn’t run away.

“Have your say, but keep in mind Mike’s still fragile,” Dylan said from behind Pa. Pa moved forward and gave Dylan a grim nod. Laura hovered near his father now, unsure. Mike didn’t have to even look at Dylan; he knew. He knew to go next to Laura and be her support.

Mike had his people here. And they weren’t related to him by blood.

“I understand that, Dylan,” Pa finally said. The sound of his partner’s name coming from his father’s mouth was a jolt, but a pleasant one. Maybe the doctors had given him drugs he wasn’t aware of, because suddenly this entire scene seemed just...right.

Like it needed to happen, as if the universe was righting some wrong.

“We’ll keep it brief.” Pa walked over to the bed, towering over Mike, making him feel like a child again. He felt the unfathomable: his father’s touch, the rough, worn hand picking up his own.

His father was expressing affection.

“I am sorry, Mikey.”

The words echoed through the room, choked out by a man whose pride had seemed bigger than his body for all of Mike’s life. Pa didn’t apologize. Pa didn’t touch like this. His Pa was a tight, efficient man who enjoyed being outdoors eighteen hours a day, who was a Godly, church-going man, a two-beer-a-week drinker and someone who preferred helping a neighbor with a calf birth than watching a football game on television.

This man wasn’t his Pa.

But then again, Mike had never been the person they’d thought he was, either.

“I’m not sorry for my beliefs,” his father clarified, looking at a spot on the wall right above Mike’s head, “but I am sorry for letting my beliefs get in the way of being your father.”

Ma walked over to Pa and Mike’s mouth opened in shock as she reached for Pa’s hand and held it. The two looked at him with a quiet eagerness, hope flashing in their eyes, Ma’s filled with tears, Pa’s with a ragged sadness.

Fury and relief fought inside Mike’s heart.

“Why are you here?” he finally blurted out. “Really?”

“Because I couldn’t go the rest of whatever’s left of my life without seeing you one more time, son,” Big Mike admitted.

“That’s it? You just appeared out of nowhere and now, what? We’re supposed to go back to the way it was?”

“We don’t have to do anything,” Big Mike said in a rough voice. “I just wanted to visit.”

Laura’s look made his own tears almost rise up. “You won’t judge? Or preach? Or try to convince us to break up or say a single negative word to our kids.” The last sentence wasn’t a question as his voice went low with warning.