***
By dawn, he was in his bed, Max tucked beside
him, sleeping, exhausted but no longer throwing up thanks to the
suppository Dale had given him. His skin was cool, no longer
clammy, his breathing even. Leo brushed the curls back from the
boy’s pale skin, pressed a kiss to his cheek, and fell asleep
himself.
***
Max was feeling better by Monday evening, and
Leo went to Quinn’s to hear about the first concert, which he’d
missed by going to the city. Quinn glowered at him when he entered
the bar. Oh. So, not good.
“If you ever leave me in charge on movie
night again, I will not be responsible for what happens to your
machine.”
“What?” Leo mounted a barstool and took the
beer placed in front of him. “I showed you how everything
worked.”’
“Right, and I wrote it all down, but the
damned machine didn’t like me. Some kid from the high school had to
get it going, after a half hour delay when everyone was getting
pissed.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe I can buy you a beer?”
“Maybe you can bring me some more
business—like a free ad in the Bluestone Tribune.”
“Because people don’t know you’re here?”
Quinn’s scowl deepened. “I don’t know.
Something with a deal, like ‘Get twenty percent off with mention of
this ad’ or something.”
Okay, that was a pretty good idea. “Consider
it done.” He glanced around. “Seen Trinity?”
“No, but you’re not the only one looking for
her.” He motioned down the bar to a stranger, a blond man around
Trinity’s age, nursing a beer and watching the door.
“Who is he?”
Quinn shrugged. “No idea.”
Unease fluttered in Leo’s chest as he turned
his attention back to Quinn. “Where’s Lily?”
“No idea.”
“You two still not talking?”
“We talk.”
“Grunting at her is not talking. And she’s
sure made herself scarce. I haven’t seen her in here since before
our first game.”
“Somewhere around there.”
Clearly the man wouldn’t be forthcoming.
Okay. “So how did the concert go? Did we get a crowd?”
“What do you consider a crowd? Twenty people?
Because, then, yes.”
“Twenty people?” Disappointment weighed in
his chest. “That’s it? You mean twenty people from out of town, or
counting the people in town who went?”
“Twenty people total. Maybe five from out of
town, the rest from here. Band was good, though.”
“So we’re going to have to make adjustments
for the next concert, get word out more.” Leo frowned, trying to
think of something he could do that hadn’t already been done.
“Could I get another beer?” the blond man
from down the bar asked.
Leo turned to him. “You’re a friend of
Trinity’s?”
The man lifted his eyebrows and scooted down
two barstools closer. “You know her?”
“I do. How do you? Are you from here?”
“We went to college together.”
For some reason alarm bells went off in Leo’s
head. College—she’d started to tell him something about college the
other night before he had to leave St. Paul because of Max.
“Sweethearts?” Quinn asked, serving him.
“You could say. We were engaged.”
Trinity’s hands slickened on the steering
wheel as she sat in the parking lot of Quinn’s. She’d made her
mother repeat the information twice, so there was no mistake.
Charles was here, and he’d been by the house looking for her. Why?
Why now? When she’d called him, she’d been so shaken by the sound
of his voice, familiar but not after eight years, that when he’d
told her he was at Quinn’s, she said she’d meet him there, just to
get it over with.
Her heart thundered when she recognized Leo’s
SUV in the lot.
This couldn’t be worse.
She walked into Quinn’s on shaking legs and
saw Charles on the barstool next to Leo, their heads bent together,
Quinn in front of them, and the stunned expression on Quinn’s
usually calm face said everything.
She hesitated in the door, shaking, and Quinn
looked up. Something flashed across his face when he saw her—guilt?
She dug for courage, pasted a smile on her face and crossed the
room.
“Charles.” The word came out sharper than she
intended.
Leo turned, the smile on his face tender,
welcoming, but she was only peripherally aware as she focused on
Charles.
Charles, too, noticed, because he looked from
Leo to Trinity. She forced herself to move closer, to not worry
about what Leo might hear, what he might think. God, she didn’t
want him to be disappointed in her, and that possibility,
especially now that her secret would seem forced from her, was
looking more and more likely.
“Trinity. You look great.”
“What are you doing in Bluestone?” She tried
to force a friendlier tone, when she wanted to send him to
hell.
He glanced at Leo again. “I wanted to talk to
you.”
“About what?” Panic fluttered at the back of
her throat.
He inclined his head to an empty table. Still
too close to Leo for her comfort, but she nodded and let him guide
her away. She wanted to look over her shoulder at Leo, to see his
reaction, but the thought terrified her, filled her stomach with
ice.
Please go away, please go away. I will tell Leo if you will
just go away
.
“What is it, Charles?” she prodded when he
didn’t say anything, only looked at her.
“I got married,” he said, waiting until she
sat across from him. “I have two boys.”
“Congratulations?” He hunted her down for
this?
“Having my sons has made me think, I don’t
know. I’m wondering about Rachel, about where she is. If we did the
right thing giving her up.”
Rachel. He had named her, she hadn’t, knowing
she’d never call the name, sing happy birthday, fill out school
paperwork. “Of course we did the right thing. We were twenty. In no
position to care for a child. You didn’t even—” She shook her head.
Charles had been absent for most of the pregnancy after he found
out, had only appeared in the last few weeks, trying to talk her
out of giving the child up for adoption. She’d already selected the
birth parents by then, and had signed the contract. She’d had to
fight with Charles to get him to sign, too, to convince him this
was best for all of them.
She found out later that while she was
suffering from morning sickness, was devastated by her parents’
disapproval, was struggling to pay her doctor bills, he was living
with another woman.
“I know I was a bad guy, I did wrong by you.
But she was our child and we could have worked on all of that.”
She shook her head. “She was better off going
with the Jennings. They were married, secure, and they wanted her
so much. You saw the look on Mary’s face when she held the baby.”
The baby Trinity herself never held. Her arms suddenly ached. “You
have a life now, I have a life now. I don’t understand why you’re
revisiting this.”
“There are so many things I need to make
amends for, and the biggest is what I did to you and Rachel.”
“Stop calling her that,” Trinity said through
her teeth. “That’s not her name. That’s the name you liked when you
finally came around with this fantasy that would never work. I
don’t care that you’re making amends. That’s about you and not
me.”
He reached over and caught her wrist. “You
can’t tell me you don’t think about her every day. Let me tell you,
it gets worse when you have other children, always wondering about
her and how she’s sleeping and if she’s healthy and loved, and what
she got for Christmas.”
She yanked her hand away, tears blinding her,
but not tears of regret. She did think of her daughter often, did
wonder those things. She didn’t need this man, this jerk who’d left
her when she was most vulnerable to lay the guilt on.
“What I feel and what I think and how I deal
is my business, not yours. You need to leave Bluestone, Charles. I
never want to see you again.”
“Everything all right here?”
She pivoted to see Leo by the table, brows
drawn together, arms folded as he glowered at Charles.
“I’ve got it under control,” she told him
through her teeth. The last thing she needed was for him to
overhear. She was going to tell him about Rachel—about the baby.
She was. Just—not under duress. She glanced past him and saw Quinn
stood a few feet behind Leo, ready to back him up. “Please, guys.
Charles was just leaving.”
“I think we need to talk. I think we need
to—”
She swung on him. “You need to leave. You’re
not part of my life anymore. I made my choice. Now, please—”
“I’m staying at one of the cabins at the
Landing this week, if you change your mind,” Charles said, rising
slowly, looking from Trinity to Leo. “I know you think you’ve moved
on but it’s not as easy as it sounds.”
She was shaking with relief when he finally
walked out the door. Leo sat beside her and put his hand on her
back.
“What the hell is his problem?”
She pressed the heels of her hands to her
eyes. “Leo, we need to talk.”
“Okay.”
“But not here. And I need a drink first. Will
you get me a whiskey?”
No sound, no movement. She lifted her head to
look at him. He stared at her.
“Please?”
“That bad?” he asked.
“I just need to calm down a little.
Please?”
He stared a moment longer, then rose, crossed
to the bar and got her drink.
She hadn’t had a whiskey in years, and the
punishing burn startled her. But as the warmth spread, she flexed
her fingers, rolled her neck and relaxed. She pushed the half-full
glass back toward him. “Now you.”
Keeping his gaze on her, he swallowed the
rest. Then she stood, reached a hand to him, then thought better of
it and withdrew it. “Let’s walk by the lake.”
She hoped he didn’t think that was code for
“Let’s go to your dad’s boat and act like horny teenagers.” She
turned and led the way out of the bar.
“Who was that guy?” he asked as they crossed
the street.
“My college boyfriend.” She made it as far as
the lawn by the landing before her legs gave out and she collapsed
on the grass. He sat across from her, cautiously. “I’ve been
wanting to tell you something about my past but wasn’t sure how to
bring it up. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I guess I didn’t
want you to think badly of me, but after this weekend, I’d planned
to tell you. Charles just kind of pushed my hand.”
“You were married?”
She shook her head and forced herself to look
at him, forced herself to register his reaction when she told him.
“I had a baby. Charles and I. We put her up for adoption.”
Nothing. She couldn’t read his face at all,
and she thought she’d gotten pretty good at it.
“I was very young, my parents were very
upset. No one in town but Lily knows. All of it happened in the
city. She went with a very good family. They were in their thirties
at the time and desperate for a baby. I got to know them before I
signed the contract and I knew they’d be good to her, would love
her, would take care of her. Charles wasn’t around at that point. I
didn’t have a real job, I was two years from graduating. I could
have kept her and struggled, maybe never graduated, but would that
have been fair to either of us? She has a good home and she’s
loved.”
Still nothing. She wanted to grip his hands
just to feel he was still alive but was terrified he’d shake her
off.
“Say something, Leo, would you?”
“Not sure what to say.” He sat back, leaning
on his hands, as if he wanted to put as much distance between them
as he could without running away. “I’m—I knew something was
bothering you but I never suspected this.”
“I should have told you before. I know that.
I just didn’t know how. I didn’t want you to change how you thought
about me.”
“What does Charles want? Why is he here now?”
The words were flat, a reporter’s voice, passionless.
“He says to make amends. I don’t know. He
twisted me up, both then and now. I dealt with a lot on my own. My
parents were upset, as you can imagine. Charles was gone. Please
say you at least understand.”
Leo looked into her pleading blue eyes. He
understood, all right. Hadn’t he pawned his kid off on his parents
so he could go be the big-shot reporter?
But Trinity—she was nurturing, surrounded
herself with kids. To make up for the one she gave up?
And all these future thoughts he’d been
thinking—would she want to have more children, or would she always
feel sad, feeling as if part of her was missing?
“I understand,” he said finally, unable to
bear looking into those sad blue eyes a moment longer. “But I
just—I’m surprised. I never thought you—that’s a big secret to
keep.”
“I didn’t know we’d get so involved. I
thought you’d leave. And when you came to St. Paul, I knew
everything had changed, that I needed to tell you, but I didn’t
want to spoil our weekend. I was going to tell you Saturday night
when you got the call about Max.”
“You didn’t trust me. You didn’t trust me not
to walk away like he did.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s not it. It’s not
something I’m proud of. Like I said, only Lily knows the truth. I
don’t go around telling everyone.”
If she’d whipped him, it wouldn’t have hurt
more. “I’m not everyone. I’m the man you’re sleeping with.”
She flinched at the phrase. “The man who I
know very well might leave on another story tomorrow. Isn’t that
really why you were in St. Paul? To get your job back?”
Why was she turning this around on him? “That
was—I didn’t go there with that in mind. It was a whim. I went to
see you. To spend time with you. But now—you couldn’t trust me with
this.”
“Leo, you’ve seen how my parents treat me,
and they’re supposed to love me. I couldn’t be sure how you would
react.”