Child by Chance Page 17

  “You’ve given it a lot of thought.”

  “I’ve been on the internet every week for two years. Trying to find something that makes sense.”

  “Why?”

  That wasn’t a question he’d been expecting. Or had asked himself, even.

  But he knew the answer. “Guilt,” he said. “I’m alive, she isn’t. Her life was so short, and that last year or two, they were the last she had, and they weren’t... She deserved to be loved better.”

  “She had a say in your relationship, too, you know.”

  The last thing he’d expected to do was talk about his wife tonight.

  “We’d talked about what we wanted out of life, how we wanted to live it...had an open line of communication, knew the pitfalls. We’d taken a course together before we got married to help us communicate with each other.”

  Everything had made perfect sense.

  “We made a promise to become one with each other, to grow together.”

  “That’s kind of the plan, isn’t it? When two people get married?”

  He stared at her, knowing, instinctively just knowing, that he could become one with this woman.

  “I thought Brooke and I were doing that—losing ourselves to each other, forming something greater than either of us would be alone. Brooke claimed that was what she wanted.”

  He wanted Talia to know the worst of him. Before he offered the best. Or things got clouded by sex.

  “I’d always considered her feelings.”

  There’d never been great passion between them, but there’d been good sex.

  “Maybe she needed more than consideration.”

  “Or maybe the problem was with the plan in general,” he said now, unable to ever see himself planning life with Talia. It would happen as it happened. Be fluid and open to change as challenges presented themselves.

  The idea panicked him.

  And woke him up, too.

  “We were to start a family two years after we married,” he said, thankful for the light breeze that wafted over his heated skin. They were hitting record highs for the end of February, but the evenings were cool. “Sex became about that. Everything was timed. For a purpose.”

  That was Brooke. Everything for a purpose. She’d been a good woman. A good wife. He’d have likely stayed married to her for the rest of their lives.

  And never known the passion that was even now wrestling with a mind that told him to take things slowly.

  “So you think that this past year, all of Kent’s anger is due to him thinking you were just letting his mother’s death go unpunished?”

  “I’m not sure. Clearly that’s part of it. But there’s a lot of anger associated with death in general. You know, how could the person leave you? Why did life do this to you? The unfairness of it all. Everyone handles it differently. Dr. Jordon believes that Kent’s having a more difficult time than a lot of kids. Probably because he’s so cerebral.”

  “He’s been taught to think things through, and this is something that doesn’t make sense to him.”

  This woman’s effect on him, the way she’d crashed into his life and made everything different in such a short time, didn’t make sense.

  “I didn’t come here to talk about my son.”

  “But then, life doesn’t go as planned, does it?” She was grinning. It took him a second to realize she was teasing him.

  Fire shot through him. Leaning forward, Sherman kissed her. Opening his mouth, he took her lips into his, acting. Reacting. Not thinking at all.

  His wine forgotten in the sand, he moved closer, pushing her back in the sand, vaguely aware that her wine had tipped over. He didn’t care. Her eyes were wide, glistening in the moonlight and staring at him. Compelling him.

  So much was hidden there. Mystery. Sweetness. Longing. And something that made her uniquely woman. Not common woman. Not every woman.

  He was mesmerized. On fire. Alive like he’d never been alive in his life.

  “I want you,” he said. “So bad...” He kissed her again. Over and over. His tongue mated with hers. Shifting until he was lying on top of her, he settled his throbbing groin against her, fitting his penis between her legs and pushing against her, mimicking the act he knew was coming.

  Her hips rose to meet his as her tongue played with him. Enticing him. Inviting naughty thoughts and pleasure beyond belief. He wanted her breasts. To touch the soft skin of her stomach.

  He wanted her naked...

  “No.”

  Sherman sought her lips again as she broke their kiss.

  “Noooo.” She kissed him even as she said the word. Through the fog of intense desire, he heard something in her voice. It stopped him.

  Talia pushed at him, and he sat up, pulling her with him.

  “Did I hurt you?” He didn’t think he had, but in all honesty he couldn’t be completely sure how much pressure he’d used. How much he’d let his weight sink into her softer, smaller body.

  Her eyes were still glistening, but she wasn’t crying. Her mouth was straight, her features expressionless as she stared out at the ocean beyond. There were no lights out there. Nothing but darkness on the horizon.

  And a chill in the air that made him cold. Even while he still burned.

  “I have to talk to you.” The words didn’t sound ominous as much as pained. And he knew a moment of fear unlike any he’d known before.

  Was she dying? Was that the aura of mystery about her? The depth that he couldn’t fathom?

  He’d hold her until she took her last breath...

  “First, I... You... This...” She motioned toward the sand where they’d been lying. “I’ve...I had no idea it could be... I’ve never had an orgasm.”

  Slow down. His earlier words, his admonitions to himself, came back to him. He was overanalyzing. Getting ahead of himself.

  “We can take it slowly,” he said aloud, needing to reassure her far more than he needed it for himself.

  And it hit him.

  Whatever she needed was more important than what he needed.

  Was this love, then? Was this what love did?

  She shook her head. “I’m not...afraid,” she said. “Not of having sex.” Her laugh was harsher now. As though she didn’t like something.

  About him? Something he’d said or not said? Something she had to say?

  “I just needed you to know that...to thank you, for showing me how wonderful sex can feel.”

  “But we haven’t even...” The shake of her head stopped him.

  Really stopped him. No more guessing. He watched her. And waited, confident that he’d handle whatever was bothering her. He’d make it better. Anything she told him was going to bring them that much closer to each other. Give him one more glimpse into her world.

  A world he was meant to inhabit. He knew that for certain now. Not because he was turned on as hell by every move she made. But because she’d turned his life—his way of approaching life— completely upside down.

  Thirty-eight years of living had brought him to this. He was not a stupid man. He recognized once-in-a-lifetime moments.

  The wind blew a few stray tendrils of her hair across her forehead. He brushed them back and her lips found his palm, pressing against it. She turned her head away, and her long, blond hair fell over her shoulders and down across her breast.

  “I’m twenty-seven years old and just this past December graduated from college.” She was looking at him as though there was some message there.

  He didn’t get it.

  “I graduated from high school when I was eighteen.”

  Right. So did he.

  “I completed my undergraduate work in three years.”

  Whatever it was he was supposed to be gleaning from this continu
ed to elude him.

  “That leaves six years unaccounted for.”

  He could add and subtract. Just didn’t get the significance.

  “I...ran away from home, the second time, when I was eighteen,” she said. “I’d convinced myself that I was never going to be good enough for my brother, that neither of us was ever going to be happy living in the same state.”

  He was with her all the way. Eager now for the entry she was giving him. He’d almost forgotten that her story had begun with a “no” to the lovemaking that had been about to occur.

  “I was convinced...” She swallowed. “Completely believed...” She swallowed again. Staring out at the horizon, she finished, “That I was my mother’s daughter.”

  Every part of him went on high alert. Not in defense against anything she might tell him, but because she needed something from him, and he had to make absolutely certain he didn’t let her down.

  “You said she had four children by four separate men and gave up custody of you younger three.” He tried to help her, tried to glean where this was leading and make it easier on her in any way he could.

  She’d also said her mother was dead.

  “Except for Tanner’s, our fathers were dealers. At least two were pimps.”

  This was about drugs, then. She wasn’t the first young person to fall into that trap.

  “When I was sixteen she took a hundred dollars from her dealer in exchange for allowing him to get in the shower with me.”

  No. This precious, beautiful, sweet woman had been raped? By a dope dealer? At sixteen?

  He’d kill him. He’d find the guy and kill him and...

  He had to do something. Wanted to comfort her. But she wasn’t crying. She just sat, staring out at the ocean.

  What did she see out there? What called to her?

  Was there a place for him there? Him and Kent?

  She glanced at him then. And seemed surprised to find him still beside her. Wanting her. If she thought a crime against a child was in any way going to change his opinion of her...

  “Tanner stopped him,” she said. “I was in the shower and didn’t even know about it. He beat the guy within an inch of his life and threw him out of our house. Literally.”

  Thank God. He had to meet this man. Wanted to meet him. To thank him from the bottom of his heart for being a good man. A good brother.

  “That day changed us all. Irrevocably and forever,” she said, her voice deadpan. “Tanner changed. He grew hard and authoritative. He used the incident against my mother, blackmailed her into giving him custody of us, though none of us knew about any of that until last year.”

  Sherman thought his life had been rough. He’d felt sorry for himself, having lost a father so young. He’d had no clue.

  “He went from being my best friend to being my jailer. He didn’t trust me out of his sight. I thought he didn’t trust me because I was just like my mother.”

  He could understand. Both sides. As a young man who’d just come face-to-face with the way other men looked at his little sister, Tanner Malone must have been scared shitless. Sherman would have been. Hell, Malone would only be thirty-four now. Four years younger than he was.

  He had questions. Wanted to reassure her. To comment. But waited for her to do things in her own way, at her own pace.

  When she was ready, when she invited him, he’d be right there, giving her everything he had.

  “By the time I graduated from high school, I knew I was like my mother.”

  He wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “I...had an...effect...on men.”

  Oh, wait. If she thought he only wanted to have sex with her, if he was only attracted to her physically, then he’d set her straight in a hurry.

  “I was told once that I exude.”

  She did. Definitely. He’d reacted like a schoolboy around her.

  “Didn’t matter where I went or what I tried to do, I’d walk into a room and men noticed. And once they noticed, they didn’t care about anything else.”

  That wasn’t right. Or fair. He cared about plenty else. But he’d come on strong. And fast. And felt bad about that.

  Because he’d recognized that she was the one. After thirty-eight years of living he’d found what he’d always been waiting for. A partner who interested him, challenged him, on every level.

  “I gave up,” she said.

  And turned to look at him again. His face chilled first. Then his neck. Across his back, down his legs, the frozen sensation passed over him.

  She wasn’t talking about them. Or him.

  “I decided that if I was the type of woman who was meant to entertain men, I’d be the best damn one I could be. I wasn’t going to be cheap like my mother. Or give in to drugs and alcohol. I was a businesswoman. With an asset to market. But I wasn’t going to sell my soul.”

  Everything inside of him stopped. Just stopped. His mind was blank.

  “I moved to Vegas. Took a week to look around. Visit clubs. Talk to people. I decided where I wanted to work. And I got the job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I was a stripper, Sherman. For eight years, the last two while attending college classes, I shimmied a pole, completely nude, five nights a week.”

  Only one thought came to mind.

  He wasn’t going to have sex that night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  TALIA DIDN’T CRY that night after Sherman left. She crawled into bed. Closed her eyes. And went to sleep. Sleep meant escape. Had always meant escape. She welcomed it.

  She got up when the alarm went off. Got showered, dressed, put on her makeup and jewelry and went to work.

  She knew what her life was, what it had to be. She’d known what she couldn’t have.

  And at least she’d done the right thing. She’d told Sherman the truth rather than stealing one night of happiness for herself. Because she’d have been stealing from him, too.

  As much as she’d wanted him, wanted one taste of joy in a lifetime of hard living, she just couldn’t take for herself at another’s expense.

  Not at Sherman’s expense.

  She cared about him. Like a woman was supposed to care about a man. It was a novel experience for her. One she didn’t care to repeat.

  The question that remained, that tortured her over the miles of road between Santa Raquel and Beverly Hills, all during work, and back home again, was Kent. Would Sherman still let her pick her son up and drive him to the Lemonade Stand after school?

  She didn’t doubt, for one second, that he’d leave Kent in the program now. The Stand had spoken for itself. Talia’s integrity or opinion no longer mattered.

  Earlier, her reputation had mattered. Back when she’d needed him to listen to her, to trust her, in order to help Kent.

  But Kent didn’t need her help anymore. And she wasn’t his only transportation option.

  No, she just needed him. And his father.

  And that was her problem.

  * * *

  TALIA COULDN’T RISK shortchanging a sixth grader because she wasn’t feeling up to par. She wasn’t going to take a chance on missing something in a collage reading, so she stuck to her own classwork Sunday night. There was a lot of reading, some of which didn’t stick. So she had to read it twice.

  She wasn’t going outside. Wasn’t going anywhere near the beach. Maybe ever again.

  Or at least until the sting of her pain had lessened.

  Sherman had said he’d be in touch when he’d left the night before. After she’d asked him to leave. He’d been shocked. She’d seen the change in his eyes.

  And she hadn’t been willing to hang out and talk things over. Fact was fact and no amount of talking or explaining was going to change it.

 
She stayed away from her brother’s wine. One glass a week was enough for her. As good as it was, she didn’t like the effect of alcohol on her brain. The whole “looking like, feeling like, her mother” thing.

  Tammy Malone had been drunk as often as she’d been sober. Talia could still hear the slur in her mother’s voice as Talia had come home from school. Or gotten up in the morning.

  Headlights in her driveway surprised her. Getting up from the table, she crossed to the living-room front window and peeked out.

  Tanner had been fine with her canceling on them. He’d understood that she needed time to catch up on her work.

  She’d told him, when she’d phoned to say she wouldn’t be coming over for Sunday dinner, that her date had gone fine and that she hadn’t invited Sherman and Kent to join them that night.

  He hadn’t asked any questions. But she knew he wanted to meet his nephew. As well as the man who was raising him.

  The same man currently walking up the driveway to her back door.

  Was he there to relieve her of her driving duties the following afternoon? She’d expected to hear from him about that.

  He could have just called.

  She didn’t wait for him to knock.

  The door was standing open when he got to it. She was sitting in front of her laptop and school books at the kitchen table.

  “You’re studying.” He came in. Shut the door behind him, then pulled out a chair and sat down.

  His jeans were black. His T-shirt white. Just like him. All black-and-white and neatly planned.

  “Just a normal Sunday night,” she told him. Nothing had changed. She was on the path of a new life. And she was going to stay the course.

  “How was dinner?”

  “I didn’t go.”

  He didn’t ask why. She didn’t offer him anything to drink.

  “We need to talk.” His look was firm. But personal, too.

  She nodded, owing him that.

  “I...” Whatever he’d had on the tip of his tongue as he’d walked in her door seemed to have fled. He met her gaze and stopped.