Black Swan Affair (27 page)

Stupidity at its finest, right here.

“MaryLou busy?”

“Yes,” I answer quietly. She’s fucking her husband Fifty-Shades style trying to get the little swimmers to latch on to her elusive eggs. She’s probably inverted as we speak.

His question is expected and thick with anxiety. “How do I make things right between us, Small Fry?”

Hmm. I wish I knew.

From where we’re perched, we have a perfect view of the Swinging Bridge, one of the oldest suspension bridges in Iowa. I spent a lot of time in this park. On that bridge. Most of my friends refused to cross it when they were little because the sway scared them. The more people on the bridge, the more sway. But not me. I craved the freedom I felt when I was swinging from side to side, even if it was subtle. Now as an adult, when I cross that bridge, it doesn’t hold near the allure it used to when I was little. It seems small and functional, not imposing and potentially life ending.

“Do you remember when Kael and I jumped off suicide cliff?” Suicide cliff is just on the other side of the Swinging Bridge. It’s the only way to get to the high cliffs that tower above the Keg River about forty feet.

Killian chuckles lowly. “Yeah, I remember.”

He was livid. Threatened to take me over his knee and spank my ass red if I jumped. Little did he know that only fueled my fire. I was just thirteen at the time. Kael was sixteen. Killian eighteen. It was one of the last things I did with Killian before he left for college that August.

“You were so mad.”

He’s quiet for quite a few beats. His hand leaves mine as he crosses one arm over the other. “I still had nightmares of you drowning, Maverick. Of pushing air into your water-filled lungs. That horrifying shade of blue on your lips. Of how stiff your limbs were. Christ, if I had it my way, you’d never have even taken a bath again.”

I laugh, but he doesn’t. I turn my head to study his profile. He’s dead serious. I never stopped to think about how my near death affected him. The gravity of that day hits me hard. “I’m sorry, Killian. I had no idea.”

“Fuck, if Kael hadn’t insisted we go that way, then…” He lets that little newsflash hang. I never, ever knew that. I didn’t know how they stumbled across me that day. I’m stunned to learn that although Killian may have pulled me from the water,
Kael
was ultimately responsible for saving me. I wonder why he never mentioned it?

I’m stuck in that memory until Killian’s comment brings me back to him, “You’re always so fucking stubborn. About everything. But thank God you were. I’m convinced that’s the only reason you didn’t die that day.”

I flash a smile, his backhanded compliment making my blood heat. “Like knows like I guess.”

He fights a smile. He loses. When he slides his eyes my way, my breath catches. He’s still as beautiful in the moonlight tonight as he was the night he told me he loved me. The night he made good on his promise and we shattered together. The same night he stole all of me, some parts of which he still has.

Suddenly I feel overwhelmingly sad.

“Will you tell me why?”

That panty-melting smile drops like it’s hot. “Why what, Maverick?” He pretends he doesn’t know what I’m asking, but he does.

I decide this is it. If he doesn’t tell me this time, I’m not asking again. I’ll go to my grave never understanding why a night of whispered promises ended up the broken mess it is today.

Maybe this is why I called. Maybe this is what I need so I can saw through the last vestiges of that cord. Maybe I need this before I can fix what’s wrong with Kael and me. I decide, either way, tonight is my closure.

“Why did you cheat on me with Jillian? Why didn’t you love me enough?”

His muscles tighten. His tongue darts out to wet his lips. He drags in a huge lungful air. He turns away from me to stare into the darkness ahead. It’s the same thing he’s done every time I’ve asked. I count the seconds as they go by until I get to 120.

Do you know how agonizingly long it can take 120 seconds to pass? Torturously, endlessly slow. So slow, in fact, you feel each crack in your heart as it keeps time with the ticks of the second hand.

Well…that’s that.

Pursing my lips, I push myself from the car and start toward the driver’s side but his low voice freezes me in place. “I didn’t cheat on you, Maverick.”

Then it fires me up. My laugh is cutting and nasty. I pivot back and practically fly into a rage, moving forward until I’m right in his face. “Is that so?”

He doesn’t move a hair. “That’s so.”

“You’re a fucking liar, Killian. Not only are you a cheater, you’re a goddamn liar, too. I overheard you and Kael in the alleyway that night. I heard every fucking word.” I stop and wipe a tear that had the audacity to wet my face.

“You don’t know what you heard.”

I shove him. Two hands on his chest pushing so hard he’s falling backward. But in a flash, he rights himself and my wrists are shackled between us. He’s squeezing so tight I wince.

“You got her pregnant.” God
damn
, that hurt to say.

His chest rises and falls fast. His eyes are practically feral. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You didn’t deny it.”

Silence.

“You didn’t deny it,” I repeat. In my mind, that went differently. I wanted it to be forceful, demanding. It came out weak and pathetic and all croaky instead.

“Maverick, please. Don’t do this.”

“Just say it.” I feel his heart racing beneath the palm of my hand. “I loved you, Killian. I waited for you. I wanted to marry you. I thought you wanted the same things I did. The same life I did.”

“I did,” he tells me with an impassioned plea. It’s so ripe with longing and truth, I almost believe him. “Fuck…I
still
do.”

My head starts shaking. It’s violent and jerky. I try to twist out of his hold before the bone-deep sorrow I feel inside unravels me. He only pulls me closer, tighter.

“Liar,” I whisper hoarsely, my muscles starting to weaken and fail. “You’re a liar. A goddamn liar,” I mumble into his chest as I let my head drop. He wraps his arms around me and hangs on as I wet his shirt with my anguish.

“The baby wasn’t mine, Maverick,” he says softly into my hair as he places his lips to my crown. “I didn’t have sex with Jillian.”

“Then why?” I ask, numb all over. What he’s saying makes no sense. Do I even care what the answer is now? It doesn’t make any difference. “Why did you marry her?” I ask again anyway.

His chest expands deep a couple of times. “The baby was my father’s.”

I jerk back. He lets me lean away but he doesn’t let me go. “What?”

“The baby was my father’s,” he says slower this time. So slow it sounds muddled.

Ohmygod. Oh my… “
What
—?”

“It’s true.”

Jillian was pregnant with Arnie’s kid?

“Did he…did he…” Oh my God…
did he
—

“No, Maverick. If he’d have raped her, he’d be rotting in a concrete cell right now. I’d have made sure of it.”

“Then it was consensual?” What the ever-loving fuck? Jillian was having an
affair
with Arnie Shepard? Mind. Completely. Blown.

“Yes,” he grits through clenched teeth.

“Did you know?” I gasp sharply. “Is that why you went to Florida?”

“Fuck no, I didn’t know. You think I would have let that continue under my nose?”

“No, I…of course not.”

“I went to Florida for exactly the reasons I told you. I needed to be my own man, Maverick. Make my way without either of our fathers’ interference. I was drowning here under them. I was doing well for myself there. One minute I was making plans for us and the next my whole fucking world was in ruins around me.”

I roll this all around in my head. It’s a jumbled mess and I’m still confused. “I don’t understand, Killian. I don’t understand why you didn’t just let your father’s due come to him? He stole from my father. He had an affair with a girl less than half his age. A girl who was like a daughter, for heaven’s sake. Why were you protecting him?”

“Why do you think?”

I say the only thing that makes sense. “Eilish?”

He nods. “Fuck knows my father didn’t deserve it, but I just couldn’t do that to her, Small Fry. She had a fucked childhood and my pops was all she had. For better, for worse, he was it. He was her world.”

I remember their story well. It was one Eilish told me often. How they met when Arnie studied abroad one summer in Ireland. She came from a poor family. Her dad was an abusive alcoholic. Her mother long gone. She worked three jobs trying to make ends meet but her father would drink and gamble it all away. Arnie strolled into a pub she waitressed at one night and according to them both, it was love at first sight. She told me many times over how he saved her from a life of destitution. They married six short weeks after meeting and when he returned to the states, he brought her with him. She was eighteen; he was twenty.

Killian straightens and drops his hold on me, pacing toward the river. I follow him. We stand on the bank looking down into the black waters below and I wait for him to be ready to tell me the whole story.

“Jillian called me in an absolute panic one night. Said she was in Pensacola and needed to see me. I picked her up and brought her back to my place. After a couple hours, she finally calmed down enough to tell me everything. Their affair had been brief. She regretted it. So did he. But then she missed her period and Richard found the pregnancy test because she was stupid enough to take it when she was at your parents’ house.” He stops and scrubs his face a few times with his hands. “She panicked. He demanded to know whose it was and she said the first person that popped into her mind.”

“You,” I mutter.

“Yeah, me. And you know, for all her flaws, your sister was not about to go against her beliefs and abort that baby. She was scared to death, but she wanted to keep it. I respected her for that, even if I was angry as fuck at what she did. At what
he
did.”

I think about Jillian having to handle that situation virtually alone. I can imagine the pressure from my father to marry and not tarnish the DeSoto name with a bastard child. He was old-school. I can also imagine how backed into a corner she must have felt not wanting to displease our parents. I find myself feeling a smidge sorry for her, even if it was her own doing.

“Anyway, I told her we’d work something out, but that I wasn’t marrying her because I loved you.”

“You told her that?” I ask, my heart beating a little faster.

“Yes.”

Empathy? Yeah…that was short-lived.

“A few days later, I get a call from Richard. They’d apparently been investigating my father for almost a year. He told me I had two choices: he would turn everything over to a federal prosecutor or I could come back to DSC, do the right thing by marrying Jillian, and he’d conveniently bury the evidence.”

“My father blackmailed you?” I ask in utter disbelief, the bile in my stomach churning.

“He pressured me, let’s put it that way.” He turns fully toward me now, addressing me directly. “I could have said no, Maverick. I could have said no and watched everything unfold. Saw my father go to jail. DSC would have gone up in flames, the scandal too much for them to handle. I was so pissed at the position your father and Jillian put me in, I almost did. I almost called his bluff. But then I thought of the fallout. How it would impact innocent people, including you and my mother and I knew I could either carry the weight of all that chaos or suck it up and just make the whole fucking thing go away with some conditions of my own.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me all of this?”

“You don’t know how many times I sat in front of your house at night wanting to bust down the door and do just that. But, fuck…I was committing a
crime
, Maverick. I couldn’t drag you in on that.”

My gaze falls. Reluctantly, I understand. I chew on my lip and push around the dirt pile underneath my feet. “Why didn’t she rub it in my face?”

He knows I’m asking about the pregnancy. She certainly rubbed their marriage in my face every opportunity she got so there had to be a reason she didn’t with the baby.

“I threatened not to go through with it. I needed time to think. I wanted to be the one to break it to you. I could never find the right words. Then…”

His eyes glisten in the moonlight. They’re tears. It’s not for Jillian, though, I know that.

“When did she miscarry?” This is the part I’m not getting. They were engaged six months before they married.

“Two and a half months before the wedding.”

“Then why did you go through with it? The baby was the only reason you were marrying her, right?”

He waits for the light to go on. When it does, it’s blinding. “You were stuck.”

“Yep,” he agrees. “The paperwork was already signed. If I didn’t marry Jillian, it nullified my employment contract with DSC. If I divorced her before the terms of my contract were satisfied, it nullified it. The only way I could successfully leave both DSC and your sister was to hit that magic sales goal as fast as fucking possible.”

A memory surfaces. One I need an answer to. “So that day in the kitchen at my parents you told me you were close. That’s what you meant?”

I think he shuffles closer. I’m not sure. I know his voice drops. “Yes.”

My feet move a couple inches forward. “Then what would you have done?” I ask lowly. The headlights of a car rounding the curve briefly illuminate us. We both stay quiet as it passes and keeps going.

“I would have been free to leave DSC.”

“Would you have?”

He’s close enough now, his hand lands on my hip. His thumb starts circling around my hipbone as he answers, “Yes.”

“What about Jilly?” I rest a palm on the arm holding me.

His breath scatters over my face. It’s warm and smells of rum. “I was going to divorce her. She knew this was temporary. She’s always known.”

“Does she love you?”

“Yes,” he states matter-of-factly.

“So when my father died…”

“I already had divorce papers drawn up. Two days before his death I’d closed that deal. Richard knew I was leaving. So did Jilly.”