Carly's Gift (6 page)

Ethan's face flushed in instant anger. “Another time?” he roared. “You want more time when you've already had sixteen fucking years?”

Before he could say more, Carly stepped between them. She put her hands on either side of Ethan's face and forced him to look at her. “Don't do this.”

He pushed her away. She stumbled backward and hit a wooden plant stand, knocking it over. The glass vase shattered, spilling water and roses across the marble tile floor.

A piece of broken glass crunched beneath her foot as she came at him again. At the last minute she turned her attention to David. “Get out of here,” she said. “And don't come back.”

The pleading look in her eyes belied the harshness of her words. He was drawn and repelled by what he saw, perversely wanting to protect her and feeling satisfaction at her unhappiness.

Again, Ethan pushed her out of the way. He loomed threateningly over David. “Where've you been all these years? What'd you think you could do, plant your seed and leave good old Ethan to take care of it forever?”

David's heart slammed against his ribs. He stared at Carly. “What is he talking about?”

“Nothing,” she insisted. “He's just rambling. It's what he does when he's drunk.” She reached for the door, but Ethan refused to move out of the way.

“What's the matter?” he goaded David. “Didn't like what you saw? Not pretty enough for you? Or were you hoping she'd get Carly's hair instead of yours? You always did like that wild look.” He made a grab for David, but missed.

“If you think I'm gonna let you just walk out of here and dump your responsibilities on me all over again, you got another think coming,” he went on. “I'm tired of carrying the load for you. That girl of yours has it in her head I'm gonna send her away to some big fancy college when it's everything I can do to set aside enough money for the boys.”

A sob caught in Carly's throat. “Ethan, listen to yourself. You don't mean what you're saying. If you don't stop, you'll never be able to forgive yourself.”

His head jerked back as if she'd hit him. He stood perfectly still for several seconds, then let out a groan and covered his face with his hands.

Carly focused her attention on David. “Please leave,” she implored.
“Now.”

David's mind searched wildly for an explanation for what was happening. As much as he might wish it were so, there was no way he could be Andrea's father. He and Carly had only seen each other once in the five months before she married Ethan—the fateful weekend she'd arrived without telling him she was coming—and then it had only been long enough to accompany her to the train. “I don't know what hair you've got up your ass, Ethan, but I've got better things to do than stand here and listen to you work it out.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” Ethan said, so softly and with such defeat in his voice that it was difficult to hear him. “I'd give ten years of my life if it would make Andrea really mine, and you don't want anything to do with her.”

There it was, impossible to ignore or rationalize any longer; Ethan truly believed David was Andrea's father. David was too stunned to answer immediately. He looked at Carly for guidance. Unshed tears shimmered in her eyes. He saw sorrow, fear, and desperation, but most profound was the plea for his silence.

Ethan waited, plainly expecting an answer. David ran his hand across the back of his neck, stalling for time. A powerful voice demanded that he tell Ethan the truth, get out of there as fast as he could, and never look back. Only one thing stood in his way.

Carly.

She was why he was here and why there was only one answer he could give Ethan. Feeling the loss even before the action, he tore his gaze from Carly to look at Ethan. “It's late and you're drunk. There's no way in hell I'm going to talk to you about this tonight.”

It was neither an admission nor a denial. It was a way to buy a little time. He chanced looking at Carly again before turning to leave. There were shiny trails down her cheeks where the tears had finally broken free.

The image was burned into his mind, haunting him on the drive back to his motel. It was the last thing he saw when, five hours later, he fell into a troubled sleep.

Five

The invasive sound
of the telephone woke David the next morning. It was Carly.

“I have to see you,” she said.

“No shit,” he answered, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and sitting up. He glanced at the clock. It was six-forty-five.

“In an hour?”

“Where?”

“The mill.”

Seeing her at the mill would only deepen the emotional mire they were already in. “Don't you think that's one sleeping dog we should let lie?”

“I tried to keep you out of this, but you wouldn't listen.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “There has to be someplace else we could go.”

“Not where we wouldn't be taking a chance on someone seeing us.”

“All right,” he finally, reluctantly agreed.

“I'm sorry,” she said softly. “I wouldn't ask if there were any other way.”

Despite himself, David felt the old compulsion to do whatever it took to make her world right again. “Who
is
the father, Carly?”

There was a long pause. “I'll tell you what I can when I see you.”

It wasn't what he'd wanted to hear, but then nothing had been since he'd arrived in Baxter. He hung up the phone and headed for the shower.

David skipped breakfast in order to arrive at the mill first, wanting the small territorial advantage it would give. This way, she would be coming to him.

On the drive out he'd determined that, no matter how compelling her reason for asking him to meet her that morning, no matter how intriguing her excuse for giving the impression he was Andrea's father, he was going to bring whatever fragments remained of their relationship to an end. When he left Carly that morning, his past would be behind him once and for all. Her problems, whatever they were, didn't involve him and he sure as hell wanted no part of them.

Thank God Victoria had decided to wait to join him. The intrigues of the people in a small town in Ohio would seem hopelessly melodramatic and middle class.

But then, if she had been with him from the beginning, he wouldn't have become involved in the intricacies and intrigue of Carly's life in the first place.

Ever since Ethan had dropped his little bomb the night before, David had toyed with the idea that Carly had betrayed them both. But he couldn't make himself believe it. He knew her—at least he'd known her—too well to believe she would ever sleep around. But if not that, then what? A one-night stand at a wild party? Retribution for the weekend he'd missed being with her in New York?

Andrea had to have been conceived within a week or two of the time Carly had come to New York. No wonder Ethan had assumed the baby was his.

The mystery was why Carly had let him.

So much for the sudden grand passion she'd tried to convince him had taken place between her and Ethan.

He looked up at the sound of a car easing its way through the brush. The sun reflected off the front window, making it impossible for him to see inside Carly's SUV. He strained to catch a glimpse of her, realized what he was doing, and felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. A sudden and sure knowledge assailed him: No matter how the morning ended, he would not walk away unscathed.

Carly chanced looking away from the weed-choked road to search for David. She'd seen his car as soon as she'd come around the final curve, but he wasn't with it.

She'd lain awake all night, counting the soft ticks of the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs, waiting for morning while trying to decide what she should do. No matter how she approached a solution, David played the key role. Without his cooperation, everything she'd done to protect Andrea would have been in vain. She had no right to ask him for help. He had every right to refuse.

She would do whatever it took to make sure that didn't happen.

Bringing her car to a stop beside David's, she turned off the motor and unbuckled her seat belt. As she stepped out into the frigid morning air, she caught sight of him standing beside one of the paddles of the discarded water wheel. He was dressed in faded jeans and a well-worn peacoat and, for the first time since he'd come home, looked as if he could have once belonged in a town like Baxter. His hands were stuffed in his back pockets and he was staring at her, an unfathomable expression on his face.

The speech she'd rehearsed all morning escaped her. It wouldn't be words that convinced him. He would either help her because he had once loved her or he would walk away for the same reason.

She stood her ground beside the open car door, saying a silent prayer that he would make the first move.

After an excruciatingly long time, he took his hands out of his pockets and started toward her. “You always were better at this than I was,” he said, stopping several feet away.

“Only because you knew it was more important to me.”

He ran his hand across his chin in a touchingly familiar gesture. “This is your show,” he said.

She swallowed. “You must have a hundred questions.”

“I did, but you already answered them with a hundred lies. I'd just as soon not hear them again, so why don't you go ahead and tell me what's on your mind?”

For as long as she'd known him, whenever David felt himself emotionally threatened, he shielded himself with a cloak of toughness, using offense for defense, striking out at whatever or whomever was near. The last months of his mother's life, he and his father had hardly spoken to each other. When she died, he'd refused to be a pallbearer. He'd sat dry-eyed through the church service and had taken off immediately afterward, skipping the graveside services. When it was the middle of the night and he still hadn't come home, his father had called Carly. She'd found David at the cemetery, lying on the ground beside his mother's freshly closed grave, his arm flung across the mound of flowers, deep, heartbreaking sobs wracking his body.

Not knowing how else to reach him now, she said, “I'm sorry.”

The shell cracked, but only a little. “Yeah, me too.”

A wind blew a tangle of hair across her face, giving her temporary shelter from his intense gaze. She reached up and tucked the strand behind her ear. She couldn't hide from him any longer. “Sometimes I let myself think about decisions I made back then and the consequences.” It was hard to put words to thoughts and feelings that she'd spent so many years repressing. “Once in a while I even allow myself to wonder how different all of our lives would be if I'd been a little older and a lot wiser.” She gave him a sad smile. “I don't do that very often.”

David looked past her, his eyes focusing on something in the distance. “Why did you let Ethan believe I was Andrea's father?” he asked, abandoning his resolve to let her take the lead.

“All the way out here I wondered which question you would ask first.”

“So that you could practice the answers?”

She closed the car door and walked over to the broad tree stump they had once painted with lopsided white and black circles to use as a target the year Ethan got a BB gun for his birthday. Not bothering to brush the leaves aside, she sat down. “I never told Ethan you were Andrea's father. He drew his own conclusions.”

“Which you conveniently chose not to correct.”

She'd decided the only way she could convince him to help her was to tell him as much of the truth as she possibly could. Still, the thought terrified her. Andrea's world had been constructed out of a fragile deck of cards, held in place with the insubstantial glue of secrets and lies. Telling David what he had to know would give him power she'd steadfastly refused to give anyone else.

“I was raped,” she said, plunging gracelessly into what had to be said.

David stood motionless. His immediate reaction was to reject what she'd said, not, to his humiliation, because it was too horrible to contemplate, but because it seemed so very convenient. Before he could say anything in response, the cynical man he'd become gave way to the trusting boy he'd been. A rage welled up in him as the years disappeared and he was thrust back to the period of his life he'd relived a hundred times in his mind. “Who—”

“That's the one thing I won't tell you,” she said evenly. “If you can't accept that condition, there's no use going on.”

“You let him get away with it?” he asked, incredulous. “Your father let—”

“If you recall, my father was dead.”

The pieces of information hit him like successive blows from a sledgehammer. “Jesus, I forgot.”

“There was a lot going on in both of our lives back then.”