Only By Your Touch (17 page)

Ben nodded. “I don’t cover his cage, though.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s accustomed to sleeping outdoors. In the wild, he just perches on a limb where it’s shady.”

She leaned across the counter to move the owl’s cage forward to get him completely out of the sunlight. “There, that’s better, isn’t it, Einstein?”

The owl made a tutting sound and lifted his wings as though to thank her. Chloe gave the top of his cage a pat. “Good night, wise guy. Sleep tight.”

As she started from the kitchen, she stopped at the end of the counter where Ben had left a stack of
manuscript pages by the cookie canister. He circled the work island to grab the papers and shove them in a drawer.

“Personal stuff,” he muttered.

Her brows lifted. She threw a curious glance at the drawer. Then she shrugged and left the room. Ben gazed after her, wanting to kick himself for leaving the printout lying in plain sight. If he was going to have her in his home, he had to start being more careful.

W
hen Chloe and Jeremy returned to Ben’s that afternoon, he greeted them at the door with a barely discernible hello. Jeremy whispered back, “How come you’re being so quiet? Is your mom sleeping?”

Ben motioned the child back out, joined them on the porch, and eased the door shut. “My mom’s taking a nap, but that’s not why I’m whispering. Buddy, a raccoon friend of mine, is just waking up from surgery.” Ben gave Chloe a long look laden with meaning. “He got hurt yesterday, and it’s taken him all this time to find his way to my house. I like to keep things quiet the first day after an animal has an operation.” Placing his hands on his knees, he leaned down to get eye to eye with the child. “Buddy’s a wild animal, and his head is fuzzy from the sleeping medicine. He isn’t used to people.”

“Oh,” the child said solemnly. “We might scare him, huh?”

Chloe rested a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “Would it be better if we skipped this afternoon, Ben?”

“No, I just wanted to explain the need to keep our voices down.” He reached behind him to open the door. “Imagine, if you will, waking up in a lion’s lair—with the lion pacing all around you and roaring.”

Jeremy’s eyes grew huge. “We aren’t lions, and we don’t roar.”

“To Buddy, we’re as scary as lions, and our voices sound like roars.”

Jeremy tiptoed behind Ben into the house. As they entered the kitchen, the child crouched down some five feet from Buddy’s cage. In a stage whisper, he asked, “How did he get hurt?”

Chloe threw Ben an uncertain look. To her dismay—or was it relief?—he knelt beside Jeremy to field the question. Curling an arm around the boy’s shoulders, he murmured, “Buddy was shot, Jeremy.”

“With a gun?” At Ben’s nod, Jeremy glanced back at the animal. “But how come?” he whispered. “Raccoons aren’t to eat, and he’s not big enough to hurt anybody.”

“There’s a sickness in some people. They do bad things we can’t understand. There’s no justifying it, no explaining it. They’re just very mixed up.”

Jeremy leaned closer to Ben. “Do you think the person who shot him got his head hit by a ’peller blade?”

Ben glanced at Chloe, his expression bewildered.

“My daddy got his head hurt,” Jeremy whispered. “He fell out of our boat, and the ’peller blade got him. Before it happened, he was real nice, and he loved me and my mom lots. But afterwards, he got mad all the time and did bad things.”

Ben’s black brows drew together in a frown. He stilled his big hand on Jeremy’s narrow back. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. That must make you feel sad.”

“My mom says he’s lost and can’t find his way back to us no more.” Jeremy’s face looked pinched, and the ache in his eyes made Chloe’s heart twist. “The last time he got real mad at me, all I did was spill my
milk. Not on purpose or nothing. But he yelled and grabbed my neck.”

The child’s eyes went bright with tears. He stared for a long moment at the raccoon. Then his mouth started to quiver. “He squeezed so hard, I couldn’t breathe. My mom tried to make him stop.” He gulped and expanded his lungs as though remembering how it had felt. “He got mad and hit her in the face. She’s lots littler than him, and he made her fall and cut her eyebrow.”

Chloe felt as if a fist had slammed into her stomach.
I couldn’t breathe. He squeezed so hard, I couldn’t breathe
. The doctor had told her Jeremy’s breathing attacks stemmed from some kind of emotional trauma, but until now, she’d never made the connection between the child’s symptoms and what he had lived through that night.
Oh, dear God.
Roger had tried to strangle him, and Jeremy had been having breathing problems ever since.

Chloe wheeled away, her only thought to find a place where she could be alone for a moment. She circled the cages at the end of the bar, passed through the family room into the sunroom, and stepped out onto the deck through the French doors. At the railing, she curled her hands over the wood, cocked her knee against a lower slat, and bent her head as she struggled against tears.

She felt so stupid. So awfully, horribly stupid, and completely inadequate as a mother. It all fit.
I couldn’t breathe.
As the truth sank in, she had trouble breathing herself. It hurt. What had happened that night had traumatized Jeremy so badly that he was reliving the incident over and over again. His wonderful daddy, the man who’d once tossed him in the air and tickled him, had flown into a mindless rage and tried to kill him over a glass of spilled milk.

The sunlight caressed Chloe’s shoulders with gentle warmth, and the breeze dried her tears. She hauled in a deep breath and slowly released it.
Oh, God, what have I done? I should have left the very first time Roger grew violent. I never should have let Jeremy go through all that.
At the time, she’d felt duty bound to remain with her husband and take care of him. It had seemed so wrong to file for divorce and abandon him when he’d needed her so much.
In sickness and in health.

Now her son was paying the price for her misplaced loyalty.

“You okay?”

Chloe jumped at the sound of Ben’s voice. Keeping her head bent, she saw his big, dark hand come to rest on the railing next to hers.

“I’m fine,” she managed to squeeze out. It was a lie, of course. “Is Jeremy all right?”

“He’s a little upset. Nothing to worry over. I left him in the family room with Rowdy. They’re having a cuddle session on the love seat.”

“Oh.” She wished he’d go away and leave her alone. “That’s good.”

“Can you talk about it, Chloe?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s, um—no, I don’t think so.”

How could she talk about what had been not only the end of her marriage, but a defilement of everything she’d believed in and come to trust as well?

He shifted beside her. She had an almost overwhelming urge to turn into his arms—to lean against him and cry her heart out on his sturdy shoulder.

When she found the courage to show her face, he was staring off at the mountains. “I guess it’s not really necessary for you to talk about it,” he murmured. “Going by the things Jeremy just said, I know you’ve been through a hell of a time.”

He spoke of the hell as though it were over. She wanted to correct him. It wasn’t over. Sometimes she wondered if it ever would be.

He turned his gaze to her. She wanted to look away, but couldn’t.

“Can I say just one thing?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said thinly.

His hard mouth tipped into a smile. He touched a fingertip to her cheek, brushing at a spot of wetness and then pushing back a tendril of her hair. Chloe instinctively wanted to shrink away, but something, she wasn’t sure what, held her fast.

“You did the right thing,” he said huskily. “By getting Jeremy out of it, I mean.”

A burning sensation came up the back of her throat, and she was afraid her eyes might fill with tears again.

“Normally, I have little if any respect for people who end a marriage over the illness of a spouse, but your situation was extraordinary. You did the right thing, Chloe. Children aren’t just a gift; they’re a God-given responsibility, and in cases of abuse, a mother should never—and I do mean
never
—let anything else come first, not even her husband.”

Tears did fill her eyes then. “Yes, well, that was a lesson I took a while learning. After Roger came home from the hospital, I stayed for almost five months, hoping he’d get better, that the—” She gulped to steady her voice. “You can’t stop hoping, you know? I told myself there might be postsurgery swelling, or that maybe the incisions deep inside hadn’t healed completely. He was such a good man before the accident, a wonderful man. We had a solid marriage.” She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “I was conditioned, I guess—to think in terms of always. It was so hard for me to end it, and because it was, I waited too long.”

“Five short months,” he corrected. He caught her chin on the edge of his hand and tipped her face up again so he could look into her eyes. “Five months, Chloe. If he was a good man before the accident, you owed him that much. What kind of woman waltzes out on an injured husband without giving him time to heal? And there’s not a damned thing wrong with being slow to give up on what was once a great marriage. Did you stay after the milk incident?”

“No, he—” She panted for oxygen. “He was choking him, and I couldn’t get him off. I knew then.” She averted her face, breaking the physical contact between them because it unsettled her so. “I filed for divorce the next morning. That didn’t entirely stop Roger from disrupting our lives—thus my decision to move here—but at least it was never Jeremy in his line of fire again.”

He nodded. “So, there, you see? When push came to shove, you jumped ship. Stop beating up on yourself.”

“It’s hard not to. When I see what it’s done to my son, it’s almost impossible not to.”

“You did your best. Jeremy’s out of it now. That’s the bottom line. You didn’t stay with his father and make him live like that for eighteen years.”

The bitterness in his voice brought Chloe’s head around. He met her regard evenly, his face set in grim lines. “My mother had her reasons for staying,” he whispered. “I don’t blame her, and I never will. But I can tell you this. I’d be carting around a lot less baggage if she had divorced him when I was Jeremy’s age.”

Having said that, he turned and went back inside the house, leaving her alone to digest what he’d said and to gather her composure. She fleetingly wondered how he had managed to zero in on the things that
tormented her most. Even more bewildering, he’d succeeded in making her feel better.

Jeremy was still on the love seat with Rowdy when Chloe reentered the family room. The child gave her a shamefaced look. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

“For what, sweetie?”

“For telling ’bout Daddy. It’s s’posed to be our secret, and I forgot.”

Searching her son’s troubled gaze, Chloe had cause to wonder if her decision to make their past a taboo subject with strangers wasn’t yet another count against her.

That was a worry for later, though. Ben entered the room just then. After taking in Jeremy’s downcast expression, he glanced questioningly at Chloe. “My mom’s still asleep. After lunch, she generally naps for two or three hours. I was wondering, would you and Jeremy like to play hooky with me and take a walk?” He gestured toward the kitchen. “You got so much done this morning, I can do the chores this afternoon, no problem.”

Chloe checked her watch. “Oh, I—”

“About a mile from here, there’s a pretty little creek, and I spotted a beaver dam there the other afternoon. I thought Jeremy might enjoy seeing it.”

“Can we, Mom?” Jeremy asked in a stage whisper. “Please?”

Chloe sighed. Her son knew just the right note of pleading to inject into his voice. She also knew that Ben had suggested this outing to cheer the child up, and she had to admit it was probably a good plan.

“It’s really not that far,” Ben assured her. “We can easily make it there and back, leaving you plenty of time to get to work.”

“Well . . .” After the conversation with him on the
deck, she would have preferred to go home where she could lick her wounds in private, but she decided that would be selfish. A walk might be just what Jeremy needed to push the unpleasant memories from his mind. “Okay. Why not? I’ve never seen a beaver dam.”

For the next hour, Ben gave them a tour of his world. As they trailed behind him through the forest, he stopped occasionally to point out sights Chloe and her son might have overlooked.

“Look there, Jeremy,” he said, gesturing at the top of a dead tree. “See that nest? It belongs to a bald eagle.”

Just as he spoke, the mother bird swooped down to perch on the untidy collection of grass and small branches. Chloe would have sworn the eagle looked directly at them. Beautiful with a reddish-brown body and snow-white head, the raptor lifted her wings and did a half-turn, as though to show off for them.

“Oh,” Chloe said softly, her skin tingling with awe. “She’s fabulous, Ben. The bald eagle is our national bird, Jeremy.”

Jeremy stood there, head back, expression solemn. He kept his voice hushed. “Does she have babies up there?”

“Probably,” Ben replied. “And because she does, we really shouldn’t linger. No point in making her nervous.”

He struck off through the trees again, moving with a fluid grace that Chloe found amazing in so large a man. He was, she thought nonsensically, as sturdy as the huge Ponderosa pines that defined the terrain.

Soon Chloe heard the rushing sound of a stream. Ben held out a hand, signaling them to halt. Then, with an exaggerated lightness of step, he led them
around a copse of manzanita. When the stream came into view, he crouched behind the brush, motioning for Chloe and Jeremy to do the same.

“There,” he said softly.

Just as he spoke, a beaver slapped the surface of the water. Jeremy jumped. Then he giggled. “Look, Mom!” he whispered.

Chloe was already looking. The beavers had impeded the water flow, creating a pool just above the dam. As she watched, three heads appeared. “It’s a family,” she exclaimed softly. “Oh, Jeremy, that’s a mama with her babies.”

His expression thoughtful and searching, Ben glanced at Chloe over the top of the child’s head. “Glad now that you came?”