Stripped Bare (30 page)

Matthew felt like it was an analogy for where he suddenly found himself. He was in darkness. The one person that showed him any light was in there and when the door shut he would be totally in the dark again. He wanted so badly to be wrong about his suspicions.

Matthew walked into the bedroom and saw Shane cuddled under the blankets, only the top of his blond head poking out of the duvet. Matthew stood for a while, trying to calm his beating heart. Then he sat down on the bed and ran a hand across his eyes. He heard Shane move and sit up.

“Hey, babe. How was your evening?” Warm arms reached out to hug him and Matthew couldn’t respond, couldn’t move. His body was rigid, unresponsive.

“Matty? What’s wrong?” Shane’s voice sounded panicked as he reached over and switched the bedside light on, flooding the room with warm light.

Matthew stood up, agitated as he stared at his lover. He needed to see Shane’s face when he asked him the next question.

“Shay, I need to ask you something. Please be truthful and don’t be mad if you had nothing to do with it. I’m sorry I even have to do this and I have no idea how it will impact our relationship. But I have to ask you this.”

Shane sat up, the duvet falling to his waist. Matthew could see his boyfriend’s face grow wary.

The lawyer’s throat closed up and he wanted nothing more than to throw up. “Did you hack into an adoption agency site and find out about an adoption Sam and I were planning?”

The look on Shane’s face told Matthew everything he needed to know. He stared in stark horror as Shane’s face paled and his body went rigid. He stared back at Matthew, his face set. Matthew could see the guilt in his eyes.

Shane had always worn his emotions on his face. It was who he was. Matthew stepped back, reeling at the knowledge of what Shane had done.

“Christ, Shane, why?” Matthew’s anguished whisper was like a knife to Shane’s heart. He could feel the hurt emanating from every pore in his lover’s body and he wanted to push back the clock and start again. Matthew’s face was stark, his eyes like burning holes in his white face.

“I saw the papers on your desk yesterday.” Shane said. His hands were cold and he linked them together to stop their trembling. “While you were looking for the stuff for Rachel. I saw the baby picture, and I was curious. Then I realised what it was. It threw me. That you could have such a huge secret and not tell me about it.”

“So you decided to pry into my past and see what you could dig up?”

Shane had to be truthful on that one. “Yes. I wanted you to share things with me. But you don’t. This was the only way I could find out.” He climbed out of bed, pulling on his jeans and coming over to Matthew. Matthew moved away from him and Shane stood there, feeling lost.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. But I thought we were supposed to be sharing things. I’ve poured out my guts to you about my past. I wanted you to trust me so you could do the same.” He raised his hands in exasperation. Matthew stood stock still in the middle of the room.

“Some things are not for everyone, Shane.” Matthew’s voice was flat, deadly. “Some things are meant to be private. If I don’t tell you things, it’s because I want to keep them that way. We’ve only known each other a few months. There was plenty of time to get to know each other, for me to tell you about things when I felt it was time. And now that’s over.”

What did he mean, over?

“Matty. For God’s sake, don’t over react.” Shane felt a surge of panic. He sat back down on the side of the bed, his legs weak.

“Did you see everything?” Matthew’s face was implacable, his voice tight. “All the footage of me when I went crazy, when I lost my child? Our daughter—mine and Sam’s?” He moved around the room now like a caged tiger, his body taut with tension.

Shane watched his lover, his mouth dry with fear. “Yes. I saw it.”

Matthew swung around, eyes blazing and strode forward, pushing Shane backward onto the bed with a violent shove. Shane fell back onto his elbows and lay there helplessly while Matthew towered over him.

“So you know what I was like. You saw me at my worst, Shane. Something I never wanted you to see or even know about it. I had a hard time reconciling what I was then myself. And for you to have to see that, it’s an absolute abomination to me. I tainted Sam’s memory with what I did. “

Matthew stopped pacing, his breath ragged. He ran a hand through his already mussed hair.

Shane sat up and drew his legs up onto the bed, sitting cross-legged. He stuck his trembling hands under his thighs as he watched Matthew. His bare-chested upper body was cold and clammy, but he didn’t want to enrage his lover any more by getting up just yet. He’d probably be knocked down flat.

Matthew sneered at him. “You want to know the full story? Fine, I’ll tell you. The night Sam died, we were supposed to be meeting my mother and sister for dinner. We were going to announce that we’d signed adoption papers that morning. For Emily. A sweet little baby girl who’d been conceived in the most unimaginable circumstances.” His voice was flat. “Her mother was a fifteen-year-old girl who was gang raped at a party. By four men. She fell pregnant. If that wasn’t bad enough, her father is a very high-ranking public figure.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t tell you his name. I signed papers committing me to secrecy.” His tone got bitter. “Although I’m sure you could find out who it was if you really wanted to.”

Shane’s heart clenched even tighter in his chest at the disgusted look on Matthew’s face. He uncurled his legs and moved to sit back against the headboard, the pillows cool against his naked back.

Matthew carried on. “It was all Sam’s doing really. He moved in the same circles as the father of the girl professionally, and my husband was very well thought of. He got wind of the whole thing and got us involved right from the start. He thought it would be what a baby needed—two loving people in her life after all that had happened. We wanted that baby more than anything before. But it was all very hush-hush and we had to sign our lives away to protect the mother and the story from leaking. The grandfather wanted nothing to do with the child and made his daughter give up the baby for adoption. We were the lucky ones, Sam and I.”

Matthew stopped and Shane saw him swallow as his hands clenched and unclenched at his side. His lover moved over the bedroom window and stared out into the street. His muscles were tight, his back and shoulders tensed like steel. “We never got to meet the mother as her father thought that would be too traumatic. She was already undergoing counselling. When she gave birth, Emily was immediately taken into foster care. Sam and I visited her all the time, and we signed the final papers on the morning of the day he died. We were going to take custody of her in a week’s time from her foster parents.” His voice quietened. “We fell in love with that baby girl. She was the cutest little thing you’d ever seen, with big, brown eyes and a sweet smile.” His face was bleak, his eyes hard. “Sam used to take her teddy bears from everywhere he’d travelled. Christ, at one stage I thought he was going to buy out Hamleys, he was there so often.” Matthew’s voice trembled. “I had a thing for dragons. I collected them whenever I saw them and we had a plan to do the nursery—my study—out in a fairy tale theme with all the stuff we’d bought.”

Shane was horrified by the story. Matthew’s face was white, haunted. Shane moved swiftly off the bed and stood facing Matthew.

“Matthew—” His boyfriend waved a hand and the look on his face shut Shane up.

“Don’t say a word. You know what happened next. Sam died. I went off the rails. I got drunk and high all the time and screwed other men. Not even the thought of Emily made me feel better. I was selfish, and it cost me everything.” His voice cracked. “I landed in jail one night for being drunk and disorderly.” Matthew’s voice was distant, his eyes blank. “The birth mother’s father came to see me. He wasn’t happy that all the plans we’d made to get her child adopted seemed to be falling apart. He didn’t think I could be trusted to keep things quiet and not spill the beans about his daughter. So he showed me those photographs, Shane. The ones you saw. Disgusting, shaming photos taken by the investigator he’d hired to follow me when he saw I was out of control. He told me he was going to hold on to them for a while as an ‘insurance policy’ and that I needed to get my life back on track. God knows what he would have done with them if I had said anything. Used them to discredit me I imagine. The adoption was cancelled.”

Shane made a move toward Matthew but he held up his hand, warning him off. Shane had never seen such a look of pain on Matthew’s face.

“Don’t, Shane. Don’t bloody touch me or I swear…”

Shane stayed where he was. He had a feeling Matthew meant every word. The sense of anguish Shane was feeling at being the cause of his lover’s distress was eating away inside him like acid. He kept quiet, his heart cracking apart.

Matthew spoke again. “In short, I was a mess. And now I don’t even know where she is.” Shane could hear the anguish in his lover’s voice. “I lost control, and they took her away from me. It would have killed Sam to know that. His last living thought might have been that at least I’d have Emily, and I managed to fuck that up as well.”

He closed his eyes in pain. Shane waited for him to open them again and Matthew took a shuddering breath. “My mother didn’t know about that. She knew about my meltdown, the fact I was drinking and taking drugs. She threatened to have me committed to a clinic in Dresden if I didn’t clean up my act. And my mother would have done exactly what she promised. She’s like that. So I cleaned up my act. But I didn’t ever have the courage to tell her my cock-up lost her a granddaughter, something she would have loved. So you see, my ‘control freak tendency,’” he spat the words at Shane, “went out the window and I lost my child. And you wonder why I try and control my life, make sense of it all?” He fell quiet. “And then you came along.”

Shane saw the look on his boyfriend’s face and felt a sense of pure loss. “Matty, I said I’m sorry. I made a mistake—”

Matthew’s voice was scathing. “You seem to make a real habit of that, don’t you? First with taking Walter’s money, hacking Roy’s phone, now again with me. Your actions have consequences, Shane. When does it become enough? When do you stop fucking interfering in people’s lives?”

Shane felt the heat of temper rise in his chest. He ignored Matthew’s warnings to stay away and moved over to stand in front of him, not too close but close enough to reach out and touch him if he needed. If Matthew wanted to get physical, so be it.

“It was all right for you when you needed me to find Mona. It was fine with you when I told Walter I’d send his video viral if he didn’t release the trust fund. Don’t be such a bloody hypocrite, Matty. You counted on me doing that, didn’t you?”

Matthew ignored his outburst. “Do you know what kills me? The fact that if this case hadn’t been particularly security-conscious, with the father of the girl insisting that his security agency plant a flag or some shit like that on the file, to tell him if anything happened—I would never have known you’d done it. You wouldn’t have told me, would you?”

Shane didn’t know what to say. He’d already decided he
would
tell Matthew what he’d done. He’d made the decision tonight when Matthew was out. He’d thought about it; after they’d told each other they loved each other he didn’t think he had a choice. He wanted no secrets between them. He would have lived with the consequences and hoped he could have convinced Matthew to trust him again. But his boyfriend would never believe him now. So he remained quiet.

Matthew took his silence as agreement. He snorted. “You’d better hope they never find out it was you, Shane. Because you don’t want to mess with the father of the birthmother, the man who’s already called me tonight to find out if I had anything to do with it. I lied to him, of course. I had a feeling I knew who’d been in the file, but I was hoping I was wrong. If he ever finds out it was you, you could go to prison, you bloody idiot.” The room was silent as both men came to terms with what had just happened.

Shane very much feared this was the irrevocable breakdown of their relationship.

Matthew’s ire seemed to have passed and he appeared to deflate before Shane’s eyes. Shane’s gut spasmed at the pain in Matthew’s eyes and his next whispered words.

“How could you do that to me? I can’t believe you thought you had the right to bloody interfere like that.” His lips tightened. “And if that man ever manages to track you down, God, I don’t even want to think about that. So now you bloody know everything about me, Shay.”

Shane moved forward and laid a hand on Matthew’s arm. Matthew looked at it. His lips tightened and he pushed it away and moved away to stand again by the window, gazing out into the darkness.

Shane swallowed, his sense of loss eating away his heart like acid. “Matthew, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise it would cost you this much. Cost us this much. I wish I could take it all back, turn back time. But I can’t.”

Matthew spoke softly without turning around. “Everything I wanted to hide, you found out. How the hell can you ever look me in the face again and have any bloody respect for me? I desecrated my dead husband’s memory and lost our child. How can anything ever work for us now? This is why I didn’t want to lose control, Shay,” he whispered in pain as he turned to face Shane. “It hurts too bloody much when I do that.”

Shane heard the slight catch in Matthew’s voice at the last statement.

“They won’t find me, Matty. The flag was something I hadn’t considered. It didn’t strike me that there would be any special security. There certainly weren’t any indicators on the adoption site. If this flag is what I think it is, it’s just a warning that someone’s tried to access or gained access to a file. It doesn’t mean they know who it is. I think I’m safe. But thanks for your concern. I probably don’t deserve it.” He heard the slight catch in his own voice and closed his eyes. The room was silent.

“You need to leave.” Matthew’s voice was defeated, riddled with pain. “I want you to go.”

Shane nodded. “I just need to get dressed and get my stuff.” He walked around and picked up the clothes that were hung over the valet rack on his side of the bed, dressing quickly with shaking hands as Matthew watched him. Finally he looked around for Bushwhacker and slung his laptop bag over his shoulder. He knew the answer to his next question but he was going to ask it anyway. “Can I call you tomorrow, see if you’ve calmed down so we can talk more?”