Skies Over Caledonia: A Small Town Marriage of Convenience Romance (The Highlands Series Book 4)

Chapter 17

As I contemplated confiding in Jared the way he’d confided in me, sweat gathered under my arms. Only one person knew my story, and she didn’t count because she was a mental health professional. I’d told no one, not a single friend or lover, about what happened to drive me completely off the rails. The truth was, I wasn’t proud of that person for so many reasons, but now that I was older, I ached for that kid. I’d put so much on myself that I shouldn’t have. Yet, there was still a part of me that feared censure from anyone I cared about.

Staring into Jared’s eyes, I thought about the man who had vacillated between casual friendliness and outright cold indifference. Could I trust someone like that? An hour ago, I’d have said unequivocally not. Even with all the evidence I’d witnessed of his kindness and care toward Sarah and his friends over the years, I could only have said no because of the way he’d treated me these last few weeks.

But then he’d gone and told me a story that I knew, from the shaky way he’d confessed it, he really had only told very few people. He’d offered me his trust.

And maybe I was just desperate enough to unburden myself for the first time in ten years. I was so tired of being the only one who carried the truth. “You have to promise me that what I tell you … you never tell Aria. No matter what.”

Jared’s brows drew together in curiosity, but he nodded. “I promise.”

Sick nerves awakened in my gut as the words hovered at the base of my throat. Just do it. “Everyone thinks my parents’ relationship is the stuff of dreams. Even Aria. Even my mother. She’s deluded herself into it.” I kept Jared’s gaze because it anchored me, and I began to calm more as I spoke. “When I was fifteen, I got angry at Mamma because she’d promised me a spa weekend before school started. Like always, she bailed for a last-minute job. It wasn’t about the spa. It was about time with her. Time she never seemed to have. My dad was busy a lot too, and he would text me every day if he wasn’t at home. At that point, he was filming in San Francisco, and I was mad at Mamma. So I got it in my head to just go surprise Dad for the weekend.” Blood whooshed in my ears with my thundering heartbeat, remembering how it felt … “Dad grew up in San Francisco. He had just bought an apartment in the city, and he told us it was because he missed it, and he wanted to spend more time there. I’d come to realize there was a specific reason he wanted to spend time there.”

Jared frowned. “What happened?”

“We had an apartment in Brooklyn and we always kept a key in a hidden lockbox, in case of emergencies. I assumed Dad would have set things up the same way in San Francisco. He had. Same code for the lockbox. So I let myself into the place and I walked in on my dad fucking another woman.” I still felt sick at the memories. “He was so angry at me. Like, I’ve never seen my father that angry. I fled. By the time I got back to Malibu, Dad had alerted Mamma to my spontaneous little trip, and she’d flown home. I told her what I’d walked in on.” Tears filled my eyes. “She slapped me.”

“Fuck.” Jared reached across the sofa for my hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry.”

“She told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and that if I repeated it, she’d make me sorry. It was like both my parents became totally different people that day. I … I’ve done some investigating since, and this woman is not just some person Dad randomly fucked. It’s a long-term affair. They’re still seeing each other. She was his high school sweetheart. She’s an anonymous widowed nurse.” Pain for my mother, despite how she’d treated me, flared across my chest. “I think he loves them both. Her and Mamma. He just didn’t want to choose. And Mamma loves him so much that she pretends it’s not happening. I mean, she’s never raised a hand to me or Aria in her life, but she hit me that day. And she looked at me with such hatred and fear, like I was about to rip everything away from her.”

“Fucking hell, Allegra … that’s so much for a kid to carry.”

I wiped at tears now leaking freely down my cheeks. “That’s not the half of it.” Taking a shuddering breath, I continued, “I knew I couldn’t tell Aria. Mamma messed my sister up good just by constantly nitpicking at her appearance and making her feel like shit because she wasn’t a size 2. Dad was Aria’s safe place. He still is. I can’t take that away from her.” I gave him a hard look. “And I never will, so this stays between us. There’s no need for her to know. What good would it do? For so long she thought men cheated. Dad was her beacon of hope, and I think knowing how much he loved Mamma was what allowed her to give North a chance too. I don’t want to take that from her. And I don’t want it to fuck things up for her and North.”

He squeezed the hand I hadn’t realized he still held. “I promise I will never tell her.”

Nodding, I leaned back against the sofa. “I was pissed, Jared. I was so pissed at them for lying to the world and then making me feel like I was the bad guy. They both avoided me for weeks, and I was a kid who’d just found out her dad was cheating on her mom.” I turned my head on the cushion toward him. “Do you know my mother was named the Sexiest Woman in the World four times?”

He shook his head.

“Four times. Sexiest Woman in the World. I grew up in a place that rewards good looks, and I think it kind of warped my perspective. If my mother could get cheated on, anyone could. And if my father could cheat, then anyone could. Growing up, I really only had Aria. Mamma ‘retired’ and returned home when I was a teen, but she still wasn’t there there. And so, I’d tell myself that it was fine because when you grew up, you fell in love, anyway, and that person became your safe place. But seeing Dad do that to Mamma … Love suddenly didn’t feel safe at all, you know.

“Anyway, I got angry and started looking for an escape. I approached a kid at our school who I knew partied a little harder than the rest of us. I fell in with his group of friends and we went clubbing, partied, drank, did drugs. One night we went to this club in the city that turned a blind eye to our fake IDs because we all had money to spend …” Grief burned in my throat. “That’s where I met Ashton.” I pulled my hand from Jared’s. “He was eighteen. He grew up in Chino, but when he was thirteen, his mom had married this bigshot defense attorney and they’d moved into his mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Ashton hated his stepfather. So he partied hard.

“I … I just wanted to disappear. To not feel so angry. To not have to hide from Aria why I was so angry. And I started dating Ashton. No one knew. I kept up appearances at school, kept my grades up, stayed on the honor roll. But all the while, he and I were texting and emailing constantly.” A sad smile curled my mouth. “Ashton loved to write. He wrote short stories. And he liked to write me these long emails. I still have them.

“Anyway … I’d head into the city almost every weekend to see him, and we’d hook up and we’d take whatever drugs he could get his hands on that day. We’d drink until neither of us could think. I doubt either of us remembered half the times we hooked up because we were so drunk or high. For me …” I finally looked at Jared again and hoped that tender sympathy in his expression didn’t disappear once I’d finished my story. “It was just an escape. I cared about him as much as I could, considering my parents had broken my belief in love. But he wrote me love letters in those emails. He told me he loved me all the time. And he started getting moodier, more depressed. He was always talking about running away together. Then …”

Tears flooded my eyes again. “And then he emailed me one night. He needed to tell me something because he was afraid if he didn’t tell someone, he’d lose his mind. He told me … he told me his stepfather had been abusing him since he was fourteen. That he was so fucked up and angry that he was afraid he might kill his stepfather.”

Jared let out a haggard breath. “Allegra …”

“I was just a kid,” I pleaded with him to understand. “And I was scared. I didn’t know how to deal with something that big, that messed up. My first thought was to tell my parents, but I didn’t trust them anymore and I was afraid they’d have Ashton arrested since he’d been sleeping with a minor. I didn’t even think about what they’d do about his threat to kill his stepfather. So … I emailed him back telling him I was sorry but that we had to break up.” My gaze did not want to lift to Jared, to see his expression, but I had to know.

Honestly, I couldn’t tell what the hard look in his eyes meant. So I pulled my knees in tighter to my chest and continued hollowly. “Ashton killed himself a few days after I broke up with him.”

“Oh Jesus … fuck, Allegra, you know that wasn’t your fault. Right?” Jared moved across the couch, his touch gentle on my chin as he forced me to look at him. His expression was grim, eyes gleaming with sadness. For me. “You were just a kid.”

I licked my suddenly dry lips. “I know that. I mean … I’ll always wish that I’d been better. That I’d been stronger. Not so afraid. That I’d gone to him and begged him to tell an adult the truth. Instead, I felt crushed by this responsibility being placed on my shoulders. Too selfish, too scared to think rationally. Maybe if I’d had time, I would have done the right thing. But it was too late, and I’ll always feel guilty about that. If there’s true blame, however, it lies with his stepfather.”

The tears blurring my vision rolled down my cheeks. “You know he’s the state attorney general now. Andrew Gray. He also has a special focus on suicide prevention in memory of his beloved stepson. The fucker. He … he’s a monster.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ve thought often about sending those emails to the media or the police. But I don’t want to do that to Ashton. Have something so painfully private splattered all over the news. And that just makes me feel like shit all over again because what if Gray is hurting someone new? What if Ashton’s story could help? Yet it’s not my place, right?” I begged Jared to understand. “If I did that, I’d be sharing a story that he didn’t give me permission to share. I’ve had private investigators on Andrew Gray since I came into my trust fund, trying to dig up something else we can bury him with, but they said his shit is locked down. So much so that they’re almost positive he’s into something bad.”

“That is so messed up.” Jared exhaled heavily and rested against the sofa. “That’s so messed up for a teenager to deal with. It’s fucked up for you now to have that hanging over you.”

“Yeah, well, I handle it better now than I did back then. I’d been on a rocky path before that, and after, I veered right off a cliff.” Feeling a little more at ease now that he hadn’t condemned me, I told him, “Before Ashton died, I was keeping up with school and my grades … but by the time I was seventeen, I was self-destructing on every level. The guilt over Ashton’s death was eating me alive. So I looked for escape in the worst places possible. Like Nathan Andros. Sloane’s ex-boyfriend. Callie’s birth father.”

“You mentioned you shot someone …”

“Yeah.” I nodded, blanching at the memory. “I shot Sloane. By accident.”

Jared was stunned.

“I think I honestly thought it would be fine if I died. That maybe I deserved it. So I put myself in stupid, dangerous situations, and Nathan was one of those. He was a criminal. Hung around a bunch of thugs who thought they were big men. One night at a house party, he took me into a room with these guys, and I realized quickly that he was intending to let them use me.”

Jared snapped up so fast from the couch I was surprised he didn’t get whiplash. “Please tell me they didn’t …”

I shook my head in reassurance, eyes wide at his visceral reaction. “They didn’t. Thanks to Sloane. She showed up there, ballsy as hell, desperate for money because she was about to be evicted. Pretty soon it was just us three in the room. Nathan locked the door. I … I stupidly mouthed off and he … I think he was going to rape me in front of her.”

Rage filled Jared’s eyes and he slowly lowered himself beside me again.

“She … she stopped him. And I knew then that I didn’t want to go out like that. I didn’t want to experience what Ashton had, and I didn’t want to die. So we all got into a tussle and I grabbed his gun and I shot at him, but it hit her in the arm instead. He …” I could still recall the evil in Nathan’s eyes as he turned on me. “I was just a little rich girl he got off on corrupting. Sloane was different. His kid’s mom. And he thought of her as his possession. He was enraged that I’d shot her. I can … I can still feel his fists. I thought it was never going to stop. But then, it did. With a bang.” I unconsciously eased closer to Jared, lowering my knees from my chest. “Sloane shot him.”

Jared’s eyebrows rose now. “I can’t even picture that.”

“Picture it.” I grinned unhappily. “Sloane is a badass. She got us both out. I don’t know how she managed it because I could barely walk and she was shot, but we got back to her place and I … I told her to call my dad because, despite the past, I knew he’d fix everything.”

“Is that how Sloane ended up here?”

I nodded. “Yeah. My family was so grateful to her that Aria got her a job on the estate to get her away from Andros. And my parents … my dad assumed that the reason for me going off the rails was because of what I knew. About his other woman. I mean, it partly was, so I let him think it. He begged me to go to rehab. I would have gone, anyway. The whole thing with Nathan and Sloane was a huge wake-up call. Aria was so worried about me. I’d never seen her like that. Even my parents were visibly shaken, you know. As angry as I was at them, as much as I wished they were better parents, I knew they loved me in their way. I didn’t want to put them through that, so I went to rehab.” I shrugged.

“And then I just got on with life. I’m not close to my parents because Mamma knows I know she’s living in denial about Dad. And Dad … I think he’s terrified that one day I’ll tell Aria. She’s a daddy’s girl through and through. His first kid, his baby. It would kill him if she saw him in a negative light. And I think he’s just waiting for the ax to fall. If he’d take two seconds to be in a room with me, I could promise him that for her sake, not his, that will never happen.”

Silence fell between us as Jared sat forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor. My heart raced as I pondered what he was thinking.

Finally, he turned to me. “You’ve been carrying all of that by yourself since you were fifteen?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry, Allegra.”

“People have been through worse. Aria was kidnapped by a stalker. Sloane was almost killed by her ex. Worse things have happened to people.”

“Aye. But they all had folks around them to share that with. You’ve kept these secrets because you either wanted to protect Aria or protect Ashton. But who …” He snatched up my hand, his grip tight. “Who was protecting you?”

I sucked in a teary breath, my vision blurring. “Jared …”

“I don’t know if what I say means anything, but I want you to know that none of it was your fault. As someone who did really awful, stupid shit as an angry kid, I know what it feels like. But I had my grandfather. He knew everything about my past. And having him carry that for me made all the difference. I know our marriage is just a business deal, but our friendship can be as real as you want it to be. I promise you now that you’ll always have it. And I’ll carry this for you. I don’t want you to be alone in it anymore.”

Overwhelming awe and gratitude flooded me and before I could second-guess myself, I leaned in and slid my arms around him, resting my cheek on one of his strong shoulders. Jared didn’t hesitate. He twisted to face me, my cheek shifting onto his chest instead and he returned my embrace.

I don’t know how long we sat there, holding each other, but I wished it could have lasted forever. His body was strong and hard and warm, and being held by him felt wonderful. Because for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel alone. I never wanted that feeling to fade.

Yet I knew come morning, there was a huge chance it would.

So I didn’t make a move to leave his arms. I held on as long as I could.