Chapter Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIX
MAVEN
At precisely midnight, I ring Ronan’s doorbell. When he doesn’t answer, I knock, feeling silly standing on the porch in the dark. Minutes tick by in total silence. Mystified, I peer at the lightless windows, wondering where he is.
Just as I’m about to give up and leave, he throws open the door and stands glowering at me from inside the shadowed foyer.
He’s bare chested and barefoot, wearing only a tight pair of jeans, ripped at the knees. His jaw is unshaven and his hair is disheveled, hanging in a tangled mess around his shoulders, as if he spent the last hour dragging his hands through it. Or wrestling bears.
Nonetheless, he’s magnificent. His muscular, masculine beauty is otherworldly. He’s Apollo and Adonis, Thor and Captain America, the rugged and noble character Aragorn from Lord of the Rings.
The audacity.
I say tartly, “Hello, sunshine. Were you asleep?”
He snarls, “No.”
“Ah. I see you’re in a lovely mood. Which one of your personalities is this? I want to prepare myself.”
Nostrils flaring, he looks me up and down, his heated gaze raking over me. He closes his eyes and mutters an oath. Then he flips on the lights, grabs me by the wrist, and pulls me inside, slamming the door behind us.
He stands there staring at me suspiciously from under lowered brows as if I’m a stranger trying to sell him fake watches from inside the trunk of a stolen car in a seedy hotel parking lot.
Because he’s decided to be churlish and uncooperative, I go first. “You smell like whiskey.”
“That’s because I’ve had a lot of it tonight.”
“Listen, you’re the one who told me to show up at this ungodly hour, but I can go.”
“No!” he shouts. Then he closes his eyes and mutters, “Fuck. Yes. You should go.”
“Sure thing. Good luck with your mental breakdown.”
I turn away, but he grabs me by the shoulders, pushing me up against the closed door so I’m pinned. Breathing erratically through flared nostrils, he looks me up and down again, then closes his eyes, drops his head, and groans.
“I’m going to count to three. If you’d like your head to remain attached to your body, you’ll let me go before I get there.”
He tears himself away from me and turns toward the living room, threading his hands behind his head and cursing.
When he flips the overhead light switch, I notice the mess.
His home is in shambles.
The coffee table rests on its side. All the sofa pillows lie randomly around the room as if they were ripped off and thrown. The black-and-white abstract art paintings hang askew. They have multiple fist-sized holes punched through them.
I look around in disbelief. “Had a little party, did you?”
Facing away from me, he pauses before saying gruffly, “I had a friend over.”
“Huh. Some friend.”
“He’s going through a bad time.”
“Evidently. I hope you had a tranquilizer gun on hand.”
Ronan turns around to face me. Head lowered, eyes blazing, hands and jaw clenched, he looks maniacal.
“This friend … he just found out something bad about a woman he was seeing.”
I can tell by his tone that whatever it is, it’s dire. I’m intrigued. “She’s cheating on him?”
“Worse.”
“She stole from him?”
“Worse.”
“I give up.”
“She’s his half-sister.”
Shocked, I choke out a laugh. “No. Really?”
“Really. And they have a child together.” He clears his throat. “Children.”
“Oh God. No wonder he went ballistic. How did they not know?”
After a moment of jaw clenching, he grits out, “He was adopted.”
“Wow. And I thought we had problems.”
When he doesn’t laugh at that, I stop joking and get serious. “So what’s he going to do besides ransack his friends’ houses?”
He clenches and unclenches his hands. Then he jerks his chin at me. “What would you have told him to do?”
I think for a moment. “Do the kids know?”
“Nobody knows but him.”
“Well, first of all, he should have the children tested. There’s a good chance they have genetic disorders.”
“Genetic disorders,” he repeats, looking ill.
“Yes. Inbreeding causes all sorts of problems.”
He thinks about that for a beat, then scrubs his hands over his face as if wishing he didn’t hear it.
“And he obviously has to stop seeing her.”
“Obviously. Yes.” He pauses. “Why, exactly?”
“It’s illegal. And against pretty much every ethical and cultural code that exists. It’s one of the ultimate taboos.”
“Right. Of course. That’s … that’s what I told him.”
“Well, I hope he figures it out, poor guy. I can’t even imagine what a mindfuck it must be.”
He tilts his head, examining my expression. “Do you think he should tell her? The woman, I mean.”
“I can’t see how it would do any good.”
Pale eyes burning, he steps closer. “No? Isn’t that unfair to her?”
“Would you want to know if you were accidentally banging your half-sibling?”
His laugh is low and humorless. “No. No, I definitely would fucking not.”
“There you go. Some things are better left unsaid. Just because he’s miserable doesn’t mean everybody else has to be. And God forbid the kids find out. He should just walk away and keep it a secret.”
Ronan gazes at me, his silence intense. After an uncomfortably long pause, he says, “What if he didn’t tell her but kept seeing her?”
“That’s every shade of wrong. It’s unforgivable. It’s a hard no.”
“Or maybe it’s romantic.”
“Did the one brain cell you were born with die of loneliness?”
“‘Love is love,’ isn’t that what people say?”
I wrinkle my nose. “I’m pretty sure they’re not talking about this particular situation.”
“But if she doesn’t know, nobody gets hurt, right?”
“It’s still a betrayal. And he’s bound to spill his guts eventually. The guilt and all that.”
He slowly shakes his head. “No, not him. He’s the kind of guy who can keep lots of skeletons locked away.”
“No wonder you’re friends.”
“Life isn’t kind to the meek. Sometimes, we have to make unpleasant decisions.”
“I hope you never run for political office. Your ethics are entirely too flexible.”
He glares at me in blistering silence for a moment, then abruptly turns away and stalks toward the kitchen. I’m about to follow him, but he quickly returns with a small black bag.
He thrusts it at me. “Here’s your money.”
“Oh. Thank you. I—”
“Good night.” He pushes past me, walks to the front door and pulls it open, then waves his hand impatiently, indicating I should leave. Quickly.
His rudeness is hurtful, but I’ll be damned if I’ll admit that. I lift my chin and walk out. Before I can say good night, Ronan slams the door in my face.
Every time I start to think that bastard might have a heart, he proves me wrong.
Walking back to the house, fog swirls around my ankles in pale-gray eddies that cling like ghostly fingers to my legs. The night air is heavy and damp, weighing down on my shoulders and chilling me to the bone. I slip through the front gate, hurry up the driveway, and enter through the back door.
Moving silently through the house, I pass a mirror in the hallway. I catch a glimpse of a figure behind me, its shape distorted and vague, but when I whirl around, no one is there. I turn to the mirror again. Only my own face stares back at me.
My eyes look reptilian, with vertical slit pupils and irises that glow molten gold and venomous green, gazing out with a sly, predatory intelligence.
I blink and the vision disappears.
In the morning, I’m awakened by a phone call. When I see the number on the screen, I hesitate to answer, but curiosity gets the better of me.
“Hi, Brett. This is a nice surprise.”
“Hello, May. I’m sorry to bother you. I know you must be busy at work.”
“It’s okay. I took a few days off.”
In his pause, I hear his shock. “You took time off work? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m fine. It was a family thing.”
There’s another pause, this one even more shocked. I can’t blame him.
With rare exception, I don’t talk about my family with men I date.
They get a rough sketch of history, some of it the truth, then a redirection of the conversation to safer waters.
Raised in a small town, both my parents are dead, left for college and never went back, nope, don’t have any close relatives, how about this weather we’re having?
Most of the men I dated never even knew I had a daughter. I didn’t bring them home to meet her. They weren’t important enough.
When you come from a family like mine, it’s unrealistic to expect healthy romantic relationships. Blackthorns don’t have boundaries, we have towering steel walls manned with machine guns and topped with row after row of barbed wire.
Ultimately, he ended it. He said being with me was like trying to love a ghost.
“A family thing,” Brett repeats doubtfully. “Does that have anything to do with the unusual phone call I received?”
I know he’s talking about Ronan. I keep my tone innocent and light. “Unusual phone call?”
“Yes. A man called me claiming to be the principal at Bea’s school. He was very unpleasant.”
Brett’s always been an excellent judge of character.
“How odd. What did he say?”
“He said she’d been involved in a serious accident.
I was immediately skeptical because I knew you wouldn’t have listed me as an emergency contact.
So I asked for his name and phone number and told him I’d call him right back.
When I did, the number he’d given me was to a gas station.
Just to ensure I didn’t write it down wrong, I called Bea’s school and asked for the principal.
The man who picked up was a completely different person.
Different voice, different manner, none of the rudeness or arrogance of the other one. ”
In spite of myself, I smile. “I have no idea who that might have been. How disturbing. But it was smart of you to ask for his contact information.”
“Thank you. There are too many scams out there to give a stranger sensitive information over the phone. You can never be too careful. One slip, and your whole life could be ruined.”
Something about that sets off faint alarm bells inside my head. “But you told this person Bea wasn’t your daughter, right?”