Chapter 5 #4
“I’m sure there were plenty of people trying to warn you away from me,” he said bitterly, even though he knew he deserved nothing less.
“I wouldn’t let them warn me away from you, and I won’t let you warn me away either.”
“You won’t?” David asked, floored.
She shook her head. “What you told me is upsetting. I won’t deny that. I can’t even think about how it must’ve been for Janey.”
“I don’t like to think about that either. I’m deeply ashamed of that. More than you can ever believe.”
“What if…”
“What, Daisy? Just say it. Whatever you want to ask. It’s fine.”
“What if something difficult or stressful happens again? Is that how you’re going to deal with it?”
“I can’t promise you that I’ll always do exactly the right thing, but I can promise I’d never be unfaithful to a partner again. It was an awful thing to do to her. I was extremely disrespectful of all the years we’d spent together, and I hurt her so badly. That’s the part I most regret.”
“It matters to me, greatly, that you’re ashamed and regretful and contrite about it.
My father was never any of those things.
He was belligerent about his right to be happy, to hell with who got hurt in the process.
He never once apologized to my mother or any of us for what he did.
And then he had the nerve to turn his back on me when I chose to be with someone he didn't approve of. Ironic, huh?”
“I’d say so.”
She looked at him with those big, doe-like eyes that had touched him from the first time Truck Henry’s fists landed her in the clinic.
“We all have things in our past we’re not proud of, David.
Even me.” Her lashes fell over her cheeks as she seemed to summon the fortitude to say what was on her mind.
“I was married, briefly, when I was eighteen. That was the first in a string of bad choices I made where men are concerned.”
“Tell me,” he said. “I want to know you, Daisy.”
Although this was the last thing in the world she wanted to talk about—ever—he’d shared his past with her, so how could she do less than the same?
“His name was Curt, and he was everything I wasn’t—brave and fearless and brazen.
A typical bad boy, right down to the motorcycle with no muffler, the piercings, the tattoos, the torn leather and the long greasy hair.
I lost my mind, among other things, over him my senior year of high school.
My parents were divorced by then, but they came together in their mutual hatred of him. ”
“Sounds like it got pretty rough for you.”
“It was horrible. The more they hated him, the more I dug in. Looking back at it now, I’m not sure if I married him because of him or because of them and wanting to defy them.”
“How did you end up married?”
“I refused to stop seeing him, so they kicked me out of the house where I grew up and told me I was on my own. I went to his place, if you could call a stall in his grandmother’s garage a ‘place.’ We stayed there until his grandmother decided she’d had enough of us, too, and then we hit the road on his bike.
We were dead broke, but somehow we managed to survive for an entire summer by picking up odd jobs here and there.
It was ridiculous when I think about it now.
One night we got drunk with some guys we worked with, and they got the big idea that we ought to get married.
I was so bombed that I have no memory of the so-called ceremony, but he had the marriage license to prove it was done. ”
David noticed that her hands had begun to tremble, so he took hold of them.
“When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t remember anything, but I was really sore… Between my legs. And the guys, they were acting very strangely. Looking at me differently… I don’t know for sure, but I think he let them take turns with me.”
Shock reverberated through him. “Jesus, Daisy,” he whispered.
She took a deep, trembling breath. “It didn’t take long to realize I’d married the kind of guy who’d let other men take turns with his wife. To say the marriage went from bad to worse, quickly, is putting it mildly.”
“Did you go home to your parents?”
She shook her head. “They wouldn’t have me. They said I’d ‘made my bed’ and I was on my own.”
“How old were you then?”
“Twenty—and pregnant.”
“God. The baby…”
“I lost it at nineteen weeks. It took me a long time to recover physically and emotionally from that. I kicked around for a while living on the charity of friends until I got a job at a hotel in Boston, and finally got a place with some girls from work a year after I left him.”
He put his arms around her and tucked her head in under his chin. “I’m so sorry you went through such an awful thing.”
Her hand on his belly had his full attention, and he had to remind himself her nearness was about comfort, not sex.
“How did you end up out here?”
“I answered an ad in the paper. I was tired of working in the city and commuting. It sounded like paradise out here, and it is, for the most part. The off-season is difficult for those of us who are seasonal workers.”
“I thought you were year-round at the hotel now.”
“It’s probationary for the summer. If I don’t get the job full-time, I may have to move back to the mainland so I can work in the winter. My rent is going up, and I don’t think I can afford it, unless I get the new job, and even then it’ll be tough.”
“You’ll get the job.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
David tightened his hold on her and let his lips slide over the silky softness of her fragrant hair, filled with relief that she knew his secrets and hadn’t run screaming from him. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.
“What time is our reservation at Domenic’s?” she asked.
“It was thirty minutes ago.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost eight.”
“How did it get so late?”
David’s stomach growled, loudly, making them laugh.
“Sounds like someone needs to eat.”
“Want to go see if they held our table for us?”
“I’d love to.”
As they stood, he kept a hold on her hand and brought it to his lips. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not running away from me when I shared the worst of myself with you and for trusting me with your story.”
She rested her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him. “I want to be able to trust you, David. That’s going to matter to me.”
“You can trust me. I swear you can. I hate myself for what I did to Janey. I never want to hurt someone like that again.” He slipped his arms around her waist. “Especially you, when you’ve already had enough heartache for one lifetime.”
“I won’t disagree with you there.” She went up on tiptoes to kiss him, her lips soft and sweet against his.
Desire streaked through his system like an out-of-control wildfire. He drew back from her so she wouldn’t feel the evidence of how badly he wanted her before she was ready to know.
“Do you mind if we stop at my place before we go to dinner? I was planning to get changed before I picked you up.”
“Not at all. I’d love to see where you live.”
“It’s nothing special,” he said as he ushered her out of the office.
“Yes, it is. You live there.”
David had no idea how he’d managed to get so lucky to find this lovely woman with the heart of gold, but now that he had, he was becoming more determined all the time to keep her in his life.