CHAPTER 3
Noelle
Having to help Dean and his friend keep this secret from the rest of the town only drove home to me that for the better part of eight years I had been plainly, flatly lying to Jed.
The one that Jed was supposed to count on the most, trust and believe in and love the most, had been telling him this dragon-sized lie.
And just like a child, Jed believed it because his Mommy would never deceive him.
But still—Dean Penrod.
After all these years I’d left him behind, Dean had reappeared in my life.
In the near-decade that we’d been apart, when I’d assumed we were history, Dean had only gotten sexier.
If the forces of nature had somehow taken on conscious thought and decided to create a being who was the definition of beauty, the result would have been Dean.
The arms and legs, the chest and stomach—everything—was masculine perfection.
The arms were like steel cords twisted together.
The legs were big, thick pillars of muscled power.
Hair accented the nipples and contours of the muscular islands that were his pecs.
And that face: the dark, tousled hair, the thick eyebrows, the squaring of his jaw and the light dusting of a goatee on the upper lip and the chin, all combined into a handsomeness surpassing most human men and most males of his own kind.
And then there was his friend, Garret Brande.
I think once, early in our relationship, Dean had mentioned his friend who had left Komodo II for a year to take an engineering apprenticeship on another planet.
This must have been that friend.
I’d certainly never seen him before.
I would have remembered seeing this dragon; he was as awesomely, stunningly beautiful as Dean.
His hair was darker, the goatee was thicker and accented his entire lower jaw.
But the face was just as fantastically, inhumanly handsome.
Both Garret and Dean wore the standard outfit of Drake males: the sleeveless, two-piece, body-fitting suit with slits in back for the wings and tail.
Without showing everything, those suits showed a lot.
Garret’s arms were even bigger than Dean’s—huge, sexy knots of pure muscle that looked fit to crush an opponent into submission, or a woman into bliss.
I could tell that the pecs under his top were as immense as the arms.
And the legs, I could only guess, were mighty things, etched with tight muscle.
So here was this Garret, the second man in charge of the entire colony, sailing into my life with his best friend, the Prime Councilor, leader of the planet, who was once the most important man in my life.
And for most of these last eight years, I had flatly lied to the most important man in my life about his father.
It was like a spear in my heart, that night when he was just about four and a half, when I was putting him to bed, and instead of wanting a story or a song, Jed asked me, “Mommy, did Daddy really love me?”
At first, the question made me freeze, sitting with him on the side of his bed after tucking him in. I couldn’t move. I felt both chilled and shocked. Sooner or later, I knew, he’d start asking questions like this, and because my little man and I had such a sweet relationship, somehow I’d managed to block the possibility out of my mind—until just then.
My eyes turned wet. My jaw trembled. Jed had just asked me if his father had really loved him. The father who never even knew that Jed existed, the one that I’d deliberately kept out of Jed’s life. I’d never felt such pain as the question caused me. Did Daddy really love me?
Looking up at me with his wide hazel eyes filled with the bewilderment that only a child can feel, he repeated, “Well, Mommy? Did he?”
I realized where the question was coming from, at least partly.
Jed was in school and he had friends.
He’d met his friends’ families, been to their homes, been there when the parents visited school, watched his friends with their parents.
He had seen what complete families looked like, and how they were with each other—and he wanted to know why he didn’t have a complete family of his own.
My guilt chewed me up inside like a ravenous dragon—and I compounded the guilt by starting The Lie.
The Great Lie.
Ruffling Jed’s sandy brown hair, I said, “Oh yes, darling. Daddy loved you very much. Daddy thought having a little boy was the most wonderful thing in the world.”
And I felt a punch in my stomach from inside as an angry, guilty voice in my head screamed, LIAR!
”Did the energy storm really get him?”
Jed asked, reiterating the lie that he’d already been told, the one that had once made him cry himself to sleep every night. That lie and the pain it caused my undeserving son were bad enough. But now I was about to heap the Great Lie on top of it.
“It did, sweetheart,”
I answered. “It took Daddy and his whole family away. He had relatives who lived in another settlement, where your grandfather had work. Jed went to help them when your grandfather was ill. And while Daddy was there, the storm came. They were all lost, Jed. All of them.”
And the tears began to run freely from Jed’s wide eyes, and I felt like the worst, most rotten, most wretched mother who ever lived. I scooped him up into my arms and told him, “I’m sorry, baby. But Daddy absolutely loved you, just like I love you. That’s the most important thing, Jed. I love you.”
With my child crying in my arms, I cried with him. I felt like a coward, not telling him the way things really were. But how was I to explain to Jed that his father was missing from his life, not because of any energy storm, but because of my anger at Dean’s rejection, and how I’d decided that if Dean couldn’t love me the way I needed from him, he’d never know the love of his child? Damnit, I was a coward, and I was selfish. But I was hurt. And now Jed and Dean were both the unknowing recipients of my hurt.
Thinking ahead, I had false holopictures of “Jed’s Daddy”
created, for which I had a false set of idents created to give him an imaginary background. This was in anticipation of other questions I knew Jed would have. I even went so far as to have bogus holopictures and holovids made of the three of us, at an age too young for Jed to remember. I created a fictitious family and a fictitious life for us, and Jed, too young and innocent to suspect that his own mother would go so far as to lie to him and create false evidence to support it, believed it all.
And from that time to now, I had lived quietly with this thing I’d done to my own child. Did the hurt that Dean caused me really justify all this deception? I had convinced myself that it did, and Jed and I had just gone on with our lives—until today. Now the lie was going to get trickier. Now Dean was right here, and as long as he was here, I had to come up with a way to keep him and Jed apart.