Chapter 28
Quinn
I stand over a luxurious pet bed in Harlan’s sunroom, where the black cat reclines on a blanket like a little queen. Her wounded leg is in a cast, a little heart on it made out of red medical tape.
“I can’t believe that’s Darla,” I say.
Harlan crouches next to me, fussing over the pet-gate wall that he had his staff set up posthaste to keep the cat secure while she recuperates. She won’t be wandering freely until the cast is off.
“I mean, yes, her name is Darla,” he says distractedly. “But no, she was never my lover.”
“Gee, thanks for clarifying.”
He nudges her food bowl closer to her, then steps over the gate.
I shake my head. “Worse… I can’t believe they abandoned her like that.”
The couple who came to collect Darla, her owners, refused to pay the vet bill when they found out how much it was. They actually got irate about it and told the vet to keep her.
Jerks. They were driving a Jaguar.
Harlan paid and brought Darla home.
“Explain, Harlan. Please. She’s safe and comfy now, I promise.”
I have to actually take him by the arm and tug him over to the sofa in the adjoining family room. He comes, but he doesn’t sit down. The guilt runs deep.
I seriously think he blames himself for her falling off the roof.
“Climbing is just what cats do,” I assure him, as I already did so many times on the ride home. I’m not sure he fully heard me. “You won’t be able to stop her from climbing in the future.”
His eyebrows are all twisted together as he watches her lick her belly fur. “Maybe she’ll just be an indoor cat from now on. I have a large house.”
My god. I can literally see how loving he is.
He adores that cute little broken cat.
I’d be jealous, except it’s just so freaking beautiful.
I just wish he could see it.
But I’m distracted, too. I’m still processing that there really is no Darla. At least, no human Darla.
Which means that his ex-lover Darla, the woman I built up obsessively in my head, isn’t real. She never was.
I sit down on the sofa, watching him pace. “So… Geneviève Blaise. She’s not Darla, then?”
“She’s not my ex at all. She dated Jamie, not me.”
“Oh my god. You have no idea…”
He finally looks at me. “How mad you are that I lied to you?” he fills in.
“How relieved am I that you didn’t sleep with that woman,” I counter. “She’s beyond gorgeous! How can I compete with a freaking movie star?”
He stops pacing, and his eyes burn into me. “You don’t have to compete with anyone.”
Oh, wow . My insides turn to molten muck when he looks at me like that.
But if he thinks I’m letting him distract me with those bedroom eyes of his, fuck that.
“Were you ever planning to tell me that the cat is named Darla, though? If I hadn’t found out like this?”
“If you want the honest answer?—”
“Yes, please.”
“Then, no.” He frowns worriedly. “Probably not.”
I sigh. “Well, the cat’s out of the bag now, right? Can I please have the explanation that I’ve been waiting for? I am not going to be patient on this. And you’re killing me here.”
He sits down on the sofa, takes a deep breath, and says basically the last thing I’m prepared to hear.
“I thought I was having a baby once before.”
“Oh. Uh…”
“But I was wrong,” he adds quickly. “The woman’s name was Chelsea. She was my most serious girlfriend. I mean, maybe she was my only serious girlfriend. This was years ago. She became pregnant, but within twenty-four hours of me finding out, someone tipped off my brother Graysen that she was sleeping with her golf instructor. It turns out the baby was his.”
“Oh, god. Harlan. That’s awful.”
“I mean, it wasn’t fun. It didn’t really sell me on the idea of falling in love and living happily-ever-after. Chelsea and her golf instructor ended up there, but I ended up kind of shutting down. More than I already was. I don’t think I really loved her like she wanted me to. I didn’t want to fall in love.”
He pauses, looking at me almost guiltily, like he’s worried how I’ll take this. But I’m just so glad he’s letting me into something from his past. Something that feels true .
“And then,” he goes on, “things just got worse after she left me for that other guy. My family made such a giant deal out of the whole mess, wanting to talk about it all the time. They wanted me to talk about it, but I didn’t want to. I just wanted to move on.”
“I guess that’s understandable…” I’m trying to be supportive. And I can understand not wanting to dwell on such a thing, for sure. “But you have to talk about it sometime, with someone, right?”
He stares at me for a beat. “You sound just like Savannah.”
“She must be a wise woman.”
He kind of grumbles in agreement. At least, I think it’s agreement.
“Either way,” he continues, “my siblings definitely didn’t let the topic of my love life rest. They became nosy as hell, like I now needed their help or something. I guess their idea of supporting me in moving on was asking me at regular intervals if I was seeing anyone. Over and fucking over again. For a while, I just said no, whether I was or not. I just decided that I was never going to tell them yes. Because then they’d pry for more details. But after a few years, they weren’t really taking no for an answer anymore. They knew I was lying. And that just made them poke at me more.”
“I hate to say it,” I interject gently, “but I think they were just doing that because they care about you.”
“Incessantly prying into my personal business is caring?”
“I mean…” I blink at him. “Isn’t that what you do to me because you care, more or less?”
He glares at me. “Hardly,” he mutters, but I know he can see my point.
“Look. If I treated my girlfriends and my mom the way you just said you treated your siblings, whenever they asked if I was seeing anyone… I can tell you, they’d pry. They’d be concerned about me. And, as people who love me, they’d feel a right to know who I was dating.”
Harlan’s nostrils flare as he takes that in. I know he doesn’t like it.
But how can he argue my logic on this?
“This is what relationships are, Harlan. Sharing. Transparency. Building trust.”
His jaw does that crackling thing that tells me he doesn’t love what he’s hearing.
Too bad.
“So, what happened? After they figured out you were lying to them about not seeing anyone for like, years?” I prompt.
I watch his chest rise and fall as maybe he digs deep for what he’s about to say.
“I lied to them again.”
Color me not surprised.
“I see. How?”
“I made up a woman named Darla, who didn’t exist.”
And there it is. The truth.
Finally.
“And how did that come about? You were already in love with the cat, so it just made sense?” Okay, maybe I’m provoking him now, but come on.
I want the truth behind the truth. I want all of him. I want to know how that crazy, giant brain of his works, and why he does what he does.
I’m starving for his truth.
He glowers at me. “No, Quinn. I was not in love with the cat. I’d had a particularly annoying argument with Savannah about my personal life. I hated her prying, being all concerned about me. But I also hated to disappoint her or upset her. It was becoming a problem. So I did what I do whenever I have a problem. I looked for a solution. And that was the day I met the cat.”
He gazes over at the little black ball of fur, napping in her new bed, the leg with the cast poking out.
“She wandered onto my patio out of the shadows as I was sitting there, thinking. Then she just kept showing up, every day, for almost a week. I had Manus drive her to the vet, to see if she had a microchip and they could find her owners. It turned out she had a chip, and he told me the vet said her name was Darla. It wasn’t a conscious decision ahead of time, but the next time my sister asked about my love life, I told her I’d met someone named Darla.”
I shake my head a little. “Evil.”
“Maybe so. But it worked. From then on, whenever the subject of my love life came up, I told my siblings that I was ‘holding out for Darla.’ I guess it was just interesting enough for them to believe, and just vague enough that I could string them along for a while, keep them buying into the intrigue of it.”
He rubs his face like he’s exhausted.
“And they just kept buying into it? And you were okay with that?”
“It’s not like it made me happy, Quinn. But over time… I guess the myth of Darla became like a security blanket. I was able to keep the walls shut tight around myself, the way I wanted them. I know I shouldn’t have lied to them. It just seemed like a solution to the problem at the time.”
“But how was a lie like that going to hold, forever?”
“It probably wasn’t.”
“So, you were just going to keep telling it, until it became another problem to solve?”
“Yes,” he says, like this is perfectly reasonable.
I guess if you’re him, it seems reasonable somehow.
I’m really trying to understand this.
“Well, I think it goes without saying that I don’t think it’s a great idea to lie to your siblings about something like that. But it seems like you did it because at the end of the day, you just didn’t want to disappoint them.”
“You don’t have to sugarcoat it,” he says.
I frown. “They wanted to know you were okay, and maybe that you would end up in a good relationship one day. I get that. But you wanted privacy and they wouldn’t respect that. And maybe you just wanted them to think you were okay… even if you weren’t.”
He stares at me for a long moment, and I can tell I’m right about that.
“I know how I dealt with it was wrong,” he says quietly. “I never actually thought it was right.” He shifts closer to me. “But I hope being honest with you about this now is the right move. I don’t want to lose you because of something like this.” He looks into my eyes. “I did warn you that I’m a liar.”
Ugh. Those eyes of his.
I used to see them as switchblades. Now I see them for what they are; a beautiful gateway into fathomless depths from which I may never escape.
The way he looks at me makes me weak.
I take a deep breath, and a moment to collect my thoughts.
“But you didn’t just lie to them about one thing, Harlan. You also asked me to lie to your family for you, to pretend to be Darla. Actually, you forced me to. With blackmail. Why?”
“Because, like I told you back then,” he says simply, “they wanted me to introduce them to Darla.”
“But you didn’t. Are you ever going to?”
“I can’t. Because there is no Darla. Then they’d know I lied.” He takes my hands in his and looks deep into my eyes. “You can’t tell them, either, Quinn. I’m telling you all this in confidence. I’m trusting you.”
With those words, I can feel the wall he’s still got up between us. This whole confession about Darla, the cat, and the lies he told his siblings might seem like he’s letting me in, but suddenly, it doesn’t feel like it.
“But why can’t you just tell them the truth now?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. You know the truth.”
“I don’t, though. You told me why you lied to them. But you haven’t told me why they suddenly wanted to meet Darla.”
He hesitates, and I know he’s holding something back, for sure. “I can’t tell you the reason. What does it matter?”
“Because, Harlan. All of this… these lies you tell your siblings, and whatever it is you’re keeping from me… You’re still lying.”
He’s still lying to me , and our baby is coming in six months. How much more time do we have to get this right?
To become a real family? One that doesn’t keep secrets from one another?
A family that’s built on a solid foundation of trust.
The kind of family me and this baby need.
“I’m being honest with you,” he says. “Right now.”
“So, you’re being honest with me, but you still won’t ever introduce me to your family as Quinn? Just Quinn? Not Quinn-who-we-also-know-as-Darla?”
He takes a breath. Exhales. “I can’t tell them that Darla doesn’t exist, Quinn. Darla has to be someone .”
Fuck me. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
What I’m still hearing.
I get to my feet. I tell him, “Then introduce them to the damn cat, Harlan.” I’m so exasperated, I don’t even know if I’m more frustrated or hurt. “Can’t you see that the solution to your problem is literally staring you in the face?”
He stares at me for a long moment.
Then he looks over at the cat. She’s awake now, like she knows we’ve been talking about her.
She stretches a little, and her green eyes meet Harlan’s.
Then he looks up at me again. And for the first time, I see true fear in his eyes. “What if I can’t?”
I sigh, my heart aching, for both of us. “You can trust me, Harlan. But I just don’t think we have a hope in hell as a couple if that only goes one way.”