Chapter 8
For two days after Adaline's visit, Solange tried to be a sensible woman.
She told herself the forged text changed nothing. She told herself a man could be innocent of one cruelty and guilty of a hundred others. She told herself she had a son to protect, a shop to save, and absolutely no business letting a crack in an old wall become a door.
It did not work. Because every time she closed her eyes she heard him on the site, lost and raw, saying I never sent you anything, and now she knew it was true, and the not-knowing-what-else-was-true was unbearable.
Eight years of clean, simple hatred had been the load-bearing wall of her whole life, and Adaline had knocked it out with one smug sentence, and Solange could not live in the rubble one more night without going to the man at the center of it.
She knew it was reckless. She knew she still did not have the whole truth, that the woman who had forged that text was Ronan's own mother and that nothing about this family was safe.
She knew, too, that she was a newly single woman with a heart still raw from ending things with a good man, and that the sensible move was to wait, to think, to stay guarded until she understood the shape of what had been done to her.
She was done being sensible. She had been sensible for years and it had cost her everything but Josiah.
So when Bria took Josiah and Zaria for the night, the two cousins thick as thieves over a pillow fort, Solange did not go home to her empty house.
She went to the inn.
*****
He opened the door in a white T-shirt and bare feet, his black hair loose for once around his shoulders, and the surprise on his face when he saw her was the most honest thing she had seen from him since he came back to town.
"Solange."
"I'm not here about the lease," she said, throwing his own words back at him, and her voice was not steady at all.
"I know."
"I'm not even sure why I'm here."
"I know that too." He stood back from the door. He did not reach for her. He let her decide, and that, in the end, was the thing that undid her. Because the cold billionaire would have pushed, and the man in the doorway just waited.
She stepped inside, and he closed the door, and for a moment they stood in the lamplit room with eight years and a hundred unsaid things between them.
Then she crossed the space and kissed him, and the time lost went up like dry grass.
*****
There was nothing slow about it this time.
The first kiss broke something loose in both of them, years of held breath let go at once, his hands came up into her hair, hers fisted in his shirt, and they were not careful, not tender, not anything but starving.
He made a low sound against her mouth, half her name and half a groan, and walked her backward until her shoulders hit the wall hard enough to rattle the framed print beside them, neither of them cared.
The whole hard length of him pressed her into the plaster, and she gasped and hauled him closer by his belt.
"Tell me to stop," he said against her throat, even as he was shoving her sweater up over her ribs. "Say it now, because in a second I won't be able to."
"Don't you dare." She got his shirt over his head, flattened her hands on his bare chest, and pushed him back just far enough to look at him, both of them breathing like they had run somewhere.
Then they were on each other again, and it was not graceful.
Her sweater snagged on her earring and they had to stop, swearing to work it loose.
His hands shook too badly to manage the clasp of her bra, so she reached back and did it herself.
He knocked the lamp with his elbow and did not look to see where it went.
Eight years of wanting did not make a man smooth; it made him clumsy, greedy and human, and Solange, who had braced herself for the practiced billionaire, found the marina boy underneath instead, completely undone, and that was what finally burned away the last of her caution.
He got his mouth on her breasts, open, hot and not gentle, dragging his thumb firmly across one nipple while his teeth grazed the other, she swore and arched into it.
He had one hand shoved down the front of her jeans, and when his fingers found how wet she already was he groaned against her sternum like it cost him something.
"Bed," he managed. It was the only word either of them spared, and it came out as a plea rather than an order, she answered it by walking him backward toward it with two fistfuls of his open jeans.
They half-fell onto the mattress, the last of their clothes kicked off in a heap, and then came the small unglamorous human pause of the whole thing, Ronan climbed on top of her swearing softly while he dug through the nightstand drawer, the foil, the impatient half-second of rolling it on with hands that still were not steady.
She wanted him so badly she could barely think.
Then he settled between her thighs, the blunt head of his cock pressing where she was open and aching, and he went still, looked at her, and the frenzy cracked open for one second into something that hurt.
"I told myself I hated you for years," he said, low and wrecked. "And I dreamed about this the whole time. I never once stopped."
"Then stop talking," she breathed, and lifted her hips, and took him in.
He pushed into her in one long unsteady slide, and they both made a broken sound at the joining of it.
Then he moved, and there was nothing careful in it now, none of the patient worship of a boy with a whole summer to spend; this was a grown man making up for stolen time, deep, hard and half-desperate, his forehead dropped to hers, her name dragged out of him ragged on every thrust.
It built too fast for both of them, and neither of them cared about that either.
She felt it gathering low and tight, and she pushed her own hand down between their bodies and worked herself in tight circles where they were joined, chasing it, and the sight of her hand there finished him as surely as it finished her.
She went first, clenching hard around him with a startled cry punched out of her, her heels digging into the backs of his thighs.
He lasted only a few more rough strokes before he buried himself deep and broke, his face shoved into her shoulder, her name bitten off against her skin, his whole body locking tight and then going loose all at once.
For a long moment afterward neither of them moved.
He held himself over her, breathing hard, then gathered her in and rolled them so she lay sprawled across his chest. His heart was slamming under her ear, his hand moved slow and wondering up and down her bare back, and the shadow neither of them had spoken stretched long over the lamplit room.
He had not said he believed her. She had not said what she now knew.
They had let their bodies say the things their mouths were still too frightened to, and it had been everything, but settled nothing at all.
"I should hate myself for this," she murmured. "And I can't find it anywhere."
"Then don't go looking," he said, and pressed his lips to the crown of her curls.
*****
It was later, drowsy and unguarded in the dark, that the whole book turned over.
He was talking. He almost never talked, she would learn, but here in the warm wreck of the bed with her weight on his chest, Ronan talked, low and half-asleep, the armor all the way off. He talked about that summer.
"I think about it more than I'd ever admit," he said, his fingers trailing through her hair.
"That summer. It was the only time in my life I ever felt like a person instead of a name.
And then it just ended." A pause. "You were gone.
They told me you took the money and went, and I believed it because the alternative didn't make sense.
That you'd just leave. The you I knew wouldn't have.
" His chest rose and fell under her. "I think that's why I came back here.
Some part of me never closed the account. "
"What do you remember?" she asked into the dark. "About that summer."
"Everything." He huffed a soft laugh. "The marina.
The smell of the place. The way you used to draw the boats with that little frown.
The Point at the end of the Breakwater, the lighthouse going round.
Dancing to that god-awful song they played all summer.
" His hand moved lazily in her hair. "I remember being twenty-four and broke and happier than any amount of money has ever made me since.
I remember thinking I was finally going to get an ordinary life.
" A pause, softer. "And then it was over and I never understood why. "
Solange lay against him, and a cold dread began to gather in her, because she was listening to the shape of what he said, and there were holes in it.
Enormous holes. He talked about the summer, the marina, The Point, the way they fit.
He did not mention the night she had told him she was pregnant.
He did not mention the vow he had made her there, lifting her off her feet.
And he did not mention the drive he had sworn to make and never finished.
He talked about The Point as if it were only a place they had been happy, not the place where he had promised her the rest of his life.
There was no baby anywhere in his version of that summer.
None. As though it had never happened at all.
He had no idea there had ever been a baby.
The realization went through her like cold water, and she had not even finished absorbing it when he said the next thing, lightly, almost as a side note, his voice already thick with sleep.
"It's strange, actually. The very end of that summer, I don't really have. After the accident, there's a couple of days that are just gone. I never got them back."
Solange went rigid against his chest.
"What accident?" she whispered.
"The car," he said. "Right after I left here.
Coast road, in the rain. Truck came round wide and threw me into the rocks.
I was in a bad way for a while, skull fracture, the works.
Nearly didn't make it. When I came round, a couple of days were missing and they never came back.
The doctors said that's normal, with that kind of head injury.
You lose the time around it." His hand had gone still in her hair; he was nearly under.
"I woke up to find out you'd taken the money and gone.
Felt like the universe just confirming what kind of luck I had. "
He drifted off mid-sentence, his breathing going deep and even beneath her.
For one wild, vertiginous moment, Solange almost shook him awake.
The truth was right there, swollen in her throat, enormous: there was a baby, Ronan, there is a boy, he is seven, he drew you a sloop on the wharf and you fixed his rigging and you never knew you were looking at your own son.
She could end eight years of lies in a single sentence. Her mouth actually opened.
And then every ounce of fear she had carried for years closed it again.
Not like this. Not whispered into the dark to a half-asleep man before she even understood the severity of what had been done to them, before she knew whether the family that had erased her once could be stopped from coming after her son.
A truth this size could not be dropped. It had to be set down in the daylight, where she could watch his face and protect her son.
So she held it. She lay back down against his chest and held it.
Solange could not move. She lay on the chest of the sleeping man while the scattered pieces of the last eight years rose up and slammed together into a single picture, whole, terrible and unbearable.
There had been a crash. She had never known.
She had pictured him driving away whole and choosing his money, and instead he had been bleeding out on a wet road the very night he swore he'd come back to her.
The last two days of that summer were gone from him, surgically, brutally erased, the night she told him about the baby, the vow he made, the drive that nearly killed him, all of it, gone.
He did not remember the baby because the memory of it had been taken from him.
He did not know. He had never known. He had not chosen money over them. He had not chosen anything. He had been lied to as savagely as she had by his very own mother.
And the worst of it, the thing that made her eyes spill over silently in the dark so as not to wake him, was that eight years of clean hatred had just been taken from her too.
She had needed to hate him. Hating him had let her get out of bed.
Hating him had let her tell Josiah his father simply did not want him, which was a cruelty but at least a finished one.
Now even that was gone. The man underneath her grieved her on a lie, the same way she had grieved him on one, and they had wasted almost a decade hating each other for a crime that neither of them had committed.
The tenderness that rose up in her where the hatred had been was almost worse than the hatred.
It had nowhere to go and nothing to do but ache.
Solange lay awake in the dark with the steady heartbeat of the man she had hated for so long beneath her cheek, holding the largest, most terrible truth of her life entirely alone.
Ronan Rourke had a seven-year-old son.
He had no idea Josiah existed.
And she was the only person left alive who could tell him.