Chapter Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIX
JO sat in simmering silence as Nathan drove the Jeep hissing across Shell Road.
She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of leaping out of a moving vehicle, or of running away once he stopped it.
She would simply tear his skin into bloody shreds when they were no longer in danger of running off the road.
“This isn’t the way I wanted to go about this,” Nathan muttered. “I need to talk to you. It’s important. A hell of a time you pick to pull some lame female cold-shoulder routine.”
Ignoring her low, purring sound of warning, he dug a deeper hole for himself.
“I don’t mind a fight. Under any reasonable circumstances I don’t mind a good kick-ass fight.
Clears the air. But these aren’t reasonable circumstances, and you having your nose out of joint is only complicating an already painful situation. ”
“So it’s my fault.” She sucked in her breath as he jerked the Jeep to a halt at the cottage. “This is my fault?”
“It’s not a matter of fault, Jo. That’s the whole—” He broke off abruptly, too busy defending himself to bother with more words.
She didn’t go at him with teeth and nails and heated accusations. She waded in with balled-up fists, and the first several blew right past his guard.
“Jesus! Jesus Christ!” He wished he could laugh at them. He wished to God he could just drag her close, pin those surprisingly well-toned arms with his and just howl at the pair of them.
He tasted blood in his mouth, wasn’t entirely sure his jaw wouldn’t turn out to be broken, and finally managed to hold her down on the seat while both of them panted for breath.
“Would you stop it? Would you pull out some modicum of control and stop trying to beat my brains—which I’m assured are in perfect working order—to a bloody pulp?” He tightened his grip, shifting fast as she tried to bring her knee up and render him helpless. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Well, that’s too bad because I want to hurt you. I want to send you off limping for treating me this way.”
“I’m sorry.” He lowered his brow to hers and tried to catch his breath. “I’m sorry, Jo.”
She refused to soften, refused to acknowledge the little trip her heart experienced at the utter despair in his voice. “You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.”
“For more than you know.” He eased back, met her eyes. “Please come inside. I have things to tell you. Things I wish I didn’t have to tell you. After I do, you can beat me black and blue and I won’t lift a hand to stop you. I swear it.”
Something was wrong, horribly wrong. The anger dropped away into fear. She kept her voice cool before her imagination ran wild. “That’s quite an arrangement. I’ll come in, and you can say what you have to say. Then we’re finished, Nathan.”
She shoved him away and pushed open her car door. “Because nobody walks away from me,” she said in a low, vibrant voice. “Nobody ever again.”
His heart sank, but he led the way inside, switched on the lights. “I’d like you to sit down.”
“I don’t need to sit down, and what you’d like doesn’t interest me.
How could you go that way?” Even as she rounded on him, she wrapped her arms around herself in defense.
“How could you leave my bed and just go, without a word? And stay away when you had to know how it would make me feel. If you were tired of me, you still could have been kind.”
“Tired of you? Sweet Jesus, Jo, there hasn’t been a minute of the past eight days that I haven’t thought of you, wanted you.”
“Do you think I’m stupid enough, or needy enough, to believe that kind of lie? If you’d thought of me, wanted me, you couldn’t have turned your back on me as if none of it mattered. Had ever mattered.”
“If it hadn’t mattered, didn’t matter more than anything else in my life, I could have stayed. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You hurt me, you humiliated me, you—”
“I love you.”
She jerked back as if to avoid a blow. “You expect my knees to go weak now? You think you can say that and make me run into your arms?”
“No. I wouldn’t love you if you couldn’t stand there and spit at me after I’d said it.
” He walked to her, gave in to the need to touch her.
Just a brush of his fingertips over her shoulders.
“And I do love you, Jo Ellen. Maybe I always did. Maybe that seven-year-old girl ruined me for anyone else. I don’t know.
But I need you to believe me. I need to say it, and I need you to believe it before I start the rest.”
She stared into his eyes, and now her knees did start to tremble. “You do mean it.”
“Enough to put my past, present, and future in your hands.” He took hers in his for a moment, studied them, memorized them, then let them go. “I went back to New York. There’s a friend of the family, a doctor. A neurologist. I wanted him to run some tests on me.”
“Tests?” Baffled, she pushed at her hair. “What kind of—Oh, my God.” It struck her like a fist, hard in the heart. “You’re sick. A neurologist? What is it? A tumor.” Her blood shivered to ice in her veins. “But you can have treatment. You can—”
“I’m not sick, Jo. There’s no tumor, there’s nothing wrong with me. But I had to be sure.”
“There’s nothing wrong?” She folded her arms again, hugged them to her body. “I don’t understand. You went back to New York to have tests run on your brain when there’s nothing wrong with you?”
“I said I needed to be sure. Because I thought I might have had blackouts or been sleepwalking or had fugues. And have maybe killed Susan Peters.”
She lowered herself gingerly, bracing a hand on the back of the chair as she sat on the arm. She never took her eyes off his. “Why would you think such a crazy thing?”
“Because she was strangled here on the island. Because her body was hidden. Because her husband, her family, her friends, might have gone the rest of their lives not knowing what had happened.”
“Stop it.” She couldn’t get her breath, had to fight back the urge to clap her hands over her ears. Her heart was beating too fast, making her head spin, her skin damp. She knew the signs, the panic waiting slyly to spring. “I don’t want to hear any more of this.”
“I don’t want to tell you any more. But neither one of us has a choice.” He braced himself not only to face it but to face her. “My father killed your mother.”
“That’s insane, Nathan.” She willed herself to get up and run, but she couldn’t move. “And it’s cruel.”
“It’s both. And it’s also the truth. Twenty years ago, my father took your mother’s life.”
“No. Your father—Mr. David—was kind, he was a friend. This is crazy talk. My mother left.” Her voice shuddered and broke, then rose. “She just left.”
“She never left Desire. He . . . he put her body in the marsh. Buried her in the salt marsh.”
“Why are you saying this? Why are you doing this?”
“Because it’s the truth, and I’ve avoided it too long already.” Nathan forced himself to say the rest, to finish it while she shut her eyes and shook her head fiercely. “He planned it from the minute he saw her, when we arrived that summer.”
“No. No, stop this.”
“I can’t stop what’s already happened. He kept a journal and . . . evidence in a safe-deposit box. I found it all after he and my mother died.”
“You found it.” Tears leaked through her lashes as she wrapped her arms tight around her body and rocked. “You came back here.”
“I came back here to face it, to try to remember what that summer had been like. What he had been like ... then. And to try to decide whether to leave it all buried or to tell your family what my family had done.”
The familiar flood of sick panic rushed through her, roared in her head, raced through her blood.
“You knew. You knew all along, and you came back here. You took me to bed knowing.” Nausea made her dizzy as she surged to her feet.
“You were inside me.” Rage sliced through her an instant before her hand cracked across his cheek.
“I let you inside me.” She slapped him again, viciously.
He neither defended himself nor evaded the blows. “Do you know how that makes me feel?”
He’d known she would look at him just like this, with hate and disgust, even fear. He had no choice but to accept it. “I didn’t face it. My father . . . he was my father.”
“He killed her, he took her away from us. And all these years ...”
“Jo, I didn’t know until after he’d died. I’ve been trying to come to grips with it for months. I know what you’re going through now—”
“You can’t know.” She flung the words out.
She wanted to hurt him, to scar him, to make him suffer.
“I can’t stay here. I can’t look at you.
Don’t!” She jerked back, hands fisted when he reached out.
“Don’t put your hands on me. I could kill you for ever putting them on me.
You bastard, you stay away from me and my family. ”
When she ran, Nathan didn’t try to stop her. He couldn’t. But he followed her erratic dash, keeping her in sight. If he could do nothing else, he would make certain she arrived safe at Sanctuary.
But it wasn’t to Sanctuary that she fled.
* * *
SHE couldn’t go home. Couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t get her breath, couldn’t clear her vision. Part of her wanted to simply fall to the ground, curl up and scream until her mind and body were empty of grief. But she was terrified that she’d never find the strength to get up again.
So she ran, without thought of destination, through the trees, through the dark, with images flipping hideously through her head.
The photograph of her mother, coming to life. The eyes opening. Confusion, fear, pain. The mouth stretching wide for a scream.
Pain stabbed into Jo’s side like a knife. She gripped it, whimpering, and kept running.
On the sand now, with the ocean crashing. Her breath heaved out of her lungs. She fell once, hitting hard on her hands and knees, only to scramble up and stumble back into a run. She only knew she had to get away, to run away from the pain and this horribly tearing sorrow.