He hasn’t tried to call again since this morning. After my mom and I came back to the lake house, I listened to the messages he left on my phone. I’d been dreading that I’d hear a lot of empty promises and apologies, or arguments that I had overreacted the other night. Instead Nick’s messages were brief, succinct.
I miss you.
I love you.
Please call me.
I’ve started to dial his number more than once, ultimately deciding that whatever we needed to say to each other is too consequential to take place on a phone call.
And if I’m being totally honest with myself, I’m terrified that the next time I talk to him might be the last—that after coming together based on lies and deception, we may never be able to find our way to a place of truth.
My mother sighs, hooking a strand of my loose hair behind my ear as I pick up the knife and start taking out my frustrations on a handful of multi-colored heirloom tomatoes. “Well, you know your own heart, honey. Just know that I’m always going to be here for you.”
“I know, Momma.” I glance at her and smile. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, baby.”
She goes back to the sink while I finish up the salad preparation and stow everything in the refrigerator. I’ve just put away the last bowl of vegetables when the front doorbell rings.
“Oh, that’s probably my new neighbor,” she says, setting down the pot she’s washing. “I let her borrow my weed whacker last week and she keeps promising to bring it back.”
Shaking off her wet hands, she reaches for the towel draped through a cabinet pull.
“That’s okay, Mom. I’ll get the door.”
I head through the small house to the screen door out front. My feet stop abruptly, and for a second I just stand there, frozen in place.
It’s not Mom’s neighbor.
It’s Nick standing on the shaded stoop of my grandparents’ old house. Despite the heat, he’s dressed in jeans and a navy T-shirt that only sets off the bright cerulean color of his eyes. Eyes that are fixed on me with breathtaking intensity from the other side of the flimsy wood-framed screen door.
“Hi,” he says.
Just one word. A single syllable that releases an entire wave of emotion inside me.
I swallow, searching for my voice. “What are you doing here?”
I don’t mean for it to sound so unwelcome. I see the flicker of doubt in his gaze. I see it in the way he doesn’t move at all, standing rigidly in front of me, his hands held down at his sides.
I take a breath and try again. “Isn’t the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the recreation center happening today?”
“It was. I postponed it.”
I stare at him. “You postponed it . . . to come here?”
“I need to talk to you, Avery. I need—” He breaks off abruptly and rakes his hand over his scalp. “Ah, Christ. I just . . . needed to see you. Everything else can wait.”
Even the rec center, the dream he’s nurtured from concept to completion.
Could he actually mean that? The fact that he’s standing here leaves little room for doubt.
“Nick, you shouldn’t have done that. The rec center—”
“It will wait,” he insists. “As for things I shouldn’t have done, that’s a long list. I hoped we could talk about it.”
“Avery, is everything okay?” My mom steps beside me, cautious when she realizes it’s a man waiting outside.
“Mom, this is Nick.”
“Oh. Hello.” She scrutinizes him, her arm coming up around me as if to let me know I don’t have to face him alone if I’m not ready to.
“Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Ross.” Nick gives her a subtle nod of greeting, and I notice that he chooses to refer to her by my father’s last name instead of Coyle, that of the unworthy monster she made the mistake of marrying after Daddy died. “I just drove up from New York. I was hoping I could speak to your daughter for a while.”
“It’s not me you need to ask.” Her frank response makes his mouth quirk in just the barest smile.
“Yes, ma’am,” he agrees. He glances back at me and I can see the hope in his eyes. I can see the fear in them too. “Avery, will you let me talk to you? Please.”
I reach for the cool metal latch of the screen door. “Let’s go for a walk.”
We end up at the lake on the wooden dock in back of the house. I’m not surprised my feet guide me there; I often did some of my clearest thinking sitting on the end of the long plank walkway with my toes dangling in the cold, dark water. I do that now, stepping out of my flip-flops and sinking down onto the sun-bleached wood.
Nick follows my lead, toeing off his Gucci loafers and cuffing the legs of his jeans before seating himself next to me. “You look a lot like your mom.”
I nod. “Everyone used to say that. She was so much prettier, though. She looked like an angel in the wedding pictures I have of her and my dad.”
“I’m sure she did.” Nick stares out at the water, a small, private smile curving his lips. “Is this the lake you used to visit with your grandfather?”
“This is it.” I mentioned the lake to him only once, sharing with him how I used to enjoy spending time on the water with Grandpa on his little sailboat. It’s surreal to be sitting next to Nick on this dock now, even if our reasons for being out here are less than ideal.
“I can see why this place is special to you. It’s so peaceful out here.”
I sigh, looking out over the glistening ripples that spread out before us. “No matter how hard things got for Mom and me, when we’d come out here to the lake it seemed like nothing bad could touch us. I never felt safer than when I was right here on my grandparents’ dock.”
“That’s something I never had growing up.”
His quiet admission draws my gaze to him. “You weren’t close with your grandparents?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs, staring straight ahead yet at nothing in particular. “My mom’s parents were from up north. They had money, from what I understand. They didn’t approve of her marriage to my dad, but she was already pregnant with me so there wasn’t much they could say about it. Mom told me they cut her off soon after she informed them I was on the way.”
“What an awful thing for them to do. I’m sorry, Nick.”
“No loss, since I never met them. Never even saw their faces.”
He says it nonchalantly, but I can’t imagine what it’s like for a child trying to understand why his own blood would want nothing to do with him sight unseen. “And what about your dad? Did you at least know his parents?”
It takes him a moment to answer, as if he’s searching for the right words. “When I was still a baby, my grandmother put a shotgun under her chin and pulled the trigger. As for my old man’s father, he was a violent drunk so I did my best to steer clear of the bastard.”
I close my eyes, trying to hold back my horror at the grim picture he’s painted. I didn’t mean for our conversation to stray into this awful territory, but it’s the first time Nick has ever opened up to me about the people in his early life or the way he grew up.
“But you did have the water,” I remind him gently.
When Nick took me to Miami last year and we spent several days aboard his beautiful sailboat, Icarus, he told me that he practically grew up on the ocean. Now I wonder if the water was more of an escape to him than a safe harbor like it had been for me.
“I sailed to get away from the life I had on land,” he says, confirming my suspicions. “My father was a fisherman. So was his father before him. All the Baine men for several generations made their living off the swamps and inlets of the Keys.”
“But not you?”
“Not me. The old man wouldn’t even teach me how to hold a fishing rod.” He laughs humorlessly. “He pretty much hated me from the day I was born.”
I wince to hear it, my heart refusing to believe Nick could be right. “Why would you think tha
t?”
“He made it clear enough, believe me. He disapproved of everything I did. Ridiculed me constantly about being too weak, too useless to go out on the boat with him. Called me a sissy because I liked to draw and paint like my mother. Fortunately, he wasn’t home much. When most of the good fishing dried up he opened a swamp boat charter and made his living off tourists.”
“Your father couldn’t have been more wrong about you, Nick. You’re the strongest man I know—in every way that matters. There’s nothing useless about you.”
He gives me a faint, wry smile. “I guess I should thank the bastard for driving me to make something of myself. Baine International is the ultimate fuck you to that sadistic son of a bitch.”
I reach up and stroke the back of his head. It’s the first time I’ve touched him since he’s been here, and while I’m not sure we’ll find our way back to the place our relationship needs to be, right now I want Nick to know that I care. That I believe in him and always will.
And as much as it hurts me to hear about his father’s unconscionable treatment of him, I can’t help but latch on to the one ray of light amid all of the bleakness he’s described. “Your mom . . . she was an artist too?”
“Not professionally. She gave that dream up when she married my old man. But yes, she was incredibly gifted.”
“You’ve never mentioned her before.”
“No.”
“Why not, Nick?” I’m terrified that he’s going to tell me that she treated him hideously too. But I have to know. “Was she as cruel as your father?”
“God, no. She was as kind as she was beautiful and gifted. She was the only good thing I had in my life.”
My relief leaks out of me on a deep exhalation. “Then I don’t understand. How could she allow your father to treat you that way?”
“She didn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t want her to think I was weak and useless too.” He glances away from me again, his gaze retreating back to the large expanse of the lake. “And then, when I was ten years old she got cancer. The doctors said she could beat it, but nothing worked. None of the painful chemo treatments. None of the medicines that made her vomit and writhe as if her insides were being ripped out.” He exhales heavily, then hisses a low curse. “I sat at her bedside every day for seven months, the last few spent at the hospital. I watched her die in agony, felt her slipping away a breath at a time those last few weeks.”
“Oh, Nick.” I take his hand in mine. The raised spider webs of scars are smooth beneath my touch as I gently rub my thumb over the back of his hand. “That’s why you’ve seemed so uncomfortable around Kathryn at her house. And at the hospital. I’m sorry if all of that brought back uncomfortable memories.”
He lifts his shoulder. “I haven’t stepped foot in a hospital since my mother died—other than the emergency room I was ambulanced into the night my father sent me through that window eight years later.”
“Where is your father now?”
He slants me a sardonic look. “We haven’t kept in touch.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I wouldn’t give a damn either way.”
He shakes his head, going somewhere distant now in his mind. I can see the way his gaze detaches from me. He’s sitting beside me, but I feel him starting to drift out of my reach again.
I have to wonder how much of the unreachable, tormented man I saw the other night was shaped by everything Nick went through as a child.
A truly awful thought begins to take shape in my mind as I look at him and process all he’s said about the violence and degradation he suffered at his father’s hands.
What if the abuse went further than mental and physical? My stomach roils at the idea because I’ve been there too. Without my mother to protect me, I doubt I would have survived.
And from what he has just described, he had no one after his mother died. Not a single person in his family whom he could turn to.
“Nick, that night you fought with your father eight years ago . . . how did it start?”
He shrugs, too quickly, I think. “I don’t remember. We were both drunk. Started saying things neither one of us wanted to hear.”
I recall the few details he’s told me about the confrontation that almost cost him his right hand if not half his arm. Whatever words were said were volatile enough for his father to nearly kill Nick in his rage.
“You told me once that your father knocked you through that window because he wanted to shut you up,” I remind him quietly. “What was it that he didn’t want to hear?”
“I don’t know. Something stupid, probably.” Nick draws his hand out of my loose grasp. He takes in a long breath, then lets it gust out of him sharply. “I don’t remember much about that night. It’s not important anymore.”
He’s lying to me. I accept it without feeling stung, but I am troubled by what telling this lie is doing to him. I can feel the edge of desperation in it. He’s keeping a secret and it’s eating him alive.
A chill sweeps over me because I’m terrified that I know what it is. I’ve survived something equally abhorrent too.
I don’t want to push him to say words he’s not ready to speak, but I can’t let him think he’s alone anymore. I need him to understand that I’m someone he can turn to now. I always will be.
“Nick, did your father ever . . .”
On a curse, he swings a wild, repulsed look on me. “No. Never. Jesus Christ, he was an asshole but he never touched me. Not like that.”
Thank God. My chest feels tight and I realize I’d been holding my breath waiting for his answer. I look for some hint that he’s not being truthful, but all I see in his face is outrage that I would even think such a thing.
Maybe my sense was wrong about the nature of his abuse by his father, but I’m still not convinced that he doesn’t remember every detail about the night he and his father nearly killed each other.
“I’m sorry, Nick. I just . . . I had to ask.”
“I know.” His expression relaxes into something tender, all of his attention focused on me. He cups my face in his palms. “Every time I think of what your stepfather did to you, Avery, I wish I had been the one to end him. I would’ve made him suffer a hell of a lot more than you or your mother did.”
I nod, knowing he means it. “What happened to me is over. I came through it. My mom came through it too. A lot of the reason I can say that now is you, Nick.”
“Even after the other night?” He brushes the pad of his thumb across my lips. “I don’t have any excuses, Avery. You said no and that should’ve been enough.”
“You told me once that I’d never need a safe word with you.”
“And you don’t. You won’t, not ever again.” His curse is soft but vivid. “What I did was wrong. I failed you. Christ, I scared you.”
I shake my head. “I wasn’t afraid. I was disappointed.”
His gaze drops to my mouth as if he wants to kiss me but won’t permit himself to do anything more than simply hold on to me. “I hate that I lost control the way I did. With the alcohol and with you.”
“It seemed to me that you needed that control. And I don’t think it had anything to do with the whisky you were drinking.”
He absorbs my words for a long moment, so long I’m not even sure he’s going to respond. When he does, his deep voice has a tremor to it, as if his emotions are almost too much for him to contain. “Do you have any idea how much I love you, Avery? I’ve never felt this close to a woman before—not to anyone. I need you. I can’t function when you’re not with me. And that scares the living fuck out of me.”
He draws me closer, holding my face as if I’m made of glass yet looking at me with a raw ferocity that shocks me. All the things he says he feels, I feel for him too.
“After Paris, I felt what it was like to lose you, Avery. Now that you’re here with me again, I’m scared to fucking death that you’re going to slip away from me.”
My smile wavers on my lips. “So inste
ad you push me away like you did the other night?”
“I’m sorry.” He strokes my cheek, then tunnels one hand into my hair, his palm at my nape. “I’m so sorry for the way I treated you, the things I said. I didn’t mean them. I can’t offer excuses. I can only promise you that it will never happen again.”
I close my eyes, wanting to believe him. Needing to believe he can keep that promise.
“All the things you said you needed from me,” he whispers fiercely. “Those are the things I want too. I just don’t know how to ask for them. I’m not sure I know how to give them. But I want to try.”
“I have to see those words in action, Nick.” I swallow past the thickness in my throat. “Giving you that chance might require more trust than I have to give you right now.”
He nods solemnly. “What can I do to prove it to you?”
“This is a start. You coming here was a start.”
A look of relief fills his handsome face. “After you ignored all of my calls, I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to listen.”
“And you came anyway?”
“There isn’t anywhere else I want to be.” He caresses my cheek, a barely restrained yearning in his brilliant blue eyes. “Would it be all right if I kissed you now, Ms. Ross?”
My heart is so full and hopeful, I can’t hold back my smile. “I’ll be disappointed if you don’t, Mr. Baine.”
Chapter 20
After staying for dinner and apple dumplings with me and my mom, Nick spent the night on the worn-out plaid sofa in the living room.
It’s too soon to know if our talk will be the lasting balm our relationship needed, but in the three days since we’ve been back in the city, Nick and I have been practically inseparable. True to his word, he’s giving me all that I asked of him—more, in fact.
I’ve never felt so cherished, so adored. He’s been tender and attentive every hour we’re together, careful to give me no reason to doubt him. Making love he’s been infinitely patient, allowing me to set our pace, even when the heat between us is at its hottest. Even when I can tell how much it’s costing him to surrender the control he has so often wielded as a weapon—and a shield.