A Child Of His Own, page 15
Taking it as self-reproach, Dory groaned inwardly, fearing the worst, that he was angry at himself for the weakness that had led him to make love to her.
“Ben, I understand if you’re sorry it happened.” She blushed deeply and lowered her lashes, unable to look him in the eyes as her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “You know, making love.”
“Is that what you think? That I’m sorry it happened?”
Her gaze returned to his, confused and questioning. “I thought that’s what you’re angry about, that you regret it.”
“Regret making love to you? God, no. Dory, I’ve never experienced anything like last night. You were incredible, so loving and giving. You made me feel whole, like the part of me that had been missing before last night was suddenly restored. I want you, more than I’ve ever wanted any woman. I’d be a liar to deny it. But I don’t deserve you. Not when I’ve been less than truthful with you.”
“Less than truthful about what?”
Last night he had felt closer to her than he had ever felt to any other human being. Yet as much as he wanted to say it, the words stuck like glue to his tongue. He thought again about the courage it had taken for her to reveal her painful secrets and regrets, and drawing in a ragged breath, he said in a low, plaintive voice, “There’s something I must tell you.”
Dory’s whole body went rigid with fear. “Th-there’s more? About Jason?”
“No, it’s not about Jason. It’s about me. It’s about my past.”
“You were an architect. You made a lot of money. You lived in Manhattan. You had a bad divorce.”
She recited aloud the facts she knew about his past, while inwardly her thoughts collided. What could it be? What could be so terrible that it put that look of fear in his dark eyes and the tremor in his voice?
He placed the hammer down, picked up his shirt and put it on, then went to sit on the edge of the carousel. He glanced around at the horses on either side of him. This was the very spot where Dory had revealed her secret pain to him late last night. Sitting there in the bright light of day, Ben knew that he could not feel the things he felt for her and not be totally honest with her. His own moment of truth had arrived.
Chapter 13
Then atmosphere was filled with a charged silence as Ben grappled with the words.
Taking in a deep breath, he let it out slowly through pursed lips and said solemnly, “Nothing gets better when you keep it in, does it?”
He had become a pro at keeping things inside, sometimes not even acknowledging them to himself. How could he ever expect her to forgive him for his past when he had not learned to forgive himself? The crusty layers of anger and bitterness that had built up over the years hid the soft, vulnerable underside of his emotions, only adding to his fear of believing that any kind of happiness could come to a man like him. It was only the hope that he had found his son that kept him going from day to day. Only the growing feelings that Dory stirred in him that gave him the courage to tell his story.
Dory’s own fears were swiftly overshadowed by the ones she saw reflected on Ben’s handsome face. In a hushed voice, she replied, “I guess that’s something we both know about.”
Ben didn’t know if it was the quiet understanding he saw in her eyes, telling him that she knew what it was like to be lonely and afraid, or the soft, reassuring sound of her voice, or the touch of her hand ever so lightly on his shoulder, telling him that he wasn’t alone, that brought the words kept too long unspoken.
A muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth, pulling it downward into a frown as he began to speak. His voice was low and unsteady.
“My wife was the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon. She grew up on Central Park West in a ten-room apartment that cost almost as much per month as some people earn in a year. I was a junior partner in an architectural firm when we met. By the time we got married, I’d been made a full partner. We were a perfect match. The more money I made, the more money she spent. It actually worked for a while.”
He drifted into silent remembering of the early years of his marriage, when he’d been ambitious to succeed and too naive to know where it would all lead.
“What happened?”
Dory’s soft-spoken voice called him back to the present. “What usually happens?” he said dully. “Someone changes. And suddenly, your whole world changes. Your world changed when Eddie started drinking. Mine changed when Allison started fooling around.”
He gave a derisive little snort at the irony of the past. “It’s funny, but like you, I actually blamed myself at first. I was working a lot at the time, putting in long hours on-site and at the office. I knew she was lonely, but hell, so was I.”
Glancing at Dory from time to time as he spoke, he saw no sign of the hatred or revulsion that he knew would come later. On the contrary, the expression on her face was one of empathy and understanding.
The words came quicker now, and easier. “I didn’t do it for myself. I did it for us. What I didn’t know at the time was that ‘us’ included all of Allison’s boyfriends. First it was one guy, then it was another. A beautiful woman with money to toss around is a target for every opportunistic creep that comes around. They just naturally gravitated toward her. But I soon discovered Allison changed boyfriends as easily as she changed clothes. I realized I was out there busting my butt for nothing.”
Dory shook her head with sad understanding. “It’s incredible, the things we don’t see when we think we’re in love.”
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s exactly the way it was with me. Okay, so I admit it, I married Allison for all the wrong reasons. She was beautiful and ambitious and I thought I loved her. It’s funny what you can mistake for love.”
Dory looked off into the distance, recalling what she had mistaken for love. “Sometimes, you can want something so bad that you find yourself living more for the fantasy you’ve created in your mind than the reality around you. Then, when things go wrong, you tell yourself that it must be your fault.” She looked back at him, her brows knit with concern. “But Ben, surely you don’t blame yourself for her infidelities.”
“I don’t know, Dory. You know how you said that sometimes you feel if you’d somehow been different, things wouldn’t have gone wrong between you and Eddie? Well, that’s the way it is with me. Sometimes I can’t help but think that the way things ultimately turned out might have been avoided if I’d been there more for her.”
She could have no idea that the way things had turned out for Ben included something far worse than divorce. Thinking that he was still hurting over the demise of his marriage, she tried to make him feel better by placing the blame where it rightfully belonged.
“I don’t care what her reasons were for being unfaithful to you. When you love someone, I mean when you truly love someone, how can you even think of it? If I had that kind of love and commitment from a man, I’d consider myself the luckiest woman on the face of the earth.”
And if that man were Ben Stone, she would have shared anything with him, even her son. But she didn’t say that.
“Allison had something that most women dream of,” she told him. “A husband who loved her and took care of her. That she could scoff in the face of that love is something I’ll never understand.”
“I know now that Allison never truly loved me, nor I her. We were a flashy couple. We went to all the right parties and gallery openings and met all the right people in our rise to the top...or should I say, in my rise to the top and Allison’s ride along. But flash doesn’t last very long. We had maybe two good years before things went sour. When I found out about her extracurricular activities, we separated. Still, I figured, who knows, if I could get her to stop running around, maybe there was a chance of saving the marriage after all. So, I called her bluff. I told her that if she didn’t stop running around, I’d divorce her and cut her off without a penny.”
His expression turned unreadable as the memories of that dark time flooded back to him.
“I assume from the look on your face,” said Dory, “that the threat didn’t work.”
He shook his head at the cruel humor of it. “It backfired right in my face. But even then, I didn’t realize the lengths to which she would go to protect her own interests.” He laughed, but it was a bitter sound from deep in his throat. “And they say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. How about the one who’s looking to take you to the cleaners, financially as well as emotionally?”
“You must have lost big in the divorce.”
“Oh, I lost big, all right. Bigger than you can ever imagine.”
She had been referring to the money he must have lost in the divorce settlement, but she could tell from the look on his face that he had lost much more than that. She assumed that, like herself, he had lost his faith in love and commitment and in his own judgment.
In a consoling tone, she said to him, “I know the feeling.”
He looked up at her. She was standing before him, silhouetted by sunlight, her chestnut hair sparkling like a halo all around her. He knew by the unrestrained outline of her nipples beneath her T-shirt that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her natural beauty and uncontrived sexiness was so different from what he had known before. She had become precious and necessary to him, something he needed as much as the air he breathed.
“Does it ever go away?” he asked.
“I used to think it never would.”
His eyes gently pleaded with hers. “And now?”
She knew what he wanted to hear, that with his help her faith had been restored, yet she was reluctant to admit it, even to herself, except to say, “I think it might be possible.”
But Dory reminded herself that faith in love was not the only thing Ben had lost. There was also the son his wife had given up for adoption. She didn’t know if a hurt like that could ever really go away.
She thought she understood now why he had chosen a drifter’s life-style free of entanglements and attachments, and why it was so important to him for Jason to be his son. In a way, she wished that Jason were Ben’s son. Maybe then this problem between them would be resolved, and the terrible pain he must be feeling might be laid to rest.
Her heart went out to him. “It must have been very difficult for you when you learned about your son.”
“Loneliness,” he muttered, “It makes fools of us all.”
He told her then about the Christmas Eve Allison had knocked on his door, how his lonely need had driven him into her arms one last time, and how, unable to bear her constant demands for more money, he had gone to her apartment several months later to have it out with her and had found her pregnant.
“Are you sure the child was yours?” Dory asked, knowing that he must have asked himself the very same thing.
“It was mine. She made sure of it. It was all part of the plan.”
He ran his hand through his hair, sweeping the dark locks from his eyes with a tired gesture. His voice sounded weary, like that of a man who had been through it all in his own mind a thousand times without any easy answers.
“In retrospect, it isn’t hard to figure out her motives. She’d become accustomed to spending freely. A divorce would have meant a change in life-style. To ensure against that happening, she manipulated me into getting her pregnant. You see, she planned all along on putting the baby up for adoption to make some money.”
He heard Dory’s muffled gasp. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “How could she do it?” He answered his own question with a contemptuous snort. “Hell, how do I know why Allison did anything? At heart, she wasn’t a bad person, not really. She did what she felt she had to do to get by, just like we all do what we have to do when we get right down to it. Of course, I wasn’t feeling quite so charitable toward her at the time. But then, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”
“If her father was wealthy, couldn’t she have gone to him for money?” Dory questioned.
“She probably did. But the old guy was tough. He grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, having to steal coal from the coal wagons. He put himself through medical school at night while working two jobs. She told me once that when she was growing up, she got less allowance than the daughter of their maid. No doubt he looked unfavorably on her life-style, and wasn’t about to subsidize it.”
“I can understand giving up a child to give it a chance at a better life, but for money? Oh, Ben, how that must have hurt you. Did you confront her about it?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But you had every right to tell her exactly what you thought of the terrible thing she did.”
“I couldn’t do that. By the time I found out about the baby and the adoption, she was dead.” He paused to take a deep breath, and added soberly, “She was murdered.”
He let the air out of his lungs in one long, low whoosh, and dropped his head into his hands. “God help me, but I hated her so much at the time, I wanted to kill her.”
He didn’t see Dory’s mouth drop open nor her eyes widen with disbelief.
Murdered? No, it wasn’t possible. Ben wasn’t capable of violence. Living in such close proximity these past weeks, wouldn’t she have sensed a violent nature, or felt it in his touch? So, maybe he had wanted to kill her, but he didn’t actually do it. Or did he?
Eddie’s image sprang into her mind. She hadn’t sensed it in him either, not at the beginning. No, she cried silently, it was impossible that there could be any similarities between them.
“How did she...I mean, who...”
“She was shot by a jealous lover. The neighbors heard them arguing. One of them saw the guy run out of the building and later identified him in a lineup.”
She sat down beside him on the edge of the carousel, feeling weak with relief knowing that he wasn’t guilty of the terrible crime. “You told me once that you weren’t around when she put your child up for adoption. Where were you?”
Ben winced, for they were headed into dangerous water. He turned to face her and looked strongly into her beautiful eyes. “That brings me to what I wanted to tell you.”
There was something odd in his gaze, something
Dory had never seen before. She felt an inexplicable apprehension wash over her.
“I never confronted Allison about the adoption because I didn’t know about it. And the reason I didn’t know about it was because I was in prison.”
Dory stared back blankly, as if he were speaking a foreign language.
“Dory? Did you hear me? I said—”
“I heard you.” Her ragged whisper sliced right through his words. “Prison?” She repeated the word, as if uttering it aloud would somehow make sense out of it. “But you said it was a jealous lover who killed her.”
He swallowed hard in an attempt to dislodge the lump that had formed in his throat. He knew there was no easy way to tell her what he also knew he must.
“That’s not what they put me away for. I was arrested, tried and convicted for beating her. I spent three years in prison for assault.”
He braced himself for her reaction. Shock. Outrage. Hatred. Revulsion. Anything would have been better than the look he saw on her face. It was an expression of utter hopelessness, as if the one thing she had depended upon in the world, hope, was suddenly shattered.
Dory felt her extremities turn cold first, and then numb with disbelief as the words sank slowly into her brain, each one killing her a little more than the one before it.
She was not cognizant of the tears that sprang from her eyes without warning, nor of jumping to her feet and running away from him as fast as she could.
Her heart pounded savagely in her chest, threatening to explode. She ran blindly into the woods, hot tears obscuring her vision, the sharp thorns of the bushes snagging her jeans and pricking her skin as she thrashed through them. She ran until she was breathless and could not run anymore. And then she collapsed on the ground, weeping inconsolably.
It was shocking to think that she didn’t really know him at all. It wasn’t even the thought of prison that upset her so much. It was the awful realization that she was falling for a man whom she couldn’t trust—a man who could potentially threaten her relationship with Jason and shatter her own resolve to never fall in love again.
She had heard the desolation in his voice. Lurking behind the words she had sensed his lack of belief in love, and it had stunned her. She had sworn to herself a long time ago that she would not get involved with a man incapable of love again. She had avoided love for that very reason, sacrificing the chance to fulfill her dreams in favor of safety for herself and her son.
Yet it seemed now that all the feelings of safety and protection that she had felt in Ben’s arms last night had been nothing more than her own desperate imagination. How could there be safety in the arms of a man she didn’t know?
Through the tears that blinded her vision one thing seemed clear. Ben was only sticking around because of Jason, and if Jason was not his son, he would disappear from her life forever.
Chapter 14
He found her crumpled in a small heap at the base of a tree, her head cradled in her arms, weeping softly. He dropped to one knee beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Dory, please, let me explain.”
She rolled over and jerked away from him as if she’d been struck by lightning. “Don’t touch me!”
In her tear-bright eyes Ben saw her mistrust and suspicion, and something else that turned his blood cold. It was her fear of him.
Something inside of him hardened like stone at the realization that the understanding and lack of recrimination he had hoped for would not be forthcoming.
“Damn it, Dory, why are you so quick to judge me?”
She edged away from him and remained with her back pressed against the trunk of the tree, looking like a frightened, cornered creature.
“I expected some kind of reaction from you, but not a guilty verdict, not without even hearing all the facts.”
