The room quieted. The fire crackled softly, the chair squeaked on every rock. Above their heads the floorboards of the old house expanded and contracted. The snow slid off one section of the roof from the heat of the fire. Daniel leaned his head back and tried to sort out all the emotions racing through him.
Beth’s husband had abused her. Emotionally abused the kids too from what Nathan had let slip. They seemed to be dealing with it well, and his admiration for Beth increased astronomically.
She was strong, desirable, and damn if he was going to let her hide away from him anymore.
The time of waiting became like a time of prayer. He mentally listed all the things he was grateful for, all the things he wanted. And the longer he sat, with a child in his arms, waiting for his woman to return, the more he realized everything he still wanted was nearly within his grasp.
If Beth was ready to trust him with her heart.
The deck boards outside the door creaked a moment before Beth stepped inside. She came into the living room, sparkling snow crystals in her hair and her cheeks rosy from the cold. Daniel could have stared at her all night long.
“Hey, what’s up?” she whispered as she knelt beside the chair, one hand resting on his arm, the other reaching to brush the hair from Nathan’s face.
“He’s okay. I just didn’t want to take him upstairs in case we woke up Robbie and you weren’t home yet. He had a bad dream.”
“He has them occasionally.” She stared at her son for a moment, and written on her face was such sadness and loss he couldn’t take it anymore.
“Beth, we need to talk.”
She nodded slowly, her fingers fidgeting with the fabric of his sleeve. “Let’s tuck him in.”
They went upstairs together, and Daniel stepped back after carefully placing the now boneless Nathan on his bed. Standing in the doorway, he watched Beth tenderly pulled up the covers and kiss both Nathan and Robbie. Then she slipped past him to check on Lance, closing his curtains and turning off his MP3.
When she would have walked down the stairs, he grabbed her hand and tugged her toward her bedroom. “You must be tired. Come on, I’ll give you that massage I promised.”
Her breathing picked up as her gaze flickered to the closed doors of the boys.
Daniel lifted her chin in his hand. “Nothing will happen that you don’t want to, okay? I promise. If you want me to crawl out the window so you don’t get caught with me in your room, I’ll do it. I even know which trees I have to climb down to get away safely.”
That was enough to bring a smile back to her face, and she laughed softly and pulled him after her, turning the lock. “I’ve been teaching the boys they are supposed to knock before entering, but they weren’t learning very fast. So they’re used to me locking the door now.”
She pulled off her sweater and stretched her arms in the air. “I never want to go on another field trip in my life.”
“Not into dinosaurs?” Daniel sat on the chair in the corner of the room and watched, mesmerized, as Beth sat on the bed and stripped off her socks and wiggled out of her slacks.
They needed to get to the real issue, but she was tying his brain in knots.
He joined her on the bed, crawling behind her to massage her shoulders, her neck. Pressing his thumbs into the tight muscles until she began to relax under this touch.
“We’re not doing a lot of talking, are we?”
Daniel laughed. “Not really sure where to begin.”
Beth placed a hand on his where it rested on her shoulder. Then she glanced up at him. “Did Nathan tell you what his bad dream was about?”
He moved in front of her, kneeling at her feet. “He did. Kinda, like a seven-year-old tells any story.”
He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight to him, just needing to squeeze out some of the hurt and agony he saw in her eyes. Beth sniffed a couple of times and then swore.
“I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this anymore.”
“Do what?”
“Cry for the no-good bastard. Cry because of him. I want to move on and forget what he did to me and the boys, and yet he’s still there, haunting us.”
She tucked her tear-streaked face into the crook of his neck, and his heart broke. “You go ahead and cry. You love your sons, and until you know they are on the road to understanding what the real love of family means, you’re going to have moments you cry. Hell, my mama still cries over the stupid things her sons do to each other, and she cries when we get our feelings hurt, and we’re all grown up. You’re a good mama to your boys, Beth, and tears come with the territory.”
She leaned back and cupped his face in her hand. “Daniel, you are one in a million. That’s sweet of you, but there are things you don’t know. Like if I really loved my boys I should have left the man years ago, before he had a chance to make our life hell. I should have left the first time he hit me, but I was like every one of the women who think they’ll be the exception. That he really was sorry for what he’d done. That he really never would do it again. That the boys were better off with a father who was decent most of the time.”
Daniel held in his anger. “You shouldn’t have had to make the decision. None of it was your fault, Beth.”
“Nathan cries because his dad is gone, and you know what, that is my fault. I’m the one who killed him.”
He choked back his surprise. “You said he died in the car crash.”
“He did.”
Daniel waited, stroking her hair gently, giving her the space to tell it her own way.
She wiggled back on the bed and wrapped her arms around herself, voice low, head dipped. “He’d found out something I’d done that he didn’t like. I can’t even remember what it was, and he was cursing a blue streak at me. The roads were icy that night—I didn’t want to drive in the first place, but he insisted—and when I felt myself losing control of the vehicle I…” she paused, “…I yanked the wheel to the side and we spun into traffic with the passenger side leading. I made sure he was the one in the direct line of anything that hit us.”
Hell, had she really taken on that burden? “Beth, if you were already skidding, there’s no way anything you did changed which direction the car turned.”
Her head snapped up, a flicker of something in her eyes that could have been hope, but it vanished too quickly for him to be sure.
“Still, it was a conscious choice. I’d do it again in an instant.” She was breathing so fast he thought she might faint. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but I need to explain—”
He hurried to reassure her. “You don’t have to explain anything more to me. Not right now. I want to know, but only when you’re ready to talk about it. Not because you think I’m expecting you to.” He held her hands clasped in his, aching to help her, wanting to comfort her. Her fingers were icy cold, and he warmed them gently in his palms. “I still think you can forgive yourself for his death. I’m sure there was an investigation, and if you had done anything wrong, they would have discovered it then. It was an accident—that’s all it was.”
“I was happy he was dead, though. He was a bastard. Stole away years of my life. Made the boys quake in fear. Made me have sex when he knew it was dangerous. Demanded I keep going until…”
She stopped. Completely. His heart was breaking for her, for every bit of pain she’d suffered.
“Until what? Oh God, Beth.”
She whipped her head around, hair flying. Her eyes were dark, not with the heat of passion he was used to seeing but with pure unadulterated rage.
“My baby girl died because of him.”
Daniel swore under his breath.