Christmas To Remember Read online

  She smiled briefly. “Clay was furious. He came after you much like he did yesterday. He went to the mall where we’d hung out and talked to some of your friends, tried to track you down. He was so mad when he couldn’t, he hit a bar, got in a fight and Dad had to bail him out of jail.” She made a face. “I was blamed for that, too. They were all mortified…so ashamed.” She pushed her sunglasses up on her nose. “My dad was thinking of running for Judge in the next election, but between my getting pregnant and his son winding up in jail, he couldn’t. I’d ruined everything. Everything. And if that wasn’t enough my mother…She ended up having a nervous breakdown.” She laughed, the sound bitter. “Can you imagine? I drove my own mother over the edge. You’ve gotta admit, it was an incredible amount of damage for the few short weeks we knew each other.”

  Beau stared at her, visibly shocked. “You mean to tell me your mom—”

  “Couldn’t handle it.” Her smile turned into a grimace. “She couldn’t handle any of it. My mother spent weeks in an institution. And when she came home it was a full two years before she spoke to me again. We’re still not…I don’t think things will ever be the same between us.”

  “It was an accident, Marley. Surely she knew what happened wasn’t done on purpose?”

  She picked at the mud caked on her carpenter pants. “You’re not getting it. I attended church with them every Sunday since I was born. I was taught better. I knew better. Sex without love is nothing, and that was exactly what it was—nothing. I ruined everything good in my life for a quick ride with you and when it was over, you kicked me to the curb. If it had just been me…but it wasn’t. The baby was taken out of the equation, but my mom has never been the same since and it’s my fault.”

  Beau swore.

  “Please, at least tell me you understand why it would be best if you left. My mother isn’t much better now than she was five years ago, Beau, and if she hears that you’re here…”

  Beau’s gorgeous, blue eyes were intense, soft with kindness and concern, but hot with determination and focus. “Marley, I get what you’re saying, but I can’t leave Pop here to do this job alone. He’s given up a lot for me. You want me treating him the way I did you? I’m sorry my presence here might cause you problems, but I’m not going to leave because of a little gossip over something that happened a long time ago.”

  “It’s more than a little gossip!”

  “If your brother and friend keep their mouths shut, who’s going to know I’m here? I’ll lie low, work and leave when Pop does, but until then all I can say is that I won’t deliberately cause you any trouble. I promise you that, I owe you that.”

  “You owe me more than that, you owe me peace.”

  “Maybe I do. God knows, I regret that I treated you the way I did, but people change, Marley. I know it because I’m not that person anymore.” His gaze fastened on hers with unerring accuracy despite the glasses. “I might not remember much, but I know I’m not the kind of guy who walks away from my responsibilities now. I’m not leaving. You’re going to have to deal with that.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CLAY’S WORDS about second chances repeated themselves in her head the entire afternoon, echoed by Beau’s. She understood wanting a new start because she wanted one for herself. What about turning the other cheek? If she thought her brother deserved a second chance after hurting Angel the way he had, if she thought she deserved another chance with her mother, could she really deny Beau his chance at redemption?

  Being young and stupid went both ways. Could it be time to forgive and forget and move on?

  Over the course of the day she saw Beau several times. Each time their eyes met, he either smiled, nodded or made some kind of comment.

  Hot enough?

  That design is lookin’ good.

  Need some help?

  The statements were friendly, casual. His attempt at easing the tension and strain between them after their conversation. Surprisingly, it was working. She wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel anything for Beau but anger, and she would’ve given anything to have met the new, conked-on-the-head Beau first. He was the man she’d seen the potential for in the boy she’d known, the one squandering his abilities by partying his way through life or at least the two weeks they’d been acquainted.

  Marley got to her feet and headed toward her flatbed truck for another ornamental tree. The small-leaved Japanese maple she’d carted to the site was just the thing to finish the landscaping around the back of the house. The planting beds had been mounded and raised, using topsoil that had been trucked in and the dirt misplaced from the construction.

  She didn’t like adding fertilizer to the soil, that way the roots would spread, seeking out the natural foods from the surrounding soil versus binding up trying to stay close to the man-added nutrients. Once the planting was completed, she and Eli could sow the grass, spread the straw and move on to the house next door. And given the weather forecast for the week, she didn’t have any time to waste. She liked having Eli around for the dirt moving and heavy lifting, but the planting she liked to do herself. She’d left Amy and Eli to cover the garden center. The eighteen-year-old was a natural at talking to whoever pulled onto the lot, something Marley still struggled to do depending on their acquaintance with her parents.

  Marley scooted the container to the edge only to pause when Beau called her name.

  “Wait up.” Wearing a frown, he hurried across the road as fast as his limping stride would carry him.

  “Something wrong?” After his alpha male “you’ll have to deal with it” statement about staying in town, she hoped this wasn’t a continuation of that conversation.

  “You shouldn’t be lifting that by yourself. It weighs more than you do.”

  “Not quite.” But Beau didn’t budge. Marley sighed and nodded, letting him help her lift the heavy tree off the bed and carry it the five or so feet to where she’d dug a hole.

  “Are all the houses going to be landscaped like this one?”

  Concentrating on where she walked, she shook her head. “No, this one just sold. The owner’s contacted me about planting the back, as well. The rest of the houses will have a basic design that can be added to later, but right now the developer just wants them pretty enough to sell.”

  They set the tree down, but when she raised her head, she discovered him a scant few inches away. And her mind decided the new and improved Beau was proving to be much too appealing.

  Both of them froze. Her heart thumped hard in her chest. A wild, out-of-control rhythm that matched the chaos tumbling through her head. Warnings, curiosity, need, threats from her conscience asking what was she doing. Why didn’t she move? Step back?

  Beau lifted a hand to her cheek and brushed away a tendril of hair. The rough pad of his thumb sent shivers through her and the not-nice part of her knew she didn’t move because she couldn’t.

  Her gaze slid to his mouth and she stared, transfixed, as Beau slowly lowered his head. He gave her plenty of time to pull back. To protest. But she didn’t. Why didn’t—

  His lips brushed hers, the softest, barest of touches that had her breath catching in her chest and a moan rising up in her throat. It wasn’t just his physical changes that drew her, it was…It was this, as well. Heady, powerful feelings that emerged from the depths and coursed through her. Confused her.

  “Marley.”

  That was all he said, her name, a whispered breath of sound, before Beau firmed the kiss and touched his tongue to her lips, sweeping into her mouth with a possessive stroke she couldn’t deny. The taste of him was of hot, rich coffee and a sweetness she couldn’t name.

  Beau’s hand slid from her shoulder to the base of her neck, into her hair, cradling her head gently and angling it. Pressing deeper, stroking, making her heart race.

  A sound intruded on the quiet. She frowned, not wanting to acknowledge it, but when the crunch of tires on the gravel leading toward the houses penetrated the sensual daze Beau had creat
ed, she jerked away from him as quickly as possible and turned, moaning. Through the trees she spotted her father’s pristine white sedan crawling over the rough road at a whopping two miles an hour.

  Marley lifted trembling fingers to her mouth and wiped, but knew it wouldn’t undo the damage she’d just allowed to happen. Had her father seen them? Surely not. The drive was lined with trees, the foliage still thick although the leaves had started to fall. Her father was no doubt concentrating on maneuvering the expensive car over the rutted road, not looking for—

  What had she done?

  Horrified, she watched as her dad pulled in behind her truck and stopped. The windshield separating them no barrier against the naked fury appearing on her father’s face the moment he saw Beau standing so close. He knew. She wasn’t sure how, but he knew.

  “You should go.”

  Beau’s attention shifted from her father to her. “Why?”

  Her dad got out of the car wearing his most threatening prosecutor’s glare. “Get away from my daughter.”

  Marley swallowed back a gulp of panic. “That’s why,” she whispered.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER Beau stood in the window of the house across the street and watched as Marley argued with her dad. The man was dressed in suit slacks and a heavily pressed white dress shirt, his tie tack sparkling in the sunlight. The guy defined uptight from the top of his carefully styled hair to his spit-shined shoes.

  Father and daughter both made frustrated gestures with their hands, and neither looked anywhere close to backing down. He shouldn’t have left. But after slamming the car door shut and stalking toward her, Mr. Pierce had ignored Marley’s attempts at civility and inane introductions and demanded to speak to her alone.

  When Beau didn’t move, Marley asked him to go, as well, her voice trembling and painfully embarrassed. Embarrassed of him, them. But of course she would be. He’d stared into Marley’s eyes, hoping to show her his support in facing her parent, the same support he’d neglected to give her before.

  Even now her “Beau, please just go,” rang in his ears and he hated the problems he’d caused her, wanted to fix them, not make them worse by kissing her.

  But the kiss had been hot and sexy and everything he’d thought it would be. Problem was he wanted more, and that wasn’t going to happen. Any headway he might have made with her was now obliterated by her father’s furious presence.

  Beau lifted his fist and banged it gently on the wall, his gaze locked on Marley’s face. He had to think of a way to change things. Repair the damage he’d caused. But until he did, he had to get to work and take some of the pressure off his pop.

  BARRY STARED UP at the bedroom ceiling, tears trickling out of his eyes. Exhaustion pressed down on him and as badly as he wanted to succumb to it, he couldn’t. It didn’t matter how many times he wiped the tears away, they kept coming, the weight in his heart heavier and harder to bear with each one.

  How could this happen? How?

  He’d spent most of the evening in the hospital getting breathing treatments and shots. The meds had helped ease his symptoms and stopped his allergic reaction to the fish.

  Normally he wouldn’t have reacted without eating it or coming into direct contact with the oils, but the allergy doc said that the air on the plane and the dust from the job site had combined with his neglect. The scent alone had sent him over the edge into a full-blown attack.

  Still, the treatments had done nothing for the real horror that had caused the problem. Finding out that Beau wasn’t really Beau…

  How? How could something like this happen?

  He’d stayed up all night, his body reacting to the medication as if they’d shot a fifty-cup jolt of coffee straight into his veins. It had given him plenty of time to think. To remember. To realize what he should’ve known all along.

  A rough sob shook his frame and, knowing he was home alone, he didn’t try to stop it. The bed shook as he covered his face with his arms and let the tears come, crying like he hadn’t cried in years—not since Beau’s mother had died. Raw cries tore out of his chest and before long the pillow beneath his head was soggy. Beau’s mother and now his son?

  What had he done to deserve to lose them both?

  He’d seen something like this on a news report once about a couple of college kids getting mixed up at the scene of an accident, but who would ever think it could happen again? And in the military?

  Barry rolled over in the bed. The picture of him and Beau he’d left lying on his chest falling onto the mattress beside him. His son. His son. Gone.

  Regrets filled him. All the words he should’ve said but hadn’t. Everyone always thought they’d have time. An explosion. A mistake. His time with his son gone—just like that.

  Thank God he and Beau had mended things some a while back. That didn’t make it any easier to accept, but it helped and he owed it all to…

  The boy he’d brought home from Germany.

  Barry wiped his eyes and tried to decide what to do. Nothing could fix this. Nothing except doing the right thing now that the worst had happened. He had to honor Beau’s memory.

  “I CAN’T MAKE HIM LEAVE, Dad. You of all people should understand the consequences of breaking a contract.”

  “Then break yours,” her father growled. “I’ll talk to the developer and get you out of it. This is too big a job for a business as small as yours anyway.”

  Nothing like having your family’s support. Marley lifted her chin high and fisted her hands to keep from opening her mouth and saying something she shouldn’t. Her dad meant well, he loved her and she knew it, but she wasn’t a child anymore, and she refused to be ordered around like one. “I’m handling this job just fine, thank you, and I will not break my contract.”

  “Only a fool gets bitten twice.”

  “Exactly.” She’d do well to remember that, too. She’d kissed him. “What does it matter if he works across the street?”

  “He wasn’t across the street when I pulled in, he was over here and very, very close to you. What did he do?”

  “Nothing! He helped me carry a tree, he wasn’t feeling me up!” She clamped a hand over her mouth and winced, unable to believe she’d just said that to her very prudish father. Oh, Lord help her. Beau’s kiss really had rattled her. She hadn’t wanted to outright lie to her dad but—

  Dads weren’t meant to know everything.

  “I see. But that doesn’t excuse what he did to your brother. What about him, Marley?”

  “Clay threw the first punch. He brought it on himself.”

  “Have you stopped to ask yourself why he threw the first punch?”

  She dropped her head, hoping to hide her hot face long enough to get control of herself.

  “Do you remember how long it took before your mother could raise her head in public? Do you?”

  “Yes! I remember perfectly well, but you don’t—”

  “Do you remember how long she laid in bed and cried? What about the night we had to call an ambulance to come get her to take her to the mental ward?” He growled the words, his voice getting lower, more intense.

  She remembered it all and he knew it. But the guilt that came with what he said—loads of it, tons of it, slammed into her, forced her head lower.

  She remembered it. And standing there being berated by her father made her feel very much like an eighteen-year-old kid again. A whore in her father’s eyes because the boy she’d known two short weeks had gotten her pregnant. How could his own daughter sleep with a stranger? That was something only whores did, according to him. No amount of apologizing or explaining or—or anything had changed his attitude. Over time it had softened, the words shoved aside in light of her mother’s illness, but his disapproval was always there. “I remember it all. But that was years ago and I’ve grown up. I made a mistake, but I learned from it and I refuse to live in the past the way Mama does.”

  “Don’t talk about your mother that way. Of all the people in this mess, she’s the inno
cent one.”

  “Is she?” Old pain combined with new. “Innocent people don’t hide away from the world when they’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “That is enough! I am still your father and I’m looking out for your best interests. Working here with him is not in your best interests and I intend to do something about it.”

  “Dad, come on! You can’t make me break my contract. I’m twenty-four years old. I own my own business and I’m doing very well.”

  “You’re scraping by.”

  “I pay my bills and I’m in the black, that’s more than scraping by. Besides, it’s a big, wide world out there. Are you going to tell me you don’t work with people you don’t like? People you don’t trust? Of course you do! You have to, but you keep an even more watchful eye on them, don’t you?”

  “There is a vast difference, Marley, and you know it.” Her father took her elbow in hand and pulled her around to the side of the house into a foot-wide band of shade. Sweat ran down his face and glistened beneath the dark red hair she’d inherited from him. “You pay your bills, but you’re working yourself into the ground and for what?”

  “Hard work never hurt anyone.”

  “No, but the root of the problem remains. Do you remember when you used to help your mother in the garden?”

  Marley blinked at him. Huh? “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You did it to make her happy. Because she liked it and you knew it made her happy. You wanted her approval to help make up for the way you two fought. What do you think this is?” he asked, indicating her truck and the landscaping nearby. “Hiring on at The Treehouse before Rickers sold out to you was just another way of trying to get her approval after that man destroyed our lives. You were—are—desperate to make your mother happy again after breaking her heart.”

  She shook her head. “You’re reading more into this than there is. I know plants, I like being outside. And I’m good at design. My profession was an easy choice to make.”