Heartland. Sara Walter Ellwood
crying, she wouldn’t ever stop. “I’m sorry, Daddy. For everything. I’ve made such a mess of my life.”
He rubbed her back and rested his chin on her head, like he’d done since they’d first met eight years ago. At times like this, she wished she’d known him all her life. Mike Ritter--the man she’d believed to be her father until she met Seth--and she had been close, but they’d never had the relationship she and Seth shared.
“The important thing is you’re here now.” His deep voice trembled as if he was holding in a massive wave of emotion. He swallowed and slowly stepped back, but didn’t completely let her go as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “C’mon. Let’s go find your mother.”
She sniffed and wiped at the stray tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Is Johnny home?”
He squeezed her shoulders and his smile beamed as bright as the morning sun. “You just missed him. Your momma took him to preschool. He’ll be home in a few hours.” He stopped at the steps leading to the wraparound porch. “You’re going to make the kid’s day when he gets home. He idolizes you.”
She shook her head. “He shouldn’t. I’m one messed up woman these days.”
Dad brushed at a stray strand of her hair lying on her forehead. “No. You’re a strong woman trying to get her life back on track. I knew you were on your way to healing when I heard about the divorce and that you were in rehab for longer than a week.”
She glanced away. The hope in his voice nearly broke down the damn holding back her tears.
Chapter 3
EJ was logging into his computer when the office door he’d left ajar opened. He looked up and swallowed a curse. Dealing with his brother-in-law today wasn’t at the top of his to-do list.
Trevor Marshall stood in the middle of his office. Dressed in a pair of black designer slacks and a pale pink dress shirt that matched the wine, pink, and black tie, the metrosexual law student looked as out of place in the ranch town of McAllister as a pile of cow shit on Fifth Avenue.
“Mama wanted to know if you were coming over to dinner tonight. She’d like to see Austin,” Trevor said, referring to EJ’s two year old son.
EJ sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. He didn’t understand Glenda’s insistence of having a memorial dinner for Raquel every year to remember her life. None of them needed reminding she was dead. He’d made the mistake of attending last year and had to leave early. His memories made the day depressing enough; he didn’t need to sit around looking at photo albums and telling stories of what an angel Raquel had been. He’d loved his wife--once--but she had never worn a halo. “Tell her I have other plans.”
Trevor narrowed his brown eyes. “What about Austin?”
EJ shrugged. “I’ll bring him over this weekend. But tonight, we have plans.”
If eating the leftover pot roast his brother’s wife had given him, watching the Rangers game, and drinking a beer or two after he put the baby to bed at eight o’clock justified as plans.
“What’s more important than family?”
His brother-in-law’s tenacity matched that of the Marshall’s bulldog when he was on one of his mother’s errands. Glenda had babied her only son as if he was a crown prince, and although, Trevor was twenty-three years old, he’d never let go of his mother’s skirt. “I never said family wasn’t important, but frankly, I’m not interested in revisiting the picture-perfect life your mother insists on painting for Raquel.”
Trevor’s eyes widened as he gasped. “How dare you say such a thing today?”
EJ had enough. He stood and leaned over his desk. “Look. I loved your sister, but life with her had never been perfect for me. She thought she was a princess, and I’ll admit at first I treated her like one, but she was lazy, demanding and at times a down-right bitch on wheels.” This time Trevor’s face paled and he thinned his lips. EJ didn’t care that everything he said would, no doubt, be relayed to the queen of bitchdom, his mother-in-law. He was on a roll. “The last straw for me was when we brought our baby home from the hospital and she refused to even look at him.”
“She was depressed!”
“I get that.” And he did, kind of. The doctor explained her postpartum depression was caused by her hormones returning to normal more quickly than she could become accustomed to and a predisposition to depression. But he knew it went deeper. She’d hated being pregnant, despite having a trouble-free time and an easy delivery. He’d caught her staring in their bedroom mirror when she was about eight months and telling their baby how much she hated him for making her fat and ugly. The memory sent a stab of pain into his heart. How could a mother hate her own baby, a child she’d created with a man she’d claimed to love? Sure, the pregnancy hadn’t been planned, and wasn’t at the ideal time in their renewed relationship, but he thought she wanted a family. Until she got pregnant. Had she suffered from postpartum depression, or was she depressed because now she had a baby she’d despise taking care of? Or was she angry because she married him because she was pregnant? After all, they had sex the first night they were together after a long breakup. Maybe she’d never intended to have a future with him.
He kept those thoughts to himself. “But instead of seeking help, she refused and started using drugs.”
He stopped before he went any further. Before he admitted he’d dealt with depression, too, but couldn’t understand why Raquel killed herself. No one knew the bottle of Zoloft she’d emptied belonged to him. He’d never taken more than three of the antidepressant pills the VA doctor prescribed for him to help with the PTSD he developed after a mission he’d commanded had gone terribly wrong. As he sat in his leather chair, he buried the memory of the five soldiers, who lost their lives under his leadership, and the dead American ambassador and her advisor he’d been sent to save in the back of his mind.
He reached for the speeding ticket he’d written that morning lying on the corner of his desk. “Now if you will excuse me, I have work to do.”
Trevor glanced at the ticket and wrinkled his brow. “Emily Kendall? Is she back in town?”
Not liking his brother-in-law’s tone, he leaned back in the chair and studied him, leaving the ticket on the desk. “Yeah. Guess after her last stay at Betty Ford or whatever posh spa rehab and her divorce, she came home.” A memory wiggled to the surface and a surge of irritation not unlike jealousy, which made no sense, scalded his blood stream. “You dated her in high school.”
Trevor stared at the ticket. “No, we never dated. We were nothing but friends. Mama hated her. Said Emily would ruin me. Then she got the record deal and we drifted apart.” He met EJ’s gaze. “How’d she look?”
Like sex in designer sunglasses.
Where the hell did that come from?
EJ distracted himself by shrugging and picking up the ticket. “I guess okay. At least she didn’t look stoned like she did last fall on the CMA Awards.”
“Hopefully she’ll clean herself up now that she’s gotten rid of the rock star.” Trevor shifted his feet and looked down at his shiny manicured fingernails--did he polish the things?--with a pinched expression.
Had his suspicions about his brother-in-law’s sexual orientation been wrong? Trevor was a decent-looking guy, but as far as EJ knew, he’d never had a girlfriend. Was the reason not because he was gay, but because he was pining after Emily Kendall?
Trevor seemed to shake himself and looked up at EJ. “I guess I can’t convince you to come to dinner tonight.”
“No. Now get out of here. I have a job to do.”
Trevor nodded and left, but EJ stared at the ticket in his hand. Why did he find Emily Kendall damned intriguing?
He crumbled the ticket and tossed it into the trash. Guess now,