CHAPTER 13
Ares stood for a long moment, simply staring at the empty driveway, wondering how his brain could be simultaneously blank and full to the brim with a million questions—and brutally conflicted emotions roiling through him. Talking with Tyler and Kathy about their futures, their plans, learning more about who they were, that was fine. Good, even.
Rehashing ancient history with Tessa?
That sucked.
But it would have been unimaginably worse if Kelsey hadn’t been here. Even now, she stood patiently beside him as he worked his thoughts into something resembling order. She’d always made him laugh. Today, she’d helped put everyone at ease.
And she did things to him inside that he couldn’t allow himself to think about. Not now.
Not ever.
“Thank you, Kelsey,” he said as they walked back into the house. “I couldn’t have gotten through that without you.”
Once they were back inside, Mrs. M. immediately inquired, “Can I get you two anything else?”
“Thank you,” Kelsey said, “but I’m stuffed from lunch.”
“Why don’t you and Martinez take the rest of the day off?” Ares suggested.
The kind older woman studied his face. Obviously, she’d gathered some of what had happened this afternoon. “Are you sure you won’t need us again? Will you be okay?”
The thought jumped into his head before he was aware it was coming: I’ll be okay, I have Kelsey.
“I’m fine.” His mantra. One he knew Kelsey could see straight through.
She wasn’t the only one who could see through it now.
It was instinctive for them to make their way to the library, a warm room with comfortable chairs and light streaming in through the
garden windows. They both sat on the worn, dark leather couch, and Kelsey kicked off her shoes, tucking her feet beneath her.
They’d often been alone in his library, talking about books or politics or a work problem that one of them was struggling with. But
he’d never been this aware of being alone with her. Never so conscious of how her lips moved, how beautiful her smile was. How
tempting.
“You must feel overwhelmed,” she said in a voice as gentle as the smile she’d given him earlier. “I know I do, and they’re not even
my brother and sister.” And mother. The two words she didn’t say aloud echoed between them.
The easiest thing to say was, “Tyler and Kathy—I like them both.”
“They’re great. Do you want to get to know them better?”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation when it came to his siblings. It was only the thought of their mother being a part of the group that
made his gut clench.
“You like suddenly finding you have family, don’t you?”
He leaned his chin on his hand and nodded, the smile he knew she was hoping to see finally finding its way to his mouth. “They’re
good people. Sally and George would like them.” It was a massive understatement. Sally would adore them.
“But?” she asked.
“I didn’t say but.”
“Sometimes silence is the loudest thing of all.” She leaned closer, lowered her voice. “Talk to me, Ares. Tell me what you need. Let
me help you.”
Her eyes were bright, her skin glowed, and her mouth was so damned soft and sweet-looking. That was Kelsey—compassionate,
wonderful, always taking care of others, taking care of him. And he was suddenly too freaking close to dragging her against him. Too
damned close to tearing her clothes off and losing himself in her. Letting her help him forget, if only for a handful of naked,
erotically charged moments, what a mess his life was, top to bottom.
That was his worst sin—wanting to take more from Kelsey, when all she’d ever done was give.
* * *
Kelsey couldn’t breathe. Not when she felt as if they were on a precipice. With a looming fall whose consequences could be more beautiful than anything either of them had ever known.
Or utterly heartbreaking.
She’d meant to help him with words, with her skills at therapy, not with her body.
Yet if he’d asked, she would have given him her body, her pleasure, everything, if it would help ease his pain in any way.
A thousand times over she’d counseled her patients not to confuse sex with love—but knowing the rules didn’t mean she could
always follow them.
Especially not when she’d been in love with Ares for so long that she literally ached with it.
She was almost there, so close to offering her aid in a kiss, so close to reaching out the way her heart and body desperately wanted
to.
But then Ares shifted back on the couch. Away from her. Deliberately putting space between them as he said, “What I really need is
help with understanding why Tessa finally came back. She’s obviously known where I’ve been all these years. So if not for money,
then what’s really going on?”
Disappointment that he’d chosen not to kiss her again was like a vise around her heart, but she pushed it down. Those emotions
didn’t have a place in this heavy discussion. Only the honest, but difficult, answer she knew she had to give him. “Forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness?” Anguish—then fury—rippled across his face. “I remember the first time he hit me. I was six.”
She tried not to wince. If she were closeted with a patient, she would ask questions, draw out feelings, impressions. With Ares, she
could only bite her lip to keep from crying out.
If only she could cut off her emotions and listen with a purely psychological brain. That was how she got through her days of hearing
things that curdled her soul. She listened, she offered aid, she encouraged healing, and she kept her emotions in check. She could do
nothing for a patient if her emotions got in the way. It was how doctors and nurses were able to treat children with cancer. Empathy
and sympathy without giving away their soul. Otherwise, the pain would kill them, and they would never cure anyone.
But this was Ares. And she had no guard against her emotions or his pain.
“He’d always grabbed and yanked and pulled and left bruises. And there was a lot of yelling, him at me, him at her. But when I was
six, he just hauled off and backhanded me across the chest. The blow threw me across the room.”
His eyes were bleak now, his voice devoid of emotion. Like an automaton repeating instructions. Her heart bled with the need to
touch him. But if she did, neither of them would get through this, and he needed to get it out. She sure as hell didn’t believe he’d
ever shared any of this with Keira. Because if he had, it surely would have changed her sister, made her into a better human being, more understanding. How could it not have?
“I’d stabbed one of his screwdrivers through a chair cushion. I was punching stars into a piece of paper. But it went right through the
vinyl.”
“It was just a mistake,” she whispered. “An accident.”
“That didn’t matter. When she ran to me and said it was her fault for letting me play there, he smacked her across the face.”
Kelsey put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t help the moan of pain.
“I don’t think I’d ever actually seen him hit her before. I knew he did, because I saw marks, bruises on her. And because I could hear
her crying in pain. But he’d never done it in front of me.”
“Ares.” Everything inside her wanted to touch him, wrap him in her arms, give him her warmth. But if she touched him, she knew he
would stop talking. Stop unburdening himself the way he needed to exorcise his demons.
“After that, it was like he’d broken through some barrier. We both turned into his punching bags whenever he got drunk or just plain
pissed. If his boss yelled at him, or he had a run-in with a traffic cop. Hell, he didn’t even need a reason. But she knew when it was
coming, and she’d try to send me to my room. Or outside to play. Anywhere. So that she could take the beating, instead of me.”
Kelsey thought about the way Tessa had been at the dinner table, keeping her mouth shut as much as possible and speaking very
softly when she did talk. It was classic—make yourself quiet and invisible, don’t say anything, don’t draw attention to yourself.
“A few times I didn’t move fast enough. But eventually I figured it out too. I called it his bullshit line. You’d think he was fine.
Sometimes, he didn’t even seem drunk. Then bam, he’d thunder out, That’s buullshhit.” She could almost see his father’s spittle
flying. “Then you either ran or hid. Or you got it. She always got it.”
Kelsey could no longer keep her mouth shut. “That’s a terrible way for a woman and a child to live.”
“Then she left.” He kept speaking as if he hadn’t heard her, lost in horrible memories. “I came home from fourth grade one day, and
she was gone. He said she was sick of me. That she must have hated taking care of me so much she couldn’t stay one more second.”
He’d been nine years old. Abandoned to a monster. “Oh God, Ares. I’m so sorry.”
“I can step back now and see what it was like. He was pissed about having to feed me, clothe me, pay for anything at school. And
he’d made her life a living hell because of it.” He shook his head as if to try to clear it. “I’m not heartless. I see how bad she had it.”
He stopped, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “But she rescued them.”
The words he didn’t say all but shouted into the room: Why didn’t she rescue me?
“He went crazy after that. He didn’t have anyone else to hit. Just me. I couldn’t hide from him anymore. He sent a note to the school
saying I was sickly and he refused to allow me in gym class anymore. So I never took my clothes off. I always wore long sleeves and
long pants. Nobody ever saw.”
No one ever saw him cry, never saw his pain. No one knew.
Until the Baddricks found him.
“How long did you live alone with him before you moved in with Sally and George?”
“A couple of years.”
She couldn’t make a sound. Not even a gasp of horror. Not now that she knew he’d endured seven hundred and thirty days in the worst kind of hell.
But then Ares laughed. Like he wasn’t dying inside with all the memories. Memories she’d never be able to shake, though they
weren’t even hers.
“Sally and George. You had to love them. I came home with Hector one day after school, and Sally and George just gathered me
right in. Like they did all the Baddricks. Sometimes I spent the night. One of those times, Sally made me take a bath, because I must
have stunk the way only a dirty teenage boy can. I was standing there with a towel wrapped around my waist when she walked in to
get my clothes so she could wash them.”
He stopped, drew inside himself again.
“She saw the bruises?”
A barely there nod was his answer.
“Did they call child services?”
“They wanted to make sure I came to them, not shunted off into the system to end up with strangers, like what happened to Sam.
They sat me down at the kitchen table and made me tell them my story.” He huffed out a breath with the memory. “It was like
pulling out every single one of my teeth.”
It explained why he’d flown off to Europe last month. When under the strain of discovering Keira’s lies, he’d shut down, shut
everyone out. He’d learned to do that in childhood.
“I remember them strategizing. George, he had it all figured out, what would get my dad to let me go.”
“They’re good people.”
“The best,” he agreed. “I wasn’t with them when they approached him. They figured it would go better without me—and I was
scared he’d demand to keep me around as his punching bag. They told him they sympathized with how much kids cost, the terrible
financial burden.” Ares dropped his voice to a gravelly note as if he were George. “Especially with his wife gone, all that
responsibility, no one to take care of a kid during the day when he had to work. They understood how it was just too much. So they’d
be happy to take me off his hands, relieve his burden.” His face turned dark again, his tone suddenly hoarse. “Thankfully, he couldn’t
wait to get rid of the little guttersnipe. Said I was a pain in the ass, had always been a pain in the ass, and no amount of trying to fix
me was ever going to do a damn bit of good.”
She blinked back tears, but the crack in her heart was already wide open. “Sally and George wouldn’t have told you any of that.”
“It was a kid who lived across the hall in our tenement block. He overheard it all and wanted to make sure I knew all the reasons my
dad didn’t want me.”
Kids could be brutal, especially if they’d been abused themselves. But Ares shrugged as if he hadn’t cared. Even though his father’s
words must have felt like being abandoned all over again, no matter what the man had done to him. He’d still been unwanted.
“I’m so glad Susan and Bob opened up their hearts, and their home, to you.”
“I wasn’t a great houseguest.”
“You weren’t a houseguest at all. You were a son to them from the start.”
“I know that now. But it took years. And a lot of acting out. And continued silence. Like you said, sometimes that’s the worst. It must
have hurt them that I couldn’t let it all out. They must have felt like they weren’t helping me. When the truth was that I would have
died without them. I just didn’t know how to show my gratitude.”
Her chest was achy and tight for the boy he’d been, for the pain he’d felt, the agony, for the adult world he couldn’t understand.
But he had learned in the end. To accept love. To trust. To discover people’s true worth.
Until Keira had destroyed him all over again.
Nothing and no one on earth could have stopped Kelsey from throwing her arms around him then. Holding him tight, giving him all
her caring, her warmth, her sympathy, her comfort.
She’d done it for patients, when they were crying, when they needed an arm around them and a gentle voice to talk them through.
That’s all it was. It was all she intended it to be.
Until Ares mouth met hers.
And it became so much more.
