Brave the Heat (12 page)

“Me too.” Gavin slipped out the door and trotted down the steps. “It’s such a relief to know that we won’t be sleeping together. That will make having lunch with you tomorrow so much easier. You know? No strings attached—an
only
friends
kind of lunch.”

“Lunch, huh?” Jordan leaned on the edge of the doorway as he strode toward his car. “At the shop?”

“Okay, it’s a date.”

“Gavin”—she laughed—“what are you talking about?”

“See you around noon,” he said as he climbed into his truck. “I’ll bring sandwiches and you get some drinks.”

His headlight beams bobbed through the early evening twilight as he backed out of the driveway, illuminating the tall grasses along the edge. Jordan let out a sigh of relief. Closing the door, she flipped the lock before leaning back against the smooth, cool wooden surface. Looking around the open, airy house, with the comforting scent of the ocean air filling her head, Jordan felt safe for the first time in years.

“Are you gonna stare at that sandwich or eat it?” Gavin asked, finishing off the last of his turkey on rye. Jordan sat ramrod straight on the bench next to him with her gaze pinned to her half-eaten ham sandwich. “Jordan?”

“My father still doesn’t know who I am,” she said quietly. Long strands of blond hair blew around her with the rush of the warm summer breeze. “I’ve been going over there every day after work, you know. The girls stay downstairs with my mother while I sit with him, and I keep waiting for something. For some kind of awareness or a flicker of recognition.
Something
that would tell me he remembers how awful he was, how terrible he was to my mother and me.” Her voice was quiet but shook with frustration. “To tell me he’s sorry… I want to hate him,” she whispered. “But I can’t.”

“Okay,” Gavin said slowly. He shoved aside the urge to pull her into his arms. Apart from the fact they were in the middle of the park, he didn’t think he could stop with a simple hug. “So why keep going over there? Let it go.”

“You know what the craziest part is?” She squinted against the sun. “In spite of everything…I still love him. Believe it or not, he wasn’t always such a bastard.”

She let out a shuddering sigh as a breeze whisked over them, lifting her hair off her neck. He fought the desire to tangle his fingers in the long, silky strands, but if they were going to be friends, then he had to keep his hands to himself.
Jesus. Let’s be friends. What a stupid idea.
He rested his forearms on his knees and watched the heavy summer traffic as it rolled by on Main Street.

“Really?” He cleared his throat. “I don’t remember you ever talking about him like that. I know I never saw that side of the guy.”

“His heavy drinking started a couple of years before we moved here from Oklahoma. I was pretty young then, not much older than Lily. Even though I mostly remember the bad times with him, there were some good ones too, at least in the beginning.” A wistful smile curved her lips. “He used to sing to me at night before I went to sleep. He’d sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’”

Swiping at her eyes, she let out a short laugh. “Silly, isn’t it? You know, I’d practically forgotten all about it until I had children of my own. When Lily was born, I sang it to her, and that’s when I remembered my father singing it to me. I’ve… I mean I’m thinking about letting the girls see him.”

“Okay,” Gavin said slowly.

“Lily asks about him.” Jordan sniffled and swiped at her eyes. “She’s curious and I can’t suppose I blame her…but…I haven’t made up my mind.”

Honking horns from cars on Main Street interrupted their conversation, and for a minute Gavin thought she was going to clam up. Jordan fiddled with the paper around her uneaten sandwich, and he could feel how conflicted she was. The woman was in pain and he wanted to fix it, to make it better, to put out the fire that raged inside of her. He wanted to say something but didn’t have the first clue what it should be, so he opted for staying quiet. Better to let her get it all out.

“Anyway,” she said firmly, as though steeling her strength, “from what my mother tells me, his friend and business partner screwed him over. The bottom line was that he and my mother lost everything—his business, their savings, all of it. They moved here because of a sales job my father had to take, and he absolutely hated it. That’s when the drinking started. The unhappier he got, the more he drank.

“He absolutely loathed being beholden to someone else and then, as you know, he was constantly getting fired. He’d bounce from one job to the next, and every time he got laid off, it was a longer dry spell between jobs. No work meant more drinking, and that meant more screaming.” Her voice wavered with emotion as she brushed crumbs off her floral print sundress. “In some ways, I guess it’s easier to remember the rotten stuff.”

“Why?” Gavin nudged her knee with his, needing some kind of contact, no matter how brief. “I’d rather
forget
the bad stuff.” He might have uttered those words in a teasing tone, but he meant them. He wished like hell he could forget some of his own dark memories. The scarred flesh on his shoulder tingled, threating to pull him into memories better left undisturbed. Gavin cleared his throat and focused on Jordan. “Why on earth do you want to shut out the good times?”

“I guess it hurts less to think about the bad stuff,” she whispered.

Turning her large brown eyes to his, Jordan got that look on her face, the one that told him she was contemplating whether or not to say what was on her mind.
Damn.
That look tore at his heart just as much now as it did back then. Probably more.

“Because every now and then, when I remember what it was like to have my father hug me, sing softly, and kiss the top of my head, the ache in my chest gets so big, I think it might swallow me whole.” Straightening her back, Jordan stared out at the street. “I go back to that house every day now, not because I want to tell him off, but because I want him to tell me he still loves me. It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that crazy, Jordan.” Crumpling up the brown paper bag, he tossed it into the garbage can by the bench, then turned his attention back to her. “He’s your father.”

“And I married a man just like him.” Jordan wrapped up her sandwich with more force than necessary and slapped it on the bench between them. “I think that’s what’s bothering me more than anything else. I went and married a son of a bitch, and gave my daughters a bastard for a father. Is this their future, Gavin? Are they going to be sitting around one day wishing that their absentee father would love them?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know that you are a much different woman than your mother.” He held up both hands and quickly added, “Don’t get me wrong. I think Claire is a sweetheart, and I give her a hell of a lot of credit for sticking it out with your father all of these years, but—”

“It’s okay, Gavin.” Her hand drifted over and settled on his knee in a familiar, reassuring gesture. He stilled beneath her touch and she must have felt it, because she pulled her hand away quickly. “I mean, I know what you’re saying. My mother stayed and I didn’t. I left Ted because I didn’t want my daughters growing up in a loveless household with a drunk. It’s a terrible way to live.” She settled her hands on the edge of the bench on either side of her thighs, her shoulders hunched. “Ted barely paid any attention to the girls one way or the other. After I had the children, he barely even noticed
I
was there.”

They’d been having lunch every day for the past two weeks, and this was the first time she’d really opened up to him. Prior to this, she would steer the conversation toward him or his parents’ upcoming anniversary party, his brothers or his job, anything but herself. The fact that she was talking to him about this stuff gave him hope. He wasn’t a big one for talking out his feelings, but he was all for the idea of Jordan opening up. The more she shared with him, the better the odds that he could convince her to give him, to give
them
, a second chance.

“He sounds like a real prince.” The bench creaked in protest as Gavin leaned back. “This Ted guy must have been nice at the beginning. You never did tell me how you met him.”

“It’s not that exciting a story.” She lifted one shoulder and rolled her eyes. “I was on my home from an audition, and I literally bumped into him at the bank. He was handsome and charming…at least at the beginning. We had a whirlwind courtship and got married at City Hall about three months after we met. At first, I thought I’d hit the jackpot, you know? He was rich and handsome, and he seemed wonderful. But it didn’t take long for me to figure out that he wasn’t the guy I thought he was.

“He blamed the pressures at work for why he drank so much—that or entertaining clients. Ted always had one excuse or another. Anyway, a little over a year into our marriage, I was going to leave him. But by then I’d found out I was pregnant with Lily, and Gracie came along a couple years after that.” She sighed heavily and whispered, “I didn’t want to get a divorce, Gavin.”

“I imagine most people don’t.” Jealousy reared its head like the ugly monster it was. “You loved him. I get it.”

He fought the surge of envy as she spoke about her ex-husband, the man who’d been given the gift of having Jordan as his wife and squandered it. Gavin felt like a jackass. Hadn’t he asked her to tell him about this? He had officially become a masochist.

“No, I didn’t,” she said quietly as she stared at her interlocked fingers. “Maybe I did at first. I mean it wasn’t like it was with—” Jordan stopped abruptly.

Gavin’s gut clenched. Was she going to say, “What it was like with you”? Hope glimmered cruelly and silence hung between them as he waited for her to finish the thought and put him out of his self-imposed misery.

“It wasn’t like I thought it would be. And even though I wanted to leave, the idea of being on my own with two little girls scared the hell out of me. The really pathetic part is that I probably would have kept staying. Honestly, if he hadn’t come after me in front of the girls that night, I probably would have stayed…just like my mother did.”

“He hit you?” Gavin’s entire body tensed, and his hands curled into fists as rage simmered brightly beneath the surface. “In front of Gracie and Lily?”

This Ted asshole hit Jordan? Fury bubbled and rolled, threatening to erupt, but he stuffed it back down. Flipping out wouldn’t do anyone any good. It was bad enough to think that this Ted bastard had laid hands on Jordan, but that he would get violent in front of those two little girls made Gavin’s blood boil.

“No.” Jordan shook her head and tears glimmered in her eyes but none fell. “But if I’d stayed…”

“Right. Well then, I won’t have to rip his head off if I ever meet him.” Gavin nodded curtly and some of the fury eased from him—but not much. “He may not have hit you, Jordan, but it sounds like he was an abusive son of a bitch. Leaving him was the right thing to do for you and the girls.”

“Anyway, after that, staying with him was a far more frightening prospect than going it on my own. We all have our demons, I guess. But do you want to know what really kills me? Thanks to me, my daughters already have theirs.”

“You’re not the one who was abusive,” Gavin said tightly. “Sounds to me like Ted is the one who’s responsible for any demons. You’ve done a great job, Jordan. Your girls are terrific, and if you ask me, it’s better they have no father than to be around a guy like that.”

Before he could stop himself, he reached out and rubbed her lower back reassuringly. She stiffened briefly beneath his touch, but only for a moment before she relaxed. That infinitesimal shift toward acceptance was what he’d been looking for.

“True,” she murmured. “But unfortunately, he
is
their father and he’ll never really go away. Ted will always hang around just enough to make our lives miserable. Case in point, he left me a few unpleasant voice mails this week and even threatened to come here and take the girls.”

“I don’t think that would be good for his health,” Gavin murmured. “Does he know where you live?”

“He was hammered when he called, and I doubt he remembers leaving half the messages. Besides, I have full custody, and thanks to his substance abuse problem, all of his visits have to be supervised. He doesn’t love me or the girls, Gavin. He’s pissed that I left him and he didn’t win. It’s a power play. That’s it. There’s no love there. I don’t know if he’s really capable of loving anyone other than himself.”

Jordan glanced over her shoulder at him, and when her brown eyes met his, it was like a punch in the gut. The sadness that lingered there almost did him in, and it took Herculean strength not to drag her into his arms.

“I-I should be getting back,” she said, gathering her bag. “Cookie and Veronica are really busy getting things ready for the Posman wedding tomorrow, and I shouldn’t leave them alone in the shop too long.”

“Right.” Gavin dropped his hand, his fingers trailing briefly over the curve of her hip as she rose from the bench. “I should get back too.”

“You’ve been pretty busy yourself these days.” Jordan slung her bag over her shoulder. They walked side by side toward the intersection, and Gavin stuck his hands in his pockets to keep from touching her. “It seems like you guys are out on at least three or four calls a day.”

“We have been. It’s always busier in the summer.” Gavin stopped at the corner and pushed the button on the crosswalk pole. “Most of them are false alarms or the usual stove-top mishap, but we’ve had two more suspicious fires. Both were on the edge of town and in empty buildings, luckily. One was the abandoned gas station on Route 2, and the other was an old toolshed on the Thompsons’ property. Whoever is doing it seems to be getting bolder. They’re choosing locations closer and closer to town.”

“You really think someone in town is setting fires deliberately?” Jordan asked as they crossed the street toward the shop. “That seems crazy, Gavin. Who would do that?”

“A crazy person, but I can’t believe it would be anyone who lives here,” Gavin shot back. He stepped onto the sidewalk and instinctively rolled his left shoulder, the scarred skin feeling tighter than usual. “You’d have to be insane to
intentionally
start a fire and invite that monster into the world. Make no mistake about it, Jordan. Fire is a living, breathing monster that eats everything in its path. It doesn’t discriminate or feel pity or remorse. All it does is burn.”