Loving Jessie (21 page)

“And Lurene asked for a couple of pies. She says this time of year, people are getting into the whole holiday thing, so they start ordering pies more often. I had an idea for a white-chocolate cream pie that I wanted to try. And, since the oven was on, I thought I might get started on the holiday baking, so I made a couple batches of
chocolate-chip cookies, and now I’m making sugar cookies. I thought we could use them to decorate the Christmas tree, though I suppose it’s really too early for Christmas baking, isn’t it? They freeze, though, so it might not be so—”

Matt’s hands came down on her shoulders, cutting off the nervous rush of words. Her fingers curled against the counter, gouging holes in the dough she’d so carefully patched, and her breath caught on something that was almost a sob.

“I’m sorry, Jessie.” She felt him press his face to her hair, his hands sliding down to grip her upper arms and pull her back against the hard strength of his body.

“You should be.” She managed to resist the urge to just collapse against him, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to pull away. “I’ve been worried sick, wondering where you went and if you were okay.” Her voice shook around the edges.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I was way out of line. I shouldn’t have yelled at you, and I shouldn’t have walked out that way.”

“No, you shouldn’t have.” She didn’t resist when he turned her to face him, but she refused to lift her gaze above his chin. She was afraid of what she might see in his eyes, even more afraid of what he might read in hers.

“It won’t happen again,” he promised, rubbing his hands up and down her back.

“It better not,” she whispered. Her voice cracked, and Matt’s arms slid around her. She let him draw her close, resting her head against his chest, listening to the solid thump of his heart, drawing comfort from the warmth of his arms. She could have stayed just where she was for hours, holding him and being held, but the sharp ping of the oven timer broke the quiet closeness of the moment.

“My chocolate-chip cookies,” Jessie murmured, wiping surreptitiously at her eyes as she hurried over to the wall oven.

Matt watched her pull the pan from the oven, filling the room with the rich, dark scent of chocolate chips and brown sugar. He waited while she used a spatula to transfer the cookies to the waiting racks. Ordinarily he would have risked scorched fingertips to steal a couple of cookies while they were still hot, but he had other things on his mind tonight.

Jessie set the empty cookie sheet on top of the stove to cool and looked around the kitchen. There was hardly an inch of counter space still showing. Two pies, a cheesecake and two batches of cookies sat cooling on various racks. A bag of pastry flour and a canister of all-purpose flour jostled for position with several kinds of sugar, a half-spilled bag of chocolate chips, cubes of butter, eggshells, squeezed lemon rinds, empty cream-cheese cartons and a bottle of vanilla.

She glanced at Matt and shrugged. “I tend to cook when I’m nervous,” she admitted.

He looked at the overflowing counters, dark brows arching in silent comment. “Really? I never would have guessed.”

Her smile was almost back to normal, and Matt felt something relax inside him. It was going to be all right. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized how worried he’d been that his temper had caused permanent damage to their relationship. But it was going to be all right.

“I’ll help you clean up,” he said, shrugging out of the jacket Gabe had loaned him and dropping it over the back of a chair.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Since it’s my fault you needed a distraction, I figure the mess is at least half my responsibility.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Jessie nodded. She didn’t care about the messy counters. She wanted to understand what had happened earlier, what she’d said to set a match to his temper. But the questions and explanations could wait a little while, she decided.

They worked in surprisingly companionable silence. Jessie put away ingredients, while Matt rinsed the bowls and utensils she’d used and loaded the dishwasher. By the time the counters were cleared and everything was put away, the last traces of tension had faded. It was after midnight, and the house was quiet around them. Somewhere outside a dog barked once and then fell silent. Jessie felt a temptation to just ignore what had happened. They’d weathered the storm, after all. Was there really anything to be gained by talking about it?

“Did you ever meet my mother?” Matt asked into the silence.

Jessie nodded, not sure if she was relieved or sorry. “Once, when I was maybe twelve or thirteen. Reilly’s mom took me shopping for school clothes, and we ran into your mom at Penney’s.” She narrowed her eyes as if trying to bring the memory into focus. “I don’t remember her very well. She was very quiet, but I remember getting the feeling that Mrs. McKinnon didn’t—” She stopped abruptly.

“Didn’t like her?” Matt finished the sentence for her.

Jessie nodded uneasily. “She didn’t say anything to me, of course, but it was pretty obvious how she felt. I think it was the first time I realized that grown-ups could dislike each other the same way kids did, so it stuck in my mind. I don’t think your mother noticed anything, though,” she said reassuringly.

“If it was past noon, then she probably wouldn’t have noticed if Libby McKinnon spat in her eye,” Matt said dryly. Jessie looked confused, and he sighed. He hated talking about his childhood, hated thinking about it. For years he’d told himself it was dead and buried, no longer an issue. Apparently he’d been wrong. “My mother was rarely sober past noon, Jessie. She was a drunk. I don’t think I ever saw her completely sober, though she usually managed to hold it together pretty well during the day.”

He saw her eyes widen in shocked surprise and looked away before he could see the pity that inevitably came next. Crossing his arms over his chest, he leaned back against the counter, wrapping himself in the careful indifference he’d perfected years ago.

“Matt, I…” Jessie stopped and tried to find the right words. Though he acted like it didn’t matter, she didn’t need psychic ability to sense that there were layers of old pain behind his indifference. “Alcoholism is a disease,” she said finally, weakly.

“So it is, and I suppose I’d be more sympathetic if she’d ever made an effort to quit, but she didn’t.” His voice was sharp with old anger. “She preferred looking at the world through a vodka haze. I guess it made it easier to ignore the sound of her husband beating the crap out of their sons.” He ignored her horrified gasp, his voice taking on a razor-sharp edge of bitter humor as he continued. “Dad’s preferred drink was whiskey, though he was willing to make do with bourbon in a pinch. He might even have shared Mom’s vodka if she hadn’t been so good at hiding the bottles.”

“Beating…oh, Matt.” Her knees suddenly weak, Jessie sank down on one of the kitchen chairs. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I didn’t know.”

“Almost no one did.” Matt stared at the colorful array
of magnets on the refrigerator as if trying to memorize their exact placement. A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Libby McKinnon suspected, I think. A few times, she tried to get me to talk to her, but I wouldn’t say anything. I think, if I had, if I’d told her what was going on, she would have done something, gone to the authorities.”

“Why didn’t you tell her? Tell someone?” Jessie tucked her shaking hands between her knees. “Surely you didn’t want to stay there.”

Matt shook his head. “I was a kid, Jessie. I didn’t reason it out. Our home life might have sucked, but it was the only thing I knew. And I half thought it was my fault.”

“
Your
fault?” Jessie’s head jerked up, and he lifted a hand to stave off her indignation.

“If I was…bad or had done something to deserve what was happening, then it wasn’t quite so frightening. It wasn’t as scary as admitting that my parents were pretty much worthless.”

She stared at him, trying to imagine him as a child, trying to imagine what it would be like to grow up in the kind of household he was describing. She’d lost her parents at an early age, but her memories of them had been full of love and warmth.

“Matt, I… I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “It was a long time ago, and it wasn’t all bad. I had Gabe, and he always did his best to look out for me. There wasn’t much he could do when we were little, but when he was sixteen, he came home from basketball practice and caught Dad beating the hell out of me for something, God knows what. I guess something just snapped, because Gabe took the belt away from him and told him that if he ever hit me again, he was going to feed it to him, buckle and all. I guess the old man
believed him, because a few days later he left for work one morning and forgot to come home.”

“Did you…were you sorry he was gone?” Jessie asked hesitantly. “I mean, I know he…but he
was
your father.”

“Honor thy parents?” Matt asked sardonically.

“No. Not that. But just because he was…what he was, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t—love isn’t always logical,” she finished awkwardly.

“All I felt was relief,” he said flatly. “When I realized he wasn’t coming back, it was like I opened my eyes and saw the sun shine for the first time in my life. Everything was going to be different now. The monster was gone, and the three of us could be a real family.”

There was bitter humor in his voice, old anger in his eyes. He straightened away from the counter with an abrupt move that made Jessie flinch. She’d never seen him like this, never guessed that he kept this kind of rage bottled up inside. Of the two of them, Reilly had been the volatile one, quick to laugh, quick to anger. Matt had always been steady, the one you could count on to always be there when you needed him.

“I thought my mother would be glad he was gone,” Matt continued in that same almost light tone. “As far as I know, he’d never hit her, but they fought like cats and dogs, and he made no secret of his contempt for her. I figured, now that he was gone, she would crawl out of the bottle and become a real mom.”

He paced over to the back door, his movements quick and jerky, lacking his usual easy grace. He stared out into the darkness for a moment, his shoulders hunched. Jessie fought the urge to go to him, to slide her arms around his waist and tell him to stop talking about it, stop remembering. Something told her he needed to do this, not
because he owed her an explanation for his earlier outburst but because he’d been keeping the memories bottled up inside for a very long time. Maybe it was time to drag them out into the light.

Matt spoke without turning. “When she realized he wasn’t coming back, she was furious. Do you know why?”

Jessie shook her head, realized he couldn’t see her and had to swallow hard before she could get her voice to work. “Why?”

“Because Gabe had made him leave.” Matt turned to look at her, his mouth twisted in a half smile that held no humor. “She said he’d had no right to threaten his father. I think she even called him an unnatural child. It was all Gabe’s fault that the old man was gone and she was alone. I guess the two of us didn’t count. Even better, it turned out that she didn’t even need the old man’s money to get by. She had a trust fund she’d inherited from a great-aunt that was more than enough to support the three of us, so she hadn’t even stayed with the bastard because she couldn’t support us without him. She stayed because being married to him was better than being single. The fact that he beat her kids just didn’t enter into the picture.”

“Oh, Matt.” Jessie searched for something positive to say. No matter what she’d been or what she’d done, this was his mother they were talking about, and she’d been raised to believe that you didn’t make nasty remarks about other people’s relatives. But, in the end, she could only come up with the truth. “She sounds like a selfish bitch.”

Matt looked startled, and then his mouth curved in a genuine smile. “She was. Probably still is, for that matter. I haven’t seen her since she moved to Florida fifteen years
ago. She sends a Christmas card, in care of the agency, and they forward it to me. There’s never a note, just her signature. Not that I want to hear from her, but I sometimes wonder if she even remembers who I am or if I’m just another name on her Christmas list.”

“Well, I can certainly understand why you didn’t want me to invite her for Thanksgiving,” Jessie said briskly. “And if I ever see her, I might not be able to resist the urge to punch her in the nose.”

Matt laughed. “I’d pay to see that.”

Seeing the tension ease from his shoulders, Jessie gave in to the urge to go to him, sliding her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek to his chest, hugging him tightly. She felt his slight hesitation before his arms came up to hold her, his hands settling on the small of her back.

Matt rested his cheek against the top of her head, inhaling the warm scent of her—shampoo and chocolate and lemon, and something soft and sweet that was just Jessie.

She lifted her head from his chest, leaning back against his hold far enough to look up into his face. “Why didn’t you just tell me about your mother? About the kind of person she was?”

“You mean instead of blowing up and storming out of here like an idiot?” he asked.

“Well…I didn’t say it. You did.” She smiled, but there was still a question in her eyes.

He lifted one hand to smooth her hair back from her forehead, feeling it curl around his fingers like warm silk. “I don’t like talking about my childhood.” Matt smiled a little grimly at his own understatement. “I don’t like
thinking
about my childhood. And I
don’t
think about it most of the time. It was…not a good thing. I guess I just
really hated the thought of it intruding on what we have. On what we’re building here.”

“I can understand that, I guess.” She brushed her hand over his chest, smoothing out an imaginary wrinkle in the thin knit of his T-shirt. “I just wondered if it was something else,” she said slowly, keeping her eyes on her hand.

“Like what?”

“Well, like maybe you thought that I might think differently about you because of your childhood.” She looked at him suddenly, her dark eyes almost fierce. “Because I’d really hate it if you thought I was that shallow.”