Shoreline Drive (22 page)

Sensing her weakening, he pushed forward. “One thing, though. This is a conversation we need to have at home.”

“Why?” Her voice rose in suspicion. “So you can weasel out of it again?”

“No.” Ben tried for a smile, but it felt all wrong on his face. “Because I don’t want to cry in front of the entire assembled population of Sanctuary Island. They wouldn’t be scared of me anymore, and I’d have to be extra mean to make up for it. As a thank-you for helping scare off my parents, let’s spare them that. What do you say?”

Concern lit a hesitant glow in Merry’s eyes, and Ben could admit to himself that he was glad to see it. If she could still worry about him, there was hope. At least enough to make it worthwhile to dig through the worst memories of his entire life.

“Fine.” Merry glanced away. “I’ll wait until we get home.”

The simple fact that she still called the house at Isleaway Farm “home” beat back some of the darkness in Ben’s brain. He smiled, and Merry wrinkled her nose at him.

“You get a reprieve, but all is not forgiven, and certainly not forgotten,” she scolded, switching Alex from one arm to the other, the way she did when she’d been carrying him for too long.

“Understood,” Ben said, reaching tentatively with both arms. It was an undeniable relief when Merry handed over the baby without hesitating.

She rolled her shoulders and pinned Ben with a challenging stare. “Really, you deserve to be punished. And I think I have just the punishment.”

Ben braced himself. “What?”

“You have to let Taylor take wedding photos of us feeding each other cake. And then you have to dance with me.”

The vindictive satisfaction in her voice and the twinkle in her eyes, along with the warm weight of the boy in his arms, filled Ben with a rush of disbelief so overpowering, he nearly staggered under the onslaught.

“Brutal,” he managed. “But I notice you’re punishing yourself, too—you’ll be choking down that cake right alongside me, and you’re the one whose toes are liable to get broken when I step on them on the dance floor.”

“I figure I’m partially responsible for this situation,” Merry said as she led him over to the table that held the towering white cake. “You offered, before, to tell me about your first marriage, but I didn’t want to hear it. Stupid.”

“Don’t call yourself stupid,” Ben growled without thinking.

Merry smiled faintly. “Don’t worry, this time I won’t let anything stand in the way of hearing the whole story. If we stand any chance of making this marriage work, we have to be honest with each other. Even when it hurts.”

Swallowing down a spurt of unease, Ben nodded. Merry pressed a quick kiss to Alex’s head, and Ben inhaled a swift, surreptitious breath of her fresh apple scent before she set off to find Taylor.

Honest even when it hurts.

Ben wasn’t sure he could promise that. There were some truths that were never meant to be spoken aloud, and some that Merry might never be ready to hear.

For instance, the fact that Ben was fairly certain he was head over heels in love with his wife.

Chapter Seventeen

“In spite of everything,” Merry said, sighing as she kicked her sore bare feet up onto the polished wood coffee table, “we managed to have kind of an awesome day.”

The party had lasted long into the evening. Merry and Ben had eventually handed Alex off to be cooed over by a revolving rotation of relatives and friends, while they made the rounds. She’d added “thanking every single person individually” to Ben’s punishment roster, which he’d taken with as good a grace as could be expected—i.e., a minimum of scowling and grumping, and only a few cutting asides when he was forced to deal with some of his more troublesome (or, in Ben’s words “idiotic”) clients.

Merry had ruthlessly suppressed her laughter, and wondered exactly when the sharp side of Ben’s tongue had started to tickle her funny bone.

Now they were home, Alex was sleeping the sleep of an infant who’d endured more squeezing, dandling, and cheek pinching in one afternoon than in the entire four months of his life, and Ben was making tea in the kitchen.

“You have a gift,” Ben told her, handing off a steaming mug that wafted minty steam.

“We said no gifts!” Merry groaned, struggling to sit upright in indignation. “I didn’t get you a wedding present.”

Ben laughed and settled onto the other end of the couch. “That’s not what I mean. You have a gift for happiness. No matter what happens, you seem to come through it with a smile.”

“Oh.” Merry made a face and blew a cooling breath over her fragrant tea. “My sister’s the one who went through therapy—and I say ‘went through therapy’ as if it were an ordeal, but I’m pretty sure if she ever gets married, her ex-therapist will be one of her bridesmaids—but even I know that ‘gift for happiness’ is another way of saying I tend to hide from the bad stuff in life.”

“Is that such a bad thing? Personally, I find repression to be an effective coping mechanism.”

Merry snorted. “That doesn’t surprise me after meeting your parents, the king and queen of the WASPs.”

“It’s true, my family isn’t big on openness and communication. Or, you know, feelings.” Ben stared down into his mug as if lost in thought.

There wouldn’t be a better opening. Merry took a cautious sip of her tea, even knowing it would burn her tongue, to buy time to pluck up her courage. This man she’d married was a mystery, an enigma, a Rubik’s Cube of contradictions. She wanted to get to the bottom of him, to plumb his depths and learn his secrets—and that meant bringing up things he clearly didn’t want to talk about.

But after today, and the threatening way his father talked about taking this life away from them, Merry needed to know.

“So … about that promise you made at the reception,” Merry began, cringing inside at her own tentativeness. Why was this so hard?

Maybe because she was already in deeper with Ben, emotionally speaking, than she’d ever thought possible when she agreed to their so-called simple business arrangement.

He blew out a breath and planted his feet in the deep-piled rug, curling his toes into the cream wool. Merry found her gaze drawn to those masculine feet. They were sort of stupidly sexy, poking out from the frayed hem of the jeans he’d changed into the minute they walked through the door.

“Right,” Ben said, pulling her away from her embarrassing sudden-onset foot fetish. “Any question you want to ask. Go.”

Merry, who’d been thinking about this off and on for hours, knew exactly where to start. “What were you going to tell me about your relationship with Ashley, when it came up before and I shut you down?”

“Straight for the throat, no warm-up, huh?” Ben leaned over the mug cupped between his agile surgeon’s fingers, his elbows braced on his spread knees. Shooting her a glance from under the thick fall of wavy brown hair over his forehead, he said, “You sure you wouldn’t rather start small, work your way up?”

More than anything else, Ben’s reaction told her she was tugging on exactly the right thread to start unraveling his past. “Start talking, Doc.”

“I used to hate it when you called me that.” He smiled slightly, returning his gaze to the fascinating stretch of rug between his feet. “Now I kind of dig it.”

“Ben…”

“No, you’re right. No more messing around. So, Ashley. We met at a hospital fund-raiser during the first year of my residency. My father is on the board, and I realized almost immediately that he’d orchestrated the whole thing—but for once, I didn’t mind his interference, because Ashley was … perfect.”

Perfect. Merry drew her legs up onto the sofa cushion under her and took a soothing sip of tea.

“She was blond and cool, not like most of the giggling, ex-sorority-girl daughters of my parents’ society friends. Ashley is smart—she’s the head of development for a local nonprofit fund that subsidized working artists. My mother loved her because she came from a good family; my father wanted to attract Ashley’s father to donate money for a new hospital wing; but I didn’t care about any of that because I was in love.”

He shook his head at himself, as if he found the entire concept of being in love unbelievable now.

“So what went wrong?” Merry asked into the hush.

“Nothing, at first. We got married, I was promoted to chief resident, she cut back on her hours at the art fund … and got pregnant.”

It wasn’t as if Merry hadn’t been prepared for this. It stood to reason that if Ben had proof of his ability to father children, he’d gotten it during his first marriage. But somehow, it was still a shock. Merry bobbled her mug and bit back a curse as she lifted her hand to her mouth to suck hot tea off her skin.

Her entire body was engaged in the act of listening, every atom of her being rerouted to her ears as she strained to catch Ben’s next words.

“The pregnancy was normal. Easy, even. Ashley never had morning sickness, and she kept up with her yoga and lap swimming until the week she gave birth.”

If Merry hadn’t hated Perfect Ashley, who Ben was still hung up on, already … but with a shiver of presentiment, Merry knew she couldn’t hate Ashley. Not with what was surely coming next.

“The baby was born exactly on time. I was in the delivery room, and since I’d already done my labor-and-delivery rotation, the attending even let me be the one to catch the baby.” There was no wonder or joy in Ben’s deadened voice, only sorrow, and Merry had to bite her lip to keep from begging him to stop talking. But now that he’d started, Ben seemed unable to stop. He told the story in a steady stream of distant words, as if it had happened to someone else.

“She looked healthy, ten fingers and toes, no obvious issues. Ashley cried. I might have, too, I don’t remember. We named her Justine, after Ashley’s mother. Justine Elizabeth Fairfax.”

He paused there, long enough for Merry to count out five heartbeats as blood pounded in her ears. “It’s a beautiful name,” she finally said.

Ben jolted, blinking at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Yeah,” he said, setting his mug down on the coffee table with a loud crack. She caught a glimpse of his eyes and caught her breath.

His eyes weren’t numb or distant—they were infinite pools of rage and grief. “That pretty name looked great on her tombstone.”

“Oh, Ben.” Merry covered her mouth with her hand, frozen on the sofa. Should she put her arm around him? He looked as if he’d throw off any comforting touch, the line of his broad back vibrating with tension.

“She lived four weeks and five days. Four weeks and five days of tests, procedures, and specialists. She never left the hospital.”

Heart breaking, Merry tried to imagine the extended terror Ben and his wife experienced in those days. She couldn’t. Her brain simply refused to go there.

“Failure to thrive,” Ben murmured. “Do you know what that means?”

Merry shook her head mutely, her vision blurred by tears.

“It means,” Ben continued, soft and ruthless, “that she didn’t grow. She actually lost weight after birth, even though Ashley fed her constantly. Her body refused to retain or efficiently utilize the calories she took in. She wasted away in front of us for four weeks and five days because of a chromosomal abnormality so rare, it only affects one out of every six thousand live births. It’s like being struck by lightning. No way to predict it, no way to prevent it, no way to cure it. Nothing to do but stand outside the NICU and watch her fade.”

The remembered helplessness in his tone was horrible, annihilating, and Merry couldn’t stay respectfully on her side of the couch any longer. “You can push me away if you want,” she said, scooting over to wrap her arms around his bent shoulders. “But I hope you don’t.”

He was icy marble under her touch for a long minute. Finally, he turned his head, just far enough to press his face to the side of Merry’s neck. She clutched him closer in relief, fisting her hands in the loose cotton of his soft waffle-knit Henley and burying her nose in his hair.

“She died,” he gasped thickly. “My baby girl, my Justine.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Merry kept whispering, over and over, feeling as if she’d been turned inside out. God in heaven, no wonder he hadn’t wanted to relive this nightmare by telling her about it.

Ben’s arms crept around her waist, hesitant at first, but soon he was holding on to her as if she were his only anchor in a stormy sea, tight enough to make her ribs creak in protest. His shoulders spasmed, he shook, but his face where it pressed against her neck was dry. He didn’t cry.

That was okay, because Merry was crying enough for both of them.

*   *   *

Eyes swollen and burning, Ben let the flood of Merry’s tears wash his grief back down into the depths of his soul. No amount of sobbing would ever wipe it away completely, he knew, but as Merry’s hitching breaths ghosted over his head, Ben felt lighter than he had in years.

Repression might be a valid coping strategy, but there was something to be said for getting it all out there.

Sitting up took effort. Every part of Ben’s body wanted to mold itself to Merry’s, to melt into her and mesh together until he absorbed some of the sweetness and good humor of her outlook, her giant and generous heart, into himself.

“You can probably guess the rest,” Ben said, sinking back into the sofa cushions, still close enough to feel Merry all along one side. He was exhausted by the emotional roller coaster of the day. “Ashley and me … our marriage didn’t survive the death of our daughter. Ash got remarried four winters ago; I hear she’s got a healthy toddler and another on the way.”

Merry let him go so she could lean over and grab a tissue from the box on the end table. Blowing her nose, she shuddered out a long breath and pulled herself together. “Then,” she said, frowning, “nothing went wrong with Ashley’s other pregnancies.”

Ben tensed. “Obviously not.”

“So that’s what your dad meant. You could father as many perfectly healthy kids as you want—there’s no reason to assume lightning would strike twice in the same place.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Ben cut off that train of thought with a sharp gesture. “I’m never putting myself, or any woman I care about, through that again.”