Addicted to You (37 page)

His mouth tightened, but he didn’t speak.

“I know how much you put her on a pedestal. I’m sorry, Rill.” She saw him swallow thickly. “She didn’t deserve to be idolized,” Katie burst out heatedly. She flushed when Rill glanced at her sharply, but her flash of fury at Eden was difficult to withhold. It was anger at what Eden had done to Rill, true, but she also experienced a sense of betrayal over the fact that Eden had never confessed this secret part of her life to her—Katie. “She
didn’t
deserve it. Not if she was screwing around on you.”

He gave her a wry glance. “Shit happens, Katie. People fall out of love all the time. I obviously wasn’t making her very happy. She must have thought my work was more important to me than her. I’m not so sure she was wrong, if my actions were any indication of how I felt.”

Katie made a disgusted sound under her breath. Eden should have been talking to Rill if she was that upset with him . . . suggested they go to therapy . . . or asked for a divorce, if she was
that
unhappy. She shouldn’t have been off fucking some other guy behind his back.

“Who was it?” Katie asked irrepressibly. “The guy she was having an affair with, I mean.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Truth? It used to consume me, that question. I don’t think about it that much anymore.”

“No?” Katie asked him in a hushed, shaking voice. “Not . . . not even after you saw that pregnancy test last night and I told you that you were the one responsible for it? How could you
not
have thought of Eden being pregnant with another man’s child when I told you that last night?”

The air seemed to thicken in the silence that followed. Rill pinned her steadily with his stare, his eyes shining with something she strongly suspected was pity. For some reason, she knew what he was going to say next. She fought the rising dread like she would her worst enemy.

“I’m
not
leaving, Rill,” she blurted out of a constricting throat.

“I
am
, Katie,” he said quietly. “Not for long,” he added when a tear fell down her cheek. “I’ll be back in a week or two. I promise. There’s somewhere I have to go.”

Katie didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. He was leaving for good. She just knew it. This was the day she’d been dreading since she first came to Vulture’s Canyon.

“Katie,” he said firmly. She forced herself to look at him. “I’ve made an appointment for you with an ob-gyn clinic in Carbondale. I called around and got several references for the best doctor. I wrote down the date and time on a notepad in the kitchen. I called Olive Fanatoon and she says she’ll go with you to the appointment.”

She swallowed and just stared at him, unseeing. It was the same when he reached out and cupped her jaw. She was too numb to really feel it.

“Katie?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to be here for you during your pregnancy. I promise you that. I’m not abandoning you. I just . . . just have to go somewhere. I need to figure something out, and when I have, I’ll be back. I’ll be back,” he repeated with emphasis.

“Okay,” she said through leaden lips.

She sensed him studying her in the silence that followed. “You’ll go for the appointment? With Olive?”

Katie nodded. There was a buzzing in her ears. Everything had gone fuzzy . . . surreal.

“Are you okay, Katie?” he asked, his forehead creasing with anxiety.

“I’m fine.” She tried to smile.

Rill’d disappeared into these woods in a bout of hurt and confusion nineteen months ago. The shock of Katie telling him she was pregnant and accusing him of being the father when he couldn’t even recall the deed would likely send him off on another anguished escape.

Hell, given what he’d just told her about Eden, she could hardly blame him for coming up short in the trust department.

Of all the fucking bad timing. Only something this unlikely could happen to her.

“I’ll be back, Shine,” he whispered, his thumb wiping away a tear.

Katie nodded, even though she couldn’t allow herself to believe a word he was saying. If she let herself, it’d hurt too much when he didn’t return.

Twenty-six

Rill didn’t exactly know how his mother would react when she
saw him. He’d stopped trying to reach out to her twelve years ago. Fiona Pierce had never tried to contact him, not once since he’d moved stateside for university when he was nineteen years old.

Rill always had the idea growing up that his mother didn’t know what to do with him . . . didn’t know how to relate to a son. She knew precisely how to relate to men, and men seemed to know exactly how to relate to Fiona. Women tended to both despise and be enthralled by her. Fiona had that effect on people—like a queen who’d flipped off the world and become a whore because it made her laugh to consider the irony of the concept.

Fiona certainly knew how to treat her brothers—Ray and William—with a harsh tongue and a healthy dose of disdain.

Despite the fact that he’d long ago given up trying to have a relationship with his mom, he still felt a sense of sharp anticipation as he closed the kissing gate behind him and made his way across the broken stone of the sidewalk. A few chickens strutted up to him, obviously used to being fed by a human hand. He’d learned from the bartender—Mick—at the Regal Lion Pub in downtown Malacnoic that his mother’s latest place of residence had changed a few years back. Rill hadn’t been surprised. Fiona made a habit of changing residences at the same rate she changed lovers.

He knew her instantly when she opened the front door at his knock, although he could tell by her blank expression she didn’t recognize him. Her long, dark hair didn’t show a sign of gray, and Rill realized distantly she must color it. Maybe she had since he was a child. For all he knew, she’d been born a redhead.

Her hair may still look lustrous, but her face showed signs of wear and age. Wrinkles deepened around her eyes when she peered up at him.

He knew he resembled his mother. Almost every person in Malacnoic had said it at one time or another. Dark with blue eyes and a confidence people seemed to feel he had no right to, as a bastard child, even if they did admire that characteristic.

You’re the spitting image of your mam, aren’t you?

The townspeople had never said it joyfully, like they might other children—but rather sadly or suspiciously, like a person might say the devil’s spawn resembled its father.

Fiona gave a dry, crackling laugh when she recognized him. Apparently, his mom still hadn’t broken her pack-and-a-half-a-day habit. He could smell the scent of stale cigarette smoke coming off the too-tight cotton dress she wore.

“Lord, I thought you were the guy here to fix my oven for a few seconds. I was wondering when Fitzgerald got so tall. Come on in, then,” she told Rill briskly, waving him inside the house as though he were a neighbor she saw every day of her life. Rill followed her down a dark hallway that smelled strongly of cigarette smoke to a sunny kitchen. She sat down at the dented, pockmarked oak table and picked up a lit cigarette. Smoke wafted through the air as she waved at the ancient AGA oven.

“That’s the broken oven I was talking about, there. Been driving me mental, that thing. Patrick finally went and called Fitzgerald, the repairman, when he didn’t get his dinner on time for the fourth day in a row, lazy sod,” Fiona said fondly before she took a long draw on her cigarette. “What brings you here, then? I’d heard on the television you’d gone mad after that prissy wife of yours died.”

“Do I look mad?” Rill countered quietly.

Fiona shrugged. She studied him as she smoked, clearly undecided on her answer . . . or uncaring, most likely.

Rill inhaled slowly, resisted his typical inclination to say something foul to his mother and storm out of the house in a fury. On the flight across the Atlantic, he’d ritualistically prepared himself for her typical coldness. He’d come here with a purpose and he wasn’t going to stay here long.

He wasn’t a child anymore. He wasn’t a masochist, either.

He glanced around the stark, serviceable kitchen. “You live with a man named Patrick, then? This is his house?”

“That’s right.”

“You have everything you need?” Rill asked, already knowing what her answer would be. Hadn’t he offered to give her money over the years, given her the opportunity not to prostitute herself to these men? She’d just laughed at him with that deep, raspy voice he supposed some men found attractive.

You’re
not going to take care of me, Rilly. Not a chance.

“Do I look like I need anything?” she asked him.

He glanced at her. Her figure was still full and voluptuous, but she was going to fat. Truth be told, she didn’t look well. There was a gray cast to her skin that alarmed him . . . hurt him to see, because he knew there was nothing he could do about it.

Nothing.

He steeled himself against the onrush of sympathy he felt for her. He knew what would happen if he expressed it, knew it deep inside his bones. She’d insult him if he communicated his concern, send him into a fury so that he forgot for days, or months, or years why he’d ever felt an ounce of compassion for Fiona Pierce.

“I came here to ask you who my father was,” he stated starkly.

She paused in the action of inhaling her cigarette. Her sharp blue eyes flew to meet his gaze. She slowly pulled the cigarette away from her mouth.

“Lord, you’re not going back to that, are you? I haven’t heard you sing that old tune since you were sixteen years old,” she said, smoke curling around her smile as she spoke.

“Tell me, Ma. What’ve you got to lose by telling me?”

“He’s dead. What’ve you got to gain by knowing?”

“Some peace of mind,” Rill grated out. “I want to know. I want to know who he was. Who’re you to deprive me?”

“I’m your ma.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

It was Fiona who laughed after a moment, though, low and rough.

“Do you want some tea, then?” she said after she’d recovered from her bout of mirth at Rill’s expense.

“No,” he bit out.

“Whiskey? I’d heard you’d developed a taste for it.”

He stood, his chair scraping loudly against the tile floor. She shook her head, a smile still lingering around her full lips.

“You won’t find any answers here, Rill. You and I were always as different as north and south.”

He wanted to snarl at her that he’d tried to meet her halfway for his entire childhood and most of his adult life, but she’d been too busy wallowing in her selfishness. How many times had he waited for her as a small child outside a closed bedroom door when she’d told him she’d take him to the park, or promised him she’d take him into town for a festival or a friend’s party?

But Fiona had always had better things to do with her time, was always willing to do them with men who were frightening strangers to a child. As he’d gotten older, he’d learned to treat his mother’s men with a coldness that he’d soon realized they found as intimidating as his mother’s dark, volatile moods.

By the time he’d reached eleven years old, he’d given up the childhood fantasy that each man his mother molded her body against and kissed might be his absent father.

He wanted to tell her she was a coldhearted bitch who had sacrificed her only child to her carnal appetites and laziness.

But what was the point? He continued, determined to finish this mission.

“I also came to tell you I’m going to have a baby. It’s your loss you never knew the mother, Katie. She’s a light I reckon you and I never deserved. One thing’s for certain: I won’t be showing up here with your grandchild. I won’t be showing up on your doorstep ever again. If you call, if you
try
, Ma, that’s another thing entirely.”

He walked out of the house and didn’t look back. Fiona wouldn’t be waiting for the backward glance. Rill knew that for a fact.

He’d said what he needed to say to Fiona Pierce.

Rill had spent most of his life being embarrassed by his name
sakes, William and Ray Pierce. The fact his uncles had just been sent to prison for gambling and soliciting prostitutes had been the main reason he’d made the final decision to film some scenes in Malacnoic four years ago.

But this visit wouldn’t be complete until he’d sat across a table from William and Ray Pierce. Micky the bartender had informed him the pair was currently out of prison, so Rill knew exactly where to find them that evening. William didn’t go anywhere without Ray, and vice versa. They even managed to organize it so that they were conveniently arrested together for similar crimes.

Tonight he was looking forward to seeing his uncles again for some reason. Maybe it was just because after his visit with Fiona he didn’t think any family visit could get much worse.

He waited in a dark corner of the Regal Lion, keeping a low profile and sipping his Guinness sparingly. Round about seven o’clock, the dim, musty pub began to bustle. He recognized his uncle Ray as he walked through the front door—tall, dark-haired, the remnants of great handsomeness still clinging to his worn visage. Rill stood. The movement caught Ray’s eye.