Secrets of You (5 page)

“You said that earlier.” She’d jump in the Schuylkill River in January, naked, before she’d give him anything, especially a second chance.

He must have read her thoughts because he scowled and snatched the beer the waitress had delivered seconds before. “My real name’s Ash Lancaster.”

“Lancaster?”

He tipped the bottle to his lips and drank, eyeing her reaction. When she didn’t continue, he set the bottle on the table and said, “As in Lancaster Development.”

“Oh.”
Oh.
Everyone in Philly knew about Lancaster Development; they owned the majority of upscale real estate in the city: condos, offices…The Silver Strand…

A faint blush crept up his neck. “The first day I met you I was just checking out the area. My brother sent me on one of his scavenger hunts and I grew bored.” He shrugged and the blush spread to his cheeks. “What did I know about condos and office buildings? I was only looking for a way to pass an hour before I had to report back. And then I met you.”

Talk of that first meeting brought back too many memories—the instant connection, the laughter filling the shop, the intense look on his face when he asked her to dinner. More memories crowded her brain, weighed down her heart—long nights of passion and promise, dreams of a future that would grow stronger each year…hope to heal the past…

Ash broke through the memories. “I wanted to tell you who I was, but I had to know the money wouldn’t matter.”

She would have loved him if he’d owned nothing but the camera and backpack he carried into her shop and were simply the half-broke photojournalist he claimed to be. “Did trust ever cross your mind? Even once? Or were you not planning to marry me anyway so it didn’t matter?” Putting sound to the questions she’d battled since he left pinched her brain and jabbed her heart until she grew lightheaded. How many times had she wondered if he’d ever really cared or if she’d just been a game?

“I wanted to marry you,” he said in a voice that sounded as if all of the oxygen had been sucked from it. “I’d never wanted anything more in my life.”

She ignored the pain that leached into his words. “But you left.”

His dark gaze flitted over her face, landed on his beer. “My parents died when I was nine. My brother was nineteen. He’d just started his second year at Duke but he transferred to Rutgers so he could live at home with me. Spoiled me rotten, gave me everything and still it wasn’t enough. I wanted my parents, a normal family, not a brother who got saddled with me. I had so damn much guilt. And anger. I rebelled, flunked out of two schools,
then finally finished.”

He smiled and shrugged, his gaze sliding to hers. “I was a pretty big disappointment to Pete, which made it even worse. I
played, partied, pretended I was Bruce Wayne without the Batman outfit. You lose your way when all you have to do is think it and it’s yours. Nobody needs you except as a ticket to the next party, you have no sense of purpose, you flit from one feel-good event to the next. After a while, it eats at your soul.”

She was sorry he’d lost his parents, but he’d had opportunity, most likely trust-fund loads of it, and if he chose not to take it, that was his problem. “You don’t really expect me to feel sorry for you because you’re rich.”

His lips twitched. “Would it work?”

“Of course not.”

Those lips turned up at the corners, spread into a smile. “I’d take anything from you right now; pity even, and I hate pity.” He laughed. “I’ve never given anybody my backstory, not my real one. You’re the first. Having too much money can screw up a person, make him think he’s bigger than he is, that the rules don’t apply. It can make him forget to be human. When I met you, I’d just returned from a bike trip out west. I’d started doing that a year before—packing up my Harley, living out of two saddlebags, taking pictures of the land and the people. You can learn a lot when you get away from the noise and stop thinking you’re so important. It was very freeing. Remember we talked about doing that?”

He stumbled over his words, cleared his throat, and continued, “Pete said I was wasting my life, and I owed it to our parents to do something constructive. He tolerated the partying and the pseudo identities, but hopping on a motorcycle, chasing landscapes and people’s stories with a camera? He said that was insane.”

Arianna recalled the plans they had to ride to South Dakota on his motorcycle after the wedding, how Ash teased her about having to downsize her hair products. Oh, how she’d looked forward to such a trip. She’d planned to sketch new jewelry designs while he captured their trip with his camera.

“Your brother sounds like a very logical man.” Past was past and if Ash continued mining for nuggets of emotion tied to what had been “us,” she’d combust. She had to stop it—now. “I’m guessing he was behind the note you sent?”

His face paled. “He was.”

Of course.
This was a fairly simple puzzle: Big brother controlled the money and while little brother could be naughty, even break a few rules, he could not choose a bride without his brother’s approval and certainly not one his brother did not know existed. It all came down to money. It always did. People like Ash could say it didn’t matter. They could blather on about losing their way and having no purpose, but threaten the income stream or maybe temporarily yank it, and these people caved and straightened up like good little girls and boys, leaving behind those who had believed their nonsense. She sipped her scotch. “He gave you an ultimatum.” It wasn’t even a question because her gut knew the answer.

His mouth flattened and the words slipped out. “You could say that.”

“And you took it.”

The left side of his jaw twitched.
Three times. “He made it hard to refuse.”

“Did he write the letter for you, too? Compose those sentences in case you didn’t quite know how to dump me?” She sucked in a breath.
To hell with composure. “Could you not have had the decency to tell me to my face?”

“If I had to do it, I thought it would be better this way,” he said quietly.

“Better for whom? Oh, you, of course, because it certainly wasn’t better for me.” One note had destroyed her dreams, taken away her belief in love and ever-after.

He shook his head and looked away. “I’d do anything not to hurt you.”

“Really?” He’d decimated her, ripped her soul apart, left her alone, bleeding, in pain. “Except when dollars and cents are involved.”

“Dammit, Arianna, I’m not asking to hop back in your bed, but can you at least stop attacking me?”

Hopping back in her bed? She’d shoot him first. But her traitorous body tingled even as she fought visions of what they’d done in her bed. And out of it…

He reached across the scarred table and clasped her right hand. She flinched but didn’t pull away. His hand was warm, his palm callused. “I left Philly the day after I sent you the note. I couldn’t stay here knowing you were in the same city and I couldn’t see you. I traveled a bit, then headed west on the bike, went to all the places we talked about—the small towns, the historic sites, traveling miles of open road and thinking about nothing but the next picture”—he paused, his voice hoarse—“and you. I came back here a few times to see my nephews and Pete, but my brother knew things had changed. Two weeks ago, he asked me to make a trip home. That’s when he told me his wife found out about the threat he made and told him if he didn’t try to make things right, she’d divorce him.”

She looked up from the hand covering hers and saw the pain and regret in his eyes. “What are you saying?”

Ash’s next words turned her world sideways. “Pete regrets that he drove us apart. He wants us to have another chance.”

“I hear he’s gorgeous.”

Quinn continued brushing his teeth and ignored his wife’s comment. Only one person would be blabbing about something that was not her business and throwing in ridiculous words like
gorgeous
. His sister. Annie loved romance, intrigue, underdogs, and collecting strays—especially human ones. That’s why she was a social worker for Catholic Charities, why she rescued Chester, a lab mix she found wandering the streets, and why she married Michael Sorbonne, the absent-minded, brilliant doctor-husband who forgot to get haircuts, pick up dry cleaning, and remember his wife’s birthday.

“Weren’t you going to tell me about Arianna’s fiancé?”

“He’s not her fiancé.” Quinn set his toothbrush in the holder, rinsed his mouth, and faced his wife. Eve Burnes still sucked the air from his lungs when he looked at her. He’d never wanted a wife, never wanted a child, or a home with a backyard and a swing set because that spoke of permanency and there was too much opportunity for hurt when a person thought long term. He had always been all about self-preservation, which meant no attachments. That’s what happens when your mother up and disappears, leaving you with a despondent father, an anxiety-ridden kid sister, and the truth, which wasn’t what everyone thought it was. His mother hadn’t been abducted at all. She’d made her weekly visit to the grocery store one afternoon and walked out of their lives until her return last year. A truth like that can mess with a person’s ability to trust anyone.

But Eve had shown him what love could be like. She’d given him another chance to believe—in himself, in love, in the goodness of others. That last one only extended so far. He was a lawyer by trade and a skeptic by nature. Besides, she was referring to the man who had hurt Arianna.

“Okay.” Eve grabbed a brush and ran it through her dark hair. “I guess I’ll just have to ask Arianna.”

Right.
As if she would provide the humiliating details of the man who’d ditched her ten days before the wedding and then suddenly reappeared to offer his undying love and limitless bank account.

“He’s not her fiancé,” Quinn repeated, taking the brush from his wife and setting it on the counter. He sifted his fingers through her hair and pulled her to him. “And never ask a guy about gorgeous. It’s not in his vocabulary.”

Her full lips twitched. Twice. “You have a point there. Annie says they were crazy in love, didn’t leave each other’s side from almost the moment they met. What could have happened?”

Quinn planted a soft kiss on the side of her neck. Distraction was the key here. If she became more interested in other…pursuits…she might forget about Arianna and her reckless ex-fiancé. He ran his tongue along the column of her neck…

“Quinn.” Eve stepped back, away from his tongue and his touch. “Doesn’t it bother you that maybe they still love each other?”

Was that a prompt to say
yes
? He couldn’t do it. “It bothers me that I want to take my wife to bed and she’s more interested in finding out about another man.”

Those blue eyes narrowed on him. “You’re very good at avoidance. I thought we were past that.”

Damn.
He sighed and leaned against the vanity. Nothing like spilling a secret in the confines of a bathroom. Married life had dragged the truth from him on more occasions than he’d like to admit, but it was a small price to pay for a life with Eve and Hope. “Ash Revelin is really Ash Lancaster of Lancaster Development. Arianna didn’t know and he didn’t tell her. When big brother found out there was going to be a wedding and he didn’t even know there was a fiancée, he put a stop to it.”

“Oh. Well, I hadn’t expected that.
Poor Arianna. Let me guess. This Ash didn’t want to lose his trust fund, so he broke it off.”

He could tell by the way her upper lip curled that she didn’t like that one bit. If he let her think that was the reason, she’d despise the guy and that would be the end of it.
Maybe. But he couldn’t do it, so he added the rest. “Actually, he left to protect her. Seems she has a past nobody knew about, including me.” That last part didn’t sit well, but Arianna didn’t know about his past either. Maybe that’s why they got along so well—they both had secrets and knew better than to pry at them. “The brother threatened to expose her if Ash didn’t break it off.”

“How horrible.
And sad.” And then, “What could possibly be so bad that he’d agree?”

“Oh, family secrets can be pretty twisted.” Like his mother walking out of her own life and leaving behind a husband and two children. And Eve with an abusive first husband who hunted
her like an animal until he got caught in his own trap. He told her the story of the real Arianna, the one who stole from her parents, got pregnant, created a fake backstory complete with studies abroad, advanced college degrees, and wealthy,
dead
parents.

“Oh, Quinn.”
Eve wrapped her arms around his waist and settled her head on his chest. “What are we going to do?”

We?
He stroked her back and held her close. “I’m not sure there’s a
we
in this.”

She pulled back a bit and looked up at him. “Of course there is. She’s your friend. Ash hurt her but not because he wanted to; he did it to protect her. Once he tells her—”

“He doesn’t want her to know that he knows. At least not yet. I think he wants her to tell him.”

Eve smiled.
“Of course. That shows trust. If she can share something like that with him, then he’ll know she really loves him.”

“Right.”
He guessed. Hell, what did he know? He had a hard enough time keeping up with his own wife—she said one thing but meant another. Or she said nothing, which meant something else. Back in his bachelor days, he didn’t care what a woman thought or if he hurt her feelings. He didn’t care about any of it…until Eve. Now he cared so much his chest ached.