The Last White Knight (17 page)

She narrowed her eyes, and another pair of tears went up and over the barrier of her lashes. “You don’t know anything.”

“I know I love you!” he shouted.

“How can you love me?” she shouted back. “You don’t even know my name!”

Her words seemed to chill the very air around them. Everything went still. Erik stared at Lynn, his heart pounding, his mind momentarily befuddled by her words.
Didn’t know her name?
It made no sense, and yet the look of horror in her eyes suggested she’d just let slip a terrible truth.

“What are you saying?” he asked, not altogether certain he wanted to hear the answer.

Lynn took advantage of his shock to pull herself free of his grasp. This time she did scramble from the bed and went in search of her clothing.

“Nothing,” she murmured. Picking her crumpled
dress up from the floor, she shrugged into it and started fastening the buttons, her fingers fumbling hopelessly over the smooth mother-of-pearl disks. “Let’s just say this isn’t going to work and call it a night.”

“Let’s not.” He rounded the end of the bed and caught her by the wrists. “You’re telling me I went to bed with a stranger,” he said, his expression fierce. “I think I deserve an explanation for that.”

Lynn’s facade of anger crumbled. Her shoulders sagged. She hung her head, her gaze fastening on Erik’s big hands circling her wrists. The fantasy was over. She’d had her date with Prince Charming, but she hadn’t made it home before midnight. The clock had struck, and now she’d turned back from a princess to … what? What she had been all along—a woman with a past.

Erik watched the fight go out of her, taking all his anger with it. His heart ached for her, for the pain she was putting herself through for whatever reason.

“Tell me,” he whispered, sliding his arms around her and drawing her against him. He buried his face in the wild tumble of her hair and hugged her close. “You can tell me anything. You’re a Russian spy. You used to be a man.” He pulled back from her just enough to let her see him make a face. “Well, I guess
I’d rather not hear that, but anything else I can deal with. I promise.”

Lynn’s heart squeezed painfully at the sweetness in his eyes. He was so good. He would try to keep his promise. But Lynn didn’t hold out much hope. The understanding he had been cultivating this last week with her girls was too new and too fragile. She’d lied to him, kept things from him. The revelation of her past was bound to bring a return of Erik the Stern, Erik the Unyielding, the straight arrow who didn’t tolerate bad behavior from children of “good” families.

“I’d like to dress first, if you don’t mind,” she said. She was going to feel naked enough with clothes on.

Erik didn’t say a word. He slipped her dress from her shoulders and tossed it aside, then picked up his discarded shirt and held it for her. Lynn shrugged into it without protest, giving in to the need to at least be that close to him. She fastened the buttons while he picked up his pants and stepped into them. He seated himself on the foot of the bed, forearms braced against his thighs, hands dangling down between his knees, and waited, his gaze following her as she moved to stare out the big window.

“My name was Ellen Bradshaw,” she began. “My father taught computer science at Notre Dame. My
sister was brilliant. I rebelled.” Such a simple story, she thought, as simple as a pebble being thrown into a pond, and with effects as far-reaching as the concentric circles of movement caused by that one small stone. “Everything Rebecca did was right, perfect, above and beyond. Dad adored her. He used Rebecca as a measure for my worth, and I always fell short because I was just ordinary. When I was little I used to knock myself out trying to please him, trying to make him proud of me, but he always had some small criticism, some way I could have done better if I’d thought about it, if I’d applied myself harder. Eventually I quit trying.”

For a long moment she stared silently through the glass, seeing not the deck beyond or even her own reflection, but a dim reflection of herself at nine, in her best dress with a stain on the collar, her braid coming loose. She was standing in the doorway of their house in Mishawaka with a construction-paper turkey clutched in her hand. It was the moment she had realized with a terrible sense of clarity that her father would never love her the way he loved Rebecca, no matter what she did, no matter how hard she tried. Twenty years had passed and she could still feel that terrible hollowness in her stomach as if it had been yesterday. She pushed past it with an effort and went on.

“I told you once before I made Regan look like an honor student. That’s the truth. I knew every way there was to make my father angry. It was the one thing I seemed to excel in. I cut school, I smoked dope, I drank, I stole. I hung out with the toughest, scruffiest bunch of underachievers I could find.”

The image of the nine-year-old faded and was replaced by that of a teenager who bore a sullen resemblance to Regan Mitchell—too tough to be believed, with a chip on her shoulder to rival the Rock of Gibraltar.

“Still, I managed to graduate. Deep down there was still a piece of that little girl who wanted to please Daddy, I suppose. By then he’d kicked me out of the house and I was living on the money my mother left me. I enrolled in junior college, thinking maybe I should try to straighten myself out. My father had written me off. There wasn’t anybody to play the bad girl for anymore. So I went in with good intentions, but … well, you know what they say about best-laid plans.…

“I got involved with one of my teachers. It was a classic example of seeking the love of a father figure. Of course, I was desperately sure it was the real thing. I wanted so badly for it to be.…” She let the words trail off as the memory of that painful longing reverberated through her like an echo. She had
wanted so badly to be loved, had needed so desperately for someone to find her worthy.

“What happened?”

Erik’s soft, husky voice pulled her back to the present. She pushed the old feelings aside and stated the facts simply and concisely, as if they didn’t still hurt. “I got pregnant. He took a hike. Turned out he wasn’t actually divorced from his wife after all. Big surprise,” she said sarcastically. “He gave me two hundred dollars and told me it was over.”

“Oh, God,” Erik whispered. From the corner of her eye Lynn could see him rub his hands over his face in a classic male gesture of weary frustration.

“You can’t
ever
begin to imagine what I felt like,” she said softly, her voice trembling with the power of those remembered emotions. “I’d screwed up everything I ever touched. The one thing I hadn’t done was prostitute myself, but then it turned out I’d done that, too, without even realizing it.”

She could still feel it—the emptiness, the hollow feeling inside that had threatened to swallow her whole. She could still feel what it had been like to stand there in the darkened hall of the science building. She could still smell the leftover fumes lingering in the air from the chemistry lab. She could still feel those crisp green bills clutched in her fist while she watched Philip Rutger calmly stroll away from her,
could still hear the dull ring of his heels against the marble floor. She hadn’t been anything to him but a convenient source of sex. He’d paid her for her trouble and walked away, absolving himself of all guilt or responsibility. She’d never imagined anyone could feel as worthless and as dirty as she had felt that night. Or as alone.

Erik slipped his arms around her from behind, and Lynn wanted to cry as his warmth enveloped her. Why couldn’t she have met him a lifetime ago, before she’d made her mistakes?

“What did you do?”

“I ran. I had the baby.” She reduced those terrible months to two meager sentences, simply unable to relive them.

“You gave the baby up for adoption?”

“Oh, I went one better than that,” she said with biting sarcasm. “I gave him to my sister. I believe my exact words were, ‘You’re so damn good at everything else, I’m sure you’ll do better than me at this too.’ ”

Lynn closed her eyes against the pain and the fierce turmoil of emotions the memory evoked. She had never wanted anything more than she’d wanted her child, someone she could love, someone who would love her unconditionally. But she had screwed up so many times in the past. Everything she’d tried, she’d
failed at miserably. She couldn’t bear the thought of failing at motherhood, too, ruining her child’s life just because she could never do anything right. At the same time, she had seen a way of getting revenge on her sister and of punishing her father. And so she had altered all their lives irreversibly.

“That was ten years ago,” she mumbled, struck numb by the idea that she had a nine-year-old son back in Mishawaka. What would he look like by now? What would he be like? What did nine-year-old boys like to do? The knowledge that she would never find out sat as heavily as a rock in her stomach. For a long time she had punished herself by thinking of all the things she was missing out on—his first smile, his first steps, his first word. Those thoughts still hit her from time to time, and it never failed to surprise her that she had yet to run out of tears for them. They slid down her face now, unheeded, to fall onto Erik’s shirt.

“A few years later,” she murmured, sniffling, “I finally got myself together and started over. New name, new me, new life.” After drifting and living hand-to-mouth and punishing herself in every conceivable way she could, a counselor had turned her around, believed in her, helped her, pushed her, and now she did the same for other girls. It seemed a fitting way to make restitution.

“So you see, Senator,” she said on a long, sad sigh, “I’m not exactly who you thought I was.”

“Aren’t you?”

Erik turned her in his arms and looked down into her upturned face. She had expected him to reject her. She had expected him to stand in judgment of her life, the way he had judged Regan. He could see it in her eyes. She was waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for him to lower the boom. The idea made him feel ashamed of himself. How could he ever have been so pompous as to judge someone without having all the facts? It was a mistake he was determined never to repeat.

He had listened to Lynn’s story, aching for the little girl who had never quite measured up, wishing with all his heart he could have been there to comfort her through the ordeal of her youth, wishing he could have been there to deal with the bastard who had left her pregnant and alone. It nearly killed him to think of her giving away her baby. He’d seen her pain, felt the raw, ragged edges of it. He would have given anything for the power to go back in time and change it all for her, to give her back her child, to give her
his
child, to hold her to him and keep her safe from all that she’d suffered.

She had certainly managed to take him down a peg or two in the short time he’d known her, he
thought as he reached up to brush a stream of tears from her cheek. He’d gone from being pompous and self-righteous to taking up the sword to defend the very people he’d thought beneath him, the people who had made mistakes with their lives. Lynn had shown him how deeply the roots of those mistakes went. She’d taught him about compassion and caring and human frailty. He had no intention of letting those lessons go to waste. And he had no intention of letting this remarkable woman push him away, either.

“You’re who I thought you were and then some,” he said, cupping the soft, smooth curve of her cheek with his hand. “You’re still the woman fighting for what she believes in. You’re still the woman who’d give everything she had to help a kid in trouble. That’s the woman I fell in love with.”

The weariness in her eyes seemed as old as time as she looked up at him. “Don’t make me out to be a saint, Erik. I’m not.”

“I don’t want a saint. I want you.”

Lynn shook her head and backed away from him. “It can’t work long-term, don’t you see that?”

“I see that you’re not willing to give us much of a chance.”

“No, you don’t see,” she insisted, her voice rising
with frustration. “By not getting involved with you, I
am
giving you a chance.”

Her meaning hit Erik like a brick, all but knocking the wind out of him. Not only had Lynn expected him to reject her, she didn’t mean to give him a choice about it. She was bowing out in the name of nobility.

“You think you’re not
worthy
of me?” he said, his voice soft with disbelief, his gaze sharp with it as he searched her face for the truth. “Is that what this is all about?”

“Erik, use your head, for God’s sake,” she snapped, squaring her shoulders defensively. “You’re a politician in a state of squeaky-clean politics. My past isn’t just checkered, it’s soot-black. You can’t possibly believe I’d be an asset to your career.”

“Pardon me,” he drawled sardonically, “but it never occurred to me to fall in love with an eye toward my popularity polls.”

“My luck,” Lynn murmured quietly, the irony striking a poignant chord inside her. After everything else she had done wrong, she would manage to screw this up too. Knowing she would never be free of her past, she had fallen in love with a man whose bright future would depend on it.

She lowered her head in defeat and stared down at the fists she had clenched before her, as if she had
literally meant to fight off Erik’s love. Slowly she relaxed her hands and let them fall. The cuffs of the shirt dropped past her fingertips, making her feel small and powerless, like a little girl dressed up in her daddy’s Sunday best.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, not even sure what she was apologizing for. She had so much to regret, the words formed far too small a blanket to cover it all. Her eyes squeezed shut against the tears as pain rolled through her in waves. “So sorry,” she whispered, misery choking her voice away.

She felt Erik’s nearness before he touched her, sensed him so acutely that her tears came harder, driven by a kind of despair she hadn’t known in ten years—the kind of despair that came from realizing she would have to give up the one thing she wanted most in the world. She wanted to clutch at Erik, to cling to him, to hold on no matter what. She knew without being told that he was the best thing that would ever happen to her, the best man she would ever know, and she could either push him away and save him or touch him and be the ruination of all his dreams.