Unstoppable (Fierce) (34 page)

“The big star finally decides to come home,” she said, crossing her arms against her chest.

“Something
like that,” I answered. “Can I come in?”

It was something one would ask of a stranger. As I stared into the cold blue eyes of my mother, I realized that was what she was to me. We had lived in the same house for 18 years, but I didn’t know anything about her. What had her dreams been? Did life end up for her the way she wanted?

Mother stared at me, and then looked over at Jace who stood steadfast and silent beside me. She noted our clasped hands with a sneer of disapproval. But instead of refusing, like I feared she might, she pushed open the door and allowed us to enter.

As I entered the living room I noticed Shane kicked back in a worn leather recliner he had to have brought from his own home, because it did not match my mother’s hand-picked collection of antique furniture in any way, shape or form. There was a can of beer in his hand, and an arrogant look on his face.

“The prodigal daughter returns,” he sneered.

Jace gripped my hand. In my peripheral vision I could see his jaw cl
ench tight. I squeezed his hand.

Shane inspected the tall, younger muscular man at my side, as if assessing whether or not he was a threat, then turned to my mother. “Get me another beer, would you, babe?”

It was strange enough that my straight-laced mother even allowed beer in the house, much less hand-deliver it like some sort of bar maiden.

She turned to us. “Would you like
anything?”

Yes. Anything fried, covered in sugar and drenched in chocolate
. “No, thank you,” I declined politely.

She nodded curtly before disappearing into the kitchen. Shane eyed me as I pulled Jace over to the sofa. “I hear you had quite the victorious homecoming,” he commented as he drained the can in his hand. “We would have come to cheer you on, but we weren’t invited.”

I stared him down, silently challenging him to ask me why. Before I could say anything, Mother had returned. She gave Shane his beer, taking his empty can.

“I’m sorry we’re dropping in on you,” I offered to her. “But I thought if I called, you would tell me not to come.”

“I’m never surprised when you don’t call, Jordi,” she called from the kitchen. When she came into the room, she walked over to where Shane sat and perched on the edge of the chair. “You only seem to show up when you need something, and it’s clear you don’t need your lowly family anymore.” She glared at Jace. “Or your husband.”

“Eddie was never really my husband,” I clarified. “He only wanted me for the fame and the money. He was cruel and abusive, and he was blackmailing me.”

Mother rolled her eyes. “Still playing the victim, Jordi?”

Jace opened his mouth but I squeezed his hand. “What happened between Eddie and me isn’t why I’m here,” I said.

Her eyes were ruthless. “Then why are you here?”

I squared my shoulders. “I want to know why you never loved me.”

“I raised you from birth,” she said. “I tried to pull you back from all your unhealthy choices and it was a struggle since you were a child. But I never gave up, even when it cost me everything. How can you even sit there and ask me that question?”

“Because you never loved me,” I answered. “You did all those things out of obligation because I was your child.”

Shane snickered and Mother sent him an angry glance. He didn’t take it very well, glaring back at her in return. “Tell her the truth, Marianne,” he said.

My eyes traveled from him back to her. “What’s he talking about?”

She hopped up from the chair and stalked from the room. Shane turned to me. “You’re not her child,” he stated simply, and with great satisfaction, as my entire perspective of reality shattered with his words.

I sucked in a breath and turned to face Jace. He was as stunned as I was.

“Your daddy was the one who wanted a baby, not Marianne. She never wanted kids, even when we were teenagers. Right, Mare?” he called out with a smile. When his eyes met mine, they were sharp and cruel. “Your mama never told you but I was her first. Way before dear ol’ dad. We fogged up the windows on a regular basis, until she got knocked up. She was sick as a dog for three weeks, afraid to tell her parents the truth. Finally they went to the doctor and he shared the happy news. How long did it take them to kick you out, Mare?”

She stood rigid in the doorway as she glared at him. “You tell us.
Since you seem to get so much joy out of sharing this story.”

“She wanted to move in with me, but clearly that wasn’t going to work. I never wanted kids either, and we were all of seve
nteen. This meant she couldn’t get an abortion without parental consent.”

My eyes shot to my devout, Christian, by-the-book mother. She had dropped her head and was staring at the floor as Shane continued. “So she got a little back alley help. Then she got an infection. Then the choice whether or not to have children was out of her hands.”

I pulled my hand from Jace’s to cover my mouth. What the hell was he saying?

“When she got together with your dad, she kept mum about her sordid little past. If he knew that we’d been bumping
uglies, he’d have never married her. Instead he thought she had just lost the natural baby-bearing lottery and suggested they adopt a child instead. He was so caring and understanding,” Shane added with a snide grin.

“But adoption was going to take too long. So they got a surrogate instead. Someone else got fat and stretched out, Joe got his baby and Marianne got… what was it you called it,
hon? A prison sentence?”

I stared at her through tears. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Shane pushed the footrest to his recliner down with a slam, which made Jace straighten as he perched on the edge of the sofa, ready to kick Shane’s arrogant ass in. “You can blame me for that. She had a chance for freedom, but by the time Joe took his dirt nap, I wanted to try family life out for a bit.” His eyes glittered as he stared at me. “Didn’t last long, though.”

Jace stood. “So that means you forced yourself on Marianne as well as Jo
rdi. Is that what you’re saying?”

Shane was nonplussed. “Take a seat, cowboy. This is family business.”

I stood next to Jace. “Apparently this is not my family.” I turned to the woman I always knew as my mother. “I guess it never was.”

When her eyes met mine, I understood in a second that we had not been so far apart. She had an Eddie of her
own, and no self-worth whatsoever to cut him loose. Her demons had made a permanent home in her head. She hadn’t spent all those years punishing me for my shortcomings… she had punished me for hers.

In the end s
he was just as much a victim as I was.

“I guess this explains everything,” I said softly. Now I knew why she resented me, I knew why she’d allowed Shane to move
in, even though she probably knew better than anyone my accusations were true. She hadn’t protected me because she couldn’t protect herself.

I turned to Jace. “Let’s go.”

Before we made it to the door, Shane called out, “Gonna leave without giving your Uncle Shane a hug?”

That was all it took. Jace swiveled on his heel and stomped over to where Shane scrambled from his chair. He grabbed the older man by the neck. “You worthless piece of shit,” he growled as he flipped him end over end, planting him on the floor. Jace held him down with the heel of his artificial leg on Shane’s throat.

“You think you got away with something,” Jace said. “But you didn’t. You couldn’t. No matter what you did, she triumphed. You stole nothing. You corrupted nothing. She’s still able to love and to trust, despite everything you did to destroy her. I hope you watch every milestone she hits as she rockets into the stratosphere. And I hope you choke on it,” he said through clenched teeth before he kicked him away and joined me at the door.

Before we left, I turned to Marianne Hemphill. She said nothing and neither did I.

It was a poetic footnote on our relationship.

Right as we walked out onto the porch, we ran right into Eddie as he was ambling up the steps. Jace pulled me to him and walked me right past the man who had made our lives a living hell for so long.

We stopped at the cemetery that afternoon, so I could say goodbye to my dad. Though losing him meant I lost the only true family tie I had in my childhood, I was so glad he never lived to see what became of the family he had treasured. Jace stood by quietly as I sobbed on my knees at his gravesite. The loss was even more painful now than it had been when I was six.

There was a big difference between feeling alone and truly being alone.

After my tears were exhausted, I joined Jace in the rented car pointed out of Oswen. We didn’t stop driving until we reached Des Moines, where we stopped for the night before flying home.

Where that would be now, I had no idea.
The only home I had left was the one in Jace’s arms, and that was the only place I wanted to be.

We lay beside each other on the hotel bed.
Jace’s embrace was strong and true. I cried for a while, before getting lost in my thoughts. My history had been rewritten in an afternoon, and I didn’t quite know how to process it.

Jace let me sort it through. Before we went to sleep, he finally asked, “So what are you going to do?”

I ran my finger along his dad’s wedding ring, still dangling from the gold chain around his neck. Maybe one day I would wear it again, but the next time it wouldn’t be as a substitute for anything else. I wanted to go to him free and clear of any baggage from the past. I owed him that much, especially after all we had been through. “I can’t go forward if I have so many questions in my past.” My eyes met his. “I have to find my real mother.”

He nodded and he took my hand in his. “Not without me,” he announced.

“Never again without you,” I agreed as I snuggled close into his arms.

It would be the journey of a lifetime, and I
had no doubt that it would be epic simply because we were finally free to embark on it together. I was writing my tale one page at a time, but I no longer wrote it alone.

###

Jordi’s epic journey continues in “Epic,” Book #3 of the Fierce Saga, due out in November of 2013. Enjoy Chapter One as a preview of what lies ahead for Jace and Jordi:

CHAPTER ONE

Los Angeles, California

May 23, 2012

“Tell me about Shane.”

I bit at my fingernail, tearing off metallic polish in the process.
This must be what shame tastes like
, I thought with a perverse inward chuckle as I stared at the middle-aged man who issued the uncomfortable request. We sat in a non-threatening room decorated in muted, comforting hues, with affirmations on the wall and children’s books scattered across a table in the corner. It was a safe space, so there was no way he could ever understand how dangerous this simple directive was for me. This wasn’t just asking some random fact about my past that I could emotionlessly dictate and analyze like some piece of arbitrary data. This was asking me to open a door I had slammed shut and bolted, packing nearly a hundred extra pounds of fat in front of it so that I would never – ever – have to face it.

It
evoked a name that, whenever it was spoken, rendered me that same terrified six-year-old, lying in a darkened room, naked from the waist down, whose innocence was repeatedly shattered with only the sliver of moonlight to bear witness. Worse, every time I spoke about this devil, he appeared. He didn’t even have to be in the same zip code and I could still feel his sweaty, warm hands on my skin, and see that hungry look in his eyes that threatened to chew me up and swallow me whole.

“
Don’t be scared, now. Big girls don’t get scared. Show Uncle Shane how much you love him
.”

Wisps of long-buried memories floated to the surface, so real it was if his breath was still warm and moist in my ear. Most days I could fake that it happened to someone else entirely, but not now – not when someone looked me in the eye and asked me what happened nearly fourteen years ago.

This wasn’t just a question. It was a lasso that yanked me back in time until I was at my most helpless and vulnerable.

And s
ince the question was a threat to my personal comfort, anyone who posed it became a threat by default. Up until this point, Dr. Challis had been perfect. His gray-haired, milquetoast demeanor wasn’t threatening in the least, even with the way his studious blue eyes watched everything behind dark, horn-rimmed glasses. This grandfatherly man was as gentle as Mr. Rogers and as benign as a teddy bear. From the moment we met I knew I was in the hands of a consummate professional. So at my very first appointment three weeks before I had laid it all bare on the questionnaire, listing everything that I thought a therapist could help me fix.

I knew eventually I would have to tell this man, this
kind and unsuspecting stranger, my deepest and darkest secret. His eyes would watch every emotion cross my face as I said, out loud, what that pig did to me, hoping my skin wouldn’t crawl right off of my bones in the process. Even though logically I knew that what Shane had done was not my fault, I still harbored the shame of these horrible sexual experiences. It had damned me in some way, sullied me… made me lesser than. These sick and perverted actions still involved my body, and parts of me that I shared with no other person aside from my love, Jace Riga.