Нора Робертс - Hideaway

“I’m not much on hate. It doesn’t get you anywhere, and tends to eat more at you than the other person anyway. But I carved out an exception for her a long time ago. I’m fine with that. But everything you just said fits into my opinion of her. So okay.”

Turning her hand under his, she linked fingers with him. “She’s not my mother in any way that matters.”

“No, she’s not. I guess I’ve got one more thing to say on it. I need to look out for you, and I need you to let me. You, Hugh, Lily, hell, Consuela. Toss in your dad when he’s here.”

She eased back, just a step. “That’s a lot of looking after.”

“We all do what we do. I figured I’d be subtle about it.”

Now she smiled. “Sneaky?”

“That’s a word,” he agreed. “But why don’t we be up front, you and me?”

“Up front’s less complicated in the long run.”

He brought the hand he still held up to his lips to brush them over her knuckles. “Your family matters to me and mine. You matter. Looking out for you just follows.”

“Your family’s connected to that night, if that’s where all this comes from. How about I look after you and yours?”

“No problem there. Looks like we’ll just have to spend more time together.”

“That is sneaky.” She got out the salad bowl, drizzled on the dressing she’d made, tossed it. “Let’s eat.”

Once they’d settled in with the salad, with hunks of bread, she decided to start the next conversation. “So, Consuela, who supervised, instructed, and eagle-eyed the making of dessert—”

“There’s dessert, too?”

“There is. In any case, she wanted to know if we’d had sex.”

He choked, grabbed the wine. “What?”

“She says you’re a good man, and very handsome. And as she’s one of my real mothers, she’s really fond of you, I’d say she felt entitled to ask and advise. Just a warning the subject may come up the next time you visit her.”

He honestly couldn’t imagine it. Didn’t want to. “Appreciate the heads-up.”

“But while we’re on the subject, there are some things I didn’t take time to talk about last night because I was more interested in getting you in bed.”

“Also appreciate that.”

“You matter, Dillon. You and your family have always mattered to me. You matter, all of you, even more since I’ve come back. The time I’ve spent at the ranch with you, with your mom, with Gram, with Red, too? It’s helped me come home, feel home. And I know how you feel about my grandparents. I’ve seen it for myself.”

Not exactly a speech, he considered, but he’d bet good money she’d practiced that delivery, like she practiced her voice-overs.

He couldn’t quite decide if that irritated him or touched him, so he opted—for the moment—for neutral.

“They’re a big part of my life.”

“I know it. We need to promise each other, and mean it, that whatever happens with us we won’t push those parts of our lives away, or make it hard for each other to keep them.”

He shifted from neutral into genuinely baffled.

“Why would we do that?”

“People get hurt, get angry when things go south. Relationships, for me, always end up a mess.”

He decided to steer her in just that direction, and eat more bread. “It sounds like you’ve had the wrong relationships.”

“Maybe, but the common element would be me. Up front,” she repeated. “I’ve tried relationships with men in the business, and it gets complicated and falls apart. I’ve tried with someone out of the business, same thing.”

“Yeah, so you said.” Since he didn’t intend for either of them to drive, he added more wine to both glasses. “Not very specific.”

“Okay. The first, I loved him. I loved him the way you love at eighteen. Giddy and dazzled and without restrictions. He was a good man. A boy really,” she corrected. “An actor—musical theater. So talented. And kind, sweet. One night when he walked me to a cab, as he always did, waited until I drove away, two men jumped him. They put him in the hospital.”

“I read about it. I was in college.”

“God knows it got plenty of play. So you know they used my name, the fact I was white and he wasn’t to beat him unconscious. His family blamed me. How can I blame them?”

“How about because it wasn’t your fault?”

“It wasn’t about fault. I was the reason, or the excuse, or, hell, just the MacGuffin.”

“What’s that?”

“MacGuffin? It’s a plot device, and it’s often something that seems important, but just isn’t.”

“But you are,” he told her, “important.”

“Not necessarily to the two men who put Noah in the hospital.” Picking up her wine, she studied it, saw through it to that brilliant fall day on the terrace of Lily’s condo with New York shining.

“He couldn’t forgive me, not then, so it ended.”

“He’d had a rough time he didn’t deserve. But for Christ’s sake, Cate, what was there to forgive you for?”

“MacGuffin.” She lifted one hand, drank some wine with the other. “A handy device to put a twenty-year-old dancer in the hospital, to sell tabloids, to give the internet something to buzz about awhile.”

“He was wrong, stupid wrong.” Anger, sudden and hot, sharpened the words. “And don’t claim it’s easy for me to say. It’s like if I blamed the shopkeeper for my dad getting shot, or blamed the women Dad died protecting. It wasn’t their fault. It was the fault of the man with the gun.”

“You’re right, and still. Noah and I ran into each other not long before I came back to Big Sur, and we resolved things. I’m grateful for that. It took me a long time to want someone again, to trust someone enough between those points in my life.”

She rose to clear the salad. “I’m going to plate the pasta because I’m fussy about the presentation. It’s my signature meal.”

“Fine with me.”

“So. I met this man through a friend of one of my cousins. Law student, brilliant mind. Definitely not in the business, which I’d sworn off of. I’d dated once or twice between, but no heat.”

She tossed, lightly, pasta and sauce as she spoke. “But something clicked with him, maybe because he didn’t care about movies or TV or any of it. He didn’t even own a TV. He read, extensively when he wasn’t studying. Mostly nonfiction. He knew about art, went to galleries. Sophisticated, erudite.”

“I’m getting the picture,” Dillon told her. “Snob.”

“No, he…” Then she laughed. “Well, yeah. He was, now that you mention it. Anyway, I put off having sex with him for about six weeks, I guess, and he seemed patient about it, willing to give me time. When we did sleep together, it was good.”

“Good,” Dillon repeated with the faintest of smirks.

“Well, it wasn’t the angels singing, but good. He didn’t care about the publicity when it came because he didn’t pay any attention to it. He thought it was all low-class. He didn’t think much of actors either—and I was doing voice work by then—but I was okay with that.”

“And then?”

“Fresh Parm? It’s yours.”

“Sure.”

“And then,” she continued as she grated. “We’d been together about three months, talking vaguely about moving in together. I’d need a place with space for my studio—which didn’t take much. That’s when it started to go south. No way was I going to put some stupid soundproof room into his apartment, or any apartment. It was high time I gave up that ridiculous hobby anyway. It wasn’t like I needed the money. When I objected, as you might imagine, he hit me.”

“He hit you,” Dillon repeated, very quietly.

“A solid backhand right across the cheekbone. Just once because once was all it took. I didn’t panic,” she murmured, thinking back. “I can panic in stressful situations, but I didn’t. It was more like a wake-up call. So.”