Jo Leigh - Confessions Bundle

“Besides, he was out of reach,” she added, sitting back to give Mary Jane access to the table she was attempting to wipe down with a sopping-wet cloth. The place mats would soak up the extra moisture when the child put them back. “For years. He’d mentioned that he was leaving for one, but it was closer to four.”

“I know.”

Of course Marcie knew. Her sister’s patience was unending when she was listening to Juliet agonize over a decision made so many years before. Would she ever be completely free from guilt?

“I might’ve been able to reach him through his father,” she continued, watching the little girl whose face was so serious as she folded the dishcloth and hung it on the rack inside the cupboard door. Mary Jane had a lot of energy, yet she concentrated fiercely on even the smallest tasks. “But he’d been so adamant about the fact that he had to have that time away from his father. I respected that.”

“And you didn’t want him to know you were pregnant,” Marcie added.

With a quick kiss to her mother’s cheek, Mary Jane ran off toward the bedrooms in the back of the house.

“I didn’t want the entanglement of a relationship with him,” Juliet agreed, only slightly defensive. “Do you think I was wrong?”

“No.” That opinion had never changed.

“I just couldn’t do it.” The words were torn from her as she remembered back, felt the crushing weight that had been a constant burden during those months of tormenting herself with a decision she hadn’t been prepared to make. “The only thing I knew about life back then was that I couldn’t, at any cost, repeat Mom’s mistakes. Because, really, who did she help, Marce? Us? Dad? Herself? Dad never wanted us. We’d have been better off not knowing that. He never wanted her, either. She lost every dream she’d ever had. And we paid for that, too. I couldn’t do that. Not to me, or to my baby.”

Marcie’s hand, as it covered Juliet’s, was warm and soft. Grounding. “It’s okay, Jules, you don’t have to tell me. I get it. We both saw what Mom went through marrying Daddy just because she was pregnant with us, everything she gave up. And Lord knows, we learned from everything that came after that. Why do you think I’m thirty-four years old and still living alone?”

“Because Hank hasn’t asked you to marry him.”

“Well,” Marcie looked away—and then back. “There is that.”

“Move to San Diego, Marce. You’ve said so many times that you want to. Mary Jane and I have room here.”

“I’m half-owner of…a salon that—”

“Can be sold,” Juliet interrupted. She turned her hand over, grabbing her sister’s. “That place has been running for fifty years and just like you bought it when Miss Molly had her stroke, so will someone else when you leave. If you loved it, that would be one thing, but you talk about it like it’s a lead ball around your neck.”

“Maybe…”

“We hated what the divorce did to Mom, having no money, no way to support us. We hated that town, the way life just stopped there. The way Mom slowly gave up. And sometimes it seems like, instead of doing the opposite of what she did, you’re letting the lure of security snag you, too. It scares me to death when I think of you there in Maple Grove, living in a trailer—albeit much nicer than Mom’s—watching television every night. I can’t bear the thought of seeing the same thing that happened to her happen to you…”

Marcie met her gaze head-on, eyes moist with emotion. “That’s not going to happen, Jules. I’m not Mom.”

She’d love to be convinced. But what if Marcie was just too close to the situation to see the similarities? Their mother certainly hadn’t seemed to be aware that she’d needed help.

“You’re more of an artist than a hairdresser, Marce. You’ve already had an offer from a Hollywood studio at that hair show, who knows what else could turn up if you looked. And you’d probably make three times the money you’re making.”

“Maybe.”

For the first time, as she watched the thoughts play across her sister’s face, Juliet allowed herself to hope. “Will you at least think about it?”

“Yeah.” A couple of tears slid down Marcie’s face. And then she smiled. “Yeah, I’ll think about it.”

“Okay.”

Standing, Juliet felt better, a little bit in control of her life again.

“And you, sis—” Marcie stood as well, eye to eye with Juliet “—you going to tell Blake Ramsden he has a child?”

She opened her mouth to say no. Adamantly.

“How many more schools you going to go through before you realize you have to do something different?” Marcie pressed, her face close enough for Juliet to see the white flecks in her twin’s blue eyes.

“Different doesn’t have to mean telling Ramsden he fathered a kid nine years ago. Telling him won’t make any difference at all if he doesn’t want her. Mom pretended Dad wanted us and look how horrible it was when we found out the truth. I’m not going to risk putting Mary Jane through that.”

“But you’re considering telling him.”

As they’d been doing since they were babies sharing the same crib, Juliet and her sister locked gazes, speaking on a level more intense than words. A conversation that permitted nothing but the deepest truth.

“I don’t know.”

SHE WASN’T DOING anything more than sitting with her back to him behind a table at the front of the room, but Blake could still feel the energy pulsing around Juliet McNeil as he walked into the courtroom Monday morning. It had been that way in the bar on the beach all those years ago, too.

He didn’t know what it was about her, but the woman did not allow herself to be ignored.

Taking a seat in the last row of the courtroom, he leaned back, making his six-foot-two-inch body as inconspicuous as possible. Schuster had thought he’d be calling Blake to the stand about an hour into the one o’clock session. He’d waited until one-fifty to show up, hoping to be in and out in half an hour, forty-five minutes tops.

Having left for New York so unexpectedly, without an opportunity to prepare anyone to stand in for him, he still had catching up to do.

Two-thirty rolled around and still Blake sat. Schuster was better in person than the papers had ever painted him. Intelligent. Methodical. Bringing out every intricate detail that the jurors might otherwise have missed.

Details that meant nothing to Blake. The paper trail of mock companies, false invoices and nonexistent vendors that Schuster was laying was far too convoluted to follow without having started at the beginning.

That fact left Blake with far too much time and too little diversion to avoid the thoughts that continued to plague him in spite of his ordering himself to stop.

If he’d been here in San Diego five years ago, could he have prevented the events that followed? The deaths of his parents? If he’d come home when he’d originally said he would, could he have saved the life of the very beautiful and very lost free spirit he’d seen buried just two days before?

“I object! A personal land purchase made before my client was appointed director of the Terracotta Foundation is irrelevant to this case.”

The judge, an older, slightly overweight man who looked to be in his mid-fifties, looked atop his reading glasses toward Paul Schuster. “Counsel?”

“If it pleases the court, Your Honor, I am attempting to establish a pattern of business dealings that has followed the defendant through most of his adult life—a pattern that is directly related to the case at hand.”

Blake wasn’t sure that Schuster had said anything relevant at all, but figured he had when the judge nodded. “You may continue.”