Chapter Twenty-Two

It was time to tell Jewell about his family. Blake was only too aware that if he didn’t do something drastic, he’d lose her in two weeks’ time, when the month he’d paid for was up. Not that he’d had much cooperation from her in the previous two weeks.

If she knew everything that was currently going on, she’d be totally lost to him. So he needed to give a piece of himself up, or else he was going to find himself without her.

He was thankful to Tyler for talking to him, thankful he’d actually listened. Blake was so used to getting what he wanted, no matter what he had to do to get it, that he’d forgotten the basic rule that you get more with honey than with vinegar. Blake had never tried to sugarcoat anything, but maybe it was time to take some valuable lessons from his youngest brother.

“You know that my family is incredibly messed up, right?”

She looked at him warily. “I know there’s a story to be told,” she said.

“I grew up wealthy. My father was a very rich man, and my mother … well, my mother was a gold-digging bitch.”

Jewell’s eyes popped open wide. “Surely, she couldn’t have been that horrible.”

“What do you think of, Jewell, when you hear the word mother? Whatever adjectives that come to mind can’t be used to describe the woman who birthed me. She was vain, egotistical, and out to get whatever she could.” Blake didn’t feel even a glimmer of emotion — unless contempt counted — when he was describing his mother.

“Is that why you’re so cold, Blake?”

“That’s part of it.”

“But you can only use past experience for so long to justify being an asshole,” she told him. “Then you have to take on some of the responsibility.”

He couldn’t help but agree. But instead of addressing her remark, he continued on with his story.

“Byron and I remember it all vividly — all the fights, all the underhanded things our mother did, and the whipped man our father had become. She couldn’t leave him and walk away with the money because she’d signed an unbreakable prenup. Sure, she could have gotten a lot of money for child support, but it wouldn’t have been enough to cover the lifestyle that she’d grown accustomed to, and she didn’t want us. She liked that we had a nanny, that she didn’t have to deal with us. We barely even saw her, and we certainly didn’t talk with her. Tyler was probably too young to be affected by her attitude and her actions, but Byron and I remember her very well.”

“Lots of children have parents who don’t live up to the dream,” Jewell pointed out. “But they don’t take that as an excuse to treat everyone around them as nothing more than garbage, worthless crap they can stomp on without the least bit of guilt.”

“I can’t deny that. But how many children watch their parents die right before their eyes?”

“Wait! What do you mean?”

When Jewell took his hand, he was more than aware of it, even if he didn’t think she realized that she was doing it — that she was trying to comfort him. It was a start, a start that he would take.

“My mother decided she didn’t want to be with my father any longer. And she didn’t want anything to do with my brothers and me. So she hatched a plan to have my father killed. Because her sons were nothing to her, she wasn’t worried about any fallout. If we got hurt or even killed in the shuffle, then so be it.” Blake’s voice sounded dead.

“That’s insane. There’s no possible way anything like that could happen,” Jewell exclaimed, her fingers tightening on his hand.

“It did happen, Jewell. I’ve told you more than once that the world isn’t always black and white. People aren’t always who they are supposed to be.”

“What happened?”

“My mother was seeing a man, and she told him that if he killed her husband, she would marry him and share the vast fortune her husband had inherited. Apparently the man she was seeing knew she was as big a liar with him as she was with my father. He found out somehow that her ultimate plan was to play the victim, throw him to the cops, and run off into the sunset with all her many millions of dollars, the money she’d get in my father’s will. Her lover told her he was going along with her plan, but the entire time, he was making his own plans. He wasn’t smart, but he was angry as hell.”

“What plans?” Jewell asked.

A distant, lost look entered Blake’s eyes when he told Jewell about the night that had changed him forever. “I was ten years old when it happened. My brothers and I were watching an animated movie in the family room when we heard shouting coming from the hallway. We just ignored the noise — it wasn’t abnormal to hear raised voices in our house, and we continued watching our cartoon.”

“But this shouting was different,” Jewell said when Blake paused too long.

“Yes, this shouting was different. These two guys suddenly came into the room, and they were pushing my parents ahead of them. Before we even knew what was going on, they had my parents each tied up to a chair, and then they bound us, too, and set us on the couch. I’ll never forget the look in my mother’s eyes. They were practically glowing with excitement. I thought it all had to be some sort of game because she looked anything but worried.”

“How could she not be worried?” she asked. “These men had bound her up.”

“Yes, but you see, that was all part of the plan. She couldn’t get away unscathed, or the cops would never buy her story. My mother’s sick and twisted setup was to have her boyfriend ‘rape’ her and kill her husband. And this plan included us, you see,” Blake said with a disgusted snort, “because we had to be witnesses to what happened, so when the cops asked, we could say the men hurt her too.”

He could see the horror in Jewell’s eyes, and she held on to him so hard, she dug her fingernails into his hand without realizing it. Strangely enough, the pain in his hand stabilized him enough to let him go on speaking.

“Things obviously didn’t go the way my mother intended them to. She figured that out pretty fast, and that’s when I saw the panic enter her eyes. Her boyfriend told her he knew she was a sadistic bitch, someone out to get anything she could. He then told my father her entire plot. My dad was weak. He started sobbing, and he begged the men to spare his life. They were very amused, of course. They began beating him, and his blood spurted out across the room. Some of it even landed on my mom.”

Blake stopped for a moment to catch his breath.

“Finally,” he continued, “our father passed out from the pain, and the men got tired of wasting their energy on him. One of the guys looked right into my eyes and smiled while saying, “Take this as a life lesson kid. If you let a woman screw you, this is how you’ll end up.” Then he put his gun against my father’s temple and pulled the trigger. My mother screamed as my dad’s brains splattered over the side of her face.”

“Oh my gosh, Blake,” Jewell whispered, and she as now sobbing.

Blake had to look away from her. He’d never be able finish his story if he focused on the sympathy in her eyes. And he needed to finish.

“My mother actually thanked the man, and then she begged for her life, just like my father had. Shit. He laughed at her while he ran the gun up and down her face. He told her that if she pleased him real well, he’d let her live. The next hour was almost worse than any other part of the evening, because that’s exactly what she did, even as the sickening smell our father’s blood was filling up the room. We closed our eyes, but we heard everything. The two men beat the hell out of my mother while doing unimaginable things to her at the same time. At one point I opened my eyes because she told them to go ahead and kill us too, that we would tell on them if they didn’t. She looked at me as she said it. Blood was dripping from her mouth, and all I saw was hatred in her eyes …” Blake was shocked when he found a strange tightness in his throat. Why should this upset him? He hated his mother and even his father. This story shouldn’t affect him in the least.

“Blake, oh, Blake, I am so sorry,” Jewell said as she rose from her chair. Before he could stop her, she sat down in his lap and wrapped her arms around him.

The tightness in his throat grew even harder to fight, but fight it he did. He needed to keep talking, to get this over with. It was several moments before he could continue, and when he did, his voice was flat. He refused to let emotion overwhelm him.

“When the men grew bored, they shot my mother in the head and left her lying on the floor, then threw my father over her. I’ll never forget the sight of my parents’ blood seeping from their bodies. To this day I will never own red carpet.”

Jewell wasn’t impressed by Blake’s attempt at a joke.

“Don’t do that, Blake. Don’t try to make light of this to show how strong you are. I know you’re strong, I get it, but there are some things no one is strong enough to deal with.”

“My mother had given the staff the day off, of course, because she didn’t want adult witnesses, so my brothers and I spent the whole night tied up on the couch there in the room with our dead parents. When the maid came in the next day, she found us and called the police.”

“But every time you close your eyes, it’s like being right back there, isn’t it?” Jewell said.

“Not every time, Jewell, not since meeting you,” Blake told her, and he felt her body tense. Had he just revealed too much to her? He decided to stop talking now, afraid of what else he might say.

“That’s way too much responsibility to put on my shoulders, Blake.”

“I’m just speaking the truth.”

“You aren’t exactly what you portray, are you?” she asked him.

He didn’t want to give her any false illusions of who he was. He drew her head back so she’d be forced to look into his eyes.

“I’m a cold bastard, Jewell. Around you, I want to be different, but I will never really change. Take that as a warning,” he said before leaning down and taking her lips.

He wanted to bring heat and hunger, but he couldn’t right now. So he settled for a chaste but hard kiss to remind her of exactly who he was. Yes, he’d been through a traumatic experience, but he’d still made choices that only he could make. He owned those choices.

“I don’t think you’re as cold as you want the world to think you are,” she said. When he was clearly about to reply, she held up her hand to stop him. “Fine, Blake. We’re both screwed up, probably too screwed up to ever discover real happiness. So what the heck? I’ll marry you. I’ll do what you want.”

It took a few moments for her words to sink in. But Blake didn’t feel the triumph that he’d expected to feel. He’d told her his story and now she felt sorry for him. That wasn’t what he wanted — not at all.

“I don’t need your sympathy, Jewell,” he growled.

“Whether you want it or not, you have it.”

“Don’t think I’m going to change for you,” he told her.

“Have you changed your mind about getting married, Blake?”

That stopped him. “No, Jewell, I still think we should marry. I just don’t want you to think it’s going to be a traditional sort of marriage.”

“I would never think that,” she said, and her sad sigh made that tightness reappear in his throat.

But Blake had just gotten what he wanted, and he wasn’t going to let the guilt consuming him change the course his life was about to take. Jewell would be his wife.