Chapter 39

When he’d picked out the oversize bathtub for the apartment, Wyatt had fantasized about a moment like this—lolling in the warm, fragrant water with Melanie using his chest as a backrest and his shoulder as a pillow. Her hair was piled in a messy bun, tickling his nose as she tilted her head to study their reflection in the cheval mirror.

“I feel like an advertisement for erectile dysfunction.”

He scooped up a handful of water and let it trickle into the hollow of her collarbone, watching it spill over and meander between her small, firm breasts. “I hope you’re referring to the bathtub.”

“As if you have anything to worry about.” She wriggled her butt, making waves in more than the water.

“I am almost forty.”

She patted his knee. “I could barely tell.”

“Good to know,” he said dryly. He leaned forward, skin sliding against slippery skin as he retrieved a bar of soap, then settled back again. The light from the single high window had turned to sunset gold, and the soaring notes of a Celtic ballad wafted in from the other room. Damn. He even loved her music. He soaped up his hands and set the bar aside to knead her shoulders and neck.

She let her head tip forward with a deep, contented sigh. “If this bullfighting thing doesn’t work out for you, I have an opening for a personal slave.”

“You can’t afford me.” In ways that had nothing to do with money, but he refused to let those thoughts poison this moment.

She was silent for a few moments, and he felt tension gathering in her muscles as her brain kicked into gear.

“What?” he asked, running his thumbs along the inner curves of her shoulder blades.

“You said you’d been through this before.”

Wyatt’s hands stilled.

She angled a look over her shoulder, eyes searching. “Was it so bad you can’t explain, or is trust something you only receive, not give?”

“I…both, I guess.” Could he trust himself to tell her as much of the truth as possible without somehow bringing the rest crashing down around him? He had never told this story beginning to end, even to Gabrielle. Being so exposed would have made him too vulnerable to attack.

But it also made him…knowable. How could he ask her to understand him if she didn’t have all the pertinent information?

“Never mind.” She slipped out of his grasp, pulling away.

“Don’t.” He caught her arms to stop her. “I just need to figure out where to start.”

She eased back against him. “At the beginning?”

“Of which life?”

“This one.” She ran a finger along his forearm, leaving a trail through the fine, wet hair. “The other belonged to someone else.”

He pressed a kiss into the hair at her temple. “Only you would know that.”

Only you. Her fingers went still, then her hand flattened over his, pressing down as if to provide support. For him, or did her heart stumble over those words, too?

He drew a deep breath and took the plunge. “For me, it started when Laura tried to kill herself.”

He felt the jolt of it hit her body. “How?”

“She overdosed on Adderall…the ADHD medication. It was her prescription, and thankfully she was almost due for a refill. As it was…” He closed his eyes against the rush of memories—Laura pale and still in a forest of tubes, pumps, and beeping monitors. “She had a heart attack.”

Melanie folded both of their arms over her chest and squeezed. “How old was she?”

“Twenty. She was in her second year at Trinity College, and I was finishing my undergraduate degree at Yale.” Wyatt took another breath. “And we were planning to get married.”

* * *

Married?

Melanie twisted around to face him. “But she’s gay.”

Wyatt grabbed her by the waist, repositioning her hip so it didn’t crush any vital parts of his anatomy. “How did you know?”

“Grace said she has a wife.” Oh crap. Of course that didn’t mean she couldn’t be into men too. “I just assumed…is she bi?”

“No.” He made a pained face. “Laura was…unaware. It’s her preferred state. We were thrown together from the time we were babies, practically a couple by middle school. She thought that was why I felt more like a big brother to her than a boyfriend. It was what our families wanted, so she just went along with it and assumed she’d figure out the big deal about sex once we were married.”

“Okay. Whoa.” Melanie held up a dripping hand. “You dated this girl from the time you hit puberty, and you never had sex?”

His jaw went tight, instantly defensive. “I was going to be a priest. I didn’t believe in sex before marriage.”

“Well, a gay girlfriend must’ve been a big help with the ol’ vow of abstinence.” Then she cringed. “Sorry. That was probably a dozen kinds of offensive.”

Wyatt smiled slightly. “And true. I was as horny as any fifteen-year-old, but I could count on Laura to put on the brakes. We were the perfect pair of enablers. She was my chastity belt, and I was her excuse not to wonder why it was so easy for her to say no.”

“Until…”

“Laura met someone.”

Oh Lord. Was this gonna be one of those humiliating My fiancée left me for another woman stories? “A girl?”

He nodded. “Her partner on a sociology research paper, who was out and proud. Suddenly, what Laura called her admiration of other women was very obviously lust. She panicked.” A spark of anger flashed in his eyes. “Instead of talking to me, she went to her mother, who made her swear not to tell her father. They consulted mine instead…their trusted friend and spiritual counselor. With the help of my older brother, they cooked up a plan to fix her.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.” Wyatt’s smile was a terrible thing. “In public, my father and brother pay lip service to the church’s ideology, but privately they are adamant that homosexuality is an emotional disorder manifested as a weakness of the flesh. If Laura would put herself entirely in God’s hands and pray for His forgiveness, He would save her.”

“How could they force her to listen to that bullshit?”

“They didn’t have to.” His hands massaged her upper arms, his gaze diamond hard. “The nineties were Tom Hanks in Philadelphia and Arthur Ashe dying of AIDS and Don’t ask, don’t tell as official military policy. Being gay in Connecticut meant never getting married, maybe never having children. All Laura ever wanted was a husband to give her kids and the status she’d always enjoyed as her parents’ child. Being gay would make her an outsider in that world. She wanted someone to tell her it wasn’t real, and if she wished hard enough and clicked her heels together three times, she could go right on with the fairy tale.”

“And no one bothered to tell you?”

His mouth twisted. “I’d made the mistake of expressing my opinions. They didn’t trust me to do the right thing. I should have known something was wrong when she moved back in with her parents, started coming up to Yale every weekend and pushing to get married right away. Spending as much time as possible with me and away from other women was part of their treatment. I was so focused on graduating with honors that I wasn’t paying attention—until she made me.”

“By attempting suicide.”

He nodded. “Afterward in the hospital, she was hysterical because she’d failed me, failed her parents, failed God. They had to sedate her for her own safety. My father—this man of our so-called benevolent God—stood outside her room and told me she was better off dead than gay. And my mother nodded along.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Was nowhere in the vicinity.” One more who’d abandoned Wyatt in his time of greatest need—or so it would have seemed.

“What did you say?”

“To them? Nothing.” He hunched his shoulders. “I didn’t dare. They would have cut off my access to her. So I told Laura it didn’t matter. We would still get married, and we’d work it out together.”

Melanie’s stomach twisted as she imagined a younger version of Wyatt—scared, betrayed, standing alone against the mob—and still trying to save the day. “You lied to her.”

“Not exactly.” Melanie wouldn’t have thought his expression could get even grimmer. “I had to get her out of there, but I had no legal rights. So I let them think I agreed that our angel had allowed herself to be seduced away from Jesus. Said it was my fault, that I’d neglected Laura and her loneliness had made her vulnerable. Her father stepped in and insisted that I pick her up when she was released from the hospital and take her to their vacation cottage to recuperate. No one dared disagree with him.”

And there it was, the springboard that had launched Wyatt out of the family nest. “You didn’t go to the cottage.”

He shook his head. “I only made one stop…in a small town on the Connecticut border, to find a justice of the peace.”

Melanie gaped at him. “You married her anyway?”

“It was the only way I could take care of her.” He gave a helpless shrug. “Her father made sure she had access to whatever money she needed. I’d gained full control of my trust fund when I turned twenty-one. We had plenty of cash and no particular destination, so we just kept working our way across the country.”

“Did you really only stop here because the car broke down?”

“Not just the car.” His hands moved back to her shoulders, massaging gently, but his gaze had turned inward, and it didn’t appear to be a pleasant view. “Laura had been coming unraveled for days. When the car blew up, she had a complete meltdown and started defibrillating and had to be rushed to the emergency room. Back then, there was an inpatient psychiatric hospital in Pendleton, so we stayed here. She had to be heavily medicated at first, which left me with nothing to do but drive around—and go to rodeos.”

Where he’d found his vocation and possibly his salvation. But… “I can see why you blame your father, your brother, Laura’s mother…but why God? He didn’t tell them to do this.”

“He sure as hell didn’t punish them. Laura was destroyed, emotionally and physically. With the damage to her heart, pregnancy could be a life-threatening condition for her.” The sadness in his voice was profound. “She lost the one thing she wanted more than anything, and they lost…nothing.”

“In this life. We don’t know what He’s got planned for them in the next.”

“We don’t know anything.” His hands tightened on her shoulders. “What if they’re right?”

She gently pried his fingers loose to press them between hers. “Then you and I are gonna be ridin’ the same train straight to hell, because I’d rather hang out with Satan than their version of the Almighty.”

He choked out a laugh, bending until their foreheads touched. “This is why I wish I could be like you. Everything is so straightforward.”

She had to close her eyes against a rush of emotion so intense it was as if it had scorched her heart. This beautiful, complicated, wounded man had bared his soul to her, but he acted as if his scars were irrelevant. As if only Laura’s dreams had been destroyed.

What Melanie felt at that moment was so far beyond anything she’d ever experienced that it was like falling into another, terrifying dimension.

“Are you callin’ me simple?” she asked, dry humor being the only cover she could find.

“Good God, no.”

She forced a big smile. “There. See? One good chat with me, and you’re already back on speaking terms with the Man.”

He laughed again and slumped back in the tub, sloshing water over the sides. Instead of crawling into the space he’d made for her, she sat facing him, nearly paralyzed by the vision that was Wyatt, naked, wet, and gilded by the last rays of the setting sun filtering in through the high window. She had to look away in order to do some mental calculations. “You were twenty-two when you eloped. And you were married how long?”

“A little over three years.” He stretched his arms out along the sides of the tub and settled himself more comfortably. “Like I said, it wasn’t easy or quick, but eventually Laura worked things through.”

“And in the meantime, you were…”

He shifted uncomfortably, seeing where she was headed. “Her husband.”

“Forsaking all others?”

“It was easier that way.”

She doubted that—at least from his standpoint—but she couldn’t imagine him disrespecting even vows of expedience. “So you were twenty-five years old…”

“And Laura wanted to move to Portland. This was never her kind of town. I went with her and stayed until she found a great support group and a close group of queer friends. And I…asked a woman out for the first time ever.”

“Whoa.” Melanie stared at him, flabbergasted. “You’d never been on a date?”

“Not with a stranger. I was so clueless…” He made a pained face. “I turned into the reverse of the gay male friend. Her crowd called me their token straight guy, and as soon as our divorce was final, they made it their number one goal to find the perfect woman to initiate me.”

Melanie’s mouth dropped open, but she couldn’t make any words come out.

Wyatt glared at her. “Go ahead. Make all the jokes about the twenty-five-year-old virgin.”

“I—” She gave her head a shake, trying to rearrange years of misconceptions. “You’re gonna have to give me a few minutes here. This is like…like…finding out Mozart didn’t actually write symphonies when he was thirteen.”

“Thirteen?” He stared at her in disbelief. “You thought I was having sex in junior high?”

She threw up her hands, flinging drops of water across the room. “I never drilled it down to a specific age. I just assumed…I mean, look at you, and well…damn.”

As he continued to stare at her, the irritation slowly faded and his mouth quirked. “So you’re saying I do okay for a late bloomer?”

“As if you didn’t know.” Then another thought struck her. “Holy shit! Joe mentioned that you were living in Portland when he met you. Were you still—”

“You cannot tell Violet!” Wyatt’s eyebrows slammed together. “She’d tell Joe, and I would never hear the end of it.”

Melanie grinned at him.

“I’m serious, Melanie. You can’t—”

She splashed water in his face. “Cool your jets. Your secret is safe with me. If I did tell her, I’d have to explain how I wrung it out of you.”

“And we wouldn’t want that,” he said flatly.

Hell. So much for lightening the mood. She traced a vein on the back of his hand as she examined her own reaction. Her mind rebelled at the idea of another clandestine affair. Either own it, or don’t bother, Shawnee liked to say. If Melanie had only stuck to that mantra where Michael was concerned.

She met and held Wyatt’s gaze. “I won’t sneak around ever again. You can assume that I will tell Violet about this. We’re all big girls and boys. We can handle it.”

His eyes darkened, a cold shadow falling over blue water. “You can’t be sure.”

“Yes, I can.” She put her hands on his knees and squeezed. “I know you. I know me. And I know our friends. I’m not saying it won’t get awkward, but as long as we’re honest with each other and them, we can work though whatever happens.”

“Then we need to be clear on where this thing is going.” His gaze shifted to one of the hands he’d fisted on the side of the tub. “I’ve been married and divorced twice, and I’ve learned that I can’t sustain that kind of relationship. I won’t stop analyzing and second-guessing until I pick it completely apart. And you have to think about Hank. At some point, he’s going to be ready to rejoin the living, and he’ll need his sister.”

And today had proven Wyatt and Hank couldn’t coexist in her life.

He leaned forward to run his thumb along her cheekbone, his eyes suddenly burning bright. “I would never willingly do anything to hurt your brother…or you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

She’d always known, even when it was easier to pretend that he was picking on Hank. Even if Wyatt had been willing to take another chance, to put that battered heart of his on the line one more time, he wouldn’t ask her to choose between him and her brother.

Damn him.

“So I guess that’s settled,” she said, remarkably calm considering the howl of pain building inside her chest. “We have our fun until I’m finished here, then we never speak of it again.”

His fingers tightened a fraction, as if in protest. Then his hand dropped away from her face. “It’s better this way.”

In whose godforsaken opinion? She could see no good in ripping apart a connection that was the truest and strongest she’d ever found. But she also couldn’t see a future that wouldn’t eventually tear them apart.

“I hate this,” she whispered.

“I know.”

He gathered her into his arms and held on tight while the light faded and the room went cold.