She glanced up to catch a flare of something in the backs of his flecked eyes that might have been disappointment or hurt, but he adopted her light tone as he said, “I’m capable of compromise. Don’t drag your feet.”
* * *
For a woman battling through an aggressive cancer treatment, as Adara’s mother, Ellice, was, the quiet of Chatham in upstate New York was probably perfect. For a man used to a nonstop pace through sixteen-hour days, the place was a padded cell.
It’s only one afternoon, Gideon chided himself. Adara had tried to come alone, but he had insisted on driving her. Still reeling over yesterday’s news, he already saw that the duration of her pregnancy would be a struggle not to smother his wife while his instinct to hover over her revved to maximum.
Letting her out of his sight when they’d arrived here had been genuinely difficult, but he respected her wish to speak to her mother alone. She had yet to bring up the topic of Nic. Ellice had been too sick for that conversation, but with doctor reports that weren’t exactly encouraging, Adara was facing not having many more conversations with her mother at all.
Scowling with dismay at the rotten hands life dealt, Gideon walked the grounds of the property that Adara’s father had bought as an “investment.” The old man had really been tucking his wife away from the city, isolating her as a form of punishment because he’d been that sort of man. Gideon saw that now. Not that it had been a complete waste of money. The land itself was nice.
Gideon wondered if either of Adara’s brothers wanted this place when their mother passed. With only a dried-up pond for a water view, it wasn’t Gideon’s style. He didn’t need a rolling deck beneath his feet, but he did like a clear view to the horizon.
Maybe that was his old coping strategy rearing its head. Each time his world had fallen apart, he’d looked into the blue yonder and set a course for a fresh start. One thing he’d learned on the ocean: the world was big enough to run away from just about anything.
Not that he was willing to abandon the life he had here. Not now.
He stilled as he noticed a rabbit brazenly munching the lettuce in the garden. Bees were the only sound on the late-summer air, working the flowers that bordered the plot of tomatoes, beans and potatoes. The house stood above him on the hillock, white with fairy-tale gables and peaks. Below the wraparound veranda, the grounds rolled away in pastoral perfection.
It was a vision of the American dream and he was exactly like that invasive rabbit, feeding on what wasn’t his.
His conscience had already been torturing him before Adara had turned up pregnant. Now all he could think was that he’d be lying about who he was to his son or daughter along with his wife.
But he couldn’t go back and undo all the things he’d done to get here. He’d barely scratched the surface of his past when he’d told Adara he’d started working young. Child labor was what it had been, but as a stowaway discovered while the ship was out to sea, he could as easily have been thrown overboard.
Kristor had put him to work doing what a boy of six or seven could manage. He’d swabbed decks and scrubbed out the head. He’d learned to gut a fish and peel potatoes. Burly men had shouted and kicked him around like a dog at times, but he’d survived it all and had grown into a young man very much out for his own gain.
By the time he was tall enough to make a proper deckhand, Kristor was taking jobs on dodgy ships, determined to build his retirement nest egg. Gideon went along with him, asking no questions and taking the generous pay the shady captains offered. He wished he could say he had been naive and only following Kristor’s lead, but his soul had been black as obsidian. He’d seen dollar signs, not moral boundaries.
The ugly end to Kristor’s life had been a vision into his own future if he continued as a smuggler, though. Gideon had had much higher ambitions than that. He’d been stowing his pay, same as Kristor, but it wasn’t enough for a clean break.
Posing as Kristor’s son, however, and claiming the man’s modest savings as an “inheritance” had put him on the solid ground he’d needed. Kristor hadn’t had any family entitled to it. Yes, Gideon had broken several laws in claiming that money, even going to the extent of paying a large chunk to a back-alley dealer in the Philippines for American identification. It had been necessary in order to leave that life and begin a legitimate one.
Or so he’d convinced himself at the time. His viewpoint had been skewed to basic survival, not unlike Adara’s obdurate attitude when he’d first caught up to her in Greece. He’d been cutting himself off from the pain of losing Kristor in exactly the way he’d fled onto Kristor’s ship in the first place, running from the grief and horror of losing his mother.