November Harlequin Presents 2(208)

‘Did you tell your mum?’

‘How?’ Lily asked, tears starting again, hysteria creeping into her voice. ‘I raced round to Mark. I wanted him to tell me what to do…’

‘And you found out that the whole world had gone mad,’ Hunter offered. In spite of herself Lily gave a watery grin at his description. When she’d found Mark with Janey it had felt exactly as if her world had gone mad. ‘I just couldn’t tell Mum—I’d have taken away her whole life if I’d told her, taken away all her memories. How could I tell her it was all just a sham, that the man she loved, adored right till the very end, had been cheating on her?’

‘You couldn’t,’ Hunter said very firmly, very clearly, and it helped, helped that he concurred, that that awful, painful decision she’d made had surely been the right one. ‘You could never have told her that.’

‘I wish I’d never found them,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I’d never given my career up for a man who was nothing more than a cheat, I wish I’d never found out the truth.’

‘But you don’t know the truth, Lily.’ His words confused her and she frowned up at him. ‘You think you found it in those letters, but that’s only a fraction of it. He was still a great father and, despite what you found, he was still a great husband.’

‘He was a cheat!’

‘He was human, Lily. It’s not your secret to keep or reveal.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You probably never will,’ Hunter said softly. ‘So let it go.’

‘It’s not that easy…’ She was quarrelling more with herself than with him because she wanted it to be the case, wanted to be able to put the truth she’d discovered aside, but she just couldn’t.

‘Let him be your dad again, Lily.’ He took the biggest problem in her life to date and shrank it as if by magic, folded up the impossible, complicated map she’d been trying and failing to follow and tossed it aside, offering her a far easier path to follow. ‘Don’t try to work it all out.’

‘Is that what you do?’ She blinked at him. ‘Just refuse to go there?’

‘Where?’

‘Inside yourself.’

‘There’s nothing lurking there. I deal with things as they happen—and then I move on.’

‘No.’ Boldly she confronted him. She’d given so much of herself it was as if she wanted a piece of him in return—a piece of his soul that she could keep for ever—no matter what the future held for them. ‘Hunter, maybe you didn’t have the greatest relationship with them, but they were your parents and with all that’s happened to your sister…’

‘Lily.’ He shook his head, smiled at her almost with pity that she couldn’t quite get it. ‘It happened—and beating myself up over it isn’t going to change a single thing.’

‘What happened?’ Boldly she stared at him, pushed for details because she needed them. ‘Hunter, it’s just so recent. What happened was so awful—surely there must be some unresolved—’

‘Oh, please!’ Hunter just rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t start with your psychobabble.’

‘I know about your parents, what happened to Emma—were you involved?’

‘Nope.’ He gave a thin smile. ‘So no unresolved guilt there. Yes, it was bloody, yes, it was awful, the police coming to the door isn’t a particularly pleasant memory, that I’m prepared to admit. However, beating myself on the chest isn’t going to change things—going over and over the hows and whys isn’t going to turn back the clock.’

‘I guess…but…’

‘Leave it,’ he snapped, then regretted his harshness; there was something in her voice that twisted his stomach, something he hadn’t heard when he’d been sitting on the couch at New Beginnings. Far, far more than professional interest, those knowing curious eyes blazing with concern. And for Hunter, instead of reassuring him, it actually terrified him—not that she couldn’t possibly understand.

More the fact that she just might.

That in revealing his pain, he might also reveal his fears.

For her.

It was more than a beat of hesitation, wrenching indecision hanging in the air as patiently she waited—offered without words this step towards intimacy.

Offered herself to the lions, Hunter thought with sickening realisation—a future like his past, like his mother’s past.

‘No buts!’ he said more softly, smiled that devilish smile and promptly diverted the conversation, dragged her closer physically as he pushed her away emotionally. ‘We’ve got more important things to attend to now.’