Purgatory Masters(73)
“Trust is really hard for me. Hell, a lot of emotion is hard for me.”
She stepped closer. “That’s now how I saw you.”
He grimaced. “Saw being the operative word here. Until my paranoia got the better of me and I ruined everything.”
She took another step. “No, don’t touch me right now. I’m like a live wire and won’t hesitate to have you under me again. We have to finish this. I have to get this out or I never will.”
“You probably don’t remember much about my father other than what he allowed the public to see. He came off to everyone around him as a righteous religious man with hard-core beliefs. Hell, even I bought into that. He rode my ass every day of my life until I left for college and even then he had no problem checking up on me at every opportunity. He nagged me to death and I hated him for it.”
Tucker squeezed his eyes shut and tried to block out the image of his father’s last night. There were some things too painful to discuss. He pushed the memories out of his mind and went back to the easier part of the story.
“One Friday night while in college, I decided to come home for the weekend. I loaded a few of my friends into my car and we showed up here unannounced. The minute we walked through the door, the world went to shit. A young woman was here. She’d gotten stinking drunk and chosen that night to come to the house to confront my asshole father.”
Despite trying to implement every coping mechanism he’d ever learned, much of the rage from that night bled through. “She wanted my mother to know what kind of man she’d married.”
“I thought your mom already knew he’d had an affair?
“Oh she did and that’s why she left him for a while. Until he found her and convinced her that he’d confessed his sins to God and prayed for forgiveness. My mother had always been devout in her religion and she forgave him. Of course he’d lied through his teeth. What he’d managed to keep from us all was far worse. There wasn’t only one. Apparently, my father’s religious beliefs were more extreme than anyone knew. He’d married and impregnated over a dozen women during his marriage to my mom. There were children everywhere.”
Maggie covered her mouth and smothered a small gasp.
“Still not the worst part.” The rest of the story felt like a giant lump in his throat. He’d spent nearly a decade trying to forget. “The woman who confronted him that night was one of his children. On her eighteenth birthday he tried to…”
“No! Oh God, Tucker don’t. You don’t have to say it.” She ran into his arms and wrapped herself around him.
Numb now, he rambled on. “Do you remember when my dad was hospitalized from a hunting accident?”
Maggie nodded.
“Not a hunting accident. That poor girl’s mother shot him.”
“Tucker, I don’t know what to say. I had no idea.”
“Don’t. There’s nothing you need to say. What I wanted you to understand is how fucked up I’ve been. My mom hasn’t spoken a word since that day and it breaks my heart every week when I visit her. But I can’t stop going to see her. And my dad… Well, he was a sex addicted serial cheater who used some whacked out religious beliefs as an excuse to impregnate half the county and I carry his fucking DNA. Do you understand what that means? Whatever short circuited in his logical thought processes could happen again. I could end up like him.”
“Bullshit!” she exclaimed. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
The fierce look of belief on her face took his breath away. It made him sick how little trust he’d shown her previously. “I believe that now. But when I was twenty-one years old, my friends and I had already started Purgatory. We spent our spare time whipping women. In the face of the asshole’s revelations it seemed pretty fucked up. So we withdrew. We wanted to sell the club and cut our ties from the past, but my father’s will made a normal life impossible. He’d left a fortune behind. A fortune I might add that was built on the backs of this small town and everyone in it. He split everything equally among all his living children with a lot of codicils and conditions.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“Exactly. Being able to keep the money depends on keeping his secrets. All of them. Of course, the first thing I wanted to do was tell them all to go to hell. The lawyers, the financial managers, everyone. As far as I was concerned every last dime could rot in the ground with him.”
She touched his cheek with her warm fingers. “Family matters are never without complications and obligations are they?”