The Obsession(112)
“He’s a monster. He’s my father.”
“My father doesn’t know a carburetor from a brake pad, owns two sets of golf clubs, and likes easy listening.”
“That’s not the same, at all.”
“Why not? Why the hell not? We have blood ties, he raised memostlyand we’re as different as they come. He reads like one book a year, as long as it’s a bestseller. We baffle each other every time we spend more than an hour together.”
“It’s not”
“What about your brother?”
He threw her off stride, just as he’d intended.
“I . . . What about Mason?”
“What kind of man is he?”
“He’s . . . great. He’s smart. Actually, he’s brilliant, and dedicated, kind.”
“So he can be what he is, with the same gene pool, but you’re what? Tainted?”
“No. No, I know better. Intellectually I know better, but yes, sometimes it feels that way.”
“Get over it.”
She stared at him. “Get . . . over it?”
“Yeah. Get over it, move on. Your father’s as fucked-up as it gets. That doesn’t mean you have to be.”
“My father is the most notorious serial killer of the century.”
“It’s a young century yet,” he said with a shrug, and had her staring again.
“God. I don’t understand you.”
“Understand this, then. It’s insulting and annoyingremember thatfor you to think I’d feel differently about you because your father’s Thomas David Bowes. That I’d act differently because seventeen years ago you saved a lifeno doubt saved a lot of lives. And if this whole fucked-up bullshit is the reason you’re trying to kick me to the curb, you’re out of luck. I don’t kick that easy.”
“I don’t know what to say to you now.”
“If you want me gone, don’t use Bowes as the lever to pry me loose.”
“I need to sit down.”
She sat on the glider. Obviously deciding she needed it, the dog picked his way back, laid his head on her knee.
“I didn’t mean it,” she murmured, and stroked the dog. “I didn’t mean it about the dog, or the house. I didn’t mean it about you. I told myself I should mean it; it would be better all around if I could mean it. It’s easier to keep moving than to root, Xander, for someone like me.”
“I don’t think so. I think that’s something else you’ve told yourself until you mostly believe it. If you believed it all the way through, you wouldn’t have bought this place. You wouldn’t bring it back to life. You sure as hell wouldn’t have taken on that dog, no matter how I worked you on it.”
He crossed over, sat beside her again. “You’d have slept with me. I saw that the first time you came into the bar.”
“Oh, really?”
Not yet settled, but getting there, he picked up his beer again. “I’ve got a sense about when a woman’s going to be willing. But if you believed all that crap all the way through, this wouldn’t have turned into a thing.”
“It wasn’t supposed to.”
“A lot of good things happen by accident. If Charles Goodyear hadn’t been clumsy, we wouldn’t have vulcanized rubber.”
“What?”
“Weatherproof rubbertires, for instance, as in Goodyear. He was trying to figure out how to make rubber weatherproof, dropped this experiment on a stove by accident, and there you go, he made weatherproof rubber.”
Baffled, she rubbed her aching temple. “I’ve completely lost the point.”
“Not everything has to be planned to work out. Maybe we both figured we’d bang it out a few times and move on, but we didn’t. And it’s working out all right.”
The sound of her own laughter surprised her. “Wow, Xander, my heart’s fluttering from that romantic description. It’s like a sonnet.”
Yeah, he realized, he was settling again. “You want romance? I could bring you flowers.”
“I don’t have anything to put them in.” She sighed. “I don’t need romance, and I don’t know what I’d do with it. I like knowing my feet are solid on the ground. And they haven’t been, not consistently, since I saw this house. Today . . . the funeral. It hit so hard because it reminded me, again, of all the people my father hurt. Not just the women he killed, but the people who loved them.”
“I’d have been sorry you found her no matter what, but I was a hell of a lot sorrier knowing what it would bring back. Have you talked to your brother, your uncles about it?”
“No. No, why bring it back for them? I wasn’t going to talk to anyone about it. Not about what it brought back.”