She was so relaxed now. Untroubled. Different from when they’d been making love and suddenly she wasn’t in the same sensual place they’d been sharing the moment before. He’d let her put him off, but now he wanted to understand.
“Earlier tonight, Darcy, where did you go?”
She knew what he was talking about. He could see it in the instant of deliberation flashing through her eyes before she made the decision to trust him with the truth.
“I never realized what I was missing before,” she answered, staring down the street ahead of them. “I mean I saw couples together, saw them having fun, but I always wondered what happened when they went home and no one was around to see, whether those bright smiles turned to fear.”
Jeff’s stomach turned to lead, and he pulled Darcy to a stop. “Did someone make you afraid?”
She seemed to consider, almost as if she didn’t know the answer. In the end, though, she found her way to it. “Not a boyfriend of my own. I didn’t really let guys get that close. But yes. My mom wasn’t so discriminating and some of the guys who took us in—they made me scared.”
He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do anything but take her hand because he needed to hold it, and wait for her to tell him the rest.
“Some of them had tempers that could get physical. And some of them would look at me in ways they shouldn’t. And some of them just liked to play the kind of control games that might mean going hungry or not being able to go to school or to sleep.”
“How the hell could she have let you live like that?” he asked, sickened and enraged by the actions of a woman he knew to have died in a car accident years before.
Darcy wouldn’t meet his eyes. And when she answered, the hollow sound of her voice was like a blade to his heart.
“She said she didn’t have a choice and we’d starve without someone to take care of us. She told me she couldn’t risk leaving me alone with them to get a job, that we couldn’t leave until she found someone else. Someone better. But that was a joke. The guys she found...” She shook her head. “I don’t know what was wrong with her. But the guys she gravitated to were all just different shades of the same sick. And the worst of it was, I actually believed she didn’t have a choice. I thought she was trapped the same way I was. I didn’t know there were programs to help us. I didn’t know she was actually choosing to live that way, to make me live that way until I got the full-time job that let me pay rent. Now that I’m going to be a mother and the need to protect this baby is so strong within me, it’s like a tangible thing—more than ever I want to know why. But it’s too late to ask, and I don’t think I could have believed anything she said anyway.”
Jeff pulled her into his arms, stroking her hair as a part of him died inside thinking of those beautiful gray eyes he’d seen so many ways filled with fear, their innocence draining away years too soon.
“Baby, I’m so sorry.”
Now he got it. This was why she’d dropped out of school.
Why she’d been afraid to trust him enough to let him take care of her.
Why with all the money and resources at his disposal, he’d never be able to give her the thing she wanted most in her life. To be totally independent. And worse, that hard-won freedom she’d sacrificed so much for? He was the reason she’d lost it. He’d taken it away.
And when he looked at the round swell of her belly, he couldn’t even regret it.