A Mother's Secret (10 page)

“Are you so sure? You sound like you’re enjoying Malcolm.”

Daniel took a swallow of coffee in hopes it would sooth the burning sensation in his chest. “I’m…trying. But I feel so damned clumsy. Being a parent…that’s one of those things you learn from your own parents. Mine called in absent.”

“Mine weren’t anything to brag about.”

“You had Mom. For whatever reason, she did better by you than she did for me.”

He’d believed then that it was because Joe was Adam’s son. Even when she was disappointed in her oldest boy, Jo Carson had loved him and continued to have faith in him. She’d believed in Daniel, too, but the softness wasn’t there for him, only starch and determination. As an adult, he’d come to realize how many forces had been at work. His birth had propelled her to make decisions she must have known were wrong. The disintegration of her marriage, the later need to penny-pinch, to squeeze in overtime when she could—it had all affected her ability to be the kind of mother she’d been twenty years earlier. Or ten years later, when her grandson needed her.

“Maybe she did,” Joe said, “but I think you’re wrong to see yourself as some kind of emotional cripple. No, you shouldn’t marry Rebecca for Malcolm’s sake and for no other reason.” He paused. “You sure you aren’t in love with her?”

Daniel wanted to issue an immediate denial, but he kept remembering how conflicted he had been, both driving her away and wanting to be with her. For the first time, it oc
curred to him to wonder whose feelings had really scared him. Hers? Or his own?

“What a bizarre triangle they had,” Daniel said, maybe to change the subject, maybe not.

“You mean, the Carsons and Grandma?” Accepting the jump, probably even understanding the reason for it, Joe propped his elbows on the table. “No kidding. To agree to raise your husband’s baby by another woman…” He shook his head. “She must have really loved him.”

“You could look at it more cynically,” Daniel suggested. “Life was harder for a divorced woman in those days. She took on the baby, she won. He was all hers. She didn’t have to worry about joining the work force, raising Sam on her own. How Jenny’s mother coped wasn’t her problem.”

“Maybe that was part of it,” Joe conceded. “But from what Jenny says, Sarah adopted her wholeheartedly. She never felt resented or unwanted.”

“She was a cute kid.”

“She was a reminder of the other woman Robert loved.”

Daniel couldn’t argue with that. Finding Rebecca and Malcolm had taught him how intimately sharing a child bound a man and woman. It was tempting to see Robert Carson as a real son of a bitch—but according to Joe, neither Sam, Jenny or their daughters Belle and Sue had described him that way. Chances were, Carson had thought of Jo every time he looked at his daughter. If he’d genuinely loved her, that must have been hell.

Was it Jenny’s presence in his life, the reminder of what he’d shared with her mother, that had worn him down, so that eventually he went to see Jo?

“What was she thinking, making the same mistake again?” Daniel asked.

“You mean, when she conceived you?” At Daniel’s tight nod, Joe gazed unseeing at the buffet that held Jo Fraser’s best china. “I made the same mistake again.”

Pip was running water in the kitchen and wouldn’t be able to hear them. “Not with the same woman.”

Joe shook himself. “God, no.”

“But then, you didn’t love Nadia.”

“No. I thought I could make myself, but…no.”

What
had
Robert and Jo said to each other that night? Let’s make love just once, for old time’s sake? They hadn’t had the excuse of youth anymore. When they conceived Daniel, Jo Fraser was thirty-nine years old and Robert Carson a couple of years older yet.

Old enough to know better.

Maybe that was explanation enough. He was in his forties, loved his wife, but they’d probably had their ups and downs after so many years together, and during all those years he’d lived with regrets. How could he ever forget Jo, seeing her in their daughter’s face every single day?

And Jo was facing forty years old herself. Had she been afraid that she’d lost any chance of finding real, lasting love? She had a few pictures of her first husband, but in them he was only a boy. No, her powerful, adult love had been given to the married man who vowed to see that she was all right after her husband’s death. The man who’d fathered her two kids. Living as near to each other as they did, maybe shopping at the same grocery store or pharmacy, chances were good that she saw him occasionally, along with the daughter she’d given up. And then, after Joe was born, she saw him again in her grandson’s face.

It was surely understandable if, for one night, in the grip of powerful memories, they relived what might have been.

The bigger question was why she hadn’t aborted the baby she must have soon discovered she was carrying. The Carsons, Daniel knew, had been Catholic. Robert would have abhorred the idea of abortion. An occasional Presbyterian, Daniel’s mother was unlikely to have let religious scruples stop her.

His best guess was that she was also sleeping with Vern Kane and had never been certain which man was the father. Vern had stuck around until Daniel was five years old. Since Daniel had been a hefty eight pounds ten ounces at birth, only eight months after their wedding day, Vern would have had to know this kid wasn’t his if he hadn’t made love with his wife until their wedding night.

Maybe Jo had believed, however desperately, that she could learn to love Vernon Kane. Or maybe she had loved that baby she carried enough to want to give him the father Adam had never had.

Nice thought
, Daniel told himself. Not very likely, but nice.

He stirred. “I’d better get going.”

“Pip!” Joe called. “Daniel’s trying to sneak out without saying good-night.”

Laughing, his wife appeared from the kitchen. She let Daniel kiss her cheek again, gave him a hug and left Joe to walk him to the front door.

“Belle keeps asking about the DNA results.”

“Yeah? Why’s she so hot to find out?”

“She seems to think that birthmark—” Joe nodded toward Daniel’s hip “—gives you two some kind of bond.”

The idea made Daniel uneasy, but he shared her feelings. It was as if they’d been marked to be sure they would find each other. However much he scoffed at the fancy, he
couldn’t quite talk himself out of it, either. Seeing his birthmark on her lower back had been one of the more unsettling experiences of his life.

“I’ll let her know. I promised.”

“I’ll tell her.” Joe cuffed his shoulder. “We’re looking forward to meeting Malcolm. And we’ll all be nice to Rebecca if you want to bring her to some family thing.”

God. He’d have to do that one of these days. He couldn’t imagine Rebecca was big on “meet the family,” especially under the circumstances. On the other hand, he thought she’d like Sue, Belle and Pip.

“I’ll think about it.”

Driving home, Daniel turned his mind back to the tangled relationship of Robert, Sarah and Jo. Why did their motives matter so much to him now? All three of them were dead. So why should he care how his mother had felt about the three men she’d loved, or at least slept with? What difference did it make whether Robert had known Daniel was his son?

He wished he didn’t give a damn. Early on, when Joe was going through some of the same tumult about Sarah Carson’s revelations, Daniel had asked him why the long-distant past had him so stirred up. He couldn’t remember Joe’s answer, but, blast it, now he was just as stirred up. And he didn’t like living nonstop with a queasy sense that a fault line deep in the ground was beginning to shift.

His best guess was that, if it hadn’t been for finding out about Malcolm, he wouldn’t have been as deeply affected by the discovery that Vern wasn’t his father. All of this was jumbled together for him now. How could he be a father himself without knowing who his own father was? Why Vern, despite doubts, had acknowledged him, when his bio
logical father didn’t. Why neither man in the end had loved him.

But most of all he wished he understood why his mother hadn’t really loved him, either. If she had, he suspected he’d have asked Rebecca to marry him five years ago. They’d be raising their son together, maybe have another baby by now. He’d have known
how
to love a woman, what family meant, instead of always feeling as if a plate glass window separated him from other people.

A plate glass window that now seemed to be shivering with that oncoming seismic activity. Glass, he thought, tended to shatter under enough pressure.

Pulling into the garage at home, Daniel swore aloud. To hell with all this heartburn. He wanted his old life back.

But as the garage door glided shut and he turned off the car engine, he pictured Rebecca and Malcolm and knew he wouldn’t go back, even if he could.

H
OLDING HER SON
’
S HAND
, Rebecca stood outside Daniel’s house in the middle of a block of other late-nineteenth-century residences in exclusive Pacific Heights, all beautifully restored. Malcolm stared wide-eyed.

“Look, Mom! That house is purple!”

Purple, pink, dove-gray and teal, the Queen–Anne style home three doors down from Daniel’s was indeed gaudy. Daniel, of course, would never paint a house purple. His was one of the more subdued on the block, while still boasting the spectacular array of colors that gave it and its neighbors the name Painted Ladies. Italianate in style, his house was painted sage-green, with brackets and cornices and trim in black, white, deeper green and rose. That pink had delighted her. When she’d teased him, he’d insisted the painter who had done the work had suggested it. Rebecca didn’t believe him.

He had told her once that these houses had been colorful in their day, but in the early part of the twentieth century had mostly been painted white or gray. Not until the 1960s, when the hippies had painted houses in the Haight-Ashbury district bright, defiant colors, had the movement begun to dress San Francisco’s historic ladies in glorious colors.

Why the heck couldn’t Daniel have moved in the past five years? Was that too much to ask?

Rebecca dreaded walking into his house. It held such a host of memories, most of which she’d succeeded in blocking out until he’d reappeared in her life. She’d loved his house so much, tied in with her feelings for him as it was! The fact that he’d chosen to buy and restore one of the elaborately adorned Victorians that had survived the 1906 earthquake rather than live in a new house he’d built had initially surprised and then intrigued her. Wanting to live in a house with so much history meant connections must matter to him, she had decided. He was a businessman, yes; ruthless in getting his way, probably. But the house, built in 1864, was so romantic, it showed a softer side of him, suggested he would eventually want a wife and children to fill the bedrooms. Family and connections.

More fool her.

After their Cabrillo Heights tour last week, Daniel had suggested she and Malcolm come to his house for lunch the following Saturday. “Let him get familiar with my place, too,” he’d said, and she had agreed, hiding her deep reluctance. Yes, when Malcolm came for his first visit without her, it would be easier for him if he’d already visited his dad’s house, had seen it in the security of her company. Even so, every instinct in her had screamed,
Say no!
But how could she, if this casual lunch date would make the inevitable transition to overnight stays with his father less frightening for Malcolm?

Her stomach felt hollow as they started up the steps to the porch. She’d been so happy here, so much in love. An occasional overnight had expanded that year to Rebecca spending half the week here. She’d taken over several
drawers and part of the medicine cabinet. She had believed, with all her heart, that Daniel would ask her to marry him.

Until she realized one day how many excuses he’d made that week alone. And then the next week, and the next. He didn’t want her there as often, even though he made love to her with the same hunger and even tenderness as always. There was someone else, Rebecca began to believe. That, or his interest was waning. Was she boring him?

She remembered her stomach-clenching panic, because she had just begun to suspect that she was pregnant. She was already nervous, because he
hadn’t
asked her to marry him or ever talked about having children someday. But if he loved her, she had tried to convince herself, it would be all right. Maybe he wouldn’t have chosen to start a family yet, but he would come around to wanting this baby.

It took her six weeks of his cancellations and excuses to accept that he didn’t love her at all, that he was not-so-subtly letting her know that he was winding this relationship down. And yet still he made love to her with single-minded intensity, as if she was the only woman in the world. The way he kissed her, and held her and said her name while he moved inside her had seemed to contradict all his hints. That last night, his voice had been raw when he said, “God, I want you.” And yet afterward, he’d slipped out of bed as soon as he decently could and gone downstairs, no doubt to work.

She had lain alone in his bed, staring up at the high ceiling, and known she had two choices. Tell him, tie him to her forever whether he liked it or not. Or walk away now, dignity intact, and raise this child on her own.

For her, with her history, that had been no choice at all. So she’d pretended to be asleep when he got up in the morning, showered, kissed her cheek and left. As soon as
she was sure he was gone, Rebecca had packed her few possessions left at his house, written him a breezy, glad-we-had-fun-but-I’m-moving-on note, and left it with her key to his house on a side table in the entry.

Some part of her persisted in clinging to the hope that he would call, or even show up angry at her apartment and say, “I love you. Damn it, marry me!” But of course he didn’t do either. She’d read him right. He was probably relieved when he came home that day and found the note. He’d escaped the necessity of an ugly scene or hurt feelings. Why wouldn’t he be glad?

And now here she was with their son, who was clearly entranced by this fairy-tale house. Soon he’d have his own bedroom here, and he would be in love with his amazing new father.

And I’m jealous.

How pathetic was that?

The door knocker in the shape of a mermaid was new.
The Little Mermaid
being one of his favorite movies, Mal was further delighted.

Within moments of her letting the mermaid knock on the shining brass plate, Daniel opened the door. “Rebecca. Malcolm. Come in.”

Wearing faded jeans and a finely knit sweater in dark green, he took her breath away. Beyond a swift glance at her, he seemed to have eyes only for Malcolm.

For once, her son was rendered shy by the grandeur of the parquet-floored entry with an elaborate crystal chandelier above. He clung to his mother’s hand.

“Smells good,” she said. “Are you cooking?”

Daniel grinned at her. “Versus slapping peanut butter on bread? Yes, I am. Occasionally I get inspired.”

She remembered. He was a creative cook when the mood came upon him, ordering out otherwise. His pasta dishes put her mundane spaghetti to shame. Creative, on the other hand, didn’t go over well with Malcolm.

Reading her mind, Daniel said, “I’m making macaroni and cheese. Just slightly improved. If he doesn’t like it…I do have peanut butter.”

“Then all is well,” she said lightly. “Have you made any major changes to the house? Do we get a tour?”

Oh, sure, torture myself, why don’t I?

“Yep. The macaroni and cheese won’t come out of the oven for another twenty minutes.” He smiled at Mal. “What do you think? Do you want to see the house?”

Malcolm nodded eagerly. “Mom says it’s old. She says there weren’t any cars when it was built.”

“That’s right. Instead of a garage in back, there would have been a carriage house for horses.”

The house was tall but narrow, rooms to each side of a central hall on each floor.

Mal loved the bay windows and the magnificent fireplace with a scrolled mantel in the living room. Upstairs in the front guest bedroom, he thought it would be a wonderful idea to climb out the window onto the balcony.

“Afraid not, buddy,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “I sit out there once in a while on hot nights, but it was designed to be decorative, not to bear weight, so I’m nervous about really using it.”

A smaller bedroom at the back of the house would be more suitable for Malcolm, Rebecca thought. She was grateful that Daniel didn’t open the door to his own room, although he did show them the bathroom that he had enlarged vastly by stealing space from another small bed
room. The floor and lower walls were tiled in black-and-white checkerboard, above which the walls were papered in pale green with a repeating black filigree pattern. A huge, glass-walled shower violated the period look but managed to be fairly unobtrusive. Mal ignored it, happy to see the deep claw-foot tub.

Peering into it, he said, “It’s even better than ours. Isn’t it, Mom? I never knew anyone else who has a bathtub like ours. Aunt Nomi doesn’t, and Chace doesn’t, and…”

Rebecca stepped back into the hall, letting Daniel deal with the flood of information on people who
didn’t
have an old-fashioned bathtub deep enough to float in. She didn’t think she could bear to stand there in that bathroom, excruciatingly aware of Daniel, and talk about the bathtub where they’d made love. Perhaps even conceived Malcolm.

She was a masochist, agreeing to come here! Why hadn’t she made an excuse, let him introduce Malcolm to his house on his own? This hurt, being a guest welcome here only to smooth the way for Mal to feel at home.

She supposed she was rather quiet when they went back downstairs. She felt Daniel’s scrutiny and ignored it, pointing out handsome period details to Malcolm as if he’d care.

They ate at the round oak table in the bay at the back of the kitchen, looking out through French doors onto a brick patio and small garden confined by brick walls. They had eaten breakfast out there whenever the weather was warm enough. Rebecca couldn’t look anywhere without the ache beneath her breastbone spreading, filling her until every breath hurt.

Mal nibbled politely at the macaroni, made with four
different cheeses, agreed that he might like a peanut butter sandwich, too, then happily ate the ice cream that followed. Somehow Rebecca participated in the conversation, although by the time lunch was over she couldn’t remember a single thing they’d talked about.

“Can I go outside?” Malcolm asked, sliding off his chair.

Rebecca started to rise, but Daniel said, “I was just going to pour coffee. You can keep an eye on him from here. The gate’s closed.”

She hesitated, then sank back down. Malcolm slipped out the door, leaving it open. He crouched to concentrate on something in a flower bed—a bug maybe. Insects were one of his current interests.

Daniel set a cup of coffee in front of her. “This isn’t a house for a kid, is it?” he said ruefully, going back to the refrigerator for cream.

“Are you kidding?” Rebecca laughed, hoping he couldn’t hear the pain in it. “It’s…magical. Any kid would love it. It’s the kind of house where you think maybe you really could open a wardrobe and find a magical kingdom on the other side. It has attics and nooks and a stair banister that someday he’ll want to slide down. If your furnishings were fussy, it might be a problem, but I didn’t see much he could damage.”

He sat down across from her and handed her a small pitcher of cream. “I thought…that bedroom at the back of the house. It’s next to mine.”

“And the window doesn’t open onto the balcony.”

Daniel nodded. She felt his gaze on her face, even as she watched Malcolm out the window. Her son was now trying out a glider, swinging his legs to try to persuade it to move.

Voice gravelly, Daniel said, “Seeing you here brings back memories.”

Her throat closed. She made some incoherent agreement.

“I missed you.”

Oh, God. Was he
trying
to torture her?

Mal had moved on to the detached garage. He was jumping to try to see in the window, well above his head.

Please get bored
, she begged silently.
Please come back in. Give me an excuse to say, “We have to go
.” She sat mute. Honestly, what could she say? You broke my heart? She wouldn’t have admitted that even if he were prying off her fingernails one by one.

Still quiet, still watching her, he said, “I’ve begun to regret that I couldn’t be the man you needed me to be.”

Rebecca was suddenly angry. The sear of heat was a welcome change from her desolation. For the first time, she met his eyes.

“What do you mean, you
couldn’t
be? You’re a man of great determination, Daniel. You could have been whatever you chose. So just knock it off, okay? We had fun together. You got tired of me. Don’t…don’t…” Abruptly, tears threatened. She willed them away. “Don’t make more of it than it was, just because we have a son together.”

His face went blank. He had a talent for that, hiding his emotions, leaving her endlessly guessing what he really felt.

There was a long silence. Neither of them drank their coffee. Rebecca wanted desperately to escape.

“I didn’t get tired of you.”

Her heart cramped, but she held on to her fury. “Then
what?” she fired back. “You met someone else? You were too busy? It doesn’t really matter, Daniel. It was a long time ago.”

“You’re right,” he said flatly. “Finding out about Malcolm has…made me think. That’s all.”

She pushed back her chair and stood. “We really should be going.” She started toward the French door to call Malcolm in.

Daniel rose to his feet and blocked her. “Damn it,” he said. “I keep wondering…”

His voice sounded strange. She froze, perilously close to him. “Wondering…?” she whispered.

“Whether this has changed.” He reached out and tipped her chin up.

She should have wrenched herself away. But she’d wondered, too. How could she help it? Maybe she’d feel nothing when they kissed. And then she could get over this foolish crush that wasn’t really love.

Their noses bumped, and his lips brushed softly over hers. Again. The tiniest touch, and she was melting, lost. He nipped her lower lip, then gently sucked it. She made a shaky sound and laid a hand on his shoulder. He growled something and then was kissing her, really kissing her, his tongue sliding into her mouth, and she was about to collapse—

“Mom!” her son exclaimed, pushing open the door. “You want to sit on the bench? I can’t make it rock by myself.”

Daniel reacted faster than she did, stepping back. She had one fleeting glimpse of his face, the skin taut over his cheekbones, his eyes glittering, before she faced her son.