Page 55 of Captivated
What could make a man feel such distaste and dislike for the woman he owed his life to?
But the man was Nash. Because of that, she worked past her own deeply ingrained loyalty to family as she studied him.
Hurt, she realized. There had been as much hurt as anger in his voice, in his face, then. And now. She could see it plainly now that all the layers of arrogance, confidence, and ease had been stripped away. Her heart ached for him, but she knew that wouldn’t lessen his hurt. She wished she had Anastasia’s talent and could take on some of his pain.
Instead, she kept his hand in hers and sat beside him again. No, she was not an empath, but she could offer support, and love.
“Tell me.”
Where did he begin? Nash wondered. How could he explain to her what he had never been able to explain to himself?
He looked down at their joined hands, at the way her strong fingers entwined with his. She was offering support, understanding, when he hadn’t thought he needed any.
The feelings he’d always been reluctant to voice, refused to share, flowed out.
“I guess you’d have to know my grandmother. She was”—he searched for a polite way of putting it—“astraight arrow. And she expected everyone to fly that same narrow course. If I had to choose one adjective, I’d go with intolerant. She’d been widowed when Leeanne was about ten. My grandfather’d had this insurance business, so she’d been left pretty well off. But she liked to scrape pennies. She was one of those people who didn’t have it in her to enjoy life.”
He fell silent, watching the gulls sweep over the water. When his hand moved restlessly in hers, Morgana said nothing, and waited.
“Anyway, it might sound kind of sad and poignant. The widow with two young girls to raise alone. Until you understand that she liked being in charge. Being the widow Kirkland and having no one to answer to but herself. I have to figure she was pretty rough on her daughters, holding holiness and sex over their heads like lightning bolts. It didn’t work very well with Leeanne. At seventeen she was pregnant and didn’t have a clue who the father might have been.”
He said it with a shrug in his voice, but Morgana saw beneath it. “You blame her for that?”
“For that?” He looked at her, his eyes dark. “No. Not for that. The old lady must have made her life hell for the best part of nine months. Depending on who you get it from, Leeanne was a poor, lonely girl punished ruthlessly for one little slip. Or my grandmother was this long-suffering saint who took her sinful daughter in. My own personal opinion is that we had two selfish women who didn’t give a damn about anyone but themselves.”
“She was only seventeen, Nash,” Morgana said quietly.
Anger carved his face into hard, unyielding lines. “That’s supposed to make it okay? She was only seventeen, so it’s okay that she bounced around so many guys she didn’t know who got her pregnant. She was only seventeen, so it’s okay that two days after she had me she took off, left me with that bitter old woman without a word, without a call or even a thought, for twenty-six years.”
The raw emotion in his voice squeezed her heart. She wanted to gather him close, hold him until the worst of it passed. But when she reached out, he jerked away, then stood.
“I need to walk.”
She made her decision quickly. She could either leave him to work off his pain alone, or she could share it with him. Before he could take three strides, she was beside him, taking his hand again.
“I’m sorry, Nash.”
He shook his head violently. The air he gulped in was as sweet as spring, and yet it burned like bile in his throat. “I’m sorry. No reason to take it out on you.”
She touched his cheek. “I can handle it.”
But he wasn’t sure he could. He’d never talked the whole business through before, not with anyone. Saying it all out loud left an ugly taste in his mouth, one he was afraid he’d never be rid of. He took another careful breath and started again.
“I stayed with my grandmother until I was five. My aunt, Carolyn, had married. He was in the army, a lifer. For the next few years I moved around with them, from base to base. He was a hard-nosed bastard—only tolerated me because Carolyn would cry and carry on when he got drunk and threatened to send me back.”
Morgana could imagine it all too clearly. The little boy in the empty middle, controlled by everyone, belonging to no one. “You hated it.”
“Yeah, I guess that hits the center. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I hated it. Looking back, I realize that Carolyn was as unstable as Leeanne, in her own way. One minute she’d fawn all over me, the next she’d ignore me. She wasn’t having any luck getting pregnant herself. Then, when I was about eight or nine, she found out she was going to have a kid of her own. So I got shipped back to my grandmother. Carolyn didn’t need a substitute anymore.”
Morgana felt her eyes fill with angry tears at the image of the child, helpless, innocent, being shuffled back and forth between people who knew nothing of love.
“She never looked at me like a person, you know? I was a mistake. That was the worst of it,” he said, as if to himself. “The way she drummed that point home. That every breath I took, every beat of my heart was only possible because some careless, rebellious girl had made a mistake.”
“No,” Morgana said, appalled. “She was wrong.”
“Yeah, maybe. But things like that stick with you. I heard a lot about the sins of the father, the evils of the flesh. I was lazy, intractable and wicked—one of her favorite words.” He sent Morgana a grim little smile. “But that was no more than she expected, seeing as how I’d been conceived.”
“She was a horrible woman,” Morgana bit out. “She didn’t deserve you.”
