Page 39 of Vengeful Seduction
She wanted a small wedding. Thirty people max, she had told me emphatically. I was more than happy to go along with it. I couldn’t think of many people I would want at my wedding, especially since it was the next thing to fake. It was nothing but a means to an end.
Of course, I hardly wanted that particular knowledge to become common. I knew, and Brent did too, but no one else. It was better to leave it like that. Two people could barely keep a secret. Any more and it was practically begging to get out.
“I suppose we do,” she murmured, and I was struck again by how unwilling she seemed to be. Not about the wedding, exactly, but about this particular part of getting ready for it.
“Who do you want to invite?” I probed, wrapping a comforting arm around her. To my surprise, her shoulders were quite tense and she wouldn’t meet my eyes, though she had been open and friendly before I’d brought it up.
We were lying in bed, getting ready to go to sleep. Like a lot of couples, we did a lot of our talking then. We weren’t really a couple, of course, but it was still surprisingly comfortable to act like one this way.
A comforting illusion.
Maybe I would have been a bit more withdrawn from her if the situation had been different. As it was, I wanted to give her no doubt about marrying me.
“Joan. Angela.” Kaye was very quick to give those answers, and I arched an eyebrow. It was a bit odd for her to go there first.
I knew who Joan and Angela were. They were her best friends from work. Was it normal for people to think of their friends before their family? I had no idea. I’d never done this before.
“What about your parents? Or do you have any siblings?”
I didn’t really know much about her family at all. Awareness dawned on me as I realized how strange it was. I’d never even met her family, even after she and I had become engaged. In retrospect, it was fairly bizarre. I would have expected to be dragged off to meet them, to get their blessing.
“No siblings.” Kaye looked at me, her eyes and voice hesitant. “I promised Joan I’d think about talking to you about all of this, but I guess I put it out of my mind.”
Well, now. As far as mysterious statements went, that one was pretty impressive. I turned to her, arching my eyebrow, waiting for some clarification. “I think Joan is right,” I stated firmly, though it wasn’t a statement I would expect to make. I had met Joan, and I got a sense she didn’t like me very much. She was always perfectly polite, and so was I, but there was some sort of tension there. “You should tell me.”
When Kaye did finally speak, after a few minutes of pulling herself together, her voice was almost too quiet to hear. “I don’t have any family.” She paused again, and I considered asking for more details, but something told me to shut up and let her tell it her way. She would, I was pretty sure. So I held my tongue and waited, my arm around her, and my fingers stroking lightly over her smooth, bare shoulder.
“My mom and dad, they were in a car accident when I was fifteen,” she finally whispered. I had to lean in a little bit to hear her at all, but she was speaking and I didn’t want to interrupt her to ask her to speak up.
This was obviously difficult for her to talk about. I would let her do it on her own terms, but I struggled to be patient.
“I lost them. They both …died.” I could tell this wasn’t something Kaye talked about much, or at all. There was as much pain in her voice as there would have been if they’d died just a few weeks ago, even though it had been a decade.
I ran my fingers over the back of her hand. “I understand.”
God, did I ever.
“I spent the next few years in foster homes. They kept shuffling me around.” Kaye still spoke softly, but there was more passion in her voice. This had been a hard time for her and she didn’t need to say it for me to know it.
How could it not be a tough time for anyone?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked when it became clear she wasn’t going to say any more. I pressed a kiss against her temple, trying to justify it to myself. Offering genuine comfort would only complicate the plan. And then I quit even trying and just let it be me reaching out to someone else who was suffering.
Someone who had suffered the exact same thing I had.
“I don’t tell people about it very much,” she responded, and I frowned a little bit. I heard what she said, but I also heard the words she didn’t say. I heard them because they were the same words I would say if only to myself.
I don’t talk about it much because it hurts.
We both knew it. Only those who had lost a parent so young could understand. She’d been younger than me, by a few years. She’d been alone and in foster care, and she must have been terrified.
It had been bad enough for me, and I’d been in a cushy boarding school. Still, I had some idea of how she must feel. More than your average person did, anyway.
“We’re the same,” I realized. I hadn’t even known I was speaking out loud, not until I saw her react to my words. “You and I. We both don’t have anyone.”
She gave me the sweetest smile, and I felt my heart clench in my chest. She wouldn’t look at me so affectionately if she knew what I was up to. Nor did I think I deserved the look she gave me.
I knew why I was doing what I was doing and nothing had changed. I still wanted what was mine.
