“No. I wouldn’t love you if you couldn’t stand there and spit at me after I’d said it.” He walked to her, gave in to the need to touch her. Just a brush of his fingertips over her shoulders. “And I do love you, Jo Ellen. Maybe I always did. Maybe that seven-year-old girl ruined me for anyone else. I don’t know. But I need you to believe me. I need to say it, and I need you to believe it before I start the rest.”
She stared into his eyes, and now her knees did start to tremble. “You do mean it.”
“Enough to put my past, present, and future in your hands.” He took hers in his for a moment, studied them, memorized them, then let them go. “I went back to New York. There’s a friend of the family, a doctor. A neurologist. I wanted him to run some tests on me.”
“Tests?” Baffled, she pushed at her hair. “What kind of—Oh, my God.” It struck her like a fist, hard in the heart. “You’re sick. A neurologist? What is it? A tumor.” Her blood shivered to ice in her veins. “But you can have treatment. You can—”
“I’m not sick, Jo. There’s no tumor, there’s nothing wrong with me. But I had to be sure.”
“There’s nothing wrong?” She folded her arms again, hugged them to her body. “I don’t understand. You went back to New York to have tests run on your brain when there’s nothing wrong with you?”
“I said I needed to be sure. Because I thought I might have had blackouts or been sleepwalking or had fugues. And have maybe killed Susan Peters.”
She lowered herself gingerly, bracing a hand on the back of the chair as she sat on the arm. She never took her eyes off his. “Why would you think such a crazy thing?”
“Because she was strangled here on the island. Because her body was hidden. Because her husband, her family, her friends, might have gone the rest of their lives not knowing what had happened.”
“Stop it.” She couldn’t get her breath, had to fight back the urge to clap her hands over her ears. Her heart was beating too fast, making her head spin, her skin damp. She knew the signs, the panic waiting slyly to spring. “I don’t want to hear any more of this.”
“I don’t want to tell you any more. But neither one of us has a choice.” He braced himself not only to face it but to face her. “My father killed your mother.”
“That’s insane, Nathan.” She willed herself to get up and run, but she couldn’t move. “And it’s cruel.”
“It’s both. And it’s also the truth. Twenty years ago, my father took your mother’s life.”
“No. Your father—Mr. David—was kind, he was a friend. This is crazy talk. My mother left.” Her voice shuddered and broke, then rose. “She just left.”
“She never left Desire. He . . . he put her body in the marsh. Buried her in the salt marsh.”
“Why are you saying this? Why are you doing this?”
“Because it’s the truth, and I’ve avoided it too long already.” Nathan forced himself to say the rest, to finish it while she shut her eyes and shook her head fiercely. “He planned it from the minute he saw her, when we arrived that summer.”
“No. No, stop this.”
“I can’t stop what’s already happened. He kept a journal and . . . evidence in a safe-deposit box. I found it all after he and my mother died.”
“You found it.” Tears leaked through her lashes as she wrapped her arms tight around her body and rocked. “You came back here.”
“I came back here to face it, to try to remember what that summer had been like. What he had been like ... then. And to try to decide whether to leave it all buried or to tell your family what my family had done.”
The familiar flood of sick panic rushed through her, roared in her head, raced through her blood. “You knew. You knew all along, and you came back here. You took me to bed knowing.” Nausea made her dizzy as she surged to her feet. “You were inside me.” Rage sliced through her an instant before her hand cracked across his cheek. “I let you inside me.” She slapped him again, viciously. He neither defended himself nor evaded the blows. “Do you know how that makes me feel?”
He’d known she would look at him just like this, with hate and disgust, even fear. He had no choice but to accept it. “I didn’t face it. My father . . . he was my father.”
“He killed her, he took her away from us. And all these years ...”
“Jo, I didn’t know until after he’d died. I’ve been trying to come to grips with it for months. I know what you’re going through now—”
“You can’t know.” She flung the words out. She wanted to hurt him, to scar him, to make him suffer. “I can’t stay here. I can’t look at you. Don’t!” She jerked back, hands fisted when he reached out. “Don’t put your hands on me. I could kill you for ever putting them on me. You bastard, you stay away from me and my family.”
When she ran, Nathan didn’t try to stop her. He couldn’t. But he followed her erratic dash, keeping her in sight. If he could do nothing else, he would make certain she arrived safe at Sanctuary.
But it wasn’t to Sanctuary that she fled.
***
SHE couldn’t go home. Couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t get her breath, couldn’t clear her vision. Part of her wanted to simply fall to the ground, curl up and scream until her mind and body were empty of grief. But she was terrified that she’d never find the strength to get up again.
