How many times had he wished he’d been enough? How many times had Frank berated him for his early failures? A breeze rushed through the garden, dancing through the scraggly blooms, whipping up a torrent of memory that he’d normally kept buried under a heavy layer of business meetings, parties, and other diversions that he’d used to drown out the loneliness.
“Perhaps I should take up gardening,” he said, more to himself than to her.
She looked at him with a peculiar expression—as if she didn’t understand or didn’t believe his insinuation. And, if she had read the social columns in the papers, it would be more than natural she wouldn’t believe him.
“My father—Frank that is—was a demanding man. He loved my mother, his company, and his children in that order. I’d struck out on my own—with my fishing business, but after a few years, he wanted me to come back to Silver Lumber. I wasn’t happy about it, but it turns out this face and mouth were far better at making money than either of us realized.” He paused, his hands itching to reach out and take her hand. Instead, he clasped them behind him as he walked.
“Why did you go back? Was the outfitting business not working?”
“It was doing great,” he said. “But Frank rarely asked me for anything, and I thought?— “
“You thought it would be nice to be needed,” she said. “Needed by someone you loved.”
Something in Beau’s chest tightened, as if she’d unknowingly hit on something so tender he hadn’t had the opportunity to prepare himself.
“I spent fifteen years at the company chasing that man’s respect,” he replied, taking a moment to clear his throat to rid himself of the sadness that had trapped itself there. “And now I know, I suppose, that I probably would never have earned his love.”
“Well,” she said, her manner circumspect, “if he was going to will you the company, and he loved it so much, he must have trusted you with it. Maybe that was his way of expressing it.”
Beau turned that over in his head. Frank was many things, but sentimental wasn’t one of them. And he couldn’t care less about appearances. If Beau had failed him, the company would have gone elsewhere—maybe even to his brother-in-law.
Beau dragged his hand down his face. He hoped to hell that Neil had nothing to do with Frank’s death. Frank liked Neil. Hell, he probably loved him.
But he respected Beau.
“Maybe,” he said, something loosening in him. Years of resistance, of numbing himself to the emptiness of working for a man who would never love him, started to yield. He let go a long, low breath as he tried to channel the whirl of pain, of loss, of grief for the complicated man who’d raised him and given him his name. “Christ, I think I might even miss the old man. I just realized I didn’t even get to pay my respects at his funeral.”
“When Dominic solves your case, you can go back to Saint John and do that,” she said.
While the idea of not swinging from a noose appealed, the very last thing he wanted to do was the thing he’d always thought he’d been born to do—take over the company.
But Frank da Silva wasn’t his father. Beau’s father lived a half mile away.
And his heart, he realized, was sitting in the hands of the woman walking next to him.
Chapter Nineteen
Beau walked along side Madeline as they made their way out of the garden. She, at least, seemed able to delight in her surroundings, pointing out one plant or another as walked back to the entrance. Perhaps it was her way of shielding herself from any awkwardness that had arisen from their coupling. Beau remained silent, still grappling with a torrent of emotion that left him completely out of his depths. Normally his carnal activities were like much of his life; satisfying in the moment for both parties, but largely transactional.
Crossing the little bridge, they soon came upon a large oak tree that had been felled by some mighty storm.
“Did you see this?” Madeline said, pulling Beau out of his thoughts. She’d jumped over a bit of brush and pointed to a series of markings in the tree. They were weathered, but there was no mistaking the initials:
H.C. + E. R.
Beau was silent as a wave of melancholy washed over him. An echo of a past love, and heartache, scratched into a tree by two people whose brief affair had created him. He’d never experienced a broken heart—at least, not from a lover. That his parents—or at least Hollis—had, brought him a measure of sadness he hadn’t anticipated.
“I wonder if they would have been happy here,” he said.
“Perhaps for a while,” she said. “But perhaps what your mother did was best for both of them, in the end. She was quite brave, I think.”
“Risky,” Beau answered, unable to keep the sharpness at bay. Why did this hurt him so much?
“Men do risky things all the time, and are celebrated for it, even when the stakes are much lower for them,” she countered. “Your mother clearly knew she would not be happy here. To have that knowledge at such a young age is a gift. They would have had to marry, and how sad would it have been for the both of them, and you, if that one event had left them in a loveless union?”
Beau sat with that for a moment. For all Frank’s faults, he worshipped Beau’s mother. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. The one solace he now possessed was that Frank and his mother may have been reunited. He’d showed Beau what it meant to be head over heels for a woman who was, as far as he could recall, equally in love with him.
“You’re a wise woman,” he said, fighting the urge to pull her into his arms and kiss her again. It was a selfish act, he knew, because he wanted it to soothe his own hurts.
