Caught in the Act (The Davenports) (16 page)

She closed her eyes once again as the picture of a tiny baby girl formed in her head. How could she explain that to him?

“You can’t let her control every aspect of your life, Cat.”

Her eyes popped back open. “What do you mean?” He didn’t know about Annabelle?

“Your mother. You’re here on vacation, but you’re letting her control you.”

“I’m having the vacation of my life,” she argued. And she was. She’d found him again.

“So your idea of your perfect getaway is to do your family’s bidding?” Before she could respond, he added, “Letting her control your every waking hour?”

He was starting to piss her off. He didn’t get it. He’d never been in her shoes. This was what her life was. It had always been her life. She wasn’t sure she’d ever had an option in the matter. It just
was
.

“Live a little,” he coaxed when she didn’t immediately respond. “Go out with me.”

She shook her head. She had to make him stop this before she caved. “We’re just sex, remember? That doesn’t entail dates.”

His eyes turned hard. As she knew they would. It made her feel guilty.

“Don’t be mad.” It was her turn to coax now. “It’s just easier if I give them nothing else to talk about. That’s all. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Oh, I’m aware it has nothing to do with me. It’s all about the Davenport name. I get that. I’ve known it all along.”

They fell silent once again, both staring out at the ocean, watching the sky turn from gray to pale blue to pink, the sun just barely hidden below the edge of the ocean. It was a beautiful morning, and she was with a man she cared about. And she would soon have to go home and put these memories aside.

It sucked.

“Will you tell me about your husband?” he asked.

She jerked her gaze to Brody’s. The request shocked her. He still had the hardness of anger, but he was trying to hide it.

“I know you met him not long after you and I were together,” he continued.

She nodded. He wanted to know about her life since they’d last seen each other. And damn it, she wanted to know about his. Because this wasn’t just sex, no matter what she’d said.

“He and I actually met as kids,” she started slowly. “He lived in DC year-round. We would hang out when my parents brought us to town. When I was ten, Mom and Dad bought a house there and we began staying through the school year. Joe and I became good friends.”

“You didn’t date, then? Before?”

“Before
our
summer?” She shook her head. “No. I expected we would eventually date, but it wasn’t pressing, you know? I had things to do, he had things to do. His family was very much like mine. We attended dinners and events together. Although his parents were considerably more laid-back than mine. But the summer I came home—” She broke off, having almost said the summer she came home from having Annabelle. She tucked her hair behind her ear and cleared her throat. “The summer after
us
,” she said instead, “I’d been away. At boarding school.” She told the lie easily. It was one she’d repeated to her friends back then. Even to her brothers. “When I came home that summer, it seemed like time.”

“You didn’t want to come back up here?”

She shook her head. She couldn’t have come up here. “I thought we were over,” she whispered.

He nodded as if he understood. “I came up just to make sure.”

“You were here the next summer?” She hadn’t expected that.
He’d
been the one to quit calling
her
. Why would he have come back?

“Only for a few days,” he admitted. “I had my license by then.” He shrugged. “There were a few other things I needed to do, but I had to make sure you hadn’t come back first.”

She didn’t understand. If he’d changed his mind about them months before, why would he have bothered looking for her again?

“What happened next?” he asked before she could form the question. “I saw a picture of you two that summer. I knew you were dating.”

“How did you see us?”

“In a DC paper.”

“You got a DC paper? When you were sixteen?”

He looked away from her then, his profile solid and firm, and she wanted to reach over and caress it. “I’ve always been into history,” he explained. He didn’t meet her eyes. “I’ve read newspapers from all over the world my whole life.”

She’d forgotten that he’d always been that way, but yeah, even at fifteen, he’d routinely mentioned some story or another that he’d read in a paper.

“I also saw your wedding photo a few years later,” he admitted.

Surprise kept her from speaking.

“I was engaged at the time,” he added casually.

She sat up straighter, the blanket slipping from her shoulders. “Was? What happened?”

“The
marriage
itself didn’t happen,” he explained. “I had a teaching position at Georgetown back then. I came home one day and we had a fight. She chose to . . . go a
different
path than marriage. I chose to come here.”

Cat stared at him. The story sounded simple, but he still wasn’t making eye contact. There was more to it.

“How did you meet?”

“In school. She was from Bar Harbor. She went to St. Mary’s like me.”

“And then you moved to DC?”

“She had an interest in politics.” He grew quiet before nodding. “And I had a bit of an interest at the time, myself.”

“Yet you didn’t go into politics?”

“My interests changed.”

Again, she could tell there were things left unsaid. She studied him, trying to figure out how to get him to open up, but the set of his jaw indicated that wouldn’t be happening.

So she switched gears. “Any other serious relationships?”

He shook his head.

“Kids?” She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought about that before. He could have kids tucked away somewhere.

Again with the head shake. This time there seemed to be sadness with the movement, and she couldn’t help but picture him with a small, pink bundle in his arms. Then she pictured him with fifteen kids hanging on his every word at the museum.

“You would make a great dad,” she said softly.

His mouth twitched as he peeked at her out of the corner of his eye. “My mom says the same thing. It wasn’t meant to be, I suppose.”

Guilt turned her gaze back to the ocean.

After a couple more minutes of silence, she pulled herself away from her memories and swallowed past the burn now lining her throat. “So you lived in DC for a while. When did you move up here?”

“The semester after the engagement ended. The college had a position open, and I’d made a good impression while attending. Plus, I like the ocean. I had nice memories of being here.” He flicked his gaze at her. “Of one particular summer here. So I bought a house. I had some money saved up. I chose the beach so I could sit out on my deck and watch the sun rise with a beautiful woman if I wanted to.”

His words made her tuck herself in closer to him. It was a good way to start the day.

“What was your degree in?” she asked.

He picked up her hand. “A double major in history and psychology.”

She watched as he traced her fingers with his thumb. “I went to an all-girls school,” she told him.

“I know.”

His movements on her hand were hypnotic, but somehow she dragged her gaze up to his. “You seem to know a lot about me.”

He nodded. “I also know that you spent a couple years in the peace corps. I don’t remember where.”

She eyed him thoughtfully. Had he been keeping tabs on her?

“I like to read the news,” he explained defensively. “I told you. And the Davenports have always had a penchant for making the news.”

That was true. Even when she didn’t want to. But her parents had played up her joining the corps to help showcase what a caring, nurturing family they were. She had no doubt the story would have run in several of the papers Brody read.

At the feel of his lips brushing over her hair, she swallowed around the lump in her throat. Them being together was so easy.

“Guyana,” she said. “I spent twenty-seven months there.” She hadn’t wanted to head directly off to college the minute she’d graduated high school. She’d needed to get away. Needed time to mentally recover from giving her baby away.

Her mother had protested, of course. Cat should be with the family, with her dad’s campaign. Blah, blah, blah. But Cat had used the family against her mother that time. How great would it look for a Davenport to give back by joining the peace corps? Of course, then her mother had gotten the story run worldwide.

Joe had been at West Point by then, so they’d dated long-distance. By the time she’d come home, she’d been almost ready to deal with her life again.

Or at least she’d been better equipped to fake it. Some things never completely went away.

“Tell me about being over there,” Brody urged.

As if he could sense what those twenty-seven months had meant to her, he encouraged her to talk about them. She told him about working with the kids, learning their language, and even about bathing in a creek.

“A Davenport bathed in a creek?” he asked. He still had his arm around her, and his palm now stroked up and down her bare arm. Steady winds washed over them as the soothing waters lapped closer to his deck. The aroma of salt clung heavily in the air and the sun became a bright ball of light making them squint into the day.

“There were no cameras around during those times,” she pointed out. “And yeah, it was either bathe in the creek or go dirty.”

“I would’ve liked to have seen that.”

“Me dirty?” she glanced up at him.

He dropped a kiss on her nose. “You in the middle of all those kids. In the middle of a third world country. You being dirty and disheveled. Just being . . . real.”

She nodded. She knew what he meant. And she had been.

There had been no headlines to make, no butts to be covered.

It had been all about the people of Guyana. The time spent with them had helped to heal her broken spirit.

It was one of the best times of her life.

“Since we’re unburdening ourselves of secrets,” he began after a couple of minutes of silence, but didn’t continue until she looked up at him. “I have one for you.”

Her entire body tensed as it went on alert.

“What?” she asked cautiously. She tried to pull out of his grasp but he didn’t allow it. He kept her tucked close, his arm tight around her.

“I found out something interesting last week,” he said. There was a grimace on his face.

It couldn’t be that bad if he’d just found it out. “What is it?”

He swallowed, and her nervousness remained high.

“Your mother once called my mother.”

Cat’s jaw loosened. She could think of no reason her mother would have to call Annabelle Hollister. Ever. “I don’t understand.”

“She called the house after she’d already told me that you’d moved on.”

She was missing something. “What do you mean moved on?”

“Found someone else. As in,
another guy
.”

“Back then? But I hadn’t,” she muttered. “Not until the next . . .” A dark cloud suddenly seemed to loom overheard as answers began to form. Her heart raced. “When did she tell you that?”

“About three weeks after we left Maine.”

“But—” She clamped her mouth shut. The missing puzzle piece had finally clicked into place, and anger spread quickly throughout her body. Her mother had been the reason Brody had stopped calling. Why had that never occurred to her?

From the day Cat had come home and announced she’d met the boy she wanted to someday marry, her mother had been against the idea of Brody. She’d gone so far a week later as to forbid Cat from talking to him again. Cat hadn’t stopped.

Of course
her mother would have figured out another way to end it. Didn’t her mother always do “whatever it took”?

“And you believed her?” she asked. That hurt as well.

“I’d called several times and you were out.” His fingers tightened on her arm. “She can be convincing.”

A cracked laugh escaped Cat. Couldn’t they all? It was a talent her family had.

Not only had she and her mother kept the pregnancy from her brothers, but from her own father as well. The one person Cat had felt safest with in the world.

She’d never once gotten to cry on her father’s shoulder because she’d given up her baby.

Because her baby had died and she hadn’t been there for her.

“Why did my mother call yours?” She pulled out of his arms now, and crossed hers over her chest. “And does it have anything to do with you not returning
my
calls?”

When he’d quit calling her, she’d finally given up and tried him. Twice. The first time, his mother had said she’d pass along the message, but Cat had known Brody wouldn’t be calling. She’d heard it in the tone of Annabelle Hollister’s voice.

The second time had been months later. Annabelle had told her not to call again.

“She wanted to make sure my mom understood that I was not to talk to you again,” Brody confirmed. “Ever.”

Yep.

Cat should have known.

“Sometimes I could hate my mother,” she whispered quietly. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. In fact, she hadn’t realized she’d been thinking it at all. Or ever thought it.

But she did, and she had.

Her mother ran her household with an iron fist, and it had always been that way. She still ran her family that way. But Cat had resented it more than once in her lifetime. She just hadn’t allowed herself to admit it.

Emma Davenport had acted like their family was damned near perfect, and she expected them all to behave that way. But the last few weeks, Cat had seen the Davenports were a long way from perfection.

Cat wasn’t the only one who had potentially brought shame to their good name.

“Anything else?” she asked.

He eyed her. The wind whipped across them as if as angry as she. And she could tell that there
was
something else. She saw it in his eyes.

But he shook his head no.

“What is it?” she demanded. Fear burned inside her. Did she even want to know?