Scandalous Secrets: Secrets Of The Past

Heath’s mood hadn’t improved by the time he got back. He was seated on the couch, balancing his plate in his lap and eating almost mechanically. Julianne had opted to eat at the table, which gave her a decent view of both Heath and the television without crowding in his space.

There was one cold slice of pizza remaining when Julianne finally got the nerve to speak. “Heath?”

He looked startled, as though she’d yanked him from the deep thoughts he was lost in. “Yes?”

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“You mean with Sheriff Duke?”

“I guess. Is that what’s bothering you?”

“Yes and no,” he replied, giving her an answer and not at the same time.

Julianne got up and walked over to the couch. She flopped down onto the opposite end. “It’s been a long week, Heath. I’m too tired to play games. What’s wrong?”

“Aside from the divorce papers sitting on the kitchen table?” Heath watched her for a moment before sighing heavily and shaking his head. “Sheriff Duke just asked some questions. Nothing to worry about. In fact, he told me Ken and Molly are no longer suspects.”

Julianne’s brow went up in surprise. “And that’s good, right?”

“Absolutely. The conversation was fine. It just made me think.” He paused. “It reminded me how big of a failure I am.”

It didn’t matter what happened between them recently. The minute he needed her support she would give it. “You? A failure? What are you talking about?” Every one of her brothers was at the top of their field with millions in their accounts. None were failures by a long shot. “You’re the CEO of your own successful advertising agency. You have a great apartment in Manhattan. You drive a Porsche! How is that a failure?”

A snort of derision passed his lips and he turned away to look at the television. “I’m good at convincing people to buy things they don’t need. Something to be proud of, right? But I fail at the important stuff. When it matters, it seems like nothing I say or do makes any difference.”

She didn’t like the tone of his voice. It was almost defeated. Broken. Very much unlike him and yet she knew somehow she was responsible. “Like what?”

“Protecting you. Protecting my parents. Ken. Saving our marriage…”

Julianne frowned and held her hands up. “Wait a minute. First, how is a nine-year-old boy supposed to save his parents in a car crash that he almost died in, too? Or keep Dad from having another heart attack?”

“It was my fault we were on that road. I pestered my father until he agreed to take us for ice cream.”

“Christ, Heath, that doesn’t make it your fault.”

“Maybe, but Dad’s heart attack was my fault. The second one at least. If I’d come clean to the cops about what happened with Tommy, they wouldn’t have come here questioning him.”

He was being completely irrational about this. Heath had been internalizing more things than she realized. “And what about me? How have you failed to protect me? I’m sitting right here, perfectly fine.”

“Talking with Sheriff Duke made me realize I should’ve seen it coming. With Tommy. I should’ve known he was going to come for you. And I left you alone. When I think about how bad it could’ve been…” His voice trailed off. “I never should’ve left you alone with him.”

“You didn’t leave me alone with him. I was doing my chores just like you were, and he found me. And you can’t see the future. I certainly don’t expect you to be able to anticipate the moves of a monster like he was. There’s no reason why you should have thought I would be anything but safe.”

He looked up at her at last, his brow furrowed with concern for things he couldn’t change now. “But I did know. I saw the way he was looking at you. I knew what he was thinking. My mistake was not realizing he was bold enough to make a move. What if you hadn’t been able to fight him off? What if he had raped you?” He shook his head, his thoughts too heavy with the possibilities to see Julianne stiffen in her seat. “I wish he had just run away. That would’ve been better for everyone.”

The pained expression was etched deeply into his forehead. He was so upset thinking Tommy had attacked her. She could never ever tell Heath how successful Tommy had been in getting what he’d wanted from her. He already carried too much of the blame on his own shoulders and without cause. Nothing that happened that day was his fault. “Not for the people he would have hurt later.”

Heath shrugged away what might have been. “You give me credit for protecting you, but I didn’t. If I had been smart, you wouldn’t have needed protecting.”

Julianne scooted closer to him on the couch and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Heath, stop it. No one could have stopped Tommy. What’s important is everything you did for me once it was done. You didn’t have to do what you did. You’ve kept the truth from everyone all this time.”

“Don’t even say it out loud,” he said with a warning tone. “I did what I had to do and no matter what happens with Sheriff Duke, I don’t regret it. It was bad enough that you would always have memories of that day. I wasn’t about to let you get in front of the whole town and have to relive it. That would be like letting him attack you over and over every time you had to tell the story.”

It would have been awful, no question. No woman wants to stand up and describe being assaulted, much less a thirteen-year-old girl who barely understood what was happening to her. But she was strong. She liked to think that she could handle it. The boys had other ideas. They—Heath especially—thought the best thing to do was keep quiet. Unlike her, they had to live with the fear of being taken away. They made huge sacrifices for her, more than they even knew, and she was grateful. She just worried the price would end up being far higher than they intended to pay.

“But has it been worth the anxiety? The years of waiting for the other shoe to drop? We’ve been on pins and needles since Dad sold that property. If you had let me go to the police, it would be long over by now.”

“See…” Heath said. “My attempt to protect you from the consequences of my previous failures failed as well. It made things worse in the long run. And you knew it, too. That’s why you couldn’t love me. You were embarrassed to be in love with me.”

“What?” Julianne jerked her hand away in surprise. Where the hell had this come from?

Heath shifted in his seat to face her head-on. “Tell the truth, Jules. You might have been intimidated by having sex with me or what our future together might be, but the nail in the coffin was coming home and having to tell your parents that you’d married me. You were embarrassed.”

“I was embarrassed, but not because of you. It was never about you. I was ashamed of how I’d let myself get so wrapped up in it that I didn’t think things through. And then, what? How could we tell our parents that we eloped and broke up practically the same day?”

“You’re always so worried about what other people think. Then and now. You’d put a stranger ahead of your own desires every time. Here you’d rather throw away everything we had together than disappoint Molly.”

“We didn’t have much to throw away, Heath. A week together is hardly a blip in the relationship radar.” How many women had he dated for ten times as long and didn’t even bother to mention it to the family? Like the woman on the phone packing her bags for the Caribbean?

“It makes a bigger impact when you’re married, I assure you. What you threw away was the potential. The future and what we could have had. That’s what keeps me up at night, Jules.”

It had kept her up nights, too. “And what if it hadn’t worked out? If we’d divorced a couple years later? Maybe remarried and brought our new spouses home. How would those family holidays go after that? Unbelievably awkward.”

“More awkward than stealing glances of your secret, estranged wife across the dinner table?”

“Heath…”

“I don’t think you understand, Jules. You never did. Somehow in your mind, it was just a mistake that had to be covered up so no one would find out. It was an infatuation run awry for you, but it was more than that for me. I loved you. More than anything. I wish I hadn’t. I spent years trying to convince myself it was just a crush. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to deal with your rejection if it were.”

“Rejection? Heath, I didn’t reject you.”

“Oh, really? How does it read in your mind, Jules? In mine, the girl I loved agreed to marry me and then bolted the moment I touched her. Whether you were embarrassed of me or the situation or how it might look…in the end, my wife rejected me and left me in her dust. You went off to art school without saying goodbye and just pretended like our marriage and our feelings for each other didn’t matter anymore. That sounds like a textbook definition for rejection.”

Julianne sat back in her seat, trying to absorb everything he’d said. He was right. It would have been kinder if she’d just told him she didn’t have feelings for him. It would have been a lie, but it would have been gentler on him than what she did.

“Heath, I never meant for you to feel that way. I’m sorry if my actions made you feel unwanted or unloved. I was young and confused. I didn’t know what to do or how to handle everything. I do love you and I would never deliberately hurt you.”

He snickered and turned away. “You love me, but you’re not in love with me, right?”

She was about to respond but realized that confirming what he said would be just as hurtful as telling him she didn’t love him at all. In truth, neither was entirely accurate. Her feelings were all twisted where Heath was concerned. They always had been and she’d never successfully straightened them out.

“Go ahead and say it.”

Julianne sighed. “It’s more complicated than that, Heath. I do love you. But not in the same way I love Xander or Brody or Wade, so no, I can’t say that. There are other feelings. There always have been. Things that I don’t know how to…”

“You want me.”

It was a statement, not a question. She raised her gaze to meet his light hazel eyes. The golden starbursts in the center blended into a beautiful mix of greens and browns. Heath’s eyes were always so expressive. Even when he tried to hide his feelings with a joke or a smile, Julianne could look him in the eye and know the truth.

The expression now was a difficult one. There was an awkward pain there, but something else. An intensity that demanded an honest answer from her. He knew she wanted him. To tell him otherwise would be to lie to them both. She tore her eyes away, hiding beneath the fringe of her lashes as she stared down at her hands. “I shouldn’t.”

“Why not? I thought you weren’t embarrassed of me,” he challenged.

“I’m not. But we’re getting a divorce. What good would giving in to our attraction do?”

She looked up in time to see the pain and worry vanish from his expression, replaced by a wicked grin. “It would do a helluva lot of good for me.”

Julianne was hard-pressed not to fall for his charming smile and naughty tone. “I’m sure you’d be pleased at the time. So would I. But then what? Is that all it is? Just sex? Is it worth it for just sex? If not, are we dating?”

“Running off with me was very much out of character for you,” he noted. “You can’t just do something because it feels good and you want to. You have to rationalize everything to the point that the fun is stripped right out.”

“I’m trying to be smart about this! Fun or not, you want us to get divorced. Why would I leap back into your bed with both feet?”

“I didn’t say I wanted us to get divorced.”

That wasn’t true. He’d had her pressed against the dresser when he’d made his ultimatum. He’d demanded it yesterday. The papers were three feet away. “I distinctly recall you—”

“Saying you needed to make a choice. Be with me or don’t. No more straddling the fence. If you don’t want me, then fine. But if you do…by all means, have me. I’m happy to put off the divorce while we indulge in our marital rights.”

Julianne frowned. “Do you even hear yourself? Put off our divorce so we can sleep together?”

“Why not? I think I deserve a belated wedding night. We’ve had all of the drama of marriage with none of the perks.”

“You just want to catch up on eleven years of sex.”

“Maybe.” He leaned in closer, the gold fire in his eyes alight with mischief. “Do you blame me?”

The low, suggestive rumble of his voice so close made her heart stutter in her chest. “S-stop acting like you’ve lived as a monk this whole time. Even if you did, eleven years is a lot to catch up on. We do still have a farm to run and I have a gallery show to work on.”

“I’m all for making the most of our time together here. Give it the old college try.”

Julianne shook her head. “And again, Heath, what does that leave us with? I want you, you want me. I’m not about to leap into all this again without thinking it through.”

“Then don’t leap, Jules. Test the waters. Slip your toe in and see how it feels.” He smiled, slinking even closer to her. “I hear the water is warm and inviting.” His palm flattened on her denim-covered thigh.

The heat was instantaneous, spreading quickly through her veins until a flush rushed to her cheeks. She knew that all she had to do was say the word and he would do all the things to her she’d fantasized about for years. But she wasn’t ready to cross the line. He was right. She did strip the spontaneity out of everything, but she very rarely made decisions that haunted her the way she had with him. She didn’t want to misstep this time. She had too many regrets where Heath was concerned. If and when she gave herself to him, she wanted to be fully content with making the right choice.

“I’m sure it is.” She reached down and picked up his hand, placing it back in his own lap. “But the water will be just as warm tomorrow.”

Six

Julianne rolled over and looked at the clock on the dresser. It was just after two in the morning. That was her usual middle-of-the-night wake-up time. She’d gone to sleep without issue, as always, but bad dreams had jerked her awake about thirty minutes ago and she’d yet to fall back asleep.

She used to be a fairly sound sleeper, but she woke up nearly every night now. Pretty much since Tommy’s body was unearthed last Christmas. As much as they had all tried to put that day out of their heads, there was no escaping it. Even if her day-to-day life was too busy to dwell on it, her subconscious had seven to eight hours a night to focus on the worries and fears in the back of her mind.

As much as he wanted to, Heath couldn’t protect her forever. Julianne was fairly certain that before she left this farm, the full story would be out in the open. Whether she would be moving out of the bunkhouse and into the jailhouse remained to be seen. Sheriff Duke smelled a rat and he wouldn’t rest until he uncovered the truth. The question was whether the truth would be enough for him. A self-defense or justifiable homicide verdict wouldn’t give him the moment of glory he sought.

With a sigh, Julianne sat up in bed and brushed the messy strands of her hair out of her face. Tonight’s dream had been a doozy, waking her in a cold sweat. She had several different variations of the dream, but this was the one that bothered her the most. She was running through the Christmas-tree fields. Row after row of pine trees flew past her, but she didn’t dare turn around. She knew that if she did, Tommy would catch her. The moment his large, meaty hand clamped onto her shoulder, Julianne would shoot up in bed, a scream dying in the back of her throat as she woke and realized that Tommy was long dead.

You would think after having the same nightmares over and over, they wouldn’t bother her anymore, but it wasn’t true. It seemed to get worse every time. Most nights, she climbed out of bed and crept into her workshop. Something about the movement of the clay in her hands was soothing. She would create beauty and by the time she cleaned up, she could return to sleep without hesitation or nightmares.

For the last week, she’d had no therapeutic outlet to help her fall back asleep. Instead she’d had to tough it out, and she would eventually drift off again around dawn. But now she had a functioning workshop downstairs and could return to the hypnotizing whirl of her pottery wheel.

She slipped silently from the bed and stepped out into the hallway. The house was quiet and dark. She moved quickly down the stairs, using her cell phone for light until she reached the ground floor. There, she turned on the kitchen light. She poured herself a glass of water, plucked an oatmeal raisin cookie from the jar on the counter and headed toward her new studio.

The fluorescent lights flickered for a moment before turning on, flooding the room with an odd yellow-white glow. Heath had worked very hard to help her get everything in place. A few boxes remained to be put away, and her kiln wouldn’t be delivered for another day or two, but the majority of her new workshop was ready to start work.

Julianne finished her cookie and set her drink on the dresser, out of the way. One of the boxes on the floor near her feet had bricks of ready-to-use clay. She reached in to grab a one-pound cube and carried it over to her wheel. A plate went down on the wheel, then the ball of soft, moist gray clay on top of it. She filled a bucket with water and put her smoothing sponge in it to soak.

Pulling up to the wheel, she turned it on and it started to spin. She plunged her hands into the bucket to wet them and then closed her slick palms over the ball of clay. Her gallery showing would be mostly sculpted figurines and other art pieces, but the bread and butter of her shop in the Hamptons was stoneware pieces for the home. Her glazed bowls, mugs, salt dishes and flower vases could be found in almost any home in the area.

When she woke up in the night, vases were her go-to item. Her sculptures required a great deal of concentration and a focused eye. At three in the morning, the creation of a vase or bowl on her spinning wheel was a soothing, automatic process. It was by no means a simple task, but she’d created so many over the years that it came to her as second nature.

Her fingers slipped and glided in the wet clay, molding it into a small doughnut shape, then slowly coaxing it taller. She added more water and reached inside. The press of her fingertips distorted the shape, making the base wider. Cupping the outside again, she tapered in the top, creating the traditional curved flower-vase shape. She flared the top, forming the lip.

With the sponge, she ran along the various edges and surfaces, smoothing out the rough and distorted areas. Last, she used a metal tool to trim away the excess clay at the base and turned off the wheel.

She sat back with a happy sigh and admired her handiwork. When she first started sculpting, a piece like that would have taken her five tries. It would have collapsed on itself or been lopsided. She would press too hard and her thumb would puncture the side. Now, a perfect piece could be created in minutes. She wished everything in her life was that easy.

“I’ve never gotten to watch you work before.”

Julianne leapt at the sound of Heath’s voice. She turned around in her rolling chair, her heart pounding a thousand beats a minute in her chest. She brought a hand to her throat, stopping just short of coating herself in wet clay. “You shouldn’t sneak up on a girl like that.”

He smiled sheepishly from the doorway. “Sorry. At least I waited until you were done.”

Heath was leaning against the door frame in an old NYU T-shirt and a pair of flannel plaid boxer shorts, and for that, she was thankful. She would lose her resolve to resist him if he came down in nothing but a pair of pajama pants. As it was, the lean muscles of his legs were pulling her gaze down the length of his body.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

“I don’t recall hearing you get up, but I woke up for some reason and realized I forgot to plug my phone into the charger. I left it in the kitchen accidentally.” He took a few steps into the workshop. “I can’t believe how quickly you did that. You’re amazing.”

Julianne stood up from her stool and took her metal spatula out of the drawer beside her. Uncomfortable with his praise, she lifted the metal plate and moved the wet vase over onto the shelf to dry. “It’s nothing.”

“Don’t be modest,” he argued. “You’re very talented.”

Julianne started the wheel spinning again and turned away to hide her blush. “Would you like to learn to make something?”

“Really?”

“Sure. Come here,” she said. She eyed his large frame for a moment, trying to figure out the best way to do this. “Since I’m so short, it’s probably easiest if you stand behind me and reach over. I can guide your hands better that way.”

Heath rolled the stool out of the way and moved to her back. “Like this?”

“Yes.” She glanced back at the position she had deliberately put them in and realized how stupid it was. Perhaps she would be smarter to talk him out of this. “You’re going to get dirty. Is that okay?”

He chuckled softly at her ear, making a sizzle of awareness run along the sensitive line of her neck. “Oh, no, I’d better change. These are my good flannel boxers.”

Julianne smiled at his sharp, sarcastic tone and turned back to the wheel. No getting out of this now. “Okay, first, dip your hands in the water. You have to keep them good and wet.”

They both dipped their hands in the bucket of water, then she cupped his hands over the clay and covered them with her own. “Feel the pressure I apply to you and match it with your fingers to the clay.”

They moved back and forth between the water and the clay. All the while, Julianne forced herself to focus on the vase and not the heat of Heath’s body at her back. The warm breath along her neck was so distracting. Her mind kept straying to how it would feel if he kissed her there. She wanted him to. And then she would realize their sculpture was starting to sag and she would return her attention to their project.

“This feels weird,” Heath laughed, gliding over the gray mound. The slippery form began to take shape, their fingers sliding around together, slick and smooth. “And a little dirty, frankly.”

“It does,” she admitted. On more than one occasion, she’d lost herself in the erotic slip and slide of the material in her hands and the rhythmic purr of the wheel. That experience was amplified by having him so close. “But try to control yourself,” she said with a nervous giggle to hide her own building arousal. “I don’t want you having dirty thoughts every time you see my artwork.”

Heath’s hands suddenly slipped out from beneath hers and glided up her bare arms to clutch her elbows. The cool slide of his clay-covered hands along her skin was in stark contrast to the firm press of heat at her back. It was obvious that she was not the only one turned on by the situation.

“Actually, the artwork isn’t what inspires me….”

A ragged breath escaped her lips, but she didn’t dare move. She continued working the vase on her own now, her shaky hands creating a subpar product. But she didn’t care. If she let go, she would touch Heath and she wasn’t sure she would be able to stop.

Easing back, Heath brushed her hair over the other shoulder and, as though he could read her mind, pressed a searing kiss just below her ear. She tipped her neck to the side, giving better access to his hungry mouth. He kissed, nibbled and teased, sending one bolt of pleasure after the other down her spine.

She arched her back, pressing the curve of her rear into the hard ridge of his desire. That elicited a growl that vibrated low against her throat. One hand moved to her waist, tugging her hips back even harder against him.

“Jules…” he whispered, sending a shudder of desire through her body and a wave of goose bumps across her bare flesh.