so I bawled my eyes out a lot at first. That’s when my father got real mean.”
“He hit you?” she asked with a lump in her throat.
“Knocked me around a bit, hollered a lot. I learned to hide my emotions, to keep my mouth shut and stay out of his way. I found that picture of my mother in a drawer one night when he was out, and I swear, it made me so happy, you’d think I’d found a million bucks.” He sounded choked up, and his jaw clenched as he looked down the beach, out at the water, anywhere but into Chloe’s eyes.
Her stomach hurt watching him struggle. She touched his arm, bringing his eyes back to hers, and said, “We don’t have to talk about this if it’s too hard.”
He cleared his throat and stretched his neck to either side the way guys did in movies before they got in fights. “It’s okay,” he said in a stronger voice. “I hid the picture under my mattress, and every night when I was sure my old man wouldn’t come back into my room, I’d take it out and look at it, wishing she’d taken me with her.”
“Justin” came out strangled. Tears burned Chloe’s eyes as she went up on her knees and wrapped her arms around him. “Thank God she didn’t,” she said against his neck.
His arms circled her. They held each other for a long time, the silence broken by the sounds of the waves rolling up the shore. Even after he loosened his hold on her, Chloe hugged him tighter, holding him for the loss of his mother and for the little boy he’d once been, who must have felt so alone. And then she continued embracing him for the friend—the man—she’d wrongly kept her distance from.
When she finally sat back on her knees, eyes damp for all Justin had gone through, she took his face between her hands and gazed into his eyes, feeling guilty for having read the haunting in them as something that should scare her, rather than realizing it was from wounds that had cut him so deep, he might never heal.
“Are you rethinking getting to know me? Are there alarms going off in your head?” he asked.
“No, and it makes me sad that you’d think that. I know how unfair life can be. I’m thinking about how sorry I am for letting my past cloud my vision of you, how lucky I am that you stuck around, and how much you must have missed your mother. I can’t…” Tears slipped down her cheeks. “You were so little.” She leaned forward, hugging him again.
“It was a long time ago, darlin’,” he said against her cheek.
She felt him sit up straighter, his back and chest expanding, becoming stronger, as if he realized he’d shown his tender underbelly and was intent on reclaiming his alpha status. Didn’t he know that the best and strongest men had soft underbellies? She hadn’t met many of them, but her closest friends’ significant others all had them.
She sat back on the sand between his legs, and he put his arms around her waist, pulling her closer. He flashed that crooked smile that sometimes looked boyish and charming and other times got her so hot she feared she’d melt into a puddle. Tonight that lopsided grin tugged at her heartstrings.
“I’m sorry for getting so emotional.”
“Don’t be. It’s a hard subject. What else would you like to know?”
“God, I don’t know. Part of me doesn’t want to know more, because it makes me so sad, but a bigger part wants to know all of your truths.”
“Ask me, sweetheart. Let’s do this right.”
She sighed. “Okay. Did it ever get easier living with your real father?”
Justin shook his head. “Not really. He didn’t knock me around as much once I learned to shut my mouth. But then things got bad in other ways. There were times he’d take me with him in the car when he robbed convenience stores and other places. He’d tell me to get down on the floor of the car and wait for him. I didn’t know what he was doing. He made a game out of it the first couple of times, telling me to stay down and not to peek because he was getting me a surprise. When he’d get back in the car, he’d drive real fast, hootin’ and hollerin’, totally hyped up, and we’d end up in some strange place. Probably in another town.