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“When I screw up my life, I really go all out,” I mumbled to myself, but Jeremy heard me.
“No, sweetheart, I’m not letting you put any of this on your own shoulders. It’s a fair assessment that everyone else in your life has been making things messy for you. None of this has been your own doing.”
“My broken heart is definitely my own doing.”
“I seriously doubt that. Sounds like some asshole didn’t deserve you.”
I laughed at that because Jeremy rarely used what he called ‘foul language’. “I opened myself up to someone who told me from the very beginning that they probably couldn’t be faithful. So, yeah, that bad decision was all me.”
Jeremy sighed. “Like father like daughter.”
“You’re not though.”
“Not what?”
“My father.”
“Not biologically, Nova, but I raised you from birth. I know that I messed up when I didn’t even think about you through my own hurt. The ball got dropped and my family was awful because I ran off to make myself feel better and didn’t even stop to think what the news would mean for you. Stupidly, since your mother claimed that Clark was your father, I thought you would just trade me out and tag him in.”
“I would have never done that.”
“I know that. It took me a while to pull my own head out of my butt, but once I did, I came back to look for you. You don’t know how scared I was when they told me you’d run, when I found out they lied, when you were nowhere to be found. Did I mention that I cut my family off after I found out?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, not understanding. If anyone was going to cut someone off, it would be Jeremy’s parents cutting him off for speaking to me again. They’d definitely do it for daring to call me his daughter when we all knew that I wasn’t.
He chuckled. “There are things I need to tell you, and some of them involve your mom, but all of it is a truth that you should know. If it’s too much today, then I’ll wait.”
“No, I’d rather get it all out in the open now. I’m kind of over having to deal with other people’s secrets, especially since they tend to ruin my life.” Other people’s secrets are what sent me into the arms of the Savage Vipers MC and they’re also the thing that made me run from them.
“Okay, let’s go inside and get you settled first. I’ll make something warm for you to drink. Coffee, tea, or hot chocolate?” Jeremy shook his head, disappointment clear on his face as he did so. “I hate that I have to ask. There was a time when I would have known what would comfort you, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
“Why don’t we try the hot chocolate and go from there?”
Once the hot chocolate was made and we were settled on the couch, Jeremy turned to me. “I overheard your mother talking to someone on the phone a few weeks before I confronted her about you not being my biological child.”
“You knew for that long?”
“No. I suspected and prayed it wasn’t true, but I took some hair from your brush and had it sent in with my DNA sample. The results had just come back about ten minutes before you walked in the door. What you saw that day was my initial, very raw reaction to those prayers going unanswered. You know what happened after that already, but what you don’t know was that I also had Clark’s DNA tested against yours. Please, don’t ask how I managed to get his sample because that isn’t something I want to share with my daughter. It was his and it wasn’t a match for you either.”
“What are you saying?” The mug of hot chocolate in my hands shook to the point where some of it started spilling over the sides before I finally managed to put it on the coffee table. “Who in the hell is my father, then?”
“I’m not a hundred percent positive yet, and I’d hate to tell you it’s someone and have that not be the truth either. I have a private investigator searching for the man I believe to be responsible for helping to create you, and if that test eventually comes back positive, we’ll deal with it then. For now, I am not your father in the biological sense, and that kills me. I will always be your father in every other sense of the word, Nova, if you’ll have me after the way things were handled.”
There was no good way to answer him, at least not yet. “Let’s get through everything before we get into that, please. You said there were things about my mother, and I’m assuming those things are more than just the fact that she seemed to have no clue who my father was. You also mentioned cutting your parents off, and that needs explaining, too.”
He nodded his head and took a deep breath before he started to tell me what amounted to the foundation of lies that my life was built on.
“Your mother was a whore.” He scrubbed his hands down his face and shook his head, as if to shake off the words he’d just thrown at me. “I mean that in the most literal sense. She was with the president of a motorcycle club. From what I managed to gather from Clark over the years, whenever he was drunk and rambling, the MC was into selling women, pimping them out, auctioning them off to the highest bidder, you name it. I’m pretty sure it went deeper than that, but your mom didn’t start out as one of the whores. She was with the guy who later became president.
“As your mother is prone to do, she pissed him off somehow and he put her in his stable. That was how Clark found her. He wanted to keep her for himself and offered to buy her, so that he could have her as his personal whore. I don’t think he ever would have married her or anything, but he wanted to set her up as his kept mistress.” Jeremy groaned as he put his empty mug down and sank back into the couch.
“Clark’s family got wind of what he was up to and told him to get rid of the woman because he couldn’t have her traced back to him in anyway, especially since blackmail was a real possibility. So, he pawned her off on me.”
“You knew all this and still took her to be your wife?”
Jeremy shook his head before he could even get the words out. “No. I didn’t know about any of this until about ten years ago, but by then you were around, and I’d already been married to your mother for quite a few years. I didn’t want to divorce her because I knew that she would get a huge payout if I couldn’t find fault with the marriage. We’d been married too long, and had a kid, so claiming a fraudulent marriage, and proving it at that point, would be a tough sell in court.
“So, when I first met your mother, it was on a blind date set up by Clark. A double date with him and another woman. I was given a story about where your mother came from. It was a lie that was easily sniffed out. I married your mother anyway because she was pregnant once before you came along. I thought that one was mine, too. She lost that baby - it was probably Clark’s anyway - and while I married her out of duty only, I knew I had to protect my assets. So, your mother was led to believe that all the businesses and the majority of the money were actually family money belonging to my parents. That wasn’t true.”
