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He told her the rest.
“You’ve verified it? The counselor, everything she told you. You’re sure it’s not some scam.”
“Very sure.” He wanted another whiskey, but didn’t have the energy to get up and pour. “This girl who was my mother tried to give me a family, to do what was right. She loved him, I imagine, and was afraid of him. He had a way of making women love, and fear him. But she loved me, Eve.”
Eve’s fingers linked with his, and gave him comfort. Steadied by it, he brought their joined hands to his lips. “I could see it in the picture of us. She never left me. He killed her. Another thing he was good at was destroying beauty and innocence. He killed her, and brought Meg back.”
He laid his head back, looked up at the ceiling. “They were married. I found those records. Married before he met and ruined my mother, but there were no children. Maybe Meg couldn’t give him a son, so he cast her out. Or she’d had enough of his whoring and scheming and left him. Hardly matters why.”
He gave what passed for a shrug, keeping his eyes closed as fatigue dragged at him. “A girl like Siobhan Brody would have appealed to him. So young and malleable, so ripe for plucking. And when she had me, he’d have little use for a young girl like her, nagging at him to marry her and make a proper family.”
“She was with him for, what, under two years. But wouldn’t someone have told her about Meg? Wouldn’t someone have told her he was already married?”
“If they did, he’d have lied his way around it. He had a quick and clever tongue, and was always ready with the credible lie.”
“Or, you have a girl, not even twenty, gone over this guy and pregnant by him—maybe already a little afraid of him. Could be she just didn’t hear what people said.”
“True enough. Though there’d have been those back in that day, back in his prime, who’d have risked speaking of him in a way he’d dislike. But if Meg’s name came to her ears, she may have pretended not to hear.”
He fell silent for a moment, thinking it through. “Meg was more his match, if you understand me. Hard, with a liking for drink and a fast pound. Siobhan, she’d have irritated him eventually, simply because of what she was. But nobody walked out on Patrick Roarke—and to take his son, the symbol of his virility? No, indeed that wouldn’t be permitted. So she had to be punished for trying. I can see how it was, see exactly how it would have been. He’d pull Meg back to
deal with me. A man can’t spend his time fussing over a baby, after all. Work to do, business to run. Get a woman to handle the dirty work. He was a right bastard, no doubt of it.”
“No one ever mentioned her to you? Your mother.”
“No one. I’d have found out about it myself, but I never bothered to look. It wasn’t closed off in my mind, as yours was, I just never bothered. I dismissed her, you see.”
He squeezed his eyes tighter, then forced them open. “Not worth my time or trouble. I never gave her so much as a passing thought in all these years.”
“You never gave Meg Roarke a passing thought,” she corrected. “You didn’t know.”
“I never even troubled myself enough to hate her. She was nothing to me.”
“You’re talking about two different women.”
“She deserved better, that’s the point. Better all around, and better from me. I ask myself if she’d gone back to him if not for me. If not for thinking my son needs his father. Would she be alive now?”
Worried, she wanted to yank him out of this maze of guilt he was circling. But she went with instinct, with training, and spoke quietly, as she would to a victim, a survivor on the verge of shock. “You can’t blame yourself for that. Or punish yourself for it.”
“There should be some payment. Goddamn it, Eve, there should be something. I feel . . . helpless, and I don’t like it. Here’s something I can’t fix—can’t fight with my fists, can’t buy or steal or talk my way around. No matter how I line it up, she’s dead, and he never paid.”
“Roarke, I don’t know how many times—you can’t keep them in your head or you go crazy—I don’t know how many times I’ve knocked on someone’s door and ripped apart the whole fabric of their life by telling them someone they loved is dead.”
Hoping to comfort, she brushed her fingers over his hair. “They feel what you’re feeling now. And no matter how you line it up, the one who caused it never pays enough.”
“You won’t like to hear it, but I’ll say it anyway. There have been moments, countless moments through my life that I wished I’d been the one to do him in the end. But I’ve never wished it more than I do now, even knowing it means nothing, changes nothing. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I didn’t tell you. How can you understand that I think I’d feel more of a man right now if I had his blood on my hands.”
She looked down at his hand, and the gold ring, their symbol, that shone on his finger. “You’re wrong if you think I don’t understand. I understand because I’ve got my own father’s blood on mine.”
“Oh Christ.” It sickened and infuriated him—he’d wallowed so deep into the mire of his own life that he’d so carelessly thrown that in her face. He drew her against him. “I’m sorry. Baby.”
“It wouldn’t help.” She eased back so he could see her. “Take my word. And believe me, you’re more of a man than any other I’ve known.”
He rested his forehead on hers. “I can’t do without you. I don’t know how I ever got by before you.”
“We’ll just go from here. You’ve had a rough couple of days, so I’ll try one of your favorite sports and make you eat something.”
He smiled, finally, when she rose to go to the AutoChef. “Tending to me, are you?”
