AllFreeNovel
Share Us
22
Carter had booked a room with two singles, but they lay atop the bed closest to the window. He held her tight as Sienna shivered with all the emotions she couldn’t put a voice to.
This wasn’t how she wanted their first night to be. The kiss on the beach had been so sweet, so full of longing and promise, and she’d dreamed of making love with him.
Now there was just this, his arms around her, his soothing kisses on her hair and forehead, the gentle stroke of his fingers along her arms, and her lacerated heart.
“She lied to me all my life.” She could no longer keep in the pain.
“I know how it hurts.” He didn’t tell her to stop feeling, for which she was grateful.
Everything poured out. “That’s why he’s always hated me, why he favored Matt. He said it was my mother who kept me behind, but he was the one who didn’t want me.”
“Maybe he turned your mother into the bad guy so you’d blame her.”
“It worked. I was always angry with her for holding me back.”
“It must’ve been hell.”
“I yearned for him to love me.” She fisted her hand on Carter’s chest. “I hated her for not letting him love me. And it was all her fault in a way I never imagined.”
“Do you think he knew from the beginning and married her anyway?”
She lay quiet, thinking. “I don’t know. When we were little, he would send Mom and me and Matthew away on vacation and only joined us on the weekends because he was working.”
“But you had a good time?”
She had to think again. “We had a great time. If we went to Disneyland or SeaWorld or stayed at the beach, we always did the fun stuff during the week because he didn’t want to deal with the crowds on the weekend.”
“What about when you were a teenager? Did you go places? Europe maybe?”
She shook her head. “There weren’t any trips like we took when we were young. He said I couldn’t do this or that. I couldn’t date till I was sixteen. I couldn’t get my driver’s license until I was eighteen. I couldn’t go on school trips with my friends. But he always said my mother had made the edict.”
“And you hated her for it.”
She nodded, her cheek brushing the soft hair of his chest. He’d stripped down to board shorts. She wore a tank and panties, their legs entwined, comforting, healing, enticing.
“When did all the vacations stop?” he asked so softly she almost didn’t hear.
In a near dreamlike state, she said. “When I was eight and fell out of the tree.”
“Didn’t you say they had to give you blood?”
She twined herself around him, and he wrapped her in his arms. In that gentle fantasy state, it felt almost like hypnosis. “Yes. They gave me blood.”
He was silent so long that she woke up fully to the feel of him against her. To all the things he wasn’t saying.
Until finally he told her. “Maybe it was the blood.”
“What do you mean?”
She had to strain to hear him over revelers on the street. “Maybe they asked him to give blood, but he didn’t match.”
She shook her head, almost wildly, her hair tumbling over his chest, and he stroked it away from her face. “If I wasn’t his blood type, they would’ve known all along, wouldn’t they? Isn’t the blood type on the birth certificate?” She couldn’t remember what hers said.
“My blood type isn’t on my birth certificate. I don’t even know it. Do you know yours?”
She had to think a minute. “I should. But I don’t.” Then she murmured, “That’s crazy.”
