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“Is that what you want—to be married to him?”
Sheila felt as if the blood were being drained from her as she told Noah her innermost thoughts, the secrets she had guarded from the rest of the world. “No, I don’t want to be married to him—marrying Jeff might have been my biggest mistake. But, because of Emily, I wonder if I did the right thing.”
“By divorcing him?”
“He divorced me,” she sighed, rubbing her fingertips pensively over her forehead. “But maybe I should have fought it, tried harder for Emily’s sake.”
“Oh, so you think that it would be better for the child if the two of you hadn’t split up.” His voice sounded bitter in the dark night.
“I don’t know what would have been right. It was difficult. I thought he was happy.”
“Were you?”
“In the beginning, yes. And when I found out I was pregnant, I was ecstatic. Jeff wasn’t as thrilled as I was, but I thought his reaction was normal and that he would become more involved with the child once she was born.” Sheila paused, as if trying to put her emotions into some kind of order. Noah felt an intense dislike for Jeff Coleridge.
“It didn’t happen,” Noah guessed.
“It wasn’t the baby so much . . . as the added strain on him to support the family. I couldn’t work, not even in the part-time job I had kept before Emily was born. The cost of a good sitter would have eaten up all my salary. I guess the financial burden was too much for him.” Sheila stopped, and the heavy silence enveloped her. Noah was waiting to hear the end of her story, but she found her courage sadly lacking. What she had hidden from her father and the rest of the world, she found impossible to say to the man whose fingers still touched her arm.
“He left you because of the money? What kind of man would leave a wife and a child when he couldn’t support them?”
Sheila felt herself become strangely defensive. “He wasn’t born to wealth, like you. He had to struggle every day of his life.”
“That has nothing to do with a man’s responsibility.” His fingers dug into her arm. “What happened? There’s something you’re not telling me.”
Sheila swallowed back her tears. “Jeff . . . he became . . . involved with another woman.” She lowered her head, ashamed of what she had admitted.
When confronted with the truth he had suspected, Noah felt a sickening turn in his stomach. He gritted his teeth to prevent a long line of oaths from escaping.
Compelled to continue, Sheila spoke again the barest of whispers, as if the pain were too intense to be conveyed in a normal tone of voice. “This woman—her name was Judith—she was older than Jeff, midforties, I’d guess. Divorced and financially secure. She wanted a younger . . .”
“Stud?” Noah asked sarcastically.
“Man.”
“Your husband was no man, Sheila!” he swore. “He’s a bastard, and a stupid one at that.”
Sheila bravely held her poise together, admitting to Noah what no one else had ever known. She had kept her secrets locked securely within her, hoping to keep any of her pain or anger from tainting Emily’s image of her father. “It doesn’t matter. Not now. Anyway, Jeff demanded a divorce, and when I realized that there was no hope for the two of us, I agreed. The only thing I wanted was my child. That wasn’t much of a problem; Emily would only have gotten in Jeff’s way.”
Noah’s fingers tightened and pulled her closer to his chest. “You don’t have to talk about any of this. . . .”
“It’s all right. There’s not much more to tell, but I think you should hear it,” she stated tonelessly. “When the marriage failed, I went off the deep end. I didn’t know where to turn. Dad encouraged me to move to California and go to school for my master’s.”
Sheila smiled wistfully to herself when she recalled how transparent her father had been. “I’m sure that he expected me to find some other man to take my mind off Jeff. So—” she let out the air in her lungs with her confession “—I took money from my dad, a lot of money that he probably couldn’t afford to lend to me, and accepted his advice. I didn’t know that payment for my out-of-state tuition and living expenses was more than Dad could afford. I thought the winery was profitable. But, it wasn’t, and Dad had to borrow the money he loaned to me.”
“From Wilder Investments,” Noah guessed. Noah’s frown deepened and the disgust churning in his stomach rose in his throat. So this was how Ben had cornered Oliver Lindstrom, by using the man’s love of his daughter and capitalizing upon it. The muscles in the back of Noah’s neck began to ache with the strain of tension.
“There are two mortgages on the winery,” Sheila admitted. “Dad had nowhere else to borrow.”
“And of course Ben complied.”
“You make it sound as if he instigated the whole thing.”
Noah’s nostrils flared, and his eyes narrowed. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Your father had nothing to do with the fact that my marriage fell apart. It’s my fault that I hadn’t paid back the loan . . . I just thought there was more time. I never even considered the fact that my father was mortal.” Her grief overcame her and the tears she had been fighting pooled in her eyes. “I thought he’d always be there.”
“Don’t,” he urged, kissing her lightly on the top of the head. “Don’t torture yourself with a guilt you shouldn’t bear.”
