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“Yes, she offered me money, but if she told you I took it, she was lying. I didn’t know what to think. I wanted you but I wasn’t brave enough to take on a potential mother-in-law from hell. I walked out. You didn’t call me. I didn’t call you. Once I was gone, I decided not to come back. I figured you knew.” Jonas would have gone on, but Bridget interrupted him.
“I knew what she told me. You were nowhere to be found all of a sudden. Not like I could ask you, could I?” she accused.
“Bridget, I told you I loved you a thousand times before any of that happened, but when it did, you never spoke to me again.” His voice was low and tightly controlled, as if he was determined not to turn it into a shouting match.
“Yes, you loved me.” Bridget laughed bitterly in disbelief. “That’s why I received so many letters and e-mails from you, I suppose,” she taunted. “I didn’t get one, Jonas, in case your memory has failed you on this point, too. Not a single, solitary one! You left Randolph ten years ago. Seems to me like you had plenty of time to cool off, make some effort to see me—-something. You never did. Why should I have assumed that you were coming back?”
“Did it ever occur to you that your mother had something to do with that? You’re so used to Margaret Harrison’s random insanity that you think it’s normal!”
“Watch what you say,” Bridget said icily. “I know my mother is self-absorbed and she sure as hell is a drama queen, but insane is a strong word.”
“She asked me to leave you and leave town! And your father just sat there and didn’t say a thing. Do you want the whole truth?”
“Go for it.”
His gaze narrowed sharply, a sudden angry watchfulness to his expression. “I wasn’t that much of a hero at eighteen. If you expected me to stand up to your parents, you didn’t tell me that. In the long run, you would’ve had to do it yourself.”
Bridget flinched. He was right, much as she hated to admit it. She never really had. Door-slamming and bickering with her mother was about as far as she’d gone. She’d needed her parents too much, especially when Molly was little.
“Has anything changed all that much?”
She didn’t want to answer that, wasn’t ready to answer that.
“You live across the road from them, your mother marches in and out of your house whenever she wants—I think you’re afraid of growing up, if you really want to know!”
“Oh, please,” she challenged with a toss of her head, clasping her arms in front of her. “You haven’t got a clue as to what goes on in my head. Not one clue.”
“Oh, yes I do.” Jonas nodded with certainty, a harsh glitter in his look. “There’s more. Your mother is amazingly manipulative. She said over and over that you were too young for marriage, and she had me half convinced. Hell, I wasn’t much older than you and I was intimidated. Me, a poor kid from two towns over, up against the high and mighty Harrisons, pillars of the freakin’ community.”
“I never cared whether you had money!” Bridget almost shrieked the words. “I only cared that you would take it from them!” But he hadn’t. She understood now, a sinking feeling in her gut, just how far her mother had gone.
“It was her idea that there be six mouths of absolutely no contact between us. Supposedly after six months if we still felt the same, she wouldn’t stand in our way.”
“She said that?” she breathed.
“And you didn’t know about it?” An eyebrow quirked in a suggestion of mockery.
“I didn’t.”
“That’s possible,” Jonas conceded with a disgruntled sigh.
“But after the six months, why didn’t you try to see me? Why did you wait for so many years?” Bridget ran a hand through her chestnut hair in confusion, believing him yet not fully understanding.
“You’re forgetting something this time. Or maybe you’re deliberately ignoring it,” he said cynically. “Maybe I wasn’t in direct contact with you, but I did stay in touch with some of our friends. Within a couple of months after I left Vermont, you did, too. By the end of six months, there were rumors that you’d married or were marrying someone else. Which you did, didn’t you, Mrs. O’Shea?”
“Jonas, I—” she began.
“So what was the point of my trying to get in touch with you? Your mother had proven her point. You couldn’t have loved me or you would have waited. Anyway, you were too young to make that kind of commitment,” he stated in a hard, flat voice.
“No,” she whispered.
“That probably applied to your late husband, too, but he conveniently died before that could be proved.”
“That isn’t true.” But Bridget didn’t want to explain about Brian yet. “Everything you say sounds so reasonable, but there is one thing you haven’t explained to me.”
Jonas leaned back in his chair, although there was no way his body was relaxed. He seemed ready to spring, alive with a powerful energy that the argument had released. Bridget wished there was no more to talk about. She wished she could be in his arms.
But, until these questions were out of the way, she knew that no matter how much she loved him, she would never be able to completely trust him. The doubts had to be eliminated or confirmed.
