She leaned back. “And then you couldn’t even be honest with me. You don’t love me enough to tell me about your child.” She shook her head. “Club life is dangerous, and I know you’re at risk. And you’re having a baby, and I can accept that; I can love it, because it’s yours, and because it’s an innocent in all this. I can take almost anything, Aidan, but I can’t take knowing that you’re going to jerk me around.”
“I’m not doing that. Not on purpose.”
“But don’t you get it? You can’t blunder through life one accident at a time. I won’t let myselfbeanother of your accidents. When are you going to grow up? When the baby comes? After? Never?”
He shoved up from the table and rushed around it to get to her. She tried to leave her chair, but he was on her, lifting her up and enfolding her in his arms, trapping her against his chest. He smelled like the garage and the cold November sky outside, and she almost allowed herself to slump against him.
She stayed stiff, though.
They stood there for what felt like a long time, his ragged breath stirring her hair, his heart pounding against her breasts.
“No,” he whispered. “Sam, no. Don’t do this, baby.Please.”
She started crying again, unable to stop herself. “You have to grow up,” she whispered back. “I love you, and I don’t know how not to love you, but God, you have to straighten yourself out, Aidan. If you can’t do it for me, do it for the baby.”
The back door opened. Surprised, Aidan turned that way, arms loosening enough for Sam to duck away, go around the table and put some distance between them.
Helen stood in the threshold, arms full of grocery bags, gaze concerned. “Is everything alright?”
“It’s fine, Mom. Here, let me take those.” Sam went for the bags.
“Sam,” Aidan said.
She didn’t look at him because she couldn’t. It was bad enough her mom was gaping at her mascara streaks. She didn’t need to puddle to the floor and weep.
“You should go,” she told him. “Please.”
A deep inner voice cried for him to resist, to stay.
“Samantha, what’s wrong?” Helen asked.
Aidan made a sound in his throat, part-fury, part-anguish. And then he left, booted footfalls heavy across the linoleum. The sharp snort of his bike starting up in the drive ripped across her heart.
For the first time since her father died, she cried and let her mother hold her.
Twenty-Four
It was dinnertime, and certainly not the right time to pay anyone a visit.
Aidan didn’t give a shit.
Ava tried to deliver a warning, when he called and demanded Tonya’s new address, the mini mansion where she lived with her parents. “Aidan, what are you–” He hung up on her.
The Sinclair house was a formless shape in the dark, an unbelievable mass of lit windows and shadowed roof angles. His tailpipes echoed off the tidy row of hedges at the curb, angry and out of place in this neighborhood.
He leaned over and jammed the intercom button with the side of his fist when he pulled up to the massive wrought iron gates. The thing hissed.“Yes?”a voice said, managing to sound superior with just one word.
“I wanna talk to Tonya,” Aidan said, “and if you gimme a buncha shit, or try to tell me she’s not here, I’ll go door-to-door and introduce myself as her fiancé to every one of these goddamn neighbors.”
There was a pause, then the gates began to slide back with a low grating sound.“Come in.”
A butler in a sweater vest met him at the grand front doors. “Sir,” he greeted stiffly, proving himself the owner of the intercom voice.
Aidan didn’t pause to wipe his feet or gather his bearings, but charged into an entrance hall worthy of a five-star hotel. “Where is she?”
“In the library, sir.”
He took four steps down the hall, realized he had no idea where he was going, and ground his teeth in frustration.
