forgive you?”
Rory’s eyes flicked to his face and went back to studying her wine. “The reason why Shay has such massive insecurities and the reason why I am not good at relationships is the same.”
Wait. Why would she think that she wasn’t good at relationships? She was open and friendly and funny and smart, who wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with her? Well, he wouldn’t...but he didn’t want to be in a relationship with anyone so he didn’t count. She had to be better at relationships than he was; then again, pretty much ninety percent of the world’s population was. “How do you know that you are bad at relationships?”
Rory’s laugh was brittle. She looked him in the eye and tried, unsuccessfully, to smile. “I can date, I can flirt, I can do light and fluffy, but I suck at commitment. I drive men crazy.”
He couldn’t imagine it. Here he was, the King of Easily Bored, and he was as entranced with Rory as he’d been from the beginning. “How?”
Rory waved his question away. “When I think things are getting hot or heavy or too much to deal with—when I get scared—I take the easy way out and I run. I just disappear.”
There was a message in her statement and he was smart enough to hear it. When she thought their time was over she’d make like Casper and fade away. Good to know, he thought cynically. Thinking back, he remembered what she’d said earlier. “You said there was a reason why you and Shay act like you do. Will you tell me what it is?”
He was as surprised as she looked at his question. He hadn’t intended to ask that. Did he really want to know the answer? It seemed he did, he reluctantly admitted. Rory was, when she let go, naturally warm and giving, and he wondered why she felt the need to protect herself.
“Well, that’s a hell of a subject to discuss during a hurricane,” Rory replied, tucking her feet under her. “Actually, it’s a hell of a subject at any time.”
“We can talk about something else, if you prefer.” Mac backtracked to give her, and him, an out of the conversation. He stood and walked over to the open balcony doors, holding his flashlight in his hand. Unable to resist the power of the approaching storm, he stepped outside and let the rapidly increasing wind slam into him. He leaned forward, surprised that the wind could hold him upright as the rain smacked his face like icy bullets.
Hello, Hurricane Des, Mac thought as he stepped back into the house and closed and bolted the doors behind him. The lights flickered and he checked that the hurricane lamp and matches were on the coffee table. They would probably lose power sooner rather than later. Mac resumed his seat, linked his hands across his stomach and looked at Rory. “Want to talk about something else?”
Rory shrugged and pulled the tassels of the pillow through nervous fingers. He knew it wasn’t only the crazy wind slamming into the house that made her nervous. The power dropped, surged and died.
“Perfect,” Rory muttered.
Within a minute Mac had the hurricane lamps casting a gentle glow across the room and smiled at Rory’s relieved sigh. “My parents are hugely dysfunctional...”
“Aren’t they all?”
Rory cocked an eyebrow at his interruption but he gestured for her to continue. “When I was thirteen, I was in the attic looking for an old report card—I wanted to show Shay that I was better at math than she was.” Rory tipped her head. “Strange that I remember that... Anyway, I was digging in an old trunk when I found photographs of my father with a series of attractive women.” Rory pushed her hair back with one hand. Her eyes looked bleak. “It didn’t take me long to realize those photos were the reason why my dad moved out of the house for months at a time.”
Mac winced.
“He betrayed my mother with so many women,” Rory continued. “I’ve always felt—and I know Shay does too—that he betrayed us, his family. He cheated on my mom and he cheated us of his time and his love, of being home when we needed him. He always put these other women before us, before me. Yet my mother took him back, still takes him back.”
Okay, now a lot of Shay’s crazy behavior made sense. “Hell, baby.”
“He said one thing but his actions taught me the opposite.”
“What do you mean?”
Rory shrugged. “He’d tell me that he was going on a work trip but a friend would tell me that she saw him at the mall with another woman. Or he’d say that he was going hunting or fishing but he never shot a damn thing. Or ever caught a fish.
“And my mother’s misery was a pretty big clue that he was a-huntin’ and a-fishin’ for something outside the animal kingdom.”
Underneath the bitterness he heard sadness and the echo of a little girl who’d lost her innocence at far too young an age.
“I thought the world of him, loved him dearly and a part of me still does. But the grown-up me doesn’t like him much and, after a lifetime of lies, I can’t believe a word he says. I question everything he does. As a result, trust is a difficult concept for me and has always been in short supply.” Rory dredged up a smile.
Mac swallowed his rage and stopped himself from voicing his opinion about her father. Telling Rory that he thought her father was a waste of skin wouldn’t make her feel better. Rory was bright and loving and giving and her father’s selfishness had caused her to shrink in on herself, to limit herself to standing on the outside of love and life, looking in. She deserved to be loved and cherished and protected—by someone, not by Mac but by someone who would make her happy.
God, he wanted to thump the man for ripping that away from her.
“Tell me about your childhood, Mac,” Rory softly asked, dropping her head to rest it against the back of the couch. “Dear God, that wind sounds like a banshee on crack.”
“Ignore it. We’re safe,” Mac told her, slipping his hand between her knees. He never spoke about his blue-collar upbringing in that industrial, cold town at the back end of the world. It was firmly in his past.
But there was something about sitting in the semidark with Rory, safe from the wind and rain, that made him want to open up. “Low income, young, uneducated single mother. She had few of her own resources, either financial or emotional. She relied on a steady stream of men to provide both.”
He waited to see disgust on Rory’s face or, worse, pity. There was neither, she just looked at him and waited. Her lack of reaction gave him the courage to continue. “I was encouraged not to go to school, not to go to practice, not to aim for anything higher than a dead-end job at the canning factory or on one of the fishing boats. When I achieved anything, I was punished. And badly.”
Rory sat up, and in the faint glow of the lamp, he could see her horrified expression. “What?”
Mac shrugged. “Crabs in a bucket.”
“What are you talking about?” Rory demanded.
“You put a bunch of crabs in a bucket, one will try to climb out. The other crabs won’t let that happen. They pull at the crab who’s trying to escape until he falls back down. My mother was the perfect example of crab mentality. She refused to allow me to achieve anything more than what she achieved, which was pretty much nothing.”
“How
