house—the security specialist who had helped him all those years ago. He’d walked as though he was being pulled toward a beacon, arriving without understanding why or how his feet had carried him that direction. Charles hadn’t been there. He’d been in a home, suffering dementia. But his wife, Brenda, had let him in.
Until then, as a product of the foster system, Roman hadn’t really believed things such as friendship and kindness and loyalty were real. He’d seen Charles’s singling him out as a mercenary move, a specialist developing a skilled apprentice for his own benefit. Anton had befriended him to exploit him, as well. That was how it was done, Roman had thought. Nothing personal. People used people. That was how life worked.
But as Charles’s wife had taken him in for no other reason than because Charles had always spoken fondly of him, Roman had begun to comprehend what one person could mean to another. Not that he took advantage of her. No, he had carried his weight, taking out the garbage and giving her what he could for groceries and rent every week.
She hadn’t needed his money, though. She wasn’t rich, but she was comfortable. She had grown children she saw often, so she wasn’t lonely. The house had been well alarmed in a good neighborhood. She hadn’t needed his protection. She’d had no legal obligation to help him.
She’d done it because she had a generous heart.
It had baffled him.
He still wondered what he might have resorted to if she hadn’t taken him in for bacon and eggs. Told him to shower and provided him with clean clothes. If she hadn’t listened to his story and believed him.
He’d been wary, not allowing her to be as motherly as she had wanted to be. Almost his entire life to that point had been a reliance on strangers. He hadn’t wanted to go back to that kind of setup, but her unconditional caring had been a glimpse of what he had missed in losing his own mom. Parents, good ones, were a precious commodity.
So the thought of Melodie’s mother’s ashes being mistreated still bothered him, even though nothing terrible had come to pass. It had been more than the basic indecency of such a thing. He simply wasn’t that cruel.
Meanwhile, the claim Melodie had made about how she’d come to have those ashes had shaken his assumptions about her and her family. He had needed to know more, to understand if what she had claimed about her estrangement from her father could be true. He’d made a number of calls over the ensuing days, first talking to her building manager at length.
Melodie, it seemed, was a perfect tenant who paid on time, lived quietly and took care of minor repairs herself. In fact, until the recent passing of her mother, she’d spent most of her days out of her apartment, working or visiting her mother at the clinic.
When Roman had looked more closely at her finances, he’d learned that she’d been living simply for years. Her income was low, especially for the daughter of a senator who received dividends from a global software company. For six years she had worked in a variety of part-time and minimum-wage jobs, only taking on debt to improve her mother’s care and then to start her wedding planning business.
He’d spoken to Ingrid’s mother, too, learning more about Melodie’s mother than Melodie herself, but even that had been an eye-opener. Patience Parnell had been a fragile sort at college. She’d been given to tears and depression over the tiniest slight. She’d quit school when a modeling agency had scouted her, but after the initial boost to her self-esteem, that sort of work had ground her down. She’d left that career to marry a rich widower, expecting to be a homemaker and help him raise his son. Instead, she’d been his trophy wife, constantly on display as he set his aspirations on Washington. The demands of networking, campaigning and entertaining had grown too much for her. She never really recovered from postpartum depression after having Melodie. She’d checked into a sanitarium six years ago and, it was whispered, had checked out under her own terms.
When she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she had refused treatment, letting it take her life in a type of natural suicide.
Every time he thought about it, he saw Melodie before him in that ridiculous outfit. Her anguish had been so real as she’d said, I’ll keep her safe. I’m the only one who ever has.
That crack in her control was the thing that niggled most. She had been such a coolheaded fighter up to that point. He’d seen it in the way she’d doggedly tried to argue with him. At any other time he would have admired such a quick, clear ability to reason her way out of conflict. Hell, he probably would have tried to hire her. People who could step past emotion to straighten out a tense situation were gold.
All he’d seen at the time, however, was an attack. A cold-blooded one. His mind had been so skewed by his experience with her father and brother he’d stayed on the offensive, refusing to hear her, especially because she’d been so levelheaded in her defense. He’d read her wrong because, until those last moments, she hadn’t flinched or broken down.
That strength in her had thrown him, making him see her as an adversary. Now all he could think about was how it would feel to put all one’s energy into fighting for someone, for your mother, and lose her to a lack of will to live.
He swallowed, pushing stiff fists into his pockets, knuckles coming up against the string of pearls he should have returned to Melodie by now. He kept thinking she might contact him, but, in her shoes, would he want to talk to him?
If there was a good enough reason, he thought she would.
The beads rubbed mercilessly against his knuckles, the way a certain question kept rolling around in his mind, rubbing and aggravating.
Did no condom mean no birth control?
A lead blanket descended on him each time he recalled his fleeting moment of sobriety, as he had recognized the mistake he was about to make.
He was a man of logic. He didn’t believe in giving in to feelings. He still couldn’t understand how he had, especially with his view of Melodie as dark as it had been. He’d been appalled in those first seconds afterward for so much as touching her.
Yet it had been the most profound sexual experience of his life.
Had it been the same for her? Had their physical attraction been real? Please, Roman, please. His entire body clenched with tension and his breath drew in and held, savoring the memory of skin and musky scents and hot, wet welcome pouring over him like a bath. Behind his closed eyes, another question, the most burning question, glowed brightly.
Was she pregnant?
* * *
Beggars can’t be choosers. It was a truth Melodie had learned to live with the day she’d come home six years ago to discover her father had badgered her mother into a hospital she couldn’t leave.
She’s an embarrassment, he’d said.
He was the embarrassment, Melodie had informed him. Terrible words had followed, ending with her nursing a bruised cheek, a sore scalp and a wrenched shoulder while she’d begged through choked-back tears for permission to see her mother. He’d forced her to stay silent on his abusive behavior if she wanted so much as a phone call.
After striking that deal, Melodie had walked out, going to a friend’s house and never returning. Her privileged life had ended. She’d learned the hard way how to make ends meet, taking whatever job she could find to survive.
Of
