left me,” Vince said gently.
Jill’s head shot up. “You accused me—”
“Let’s not circle back to that.” There was no anger in Vince’s expression, only compassion. This was the Vince she’d married.
“I’m not proud I left, Vince. You offered me something I wasn’t ready to take.” Jill’s voice was brittle from years of guilt. “We were kids ourselves. After what happened I couldn’t—”
“I would have waited. I told you on our wedding night—”
Hugging herself, Jill stepped back. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t about us sleeping…” She choked on the word. Jill willed herself to keep it together. “You don’t…I…I left Las Vegas because I was ashamed.”
“No one knew about Craig but you and me.”
“I’m not talking about Craig,” Jill said, tightening her arms about herself. “I was ashamed that I couldn’t be sure…that I didn’t know…You had no doubts, but I was going to have a baby that was created from an act of violence. I wasn’t sure I could love it.”
It was a rare occasion that left Vince speechless.
“I knew what it was like to grow up without love. I came second to our family casino. I couldn’t do that to another child,” Jill whispered. “And if you loved the baby and I couldn’t, our marriage would have been a terrible mistake.” A far bigger mistake than it had been.
“You could have said something,” Vince returned gruffly. “I would have understood.”
“You would have tried to convince me I’d learn to love the baby.” Vince could coerce the devil if he wanted to. Once on a class field trip to an amusement park, he’d persuaded Jill to try a crazy-scary roller coaster. Her stomach still flipped at the memory. “I was getting over the shock of what happened. By the time I realized how I felt, we were married.”
“You would have given Teddy up for adoption?” She’d never seen Vince so dumbfounded.
Jill nodded. She forced her arms to relax, brought an image of Teddy as a baby to mind and found herself smiling. “But I loved Teddy from the second I laid eyes on him.”
“Then why didn’t you come back?”
“Because you deserved so much more out of life than a broken woman and another man’s child.” Drained, Jill wanted nothing more than to collapse on a chair.
“At least you were right about one thing,” he said unforgivingly.
Jill bristled. She’d come clean. She didn’t need Vince’s bitterness. “I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Good night.”
Those two words rekindled the intimacy she’d felt with him earlier. Jill edged toward the hall, eyes on the floor, torn between wanting to slug Vince and needing to be held by him.
“Isn’t this funny?” Vince said softly.
Jill’s head snapped up.
“You and me under the same roof. Me on the couch. Déjà vu.” His dark eyes hinted at old hurts. “You don’t plan to run out on me in the middle of the night, do you?”
Jill’s chin came up a notch. “Teddy’s asleep. Down the hall.” She wasn’t about to leave her son. This was her home.
“He must be a sound sleeper to snooze through all this.” Vince’s half smile wasn’t apologetic or rueful. It was…
Vince couldn’t be thinking…
Oh, yes, he could. He’d been the bad boy all the high-school girls whispered about with longing in their voices. Rumors abounded about Vince, rumors based on what someone told someone else about some unknown girl at some other high school and her lost virtue.
“That’ll be enough of that,” Jill said as matter-of-factly as she could manage without quite looking him in the eye. The last thing she wanted was for Vince to see how he unsettled her.
On shaky legs, Jill retreated to her bedroom and shut herself in, his deep laughter following her. She climbed into the dormer window and leaned her forehead against the cool glass, striped with tears from the storm. Vince had always managed to be one step ahead of her. She might kick Vince out tomorrow, but he’d be around, studying her, trying to anticipate her next move to block his casino. She’d need more than garishly painted signs to stop Vince and Arnie.
She should be angry or anxious. Yet her heart beat faster knowing her husband was in her home, sleeping between sheets that had touched her skin.
She should never have created the fantasy Vince, the ideal husband. The real Vince wasn’t perfect. He had a hair-trigger temper and he loved the trappings of success, the energy and excitement of Vegas. Whereas Jill was often uncomfortable in her own skin and content living her life behind a security fence.
So why did she still find Vince so compelling?
Jill stroked the angles of the diamond on her wedding ring, but for once it gave her no comfort.
CHUCKLING, VINCE PLUMPED up the pillow Jill had given him and lay down on the couch. Despite the surprising revelation about why she’d left, Jill amused him. Few women he ran across in his life did that nowadays. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time being with a woman without having sex had been so much fun.
If he was a cat, she’d be the mouse. She’d given too much away tonight, providing Vince with information he could use to his advantage. And she’d always been a soft touch. It wouldn’t be long before Vince had Jill supporting his efforts in Railroad Stop. He wouldn’t let their past and his fondness for her stand in the way.
There was just enough light outside to cast liquid shadows on the ceiling. Something hard poked his hip. Vince shifted and reached beneath the sheet to find a button on the cushion. He edged closer to the back of the couch only to encounter another in the middle of his back. Edda Mae’s love seat was starting to look better and better. Through trial and error Vince found a way to avoid the buttons, certain that his position on the couch had some fancy name in yoga.
A light and flowery aroma filled his nostrils. He turned his head and drank in the smell of Jill from the soft cotton pillowcase. He’d only been close to a handful of people in his life—his grandparents, his best friend, Sam, and for a few weeks, Jill. For years, he’d taken her abandonment personally. Jill’s leaving had never made sense, until now.
He’d understood Jill from the first day of kindergarten. While other kids were walked to class by their moms or dropped off by dads in luxury SUVs, Vince stepped out of a large black Town Car driven by his family’s chauffeur. But at least the windows were so dark that no one could tell his mom wasn’t inside.
Jill didn’t have it so lucky. On good days she hopped out of dented old cars driven by someone in a white shirt with a name tag. Sometimes during the off-season the hotel shuttle bus pulled into the school’s circular driveway—social suicide.
And yet Jill kept smiling, kept trying to fit in, not that the kids ever really let her. Vince didn’t fit in out of necessity. It was safer alone. That way he didn’t have to explain anything. In school he’d kept his mouth shut and his head
