or the Caribbean. But Hawaii sounds really nice.”
“I know a couple of places. Quiet. Secluded. You could go naked.”
“Joe!” She glanced over her shoulder toward the closed library door. “You have a family of lurkers. I love them to pieces, but they don’t grasp the concept of privacy.”
She was cute when she blushed, cuter still in his bed. They hadn’t had much opportunity to make love. Not with so many people in and out of the house. But soon, he promised himself. Soon.
“How’s it going?” she asked in an obvious attempt to change the subject.
He decided to go along with it. “Not bad. Running a winery is a lot of work. Sometimes I can feel the walls closing in.”
Her concern turned sympathetic. “Your family is dependent on you in a way they’ve never been before.”
He nodded.
“That makes you feel funny,” she said. “You thought it would be different. That they were strong on their own. But things aren’t always as they seem.”
He looked at her. There was something in his voice. “We’re not talking about the Marcellis, are we?”
She shook her head. “I was thinking about my situation.”
“Lauren?”
“No. My father. He’s…” She looked out the window. “I haven’t felt a part of his life for a long time. I thought he didn’t care about me, but now I wonder if that was just an excuse for me to stay mad and not try.”
He didn’t know what they were talking about but knew Darcy would explain further if she wanted him to know.
She returned her attention to him. “As a naval officer, are you legally and morally obligated to keep the president’s secrets?”
He hadn’t seen that coming. “Yes. I have top secret clearance. I’m a good security risk.”
“You have to be better than good,” she said. “You have to be…” She swallowed. “You can’t tell anyone.”
She was serious. Joe leaned forward. “I give you my word, Darcy. But if you’re not sure, don’t tell me.”
She smiled. “I appreciate that. But I want to talk about it. I never have. Not even with Lauren. Oh, I know she knows, but we never discuss it. It’s our elephant on the table. The one we all carefully ignore.”
“All right.”
He stood and crossed the library, where he carefully locked the door. Then he returned to the desk, but this time he sat on her side of it, in the chair closest to hers. He took her hand and laced their fingers together.
She glanced from the door to him. “Gee, no pressure.”
“I told you-don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I do. It’s just, I don’t even know where to begin.”
“How about with ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’”
She burst out laughing, then leaned toward him and kissed him.
“Thank you. I feel better now.” She laughed again. “Okay, it was a dark and stormy night. My mom was dying. She’d come home from the hospital because she wanted to die at home. I was sixteen, Lauren was seventeen. We were scared and waiting to hear she was gone. Lauren fell asleep, but I couldn’t. I went downstairs-a hospital room had been set up in the study of our house-and I sat in the hallway. I don’t know how long. It felt like hours. I remember it was so cold, but I didn’t want to leave to go get a blanket or a sweater.”
Joe had known that Darcy had lost her mother at an early age, but he hadn’t known the details.
“Didn’t you have anyone to sit with you?” he asked. “Other family members?”
“I don’t remember. That night it was just me. Finally my dad came out. I could tell from the look on his face she was gone. I started to cry and go to him. He…” She paused, then continued. “He pushed me away. I tried to cling to him, and he told me not to touch him. That I wasn’t his daughter. He never wanted to see me again.”
Joe hadn’t had any idea what she’d been going to tell him, but he hadn’t expected this. Horror filled him, but nothing he felt could match the pain in her eyes.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said in a whisper. “What to think. I ran to my room. I was crying too hard to speak. Lauren woke up and she got that Mom was gone. We cried together.” Darcy tightened her grip on his hand. “Later my dad came to me. He said he was sorry about what he’d done, what he’d said. He told me it wasn’t about me.”
Joe moved his chair closer and wrapped his arm around her. “You don’t have to talk about this.”
She blinked away tears. “I’m kind of into it now, so you’re going to have to hear the rest.”
He kissed her forehead and rubbed her back. “Sure thing.”
She drew in a deep breath. “He told me that my mom had had an affair. She’d met this bright young lawyer at some campaign event, and they’d had a torrid affair. She’d gotten pregnant and had been prepared to leave her husband and baby daughter, only the guy died. So she stayed and they patched up the marriage.”
Darcy looked at him. “I’m the baby. The child of her lover. No one ever told me until that night. I never guessed. My dad-the man who raised me, not my biological father-never let on. Until the night she died, he loved Lauren and me exactly the same. Or at least he acted that way. But when my mom was dying, she called out for her lover. She died speaking his name. So that’s what upset my dad-so much. When I went to him, he was thinking of her and what she’d done. That’s why he was angry.”
She brushed away tears. “He told me he was sorry and that I was still his daughter. He did everything he could to make it up to me. But I didn’t believe him. I wasn’t angry, exactly, but I was scared and hurt. I shut down. For weeks I wouldn’t talk to him. At some point he told Lauren, but we never discussed it either. He kept reaching out to me, and I kept turning away. One day he stopped trying and when I was ready, I didn’t know how to reach out to him. We sort of reached an impasse, which is where we’ve stayed. And in the middle of that is Lauren.”
“All this family crap. Now you know why I want out of here.”
She clutched his hand tighter. “No, I don’t. You have wonderful people here who love you. There is nothing more important than that in the world.”
He didn’t want to have this conversation with her, but he knew she was vulnerable, and he didn’t want to lash out at her.
“You don’t understand,” he said, determined not to get angry. “It’s not forever. It’s never forever. Why should I walk away from the work I do, the career I love, for this?”
She stared at him. “What are you saying? The Marcellis will change their mind? They’ll wake up one morning and decide they don’t want you in the family?”
He pulled free of her and stared out the window. “They already did that once.”
Her breath caught. “The circumstances were completely different. You were a baby.”
“Yeah, and now I can fight back.”
He felt her gaze on him. When he finally looked at her, pain darkened her eyes.
“This isn’t about them, as much as it is about her,” Darcy murmured. “Your ex-wife. The one who left.”
“That was years ago.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. There was no point in rehashing that old news, yet he found himself starting to speak. “I’d been gone nearly five months. I’d shipped out without warning. I couldn’t get in touch with her while I was away. I got back after midnight. When I walked in the house, it was dark. It took me a minute to figure out it was mostly empty. She’d gone a few weeks before. Moved out, took the kids. She left a note and the divorce papers on the kitchen counter.”
Darcy made a noise low in her throat. He saw tears fill her eyes.
“Don’t sweat it,” he told her. “I’d told her the life was rough. She didn’t believe me until she lived it herself.”
“Did you talk to her?” Darcy asked, her voice thick.
“I called to let her know I’d signed the papers and sent them back to the lawyer.” He’d wanted to ask about seeing the kids but had figured it would only make things harder for them. Still, he wished he could have let them know he missed them.
“You didn’t ask her to come back?”
“No. If she’d wanted to be with me, she would have stayed.”
Darcy wiped her cheeks. “Maybe she wanted to know she mattered. Maybe she was trying to get your attention.”
