Melissa James - Who Do You Trust?

Like a flash she turned on him. “And who’s been in your bed lately, Mitch? Who’s filled your lonely nights the past twelve years? How many times have you sunk to doing things you hate so you’re not alone, even for a few hours?”

He’d expected her to shove the question back in his face, but not with such raw intensity. Oh, yeah, she’d walked his path, if from the other side of the fence. He understood that loneliness. The darkness of nights filled with aching. The sunrises and sunsets over concrete and stone, standing alone in a city of four million people, that city not where you ached to be, none of those people the one you hungered to be with. Even when he was on a mission, even when he’d saved someone’s life, it only patched over the gap for a few hours, before the gut-gnawing voracious need for home and family and Lissa. Dear God, how he’d ached for her; a devouring need to sink inside her, lose his pain in her smile, her arms and welcoming body forever left the wound open again, savage and unhealed and bleeding.

He’d learned long ago how to live alone. Taking another woman to his bed or hers—even women who knew the score—had only ever intensified the loneliness, the anguished yearning. An hour, a minute of mind-numbing forgetfulness nowhere near compensated for weeks of self-hate, using a woman as a replacement for the only woman he’d ever truly wanted.

Kerin’s fall from grace completed the lesson forever. He’d used her in his unhealed grief for Lissa, taken Kerin’s eager smile and giving sexuality as a shallow replacement for real love, and discovered too late the abyss of unbalanced emotion that lay beneath. But by then, she was pregnant with his children, and leaving her wasn’t an option.

But now Kerin was gone, Lissa was free—and his heart and body, primed and hard all day, thudded till the pounding need roared in his ears, reminding him they’d been starved way too long.

In his whole life he’d never known love the way Lissa used to give love to him. She sneaked him food when Old Man Taggart left him hungry again. She helped him with his homework, even did it for him when he didn’t have time. She sat and talked to him by the pond that joined their farms when the sun went down—the loneliest time for him, when families gathered around the tables to be with their kids—often giving up her own family time to be with him. She’d listened to him as he talked about his hopes and dreams for the future, and confided hers to him. Sweet Lissa Miller of the popular crowd at school really cared about unknown, unimportant Mitch McCluskey. She worried about him, fussed over him, poured her heart and soul’s care over him until he’d swum in it, drowned in it, lived and breathed the love filling him. Even when she started dating Tim—damn Tim for asking her to their formal first!—Mitch never felt less than special, less than loved by her, even when he’d been jealous enough to murder Tim when he touched her, kissed her.

Even now the memory had the power to make him burn.

How could he feel so much, hurt so much, and she not know it?

Deep inside, he’d always known this sort of love only came to a man once in a lifetime. He’d learned long ago that to have another woman in his arms and bed was nothing more than an empty cheat, fool’s gold, a poor substitute for what he wanted. To have and to hold the woman he loved, forever. To have, not just her body, but her trust, her joy and pain, to grow old beside her at the place they loved best. To love and be loved in return.

And if he’d been the one to marry Lissa he’d never have walked out, never left her. He’d have loved her forever, kept that innocent joy glowing from her eyes—eyes now filled with the cloudy shadows of suffering and rejection.

Suffering Tim had put there. Shadows he’d have to erase before she’d even consider his proposal.

Why had he ever stood aside for Tim? Why didn’t he ever tell Lissa how much he wanted to be the one?

Never a time, never a place, he’d always thought. But the simple truth filled him with self-contempt. Because you were a bloody coward, always terrified she’d say she only loved you like a sister. Too scared you wouldn’t be enough for a girl like her.

He still was. He, who regularly looked death in the face, was too scared to look into the eyes of a delicate, five-foot-four woman and tell her he loved her. If only Tim hadn’t walked in on them on her seventeenth birthday—but Tim had. And then he’d had to walk away. Tim had a home, a life, security—a family to offer Lissa. He, Mitch, didn’t even have a real name to give, just the minister’s surname from the church steps his mother had dumped him on as a newborn. He was a hooker’s unwanted bastard, pushed from place to place all his life, a worker begrudged even the basics of life, like food or affection. How could he ever think she’d love someone like him, beyond the miracle of her friendship?

“Mum!” At the other end of the house, a door slammed once, twice. “Hey, Mum, you shoulda seen this cool girl-fight—” Matt ran in, saw him, gaped and yelled, “Daaad!”

“Dad?” Luke came flying in. “Dad! Oh, Dad, you came!”

Within seconds two blurs cannoned into him. He staggered back, laughing. He hitched them up in his arms, feeling the identical little heads snuggle into either side of his neck.

Matt and Luke. His boys. His beautiful, precious sons. So like him, and so alike few could tell them apart—but they were his kids. He would know Matt from Luke any time. “Of course I came, matey. You knew I would, as soon as I got off my tour.”

Matt pulled back, looking at the father he closely resembled, with a solemn frown. “Kerin’s dead, Dad.”

His heart ached for the boys who’d never called their own mother Mum. “I know.”

“She topped herself on crack,” Luke added.

He shook with the primitive fury he still hadn’t conquered, even after her death. Damn Kerin for her paltry revenge on him, making the kids suffer! No nine-year-old boy should know what topping meant, let alone crack—and little guys of eight should never have to find their mother’s body with the empty crack pipe hanging out of her mouth. “I know, mate.”

Luke’s gaze was anxious. “We didn’t want to go with her. We didn’t want to steal your stuff, Dad—it was Kerin.”

Mitch kissed his son’s hair. “I know, mate. I knew it wasn’t you.” Just Kerin paying for her bloody drugs. Trying to hit out at me any way she could. Needing someone to blame for her life.

“What took you so long to get here, Dad? Mum said you’d be here in a few weeks, an’ we waited an’ waited—”

So it’s Mum already. Oh, yeah, taking the risk of calling Lissa when Nick told him he’d found Matt and Luke had paid off all right. He knew Lissa’s gift of healing hearts—he’d been a recipient of the same loving treatment. And now his kids had that same total love, the unconditional support, he’d once had.

Then it hit him: they’d forgotten Kerin already. They told him about her death like an item they’d watched on the news, only anxious to know he didn’t blame them for anything Kerin did.

His gaze met Lissa’s. She nodded and touched her finger to her lips. Counselor, she mouthed.

He’d never wanted to kiss her more than now. The love he’d counted on for so long was there for his sons. She knew what his fear had been, the shadows of old ghosts still stalking him, and she’d led him to the sunlight with a single word. She wasn’t fostering Matt and Luke. His boys were loved, an integral part of her family.

His heart whispered in delicate hope, She did it for me.

He couldn’t fool himself for long. Lissa, his lovely, open-hearted girl, would have done the same for any child in need. As she’d done for him once—until he blew it.

Thank you, he mouthed back.

“Sorry, kids. I couldn’t get away from work,” he answered Matt’s question. “The brass wouldn’t let me off until yesterday. I couldn’t even quit a day early.”

Luke’s mouth twisted. “Cityfellas.”

Mitch chuckled and ruffled his son’s tousled mop of curls. “I see Lissa’s been passing on some of her ideas about the city. She used to call me that, until I’d been here a year or two.” He grinned at her. As a kid, he’d loved the way she’d called him Cityfella, poking her tongue out, wrinkling her nose in cute teasing. There was never any malice intended, no offence taken. Being a cityfella had given him the sort of glamorous mystique he’d never had as a plain unwanted foster kid—and it gave him undivided attention from the girl whose angel-faerie face haunted his dreams, night and day.

Lissa’s smile was slow in coming, but when it did, her soft, dove-gray eyes twinkled. She bit her lip, then poked her tongue out and wrinkled her nose. “You still stink with it—cityfella.” She snorted. “Buying a house at Bondi Beach. What a yuppie!”

Matt wriggled. “Wanna come see our room, Dad? It’s mega cool. It’s got pics of Mick Doohan and Wayne Gardner—”

Luke jumped off Mitch’s hip. “And Luke Longley, Andrew Gaze, Michael Jordan and the Shaq—”

He laughed. “I see you two are as alike as ever.”

The boys grinned. “Basketball. Kids’ stuff,” Matt snorted. “Who’d wanna waste time playin’ with balls, just runnin’ up and down and dribbling, when you can burn rubber at 220 an hour?”

“Bikes are all right, I s’pose,” Luke retorted with lofty condescension, “but I’d drink the grog if I won. Who wants the good stuff poured all over your head?”

“Hey, mithter, do you like Barbieth?”

Belatedly, Mitch noticed someone was tugging at his shirt. He looked down to the source of the little, lisping voice.

Oh, dear God. Living proof of Tim and Lissa’s love. A sweet sprite gazed hopefully at him, a child with Tim’s riotous blond curls and an angel’s face. Lissa’s face.

“You must be Jenny.”

Jenny rolled her eyes, reminiscent of her mother. “Mithter, I thaid, do you like Barbieth?”

Oh, yeah, this was Lissa’s daughter all right—with her one-track mind. The boys were sniggering already. “Watch out, or she’ll get you into the dollhouse.”

Jenny’s brow lifted; she stared Matt down, her childish lisp adorable and impatient. “You play with me all the time, so don’t you talk!” She turned back to Mitch. “You gonna play or not?”

“Jenny.”

The quiet word brooked no denial. Jenny sighed dramatically. “Sorry, Mummy. Sorry, Mister. Please are you gonna play with me?”

Lissa put a hand on Jenny’s pigtail. “Jenny, this is Mitch. He’s Matt and Luke’s daddy.”

“No!” Jenny’s sweet, flushed face drained white; those lovely china doll’s eyes filled right up with tears and spilled over. “Don’t take my bruvers. Don’t take Matt and Lukey away from me!”

“Jenny.”

The little girl’s tiny, flower-like face lifted, drenched with tears. “No, Mummy, no!” she sobbed. “Don’t let him take them, Mummy! Make him go away!”

Lissa squatted before the sobbing child as Matt and Luke stood either side of her, patting her in awkward affection. “Mitch is a friend of mine, and Matt and Luke’s father. Would you like it if Matt and Luke told your Daddy to go away?”

Jenny sniffed and gulped. “But he’s gonna take them away from us, Mummy! Stop him, stop him!”

“No, I’m not, Jenny,” Mitch cut in quietly, aching for the child’s pain. So much like her mother…

Jenny’s eyes grew round. “You’re goin’ away? Yay!”

But the twins gasped, forgetting Jenny’s grief in an instant. “Dad?” Matt’s voice quivered.