Ciji Ware (66 page)

Privately, Daphne was forced to admit that some aspects of Sim’s declarations were definitely true. She
did
, in fact, go kind of nuts when she thought a guy was going to “do her wrong,” as he’d so aptly phrased it. The proof? She did stupid things like drive alone to New Orleans in the middle of the night with half a tank of gas in her Jeep, and arrive at one a.m. in a city with one of the nation’s highest crime rates.

“Okay…” she said, attempting to calm down. “So what happened?”

Sim paused to gather his thoughts and continued. “The question for me had become how can I be fit company for a serious relationship with
you
if I haven’t put Francesca’s ghost to rest?” he asked rhetorically. “And the same goes for you, my dear Ms. Daphne. I don’t want to take crap from you for stuff
I
didn’t do.”

“Such as?” she demanded.

“Such as sleep with my ex-wife or anybody else since we met.”

“Well, did you?”

“Sleep with Francesca? No, I did not.”

“Come close?”

“Didn’t even open the car door for her.”

“She obviously slept over at Gibbs Hall last night,” Daphne asserted.

“In the guest room in the main house. I was in the cottage.” He shot her a crooked grin, and asked, “Far enough away for you?”

Daphne had a moment of chagrin. Then she steeled herself to listen to the outcome of Sim’s rendezvous. “And after all this, did you slay the ghost?”

“It took a while,” Sim acknowledged. “But something you said the night you first surprised me at the cottage had been nagging me for months.”

“Something
I
said?” Daphne replied, startled.

“Yeah… remember you theorized that Francesca might be projecting all that blame onto me when, in fact, during her pregnancy she was smoking and drinking and working unbelievably late hours?”

“So, you were wondering if, after ten years, she was finally willing to take some responsibility for how her own unhealthy behavior might have contributed to a miscarriage?”

Sim paused, and then said quietly, “In fact, she took
all
the responsibility.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I demanded to know why she’d been so reckless the last few months we were together, she broke down.”

Ah
ha!
Daphne thought. Just as she’d thought, Ms. Francesca regretted cutting loose such a dishy guy after all and had come to Mississippi to make her amends in a bid to get Sim back.

“I’ll just bet she cried her little eyes out.”

Sim shot Daphne a warning look.

“Sorry,” she said with genuine contrition. “It’s just I’m having a hard time with the thought of you two in a motel, talking about such intimate stuff.”

“We spent most of our time in the back rooms at the Capitol when we were negotiating the specifics on the toxic dumps with a bunch of cigar-smoking legislative assistants. Yesterday, we talked about
our
stuff… for three hours in her motel room, and another two on the drive down.”

“Hmmm.” Daphne shrugged, girding herself for what came next. She gazed at her hands folded in her lap to avoid looking at Sim. “Look… from what I know about these things, a woman’s hormones after childbirth or miscarriage can go up and down like a yo-yo, which could account for why she—”

“Francesca didn’t miscarry.”

Daphne raised her eyes and stared at Sim in confusion.

“She
didn’t
?”

“She waited until she knew I’d be out of town on a shoot and got a woman doctor friend of hers from college to perform an abortion.”

“Oh, Sim,
no
!” Daphne said, barely above a whisper. “And she kept it from you all these years? But why did she
do
such a thing?”

Sim rose from where he’d been sitting on the desk and gazed out the window. “For the simple reason that she’d been having an affair with a colleague at work.”

“Oh, my God!”

“At first she figured she’d pass the child off as mine.”

“Even if it wasn’t? Shades of Antoinette,” Daphne murmured. Months before, she’d told Sim about her brother’s true parentage. Now she was shocked that the other important man in her life, too, had been subject to such deceit. “So, when she found out she was pregnant, she told you the baby was yours, and of course you believed it.” She was unable to mask her sense of outrage. “What happened after she unleashed
that
bombshell?”

“This is making Francesca sound like a callous bitch, and she’s not,” Sim insisted. “She’s more complicated than that, but… the sad truth was, she hated being pregnant. She told me yesterday that then, as now, she really didn’t want to be a mother, regardless of who was the father.”

“Wow,” she whispered. “That must have been hard to hear.”

“It was.”

“At least she was finally straight about it, though.” Daphne rose from her chair and crossed to the window. “What did the father have to say about what she’d decided to do?” she asked, gently placing her hand on Sim’s arm.

“The day after she broke the news to him that she was pregnant—probably with his child, given my traveling schedule around that time—
and
in love with him, the guy negotiated a transfer to the firm’s Washington, D.C., office without telling her first. After he took off, Francesca was devastated.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Daphne murmured in spite of herself.

“And she was scared. Once she got over being scared, she was more certain than ever that she didn’t want to be a mother. She’d figured out long before I did that
our
marriage was a mess and our incompatibility manifestly obvious… and since she couldn’t have
him
, she kind of went berserk. She persuaded her doctor friend to perform a second-trimester abortion—which is legal in California—and covered it up.”

“But Sim,” Daphne protested, aching for him and the heartbreak he’d endured, “what was she by then, five or six months pregnant?”

“Four and a half months,” Sim replied hollowly.

“Another month and we start to talk about the marvels of modern science in the prenatal ward!” Daphne said, starting to feel furious in Sim’s stead. “Why did she have to do such a horrible number on
your
head?”

“Given her emotional state at the time, I think she was doing exactly what you’d guessed at months ago: projecting all those negative feelings about herself onto
me.
She felt so guilty, she told me yesterday, that she actually began to believe her own made-up story—in other words, that I was the original cause of all her problems.”

“I’d say that
she
was the original cause of all her problems.”

Sim turned around, his face inches from hers. “That’s right,” he said simply. “And you cannot imagine how learning all this has made me feel.”

“Well… like
how
?” Daphne asked cautiously.

“Like I’ve been let out of jail. Like I’ve had a sentence commuted. Like I’m not such a bad dude, after all. Like I shouldn’t ever again accept anyone else’s opinion of me if I don’t believe it myself.”

“And how does it make you feel about Francesca?”

Sim was silent for a moment, turning his thoughts over in his head. “That she’s… trouble. Always was and always will be. Lovely to look at. Smart as a whip. A fabulous lawyer. But big trouble one-on-one. And I picked her to marry, so I have to take responsibility for that and ask myself why.”

“Frankly, I’m amazed you didn’t punch her lights out.”

“Actually, now that I know the truth, I feel some compassion for her. She was scared she’d be a bad mother because she truly loved practicing law and didn’t want to give it up or let motherhood slow down her making full partner in her firm. Kind of a guy thing, you know? Which only made her feel doubly guilty.”

“But aren’t you angry?” she demanded. “Why are you being so goddamned charitable to a woman who
really
did you wrong? Not to mention… maybe your child.”

“I—am angry,” Sim said quietly. “At her… and at myself. From the very beginning, she and I hadn’t dealt straight with each other. When our marriage crashed and burned, I took it out on myself, on my family, and on all the women afterward who wanted to get close.”

“Like me, by not letting me know what was going on with you this week when we’d agreed to produce the benefit together.”

Sim paused. “You’re absolutely right. When things got complicated I did my typical head-for-the-hills routine, which stinks.”

“Definitely,” she agreed. “My heading for New Orleans in the dead of night was sort of the same deal.” Then she murmured, “Wow. That’s a first in my life.”

“But, here’s the good part,” he said with a bemused expression. “Now I understand what happened back then. I can see that very little of what Francesca did in those days had much to do with me. Her walking out was a major blow, but she didn’t do it
to
me, if you know what I mean? If I’d known that a week ago, I’d have called you when all this started happening and explained what was going on and probably have saved us both a lot of grief.”

Daphne was silent for a long moment, shaking her head from side to side. Then she sought his gaze. “I cannot tell you how sorry I am that you’ve had to go through all this again… and that I lost faith about… us.”

Sim fell silent too. Finally he said, “Thank you. And I admit, given the context of what you saw yesterday, it looked bad.”

“Especially when she leaned over in the car and kissed you,” Daphne reminded him.

Sim laughed. “I told her to get her mitts the hell off me. We were right at the end of hashing all this out when we got to the turnoff at Bailey’s and saw your Jeep.”

“She kissed you deliberately. All along I bet she’s wanted you back,” Daphne said, watching him carefully.

“The subject came up.”

“And?”

“I told her she can’t have me,” he said with his old grin. “I told her flat out that I was in love with you and that her offer, while flattering, didn’t tempt me even a little.”

“Good answer,” Daphne said, the first smile in twenty-four hours brightening her features. “What in the world did Bailey think when you walked into Gibbs Hall with Francesca Hayes in tow? Didn’t the good doctor think it was strange to have you consorting with the enemy on his turf?”

Sim laughed a second time. “He sure did. Almost didn’t let Francesca in the door. Almost didn’t let
me
in the door.”

“Yea, Bailey!”

“He said he’d just had a nice visit with you.” Sim seized her hand gently and rubbed his thumb across her palm. “He was very pointed in the way he mentioned your name in front of Francesca about every third sentence.”

“I love that man!”

“And what about me?” Sim demanded, his eyes growing grave. “Are you ever going to get to a place where you’ll trust a guy you don’t have in your line of sight twenty-four hours a day?”

He’d asked her a direct question and Daphne felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “That’s a pretty mean thing to say.”

“No,” Sim insisted. “It’s a fair question, and the answer is important to me. Can you learn to assume that, unless you have iron-clad evidence to the contrary, my intent toward you is always going to be
good
?”

“It
looked
pretty iron-clad, you must admit, Sim,” she replied stubbornly.

“I know sweetheart,” he nodded, “but I need you to someday get to the place where you truly believe that I’ve got your back, now and always.”

Daphne nodded her assent and swiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “This trust stuff is hard for me, Sim.” She was breathless now, and couldn’t put into words the misery that had engulfed her when she’d spotted Sim’s Range Rover about to make the turn into Gibbs Hall.

“I expect none of the last week has been fun for you,” he agreed, “but still—”

“It was horrible,” she interrupted in a choked voice.

“And I absolutely should have been clearer with you about what was going on.”

“Yes, you
absolutely
should have.” Her gaze grew troubled again. “And I want to say that I am so sorry for the way I behaved yesterday and just now on the veranda,” she confessed, tears spilling down her cheeks, “but I hope you can understand, now, why I sometimes felt so… so… bereft. So betrayed.”

He took her in his arms and she burrowed her head into his chest.

“I know, baby,” he said soothingly. “I have an idea how hard it’s been. But we’ve both got to show a little more moxie about this stuff,” he teased, giving her shoulders a gentle squeeze. He leaned away from her and pointed both thumbs at his chest, and said, “It’s
me
… Sim. I’m the only guy in the room.” He glanced around, and declared with a faint smile, “No Jack. No Rafe. No rats. Just Sim.”