Misty Blue (8 page)

“Mia and I were put in foster care,” he began, “for a short time, but it seemed like forever. It was the first time I’d ever failed my sister.”

“Keefe, you’re taking responsibility for things that weren’t in your control. It was your mother’s fault, not yours. If anyone failed Mia she did, not you.”

“Mia never expected our mother to protect her. I was the one she trusted.” He sighed again. “Maybe she’s…I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t think I deserve to walk her down the aisle.”

“Snap out of it, Keefe, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Yes, Mia was a little girl and had a hard life. So did you. She had you, Keefe. Who did you have? You’ve got to stop beating yourself up. This thing with your sister could be fixed so easily. I’ll bet if I talked to her…”

“No.”

A shudder of revulsion ripped through Keefe at the thought of Ashleigh questioning Mia. If she didn’t already feel betrayed, she surely would after talking with Ashleigh. “This is between my sister and me, Ashleigh. No offense but I don’t want you talking to her.”

He watched as Ashleigh wrestled with her own feelings of betrayal. He couldn’t help it. He would protect Mia at all costs. Still, he didn’t want to hurt Ashleigh. “I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered to her. “I told you it was hard for me to talk about.”

“I understand,” Ashleigh said, still sounding a bit miffed, especially when she continued.

“I’m sorry that your sister and you were put into foster care, but that happens. Besides, you got out and you’re both okay.”

“It’s what Mia went through while she was in foster care. She was just a little girl. They wouldn’t allow us to be together and at first they wouldn’t even let me call her or check on her. That is, until she landed in the hospital.”

Keefe shuddered, then shook his head to dispel the image of his baby sister when he’d first seen her in the hospital, her eyes wide and frightened, her arms thinner than they’d ever been—the look of total terror on her face.

He could still remember how he’d stood there for an eternity staring at his baby sister before rushing forward to hug her. She’d pushed him away, her look piercing his heart.
She didn’t know who he was.

Keefe had looked into her eyes, but Mia wasn’t there. Fear had raced through him and he’d grabbed her shoulders. “
Mia, look at me, it’s Keefe
.” He’d had to shake her several times to make her focus. When she concentrated on his face and finally recognized him, she’d screamed his name. Then she’d held on to him for dear life. ‘
He hurt me, Kee. Save me!’
It was her words, ‘
He hurt me
,’ that had haunted Keefe every day of his life since. It was those words that he’d shoved away and not examined, fearing what they meant. It was what made him so determined that no one would ever hurt Mia again.

He closed his eyes, hugging Ashleigh close. Ashleigh couldn’t possibly identify with what had happened to Mia. He thought about dropping the matter but found he wanted her to know, so that she could at least try to understand. “She was in bad shape,” Keefe finished.

“Keefe.”

“The only person I could think to call was Jerry. I pleaded with him to get us out of foster care. I promised him that he wouldn’t have to be responsible for either of us. His girlfriend didn’t want him to, but he’d never known me to cry. He agreed to help us, to pretend that he was taking care of us, that he was our foster father. He rented us an apartment in his building and gave me the money that was left over from the check the state sent to help us out. And I worked. I worked my ass off.”

“And it paid off. Look at both of you, all that you’ve accomplished. Your sister’s not yet twenty-four and she’s working on her Ph.D. I’d say you’ve done wonderful job.” Ashleigh smiled her acknowledgement.

“That’s now. A lot happened before we got here. You weren’t there, Ashleigh. You don’t know the nightmares Mia had when we were finally back together. She blamed herself for everything, for our mother being what she was and for our being thrown into foster care.”

Ashleigh looked at him with a question in her eyes. He knew what she wanted to ask, the same thing he’d wondered about many times. He had asked the social workers the question, the people at the home where Mia had lived, but he’d never asked his sister.
Had she been abused
? No, that was one question he’d never ask her. He’d instead made it his mission to insure that she would never be hurt again. Mia had never mentioned that she’d been hurt after they were reunited. It was probably the one thing that had kept Keefe sane.

“When our mother left…when she abandoned us, I warned Mia not to call anyone. We were used to her taking off for weeks at a time. Only this time she took all of her clothes and personal possessions. I knew it was different. I knew she wasn’t coming back. Mia was usually such a good little girl. I told her what could happen, but she didn’t understand what I was trying to tell her. She called a cousin and asked if she’d seen our mother and the cousin called the department of children and family services.

“After we got out of foster care, Mia barely let me out of her sight. She never got in trouble, never really played with other kids, except once in a blue moon. She just wanted to stay near me. She was so afraid that something would happen, that I would leave her, that…”

Keefe remembered once when Mia was about fifteen and he’d yelled at her because he’d caught her kissing a boy. He didn’t remember the exact words he’d spoken, but he did remember her tears. He vaguely recalled saying something about how she was acting like their mother, that he wasn’t going to let her be a slut.

The force of the memory pounded itself into him and he knew he was as much to blame as their mother for some of Mia’s demons. He was the reason Mia was still a virgin. She’d not wanted to disappoint him. He would bet money on that.

“Keefe?”

Caught up in past memories, he’d not even been aware that Ashleigh was talking to him. “Let’s just say I have good reasons to worry about her.”

“Are you worried that Jerry will hurt her?”

“No.”

“But you want him to say no to Mia.”

Keefe smiled.

“Isn’t Jerry a good guy?”

“Yes.”

“I think maybe you’re just jealous. You made her stop seeing Damien to wait for James and look what happened. James married someone else. Keefe, you’ve got to stop trying to control your sister’s life.”

“You’re wrong about my motives. It’s not like when I didn’t want her seeing Damien. I thought he would hurt Mia. It’s not like that with Jerry. Jerry would love to see Mia get married. I know he would jump at the chance to do this…it’s not that. It’s just…I want to do it.”

“Then tell her.”

He kissed Ashleigh. She didn’t know how much he’d worried about Mia, how he still worried about her. And he couldn’t tell her, so he kissed her instead. He would not be responsible for causing his sister any more stress than was necessary, not if he could help it. He knew that in the end he would give in to Mia’s wishes. But he could hope, couldn’t he?

Exhaustion was Mia’s constant companion. For weeks every moment of her time had been taken until it got to the point that she even had to schedule time to be with the man she loved. Wedding plans had come together much faster than Mia had anticipated. Not in the month that Damien had first given her, but in a little under two months, and that, she thought, had been a miracle. Between finalizing plans, working, and going to classes, she found little time for going to listen to Damien sing or spending time with her brother. In only two weeks she would be married to the man who made her shiver with desire. Just the thought of it made her wet. She could hardly wait.

Admittedly, she had Keefe to thank for everything coming together so quickly. She’d called Stavros, a business associate and friend of Keefe, who owned Boomerang’s, a small exclusive hotel that boasted one of the state’s best banquet halls. Stavros had agreed to allow Mia and Damien not only to have the reception there but he’d told them they could get married there as well. He was setting up a makeshift chapel with a grape arbor covered in lilies and white roses. Damien had even managed to secure a minister for them. It was all well within their budget, especially since she’d decided to wear the gown she’d bought from Ashleigh. Mia was proud of all they’d accomplished and of her steps toward staking a claim on her independence.

The only thing Mia hadn’t done was call Jerry. She shuddered, knowing she couldn’t keep putting it off. Keefe was not going to ride in and save her from being an adult. She’d made her choice and now she would have to live with it.

* * *

“Mia, it’s getting really hard to help you with your vow. I want you so bad,” Damien moaned into her ear. “Tell you what. Just touch me once and I’ll go home.” He leered at her. “You know you never have. Don’t you want to?”

Mia looked slyly at the bulge in his pants and ran her hand down the ridges, pausing to cup him for a few seconds. She giggled and dodged as Damien lunged for her.

“You’re a tease, Mia.”

“We have only a couple of weeks.”

“Yeah, but if you count all the time we haven’t made love, that’s a lifetime. Did I ever tell you that a man could go insane if he doesn’t have release on a regular basis?”

“Only about a million times.”

“You think I’m making this stuff up.” Damien adopted an indignant scowl. “If you don’t believe me, check it out on the web, visit any mental institution in the country and talk to the doctors, talk to the patients. You’ll see that I’m right.”

Really getting into his story, he turned away from Mia. If he saw her face as he spun his web, he’d laugh. “Have you heard of the Terrell clinic in Sweden?”

“No, but since it bears your name I’m sure it has to be a sex clinic.”

“Well, the name’s only a coincidence. But you are right about the type of clinic that it is. They’ve been taking patients from the mental hospital, men mostly, and making sure that they get plenty of sex. So far they’ve had a ninety-nine percent success rate. All the patients except one were returned to society to work and pay taxes and all because of good sex.”

“What happened to the one patient?” Mia asked, laughing.

“Oh, he liked sex a little too much. He wouldn’t leave the clinic because, let’s face it, he got to have sex twenty-four hours a day. So they’re waiting for him to tire of it. Like that’s ever going to happen.” Damien laughed and joined Mia on the sofa.

“I love your stories,” she said as she kissed him.

“And I love you, baby girl. And if I can’t have you for a few more days, I guess I might as well feed both of our fantasies. Now come on and give me a kiss. I have to get home before I’m no longer able to help you keep your vow.”

After several more kisses they walked to the door and Mia slid her hand down the center of his arousal and smiled.

“Like I said, you’re a tease, baby girl.”

She laughed and closed the door, wondering how in the world either of them had been able to resist giving in to the instincts that were bowling her over. She tingled from the contact with Damien’s body, from touching him through the fabric of his pants, from his touching her and she wanted so much more.

She wanted to forget her vow, forget everything but the wonder of having Damien make love to her. They would be so happy, she knew that they would. As for the vow, the only reason she was keeping it was to prove to her brother that she wasn’t a slut. She wouldn’t ever be that. She would marry Damien and she would spend the rest of her life making him deliriously happy. She would never be like her mother, moving from one man to another.

Mia shivered. She’d not called her mother again. She didn’t know if she really wanted her at the wedding or not. She had a bad feeling about her coming, something that she’d never had before. Always she’d been too busy keeping the peace between her mother and Keefe, trying to make her mother see that both she and her brother had done things that any mother should be proud of. Of course she knew at her age it was unhealthy to worry about the approval of a parent. She would be getting her Ph.D. in psychology in a little over a year, give or take a few months. She would open her own practice and she would counsel people just like herself. Still, she recognized that she too had failings.

In a couple of weeks she would no longer have to fight the sexual urges she had. She would freely and gladly make love with her husband, day and night. A delicious tingle filled her and she danced around the room before heading to the window to wave one last time at Damien.

Her face flushed at the thought of finally touching and being touched in all the ways she’d never allowed, but in all the ways she’d wanted to since meeting and falling in love with Damien. So many times they’d come so close, each time going a little farther. She knew it was more of a miracle than will power that they hadn’t gone all the way. God, she wanted to. They both wanted to.

* * *

Damien smiled as he looked up toward Mia’s apartment, searching for her to appear in the window. When she appeared, his heart swelled with love for her. He didn’t care that his father thought he was whipped. He had Mia.

Of course all of his friends assumed that the deed had been done months ago. He’d never bothered to tell them any better. It wasn’t really any of their business. He’d only told his parents, and only then because he wanted to show them just how special Mia was. It had backfired with both.