The Secret Heir

“Are you going to tell me about it?”

“I’ll have to, eventually. But I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“Is your mother all right?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s just fine.”

Anger, she thought, analyzing his tone. And pain. Jackson wasn’t merely upset. He was devastated. “Please talk to me.”

Pushing the remains of his dinner away, he reached for his tea glass. He downed half of it without stopping for breath, then set the glass down with a thump. “How’s Tyler?”

“He was a little cross this evening. I think his incision was bothering him. I gave him some Tylenol and read to him until he fell asleep.”

Jackson made a sound of self-disgust. “I told him I would be home in time to play with him before bedtime.”

“I told him you wanted to be here, but something came up. You’ll have time to play with him tomorrow.”

“I’ll try.”

“Maybe you and your dad could take him for ice cream?” she suggested tentatively. “He always likes hanging out with Daddy and Gampy.”

Because she was watching his face, she saw his jaw clench. “Maybe.”

She was growing more frustrated with him by the minute. After all his big talk about working as a team during Tyler’s hospitalization, now that Jackson was the one in crisis, he refused to open up to her. Once again he had shut her out, relegating her to the silent-partner role she had always chafed against before.

If she were the one in trouble, he would be nagging her to talk to him, demanding to know what he could do to fix everything, because that was what he saw as his duty in their marriage. But that image of protector and defender didn’t allow for revealing his own weaknesses, or turning to her for help or even sympathy. He couldn’t see that love was a two-way street, and that he was deliberately putting barriers across the path to his heart.

With a sigh of surrender, she stood. If this was really the marriage Jackson wanted—polite, distant, lonely—then maybe it was time for her to decide once and for all if she was willing to settle for that.

“I’ll go check on Tyler,” she told him. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

She didn’t expect him to need anything else from her, of course. Or at least nothing that he would admit to.

Twelve

Saying again that she wanted to be close to Tyler, Laurel went to bed in the room upstairs, leaving Jackson sitting in the darkened den pretending to watch a hockey game on TV. She had hung around in the doorway for a few minutes, hoping he might decide to talk to her, after all, but he’d remained silent. Just as Carl had said very little when she’d called him a short while earlier to tell him Jackson was home safely.

Whatever was going on in the Reiss family, it was being made painfully clear to her that she was not a part of it.

She lay awake for a long time, thinking of all the things she had done wrong since the beginning of her marriage, and regretting that it was too late to start over. It was well after midnight when she finally fell asleep.

Less than an hour later, Jackson came to her.

She roused instantly when he sat on the side of the bed. “What is it?” she asked, not quite fully awake yet. “Tyler?”

Jackson put a hand on her shoulder. “Tyler’s fine. I just looked in on him.”

Shaking off the last remnants of sleep, she blinked him into focus as much as possible in the deeply shadowed room. “What—”

“I’m sorry I woke you.”

“That’s all right.” Rising onto one elbow, she pushed her hair out of her face. “Are you okay?”

He reached out to stroke a fingertip along the line of her jaw. “I missed you in our bed.”

She had thought maybe he’d decided he wanted to talk, after all. Now she realized that wasn’t at all what he’d had in mind when he had come to her.

He could admit he needed her physically, so why couldn’t he acknowledge that she could help him in other ways, as well?