“I am. I’m not going to stop.”
He wouldn’t, either. Because he was Hendrix Harris, the hero of her story, who stood up to her father and had such a good relationship with his mother that he’d willingly marry the wild Carpenter daughter with seemingly nothing to personally gain from it. In bed, he worshipped Roz. Out of it, he talked her down. He was everything she’d never have said she wanted—but did—and that was pushing buttons inside that weren’t meshing well with clowns.
But at least she didn’t feel like she was standing on the edge of a mile-high cliff any longer, legs about to give out as the darkness yawned at her feet. She could breathe. Thanks to Hendrix.
“I started Clown-Around because I needed to stop being afraid.” He didn’t blink as she blurted out her second-biggest secret, and he didn’t interrupt with a bunch of advice on how to fix it. “I really thought it was going to work.”
“Facing your fears is a good step,” he agreed and shut his mouth expectantly, as if to indicate this was still a conversation and it was her turn again. He was good at that and she didn’t mistake it as anything other than a skill.
That or he was just good at being with her, and she might appreciate that even more.
It was the thing she clung to as she spilled out the story of her eight-year-old self missing an entire semester of school because no one could figure out how to tell her she wasn’t allowed to sit at the bedside of her dying mother.
At first, they’d tried. Her nanny would drive her to school, only to get a call from the headmistress that Roz had snuck out again. Fortunately, her father had found her at the hospital before the police had gotten involved, but his mandate that she not try that trick again had only fueled her need to both defy him and spend time with her mother. Sneaking out of school became great practice for later, when she did it to hang out with boys nearly twice her age.
As she recalled all of it for Hendrix, she didn’t leave any of it out, especially not the ugly parts because he deserved to know what was going on with her, as he’d asked to.
“She was so sick,” Roz recalled, not bothering to wip
e the stream of tears that finally flowed. They’d just be followed by more. “The chemo was almost worse than the cancer and they’d come to get her for the treatments. I wouldn’t let her go. There were these clowns.”
She shuddered involuntarily, but Hendrix didn’t say anything, just kept rubbing a thumb over the pulse point of her wrist, which was oddly comforting.
“Every day, I imagined that I was helping draw all the poison from her body when I sat by her bedside and held her hand. But they wouldn’t let me go with her to the treatments and when she came back, it was like they’d sucked a little more of her life away.”
Verbalizing all of this was not helping. If anything, the absolute terror of it became that much fresher as she relived how the two clowns wrenched her hand out of her mother’s, with their big fake smiles and balloon animal distractions. They’d been employed by the hospital administration to keep her out of the way as the staff tried to care for her mother. She knew that as a rational adult. But the associations in her head with clowns and the way her mother slipped away more and more each day—that association wasn’t fading like the psychologists had said it would.
“And now you know the worst about me,” she informed him blithely.
Instead of responding, he dashed away the tears from her cheeks with one thumb, still clinging to her other hand as promised. His strength was amazing, and definitely not a quality she’d have put on her top twenty when it came to men. It was a bonus, particularly since he had twenty out of twenty on the list of what she’d have said would embody her perfect man.
What was she going to do with him?
Divorce him, most likely. Her heart lurched as she forced herself to accept the reality that all of his solid, quiet strength, the strength that was currently holding her together, wasn’t permanent. She didn’t get to keep things. The clowns were a great big reminder of that, one she needed to heed well.
“So what you’re telling me is,” he drawled, “that the worst thing about you is that you went through an incredibly traumatic series of events as a child and clowns were in the middle of it. And now they freak you out. Stop me when I get to the part where I’m supposed to cast the first stone.”
She rolled her eyes. Miraculously, the fact that he was cracking jokes allowed her to reel back the emotion and take a deep breath. “Yeah, okay. It’s not on the same level as adultery. But it’s still real and scary and—”
“Something we need to deal with,” he cut in, his gaze heavy on her with sympathy and tenderness. “And we will. You know what most people do with fears? They run really fast in the other direction. You started an extremely worthwhile charity while trying to deal with your fear. I don’t think I’ve ever been more impressed with a human being in my life than I am with you right now.”
Okay, not so much with reeling back the emotions then. The tears started up again as she stared at him. “It’s not working, though, in case you missed that part.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll try something else. What matters is that you’re amazing and you can’t erase that by throwing down your failures.”
She hadn’t done anything special. But he had. She felt hollowed out and refilled all at the same time, and Hendrix was the reason. That scared her more than anything else that had happened today. “I don’t think I can go back in there.”
Which wasn’t the biggest issue but the only one that she could reasonably be expected to address at this point. It was also the most critical.
Nodding, he squeezed her hand. “That makes sense. The problem is that you want to.”
How did he see the things inside her so clearly? It was as frustrating as it was extraordinary. It meant that she needed to watch herself around him. If she wasn’t careful, he’d pick up on the way her insides were going mushy as he sat with her in the corner of the children’s ward holding her hand when he had a multimillion-dollar business to run.
“The problem is that I need to,” she corrected. “This is my charity. Your mother is helping me enormously by bringing credibility to my organization.”
And it was doubtful she needed to explain that her credibility was lacking. He understood how scandals affected everything—regardless of whether you deserved it—far better than anyone else in her life.
“Here’s an idea,” he said casually. “Why don’t you be a clown?”