All the Pretty Poses (Pretty 2)

CHAPTER THRITY-NINE - Reese

Each time I wake up, I glance down to make sure Kennedy is still with me. And she is. Curled up in my arms, sleeping like she hasn’t slept in days. Which, if her last few days were anything like mine, she probably hasn’t.

Maybe this means things are getting better. Maybe we can finally have what we should’ve had all those years ago.

As I close my eyes and drift back to sleep, my last thought is to wonder when she’s going to tell me about the baby.

CHAPTER FORTY - Kennedy

My mind wakes not to the ultimate peace and happiness that it should. No, it wakes to the knowledge that now the only person who hasn’t come clean is me.

There’s something I have to tell Reese, something that he has a right to know. My intentions were good in keeping it to myself all this time—I thought only of Reese and how it would affect him—but now I wonder if I made a huge mistake.

There’s only one way to know for sure…

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - Reese

I decided days ago that I’d wait for Kennedy to tell me about the baby. I don’t understand why she wouldn’t have told me already, but I have to give her the benefit of the doubt. So I’m going to give her time. Well, at least as long as I can before others start to find out.

I asked Bingham to keep the information to himself until I was back in the states. I probably have until tomorrow before he tells my father who Mary Elizabeth is. But I’m going to tell him first. I want him to hear it from me. And I want him to know that there’s no reason for him to address it any further. Legally or otherwise. I want Kennedy to have half of Bellano. I would’ve wanted our daughter to have it all.

I tried to reach my father earlier, but he wouldn’t take my call. So here I am, driving out under the guise of getting lunch to try again, but with no luck. It’s when I pull up outside Kennedy’s townhouse that I realize why he wouldn’t take my call. He had plans of his own. His car is parked directly beside where mine was earlier.

I grab the bags of food from the passenger seat and I make my way to the door, cautioning myself to remain calm. That’s hard to do when it comes to Kennedy, though. The thought of anyone…anyone…giving her grief makes my blood boil.

When I walk in the door, they’re facing each other right inside the entryway. Kennedy is holding a manila envelope and her face is unnaturally pale.

Her eyes dart to me and I see them fill with a mixture of regret and fear and so much sadness that it makes my gut clench and my temper rise. Toward my father.

“What’s going on? What the hell are you doing here?” I ask Henslow Spencer.

“Reese,” he says, surprise evident in his tone and expression. “I was just…I was…we were…” My anger escalates as my father fumbles for some plausible explanation as to why he’s here, as he fumbles for a lie. “I was just catching up with Kennedy.” I see him glare at her as if daring her not to go along with his fabrication.

Kennedy casts her eyes down and squeezes them shut before she speaks. “No, you weren’t. I’m not keeping this from him any longer,” she says quietly.

My heart is pounding as Kennedy walks slowly to stand before me, her head bowed, her chin trembling. I know what she’s going to tell me. I already know what is weighing so heavily on her right now. But knowing it and hearing it from her, listening to her say the words, finding out the truth from her lips…those are totally different things.

“What is it, beautiful?” I prompt her, setting down the bags of food, to lift her chin.

She swallows hard and it kills me a little to imagine what she must be going through right now, what she must be feeling.

“Reese, that time in the woods…all those years ago…I know you used protection, but something must’ve happened.” She looks up into my face, her heart in her eyes, tears shivering on the edge of her bottom lids. “I got pregnant.”

I don’t have to feign the surge of emotion that rushes through me or the way my breath catches in my lungs. But it’s for that reason, for the pain that I feel watching her relive it to tell me, that I admit to her that I already knew. I can’t watch her do this. Not for me. Not when I can help ease her agony. “I know.”

Confusion enters her eyes. “You know? How?”

“A few days ago, I got a call from Malcolm’s lawyer telling me who Mary Elizabeth Spencer was. She was named in the will, so he was trying to find her.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Guilt, not anger floods her expression.

“I knew you’d tell me when you were ready.”

“Oh, God, Reese!” she cries, burying her face in her hands. I wrap my arms around her shoulders and pull her to me, wishing there was something I could do to help her, to take away her torment.

“Shhh, it’s okay, baby. Please don’t cry.”

“I wish I’d told you sooner,” she moans, sniffing back more tears.

“I knew you’d tell me when the time was right.”

“Reese, I’m so sorry,” she says, lifting her head to look into my eyes.

“Don’t be. I just wish I’d been there for you. To see your belly grow with our baby. To hold her before she died,” I confess, my own bitter remorse choking my throat.

“I wanted to tell you, but they wouldn’t let me.”

My pulse thunders to a stop before it starts back up twice as fast. “Who is ‘they’? Kennedy, who wouldn’t let you tell me?”

She turns to look at my father. “Your father and Hank made some kind of a deal for money. He agreed to pay Hank if Hank could keep the pregnancy quiet. That’s why Hank pulled me out of school and kept me locked up in the groundskeeper’s cottage. He wouldn’t let me leave. He turned off the phones and hid the car keys at night. He was furious, I guess because someone else had gotten me pregnant and he couldn’t play his games anymore. I think he wanted the baby to die right from the beginning. He barely let me eat and I got really sick. The two times that I tried to leave when I thought he was gone, he caught me and hit me until I couldn’t stand up. After the second time, he wouldn’t let me out of my room unless he was there. He kept me like that until I went in to labor, but it was too early.

“By the time we got to the hospital, they couldn’t stop it. She was too tiny to make it, too weak to breathe on her own. She died two days after she was born.” Kennedy bursts into sobs so deep, they sound like they’re coming from somewhere in her soul rather than her physical body. “Your dad came to visit me. He told me that it would ruin your life to know about her, that if I loved you I would never tell a soul. So I didn’t. I never told anyone. Because I loved you.”

Over Kennedy’s head, I glare at my father. I’ve never felt more hatred for another human being in my entire life. It burns in me like a hellish fire.

“How could you?” I growl.

“I did what I had to do for you, son. For your future. You wouldn’t be where you are today if you’d stayed with her. She was tarnished goods.”

Tarnished goods?

Ice. My heart pumps one sudden burst of icy cold blood through my veins before it bursts into flames. An inferno traveling through my body.

“What did you say?”

“You think I didn’t keep an eye on you? You think I didn’t know what you were doing? And who you were doing it with? I knew all about her. Her perverted father, too. I saw the way he looked at her, touched her when he thought no one was around. He couldn’t stay away from her. That’s how he found out about you. He was following her and saw you two in the woods. He was filth. I would never let something like that touch you, touch our family.”

I see red.

I release Kennedy and I lunge at my father, grabbing him by the throat and throwing him against the wall, intent on choking the despicable life out of him, intent on watching existence drain right out of him. “You knew? You knew what he was doing to her and you did nothing? You did nothing?”

My father makes a sputtering sound, his face turning bright red, fading into a dusky purple the longer I cut off his air supply.

“You make me sick! You are every bit as much a monster as he was!” I shake him, slamming him harder up against the wall as he claws at my hand, trying to loosen my grip. “I hate you! I hate that I share your blood!” I squeeze harder.

“Reese! Reese no!” Kennedy cries, pulling at my arm. “Let him go! He’s not worth it.”

I hear her words, but I don’t care. To me, taking his life is worth it. It’s a service. I’m doing the world a favor by ending him.

“Reese, if you hurt him, we won’t have a future. It’ll ruin your life. Please don’t hurt him. Please don’t let him take anything else from me.”

The pain in her voice penetrates the haze of my fury. I see the consciousness dwindling from my father’s eyes and I know how close I am to killing him.

But I think of Kennedy.

Always Kennedy.

I release him and back away.

My father slides bonelessly to the floor, gasping for air and holding his beet-red throat.

“I swear to all that’s holy, if you ever, ever come near her again, I’ll kill you. I’ll drop you where you stand and bury your body where no one will ever find it.” He neither moves nor speaks. “Do you hear me?” I shout, bending to scream into his ear.

My father raises hate-filled eyes to glare into mine. We stare at one another for a few seconds and I see the instant that my sincerity sinks in. A wary light flickers in his cold eyes and I know that he realizes that I’m as serious as I’ve ever been about anything. I just pray that he’s smart enough not to test me. Because he will lose. He will lose everything if he crosses me. I’d give my life for her, even if it means taking someone else’s.

Finally, he nods.

“Now get out,” I say, dragging him to his feet and throwing him toward the door. “Get out!”

I watch him open the door and stagger through it. It takes all my self-control not to kick his ass onto the walkway and make him bleed, but Kennedy asked me not to hurt him. So I won’t. Instead, I shut the door, shut the door on my father and that part of my life.

I turn to gather Kennedy into my arms and I let her cry. My chest feels heavy. Crushed, like I’ve suffered a great trauma to it. I hurt for her, for all the things she’s suffered, for all the time we’ve lost and for the baby that I never even got to see.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - Kennedy

I never considered how much it might hurt me to have to tell Reese about Mary Elizabeth. Or how much it might hurt him to hear it. The look on his face when he finally turned to me after coming to blows with his horrible father was agonizing to see. However, it was just another reminder that, deep down, Reese is nothing like that man. Henslow Spencer might’ve steered Reese in one direction or another, but not even his evil manipulation could kill the wonderful soul that Reese was born with. It just delayed its appearance by a few years. In a way, that almost makes it sweeter. It certainly makes me thankful that I’m still around to see it. I wouldn’t have missed this Reese for the world.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - Reese

Waking with Kennedy in my arms is the only solid, real thing that I feel when I open my eyes. I’ve always known that my father was a bastard, but I guess I never knew just how much of a bastard.

I feel overwhelmed by wrongs that need to be righted, by mistakes that need to be rectified, by apologies that need to be made. But how? How can I go back and fix things that happened so long ago?

Kennedy stirs against me. She’s my first priority. Making things right with her. Making things right for her.

I turn onto my side, pulling her into the curve of my body and pressing my lips to one bare shoulder. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” comes her hoarse reply. I can hear her smile, though. Gone are the tears. I just need to make sure they stay gone. After today…

“Can we talk?” I ask.

I feel her stiffen. “Of course.”

“I know this might be hard for you, but I need to work all this out. Will you tell me about the baby?”

I feel as much as hear her sigh. “Oh, Reese, she was beautiful. For the hours that she lived, she was the sweetest baby in the world. She had your hair, dark and a little wavy. A head full of it from the moment she was born. Her little hands and feet were the most precious thing I’ve ever seen. And the way she fit in my arms when I got to hold her…even for those few minutes…”

I can feel her anguish. It’s different than mine, but I feel it nonetheless.

“Where is she buried?”

“At Bellano,” she sniffs. “Near the cottage. Hidden”

“Malcolm never knew?”

“I never told anyone. I can’t be sure who Hank told. Malcolm found out about her somehow. He might’ve known where she was buried.”

I hesitate to ask this of her, but I’ll need her help if the grave is that hard to find. “Would you mind if we go visit her?”

She turns in my arms to look up into my face, her pale green eyes glassy with unshed tears. “No, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

The way she presses her lips to mine, like she’d rather kiss me than to take her very last breath, tells me that this will mean as much to her as it will to me.

It’s when we get to the old groundskeeper’s cottage that I begin to wonder if I might’ve been mistaken.

Kennedy gets quieter the closer we get to the place where she spent such difficult years. When I pull to a stop in the gravel drive that approaches the house from the rear, I hear her take a deep breath and let it out slowly.