“My brother was dead, damn it!” He kicked the tool belt across the floor, sending it crashing into an ottoman. “Dead! And you...you...”
“I what?” she demanded, her lungs constricting, old memories burning through her mind.
“You didn’t care.”
“Oh, Ben—”
He held up a hand, to cut off further conversation. “Forget it, Carlie. Let’s just start back at square one. You didn’t do anything. Okay? Not a damned thing!” But a tic jumped near his left eye and the muscles in the back of his neck grew rigid.
“Wrong.” She shook her head and thought hard, rolling back the years, allowing the blinding pain of the past to surface. For over a decade she’d kept it bottled up, tucked away in a dark corner of her mind, collecting cobwebs, but now she let all of her suspicions surface. “It was because of Kevin,” she said quietly, finally saying the words that she’d denied so long. “Somehow you blame me for what happened to him.”
Ben didn’t say a word, just stared at her as if she were Eve in the Garden of Eden, offering him forbidden fruit, trying to open his eyes to things better left unseen, forcing him to face the truth.
Shoving away from the couch, she picked up his heavy belt and walked the short distance that separated them, her footsteps muffled on the worn Oriental carpet. He never stopped staring at her and she only quit moving when the toe of her shoe nudged the tip of his worn sneakers. She dropped the belt at his feet. “You’ve blamed me, though I don’t know why. There was nothing I could do. Nothing either of us could do. We couldn’t have stopped Kevin from driving into that garage and letting the engine run.”
The air grew thick with cold. Rain pelted the windows and dripped down the sill into the house. Ben’s eyes narrowed a fraction and a deep anguish shadowed his eyes.
“Whether it was an accident or suicide, we weren’t to blame,” she said, wishing she could touch him and erase the pain that still lingered in his gaze.
“You don’t know that.”
Her heart ached for all the years they’d let the past keep them apart, for all the misunderstandings, the hatred and mistrust. “What could either of us have done?”
“I could have been there for him. I knew he was having problems,” Ben said gruffly. His throat worked and he stared at her with a venom so intense, she shuddered.
“Did you think he’d take his life?”
“No.”
“Neither did I.”
Ben snorted. “But I suspected he was in love with you and I didn’t care. Nadine even warned me, but I still took you out, bragged about it, even told him I thought I might marry you,” Ben said. His face was filled with self-loathing.
“Marry me?” she whispered, her heart aching.
“I’d thought about it. He’d tried to talk me out of it, claimed that you weren’t the marrying type—too interested in seeing the world.” He slammed the window shut and the room seemed suddenly still.
“Ben, I didn’t know—”
“You knew a lot, Carlie,” he said, his lips curling into a sneer of disgust, his gaze suddenly dark and menacing. He grabbed her by the shoulders, his eyes fierce, his expression haunted. “He loved you, Carlie. We both should have known it, but we didn’t want to. We were too wrapped up in each other to care about someone else. I rationalized everything—he was dating Tracy so it was okay for me to start seeing the girl that he couldn’t forget.”
“You’ve got it all turned around,” she said, but she remembered the day on the dock when Kevin had surprised her and professed his love. She’d conveniently forgotten how wounded he’d been.
“Do I?” Ben snarled, his face flushed in anger, his hands clenching and stretching in frustration. “Why didn’t you tell me about the letters, Carlie?”
“The letters?” she repeated. “What letters?”
He offered her a smile that chilled her to the bones. “You know the letters. The ones that Kevin wrote to you.”
“I didn’t get any—”
“Liar!” His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her upper arms. “We found some of the letters he hadn’t gotten around to
sending to you and they were pretty explicit about your relationship.”
“There was no relationship!” she said. “I’d broken up with him, if you can even call it that. There wasn’t even a reason to break up. We only had a few dates and I just told him I couldn’t go out with him anymore.”
“But those dates...they were powerful, weren’t they?” he said, his hold punishing.