Unattainable (Undeniable, #3)(84)

“I know what you think of me, Tegen,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know you think I’m a club whore.”

My eyes went wide. “No!” I protested but my mother quickly put her fingers against my mouth.

“Shh,” she whispered. “It’s well past time you knew the whole story. Maybe if you’d known all along…” She trailed off and shook her head.

“I didn’t love your father,” she continued. “I tried to, but he wasn’t just physically absent from us, he was emotionally gone as well. When I met Jase… Well, Jase started out as a distraction, something that made me feel like a woman that was actually wanted.

“We were both married, both unhappy with our marriages. I knew he wasn’t faithful to me but initially I didn’t care. I was happy with what he gave me but…eventually it wasn’t enough anymore and I demanded that if he refused to leave Chrissy, other than her, he be with only me. In return, he wanted me to leave your father. He wanted to take care of me and with every request, every demand for more, I fell more and more in love with him.

“Deep down, I knew he was never going to leave Chrissy, but that didn’t mean I never stopped wishing he would.”

I blew out a large breath of air. I already knew all of this; I’d figured it out on my own over the years, but hearing her say the words, trusting me with all of this, made me hate her a little less for some of the decisions she’d made. Decisions that hadn’t just affected her but me as well.

“Hawk was an accident,” she continued. “Jase had been on the road for nearly two months, I was drunk and sad, I barely remembered it. But he came to me again the next night and when I said no, he blackmailed me.”

My mouth fell open. He what? He f*cking what?

“I will kill him,” I bit out. “I will f*cking—”

“Tegen!” she snapped. “Watch your damn mouth! Let me finish talking!”

Breathing hard, I pressed my lips together. Maybe hearing this wasn’t going to be the best thing for me. Planning a homicidal rampage through the club was probably not the best idea.

“I won’t get into specifics,” she said. “But yes, he blackmailed me. He said if I didn’t agree to being with him again, he was going to tell Jase what happened.”

I closed my eyes to try to calm my quickly rising rage. How could she let these men walk all over her like this? For f*cking years? Why? She was a smart woman, she was beautiful, she could have taken me and just left, we could have made a life somewhere else!

“Of course I was terrified of Jase finding out what had happened so I agreed…” She trailed off, her eyes going glassy, remembering, watching something only she could see.

“It was hard,” she whispered tearfully. “The first few times. Being with a man who wasn’t Jase, but…”

“But f*cking what?” I gritted out.

“I fell in love with him,” she finished listlessly.

I gaped at her. “You fell in love with a man who blackmailed you into f*cking him?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Do you always have to be so crude? You sound like the men around here!”

“I grew up here,” I shot back.

“Tegen, I don’t know how to explain this to you in a way you’re going to understand, but yes, I fell in love with him. He was different from Jase. He didn’t want to be with anyone but me. And the way he spoke to me, the way he was with me… He was willing to give up everything for me. The club, the boys, even Deuce. Nobody had ever loved me like that. Nobody had ever put me first. Especially not Jase.”

“Then why didn’t he?” I demanded. “If he loved you so much, and you loved him, why didn’t he just come clean, get tossed on his ass, and take us away from here?”

I watched as more tears formed in her eyes and spilled over.

“I never told him I loved him,” she choked out. “I was afraid of myself at that point, my betrayal to both of them, not knowing who to choose, not wanting to hurt either of them but at the same time, selfishly not wanting to give either of them up. It was all my fault, Tegen, getting shot and Chrissy going to jail, leaving those three girls without their mother. Jase is a wreck now, and Hawk…when he’s not with us, he lives alone. All the time, alone. And it’s all my fault.”

She broke down then, sobbing silently, tears flowing freely down her cheeks.

I grabbed her shaking hands and held them both inside my larger ones.

“Mommy,” I whispered, my own tears falling, my heart breaking for her. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

She hadn’t. I knew that now. She’d been stuck in a loveless marriage, in an impossible situation, and had tried to follow her heart. Had she made some bad decisions? Yes. But my God, she had been so young, younger than I was now when this had all begun.

“Shit just…happens.”

My mother’s eyes met mine and surprisingly a small smile formed on her lips.

“Which brings me back to my original point,” she said gently. “Your shit, Tegen. ZZ and Cage. You’ve been doing well, considering, and I haven’t wanted to rock the boat, but you of all people can’t keep your feelings bottled up forever. Let’s start by why you never told me about ZZ.”

My eyes dropped to the console between us. “Because you didn’t remember him,” I muttered. “So, what was the point?”