Wild Like the Wind (Chaos #5)(19)

Well, it was now clear she paid closer attention to her accounts than he thought she did.

“Jean—”

“It’s because of me,” she spoke for him.

It was.

“Jean bug—”

“I’m here because I’ve lived here for fifty-three years, and it wasn’t like this when I moved in and I just don’t have it in me to move out. But more, I don’t have the money to do it. You’re here, in these apartments, in a bad part of town, right where you’re sitting now after making me breakfast, because of me. You’ll come back to make sure I have lunch. You’ll come back and help me get to bed. Boy your age doesn’t need a woman mine hanging like an albatross around his neck. You need a woman to love and children to raise, but more, you need a woman who loves you. I think it’s time we again discuss someone coming in to help, and it’s definitely time we discuss how much money you’re pouring into looking after me.”

“I don’t mind,” he said quietly.

“Well I do,” she retorted firmly.

All right.

He was done.

So done, he found himself maneuvered into sitting on the other side of a discussion they’d quit having two years ago.

“If I don’t, how can you?” he asked tersely. “Has it occurred to you that wakin’ up knowin’ I’d get a dose of you and havin’ something important to do in my day, that also bein’ lookin’ after you as well as stepping up for Keely and her boys, is the only thing feels right about me except my brothers’ givin’ me their love. But that last, I earned. The rest, those are gifts and you want me to give that up? Move out. Leave you to what, Jean? Some soulless company that offers care and you’re just a name on their daily list to tick off and they don’t give a shit about you?”

“Language, Shepherd,” she murmured.

Hound clamped his mouth shut.

“I despair every other morning when it’s time for you to help me shower,” she whispered.

“I don’t. I don’t give a sh … oot.”

She shook her head. “The beauty you have in you, motek, I don’t understand why you don’t offer that to a woman.”

“You don’t understand because the only woman I’d let have that is Keely, and her man’s been dead for seventeen years and she still loves him like the first day she laid eyes on him.”

Christ, why was he giving her this?

Maybe because he needed to say it out loud to remember it.

Her voice was filled with misery when she said, “Shepherd.”

“Don’t worry, Jean. I’ve lived with it so long it just is what it is because that’s all it can be.”

“And this visit of hers the other night?”

“She said somethin’ uncool to me and felt bad. She knows I’m hers and she lost one of the three most important things in her life, and the kind of woman she is, that important is important. I’m not that but she wasn’t feelin’ like losing me. So she made sure that won’t happen.”

“Is this … this … woman using you?”

He shook his head. “Can’t be used when you’re gaggin’ to be kept on that string.”

It was Jean’s turn to clamp her mouth shut.

She got over that quick.

“I’m not certain how I feel about this situation.”

“She loved him with a love that made even me wonder if there’s a God because only something divine could create that kind of beauty.”

She leaned toward him over her TV tray, her face earnest. “Please, find that for you.”

“It’s not out there for a man like me,” he educated her.

She sat back. “How can that be?”

For the most part, he was honest with her. That was what he gave his Jean.

But with some things, he held back.

Now, he put it out there.

“Because the man I am in here for you is not the man I am when I walk out that door. And the man I am for Keely and her boys is the man I need to be to replace the one they lost. But the man I am, there’s nothing divine about it.”

“You’re very wrong,” she stated irritably.

“I’m all kinds of right,” he shot back.

“You can’t be different men, Shepherd Ironside. You’re the same man who needs to be different for different parts of your life and the different people in it. You cannot tell me and make me believe that a single thing you’ve done in your life you didn’t have your reasons for doing it. So not in this house, Shepherd. Not sitting right across from me. You don’t talk yourself down looking right at me. The second man in eighty-nine years who I’ve given my love to, I didn’t give it foolishly. I know the man you are and it might not be divine but it’s blessed, because I’m blessed to have you here with me.”

Hound looked to her TV, his throat closing.

Jean didn’t care she lost his gaze.

She kept at him.

“Now, if this woman cannot see the blessing of you, then you need to find it in you to harden your heart to her and find one who does. She’s out there, Shepherd. She’s waiting. She’s lost and alone and she needs you in her life. So stop messing about and find her.”