Irresistible (Cloverleigh Farms #1)(37)

I raised my brow. “Should I be worried about you?”

Laughing, she gathered her clothing and headed for her room. “No. I’m not a huge drinker, but I do like a little whiskey by the fire now and then.”

“Whiskey by the fire it is.” I looked around and noticed the fireplace at the far end of the room. Scooping up my clothing, I threw on my underwear, jeans, and shirt and wandered into the kitchen.

By the time Frannie came out of her bedroom, dressed the same way she had been before but with her hair loose around her shoulders, I’d poured two glasses of whiskey and lit the gas fireplace, which lacked the romance of real wood in my opinion, but it warmed the room.

She smiled as she joined me on the couch, tucking her legs beneath her. “This is nice.”

I took her glass from the little coffee table and handed it to her. “It is. Much nicer than what I was heading home to, which was an empty house.”

She took a sip of her whiskey. “So the girls are with your sister?”

“Yeah. Jodie. She’s got a daughter a year older than Millie and a son Felicity’s age. They all get along really well. I wish they lived closer.”

“I wish Sylvia lived closer too. I hardly know my nieces and nephew.” She smiled sadly.

“How is Sylvia? I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”

“Good, I guess. I don’t talk to her much, either.” Frannie tipped up her glass again, then stared into it. “That’s something I’d like to change, though. I should reach out to her. Are you close to your sister?”

I nodded. “Pretty close. I mean, we’re both busy with kids and jobs, but we were tight growing up. She’s only seventeen months older than me. And she’s married to a great guy. They make it look easy.”

She looked up at me, her expression curious. “Can I ask what happened with your marriage, or is it too personal?”

I exhaled and tossed back some more whiskey. “My marriage was tough from the start. Carla got pregnant with Millie right before I was set to deploy, and we got married fast before I left. We’d only known each other for a few months.”

“Marines, right?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“What made you join?”

“I was kinda lost for a while in my early twenties, didn’t really know what I wanted to do yet. I’d dropped out of college because I was too immature to handle the responsibility and my parents told me they weren’t going to pay for me to fuck around anymore.” I took another drink. “I needed to burn off some energy and I wanted to get out of here. One day I decided being a Marine sounded kind of badass. So I signed up.”

“And you were in Afghanistan?”

I nodded. “Twice. And I was in Iraq too. So I was gone a lot during the early years of our marriage, while the older two girls were little. That didn’t help. Then, when I got out, I wanted to move back up here where I’d grown up, and she wanted to move to Georgia, where she was from. She said she’d agree to come here if I agreed to have another baby. So we did both.” I paused to take a drink. “But it didn’t matter where we lived. We never really made each other happy. Eventually resentment set in.”

“Resentment over what?” She took another small sip.

“Oh God, you name it. She resented feeling like I’d married her out of a sense of duty more than anything else. She resented being left alone with kids while I was deployed. Then when I came home and struggled to readjust to civilian life, she resented me for not bouncing back faster. She also felt abandoned again because I worked during the day, managing a hardware store, and went to classes at night so I could finish my degree.”

Frannie nodded slowly and took another sip. “How’d you end up at Cloverleigh? Did Sylvia get you the job here?”

“Yeah. I’d finished my degree and was looking for a better job, and I ran into her one day when she was home. She introduced me to your dad.”

“Did things get better once you had a good job?”

“Not really. We fought all the time, and when we weren’t fighting, there was a lot of angry silence.”

“That must have been awful.”

“It was.” I frowned. “I tried to make it work, I really did—especially for the kids’ sake. But nothing I did or said was right, and I got tired of being the bad guy. Eventually I stopped trying, and she ran off with someone else.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “Don’t be, not for me, anyway. It’s not like Carla and I had some great love affair. But our kids deserved better. I feel horrible every day that I failed them.”

“You didn’t fail them, Mack.” She put a hand on my leg. “Sometimes marriages don’t work out. It wasn’t your fault.”

I’d heard the same from my sister, from Woods, from my parents … but I couldn’t convince myself of it. Rationally I knew it wasn’t fair for Carla to blame me for the divorce, but her words had a way of eating at me deep down. Maybe I hadn’t loved her the way I was supposed to. Maybe I didn’t know how.

Frannie swirled the amber liquid in her glass. “The girls don’t talk about their mother much.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. They missed her a lot at first, but since she’s only seen them a couple times since, the separation anxiety has eased. I’m sure somewhere in each of them is a gaping wound and a permanent fear of abandonment, but day to day they seem okay.”