Only Yours (Fool's Gold #5)(57)

His cell phone rang.

He didn’t want to answer it. For once, he didn’t want to be called to the hospital for an emergency, didn’t want to help or heal or… He swore and pushed the talk button.

“Bradley.”

“You sound grumpy,” a cheerful Alistair said.

Simon relaxed. “I’m busy. Go away.”

Alistair chuckled. “Ah, yes, the ever present American overexuberance. Who is she?”

He glanced at Montana, who wasn’t bothering to pretend she wasn’t listening. “Someone special.”

“A girl?”

“A woman.”

“Better and better,” Alistair told him. “Would I like her?”

“Yes, but you can’t have her. I’m hanging up now.”

“Give her a kiss for me.”

“Not a chance.”

“A friend of yours?” Montana asked when he’d hung up.

“Yes. Alistair. I’ve known him for years. He’s a surgeon, as well. We’ll be in Peru together.”

He drew her close and kissed her. “He’s handsome, witty and British. You’d like him.”

“I like you better.”

He kissed her again, released her and reached for the wine. “Your mother came to see me earlier.”

Montana froze, her eyes wide. “Why?”

“She brought me food.”

“Oh. Good. She’s like that. You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“No.”

“Not that I mind her knowing. Sort of. I don’t know. The whole sex-parent-child situation confuses me. I don’t want to know if she’s doing it, and I suspect she feels the same way about me.”

“I didn’t tell your mother what we’d done.” He poured red wine into two glasses, then handed her one.

“I don’t usually drink wine at three in the afternoon.”

“I wish I could say the same,” he joked.

“Ha. I knew you were the bad boy type.”

“Not until I met you. I was pretty boring and studious as a kid.”

She sank onto the sofa. “I guess I need to tell you something.”

She sounded worried. That should have concerned him, but this was Montana. Nothing she could say would shock him.

He sat across from her and leaned forward. “Go ahead.”

“I know what happened to you. The scars, I mean. Someone told me.”

He’d been expecting some sort of confession, not this. His first reaction was embarrassment. No one liked admitting they had been so unlovable as a child that their own mother had set them on fire. Only there wasn’t a “them.” There was him.

“I was a smart kid. Scary smart. I never fit in. Skipping a lot of grades meant I was always the youngest in the class. That didn’t help either.”

He leaned back on the sofa. “My mother wasn’t one who enjoyed working for a living. She preferred to find a man to support her. Something that wasn’t so easy with a freaky kid around. When I was eleven, her boyfriend was kind of a weasel. I don’t know exactly what he did for a living, but I’m sure it was illegal.”

He took a sip of the wine, more as something to do than because he wanted to taste it. “He complained that I was always staring at him, which wasn’t true. When I was home I knew to keep my head down. One day they had a big fight and he walked out. On the way he said I was the main reason he was leaving. My mother was already drunk and she started screaming at me. Crying and screaming.”

He kept telling the story as if it belonged to someone else, as if relating a movie premise. He didn’t want to remember that this had happened to him.

“She threw a couple of things across the room. My schoolbooks, I think. I went to leave but she grabbed me by the front of my shirt and shoved me hard. She told the police that she didn’t mean for me to fall in the fire, but she did. There was no screen, nothing but burning logs.”

Despite his best intentions, the memories returned. The split second of disbelief followed by searing pain. Pain that exploded, pain that was unendurable. He remembered screaming and scrambling, trying to get away, begging her to make it stop. And when he managed to crawl out, she pushed him in again.

The rest of it was a blur. It was a cold day and when he managed to get outside, still screaming, he threw himself into a snowbank. But the cold didn’t help. Nothing helped. He screamed and screamed until the sirens came. He remembered men surrounding him, telling him he would be all right. Even then, he’d known they were lying.

“I was in the hospital for a long time,” he continued, sparing her the worst of the details.

“Did you ever see her again?”

“No, she went to prison. She died there.” He shrugged. “By then it didn’t matter. I lived at the hospital. The doctors and nurses were my family. I had a lot of surgeries. For reasons I can’t explain, my hands were untouched. Within the first year I realized I wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon. I wanted to help kids like me.”

Montana set down her wine and crossed to him. She knelt on the floor in front of him and put her hands on his thighs. “Didn’t the doctors and nurses always leave?”

“Don’t make it more than it was.”

He knew where she was going. That because the people he cared about left, he left as well.