Pelican Court (Cedar Cove #3)(102)

Jon didn’t answer. She knew what he was doing—the same thing her father had done. Rejecting and hurting those he loved most.

“You never met my father, did you?” she said, struggling to keep the pain out of her voice.

“No…”

“You seem to have a great deal in common with him. He destroyed the people he loved, too.” Pride carried her to her feet and she stood. “If you’re going to leave, there isn’t anything I can say to stop you. The thing is, Jon, I love you, too. I didn’t want to love you and I tried everything to keep my emotions out of this, but…but it didn’t work.”

She took another deep breath. “I assumed it would be easy to have a baby on my own. Women do it all the time. But it’s hard, so much harder than I imagined. You were there for me and for Katie, and slowly, little by little, I realized my mistake. I began to see how important a father’s role is to a child. And…to a mother.” She wiped the tears from her cheek. “Perhaps this is what I deserve, but it sure as hell isn’t what Katie deserves. If you walk away from her now, you’re a bigger fool than I ever was.” She started to leave, but his words stopped her.

“All right, I’ll tell you.”

She frowned at him. “Tell me what?”

He briefly closed his eyes. “I’ve got a record, Maryellen. A prison record. You once asked me where I learned to cook. Well, guess what, it was behind bars. I couldn’t tell you for fear you’d take Katie away from me.”

That explained some, but not enough. She lowered herself to the bench again so they sat side by side. “I’d never do that!”

“I trusted someone else, someone I loved. I learned a painful lesson. It’s not one I’m eager to repeat.”

“Another woman?” she asked.

“No, my half brother.” He didn’t add any details, and this seemed all he was willing to divulge.

“Why are you telling me now?” she asked. If he was leaving, anyway, it seemed pointless to admit the truth.

He didn’t respond.

Maryellen refused to let the matter drop. “What made me so trustworthy all of a sudden, especially if you’re about to drop out of my life and Katie’s?”

He had no answer, but that didn’t surprise her. Jon rarely volunteered information about himself. It used to be a game she played when he came into the gallery—getting him to chat about himself, learning what she could about him. Even now she knew damn little.

“This might surprise you, but I suspected you might have done jail time,” she said. It was one of the endless possibilities she’d considered late at night, when she couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t one she’d taken all that seriously, just as she’d dismissed the possibility that he was on the run or an amnesiac or involved in some equally bizarre scenario. Another woman had seemed the most likely….

A scowl darkened his face. “Not the kind of question you want to ask, is it?”

“What was the charge?”

There was a lengthy silence. “I was convicted of dealing cocaine.”

“This is where your half brother comes in?”

Jon nodded. “The two of us were total opposites. He was the perfect son and I was the starving artist. The disreputable kid. My dad and stepmom favored Jim. He was ambitious, a businessman-in-the-making. He was everything they wanted in a son and I wasn’t.”

This was the first time he’d mentioned any family member other than his grandfather and the fact that Katie had been his dead mother’s name. His grandfather had left him the land on which Jon had built his house. “Where’s Jim now?”

His face tightened. “Dead.”

“Oh, Jon, I’m sorry.”

He nodded, but she saw him swallow hard. He set his foot against the back of the bleacher in front of them and slid his hands inside his pockets. “We lived together, and I was scraping by selling my pictures. I’d take my camera and hike into the forest and get as many shots as I could afford to develop. Jim moved in with me one summer and for a while it was great.”

Maryellen tucked her own hands in her pockets, but leaned closer to him, pressing her shoulder to his, needing to touch him.

“Jim was dealing cocaine. I swear on Katie’s life that I didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He was in college and his friends were the same upwardly mobile type he was.”

“He was selling to them?”

Jon nodded. “Fool that I was, I didn’t put two and two together. Jim always seemed to have money, always seemed to have whatever he wanted.”

“What happened?”

“One night the police came and dragged us both out of bed. They found the stuff. While I was screaming that it was planted and that we were innocent, Jim was selling me to the cops, saying it was mine.”

Maryellen placed her hand on his forearm, and he gripped her fingers with his own, squeezing hard.

“My brother testified against me, and my father claimed—well, he lied and said I was the one with the drug problem and that Jim had only recently moved into the house and couldn’t be involved.”

She closed her eyes, imagining that kind of betrayal. First his brother and then his father, too. “How could he do that?”

“Dad believed what Jim told him, I guess. He wanted to protect one of his sons—but not the other.”