Rough, Raw, and Ready (Rough Riders #5)(66)

Edgard whirled around and his face was as cold and hard as an icicle. “My family disowned me.”


Chassie automatically stepped back in the face of his rage. “How can they—”


“Evidently my mother was the only one who didn’t have an issue with my so-called perversion. Evidently she’d kept my stepfather and my brothers and sister in line. So I’d lived years with the lie of complete acceptance about my sexuality. The only reason my family”—he spit the word as if it tasted bad—“tolerated me was because of my mother’s threats.”


“What kind of threats?”


“Financial threats. See, my grandparents—my mother’s parents—were rich. She became their only child after my uncle Ramon was murdered when I was eighteen.”


“Oh, Ed, I’m so sorry.”


“Yeah, well, it gets worse. Turned into a big ugly political deal, no one knew if my uncle’s murder was a botched kidnapping and extortion attempt. My mother sent me to the U.S. to live with my real father’s parents for the summer in some misguided attempt at protection.”


“You knew them?”


“They’d kept in contact with me. Luckily my English was excellent. After I passed the Wyoming test as a real cowboy adept at ridin’ and ropin’, they took me to a rodeo. I was hooked. Especially after I began to win.” A ghostly smile appeared. “I stuck around for three months.”


“Did they know you were gay?”


“No.”


“When did you…you know…figure it out?”


“First time with a girl was at sixteen. First time with a boy was at eighteen. When I turned nineteen I told my mother which I preferred. She saw no reason to keep it a dirty secret and blabbed to my entire family. Everyone acted supportive. Or so I thought,” he added bitterly.

Her thoughts drifted momentarily to Dag. No one in their family would’ve granted him that false sense of security, even temporarily.

“I returned to the States when I was twenty-two to make a name for myself in U.S.

rodeo. Figured out PDQ how ‘real’ cowboys feel about gays so I stayed in the closet. Had a few random encounters in bigger cities. Was lonely as hell but making enough money to buy my own place in Brazil. I stuck it out for two years before I thought about going home.

“Then I met Trevor. Instantly fell hard, but somehow managed to keep that from him. I was just goddamn happy to be around him all the time. We traveled together as partners, relied on each other for everything until one day he began to look at me differently. And I knew he’d picked up on how I felt about him. I also knew it f*cked him up. By the end of the first year of our partnership we were lovers.

“And yeah, I harbored romantic delusions about him pulling up stakes and moving with me to Brazil. After another two years passed of us being together, but not really being together, I left him because I wanted his public acknowledgement of our relationship. Having it in private wasn’t good enough for me.”


Chassie bit her lip to keep from crying at the unfiltered anguish in his voice.

“Goddamn, I was so childish and needy about proving to everyone that he belonged to me. So stupidly self-righteous and so very, very wrong that I threw it away on a lie.”


“A lie?”


“A total f*cking lie.” Edgard punched the couch cushion, shocking Chassie and himself with his angry gesture. “Sorry. It’s just… About a year and a half after I returned home, my mother died in a car accident. In addition to losing the only person who’d understood me, my father— stepfather—told me his true feelings; he didn’t accept me as a gay man, never had, never would. I was perverted, an embarrassment to his name, his family, to God and the church. He expected me to leave and never return. Problem was, as the oldest male child I was set to inherit everything of my mother’s, which meant cutting out his children.”


“Your brothers and sister?”


“Yep. He bribed a government official and the verdict handed down decreed we had to sell the homestead that’d been in my family for seven generations.” He closed his eyes.

“I never once thought about cheating my siblings out of any money and they made me feel so…dirty for everything I was. Everything I thought they’d accepted about me. I lost my mother, my ancestral home, my family, and my…dignity.”


“Edgard—”


“The final cut was when my stepfather told everyone in my hometown selling had been my idea because I wanted to live in Sao Paulo with my male lover. I became a pariah. The church forbade me from even visiting my mother's grave.”


She couldn’t speak.

“So see. I know about difficult family issues. I’ve lost everything that ever mattered to me.”


Except Trevor.

Edgard didn’t say it; he didn’t have to.

Her heart seemed to shatter into a billion pieces. That’s why Edgard had come back.

Not to steal Trevor away, but to remind himself of something that’d been good in his life.

Or maybe he’d come back to cement his disillusionment that his time with Trevor hadn’t been the sunshiny rainbows he’d remembered?