Fade To Black

Pierce’s brows arched. “I’m glad I don’t have to take the responsibility then.”

Jay blew a trail of smoke from the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “What about your other responsibilities? You as anxious to dismiss those?”

“Meaning?”

“Jessica and Max. You left them high and dry five years ago. If it wasn’t for Jesse’s grit and determination, I’m not sure what they would have done.”

“You don’t have to remind me of my responsibilities to my wife and son. I’ll take care of them from now on.”

Jay crushed his cigarette in his saucer as he stared at Pierce. “You still don’t get it, do you? They don’t need you to take care of them. Jesse’s managed just fine without you. More than fine. The business you left behind is booming, thanks to her. This house is worth a small fortune, and Max, well, Max won’t even know you, will he?”

It was a reality Pierce had been trying to come to terms with since he’d stared into those wide, accusing eyes this morning. Max. How strange that Jessica had named him that after she’d fought him so hard about it. It gave Pierce a small thrill of happiness to know that even after he’d left, Jessica had still wanted to please him.

“Look.” Jay folded his arms on the table and leaned toward Pierce. “Let’s cut through the crap, shall we? This memory business may work with Jesse, but it won’t wash with me. I can recognize a man in trouble when I see one, and I’d say you, my friend, are definitely in trouble. You don’t have to tell me what, you don’t have to tell me how or when or who. All you have to tell me, Kincaid, is why? Why did you come back here?”

“This is my home.”

“Was your home.”

Brown eyes challenged gray. It gratified Pierce to see Jay glance away first. He’d always thought his brother-in-law a little too cocky, a little too self-possessed. Pierce could spot a phony when he saw one, but he’d never had the heart to tell Jesse just how one-sided her sibling devotion was.

“This is my home,” he said, feeling the warmth of anger stealing over him. “I don’t have to justify myself to you. I may owe Jesse an explanation, one I don’t have at the moment, but let’s get one thing straight. I don’t owe you a damned thing.”

The air buzzed with tension. Jay’s gray eyes glinted with steely anger as he half rose from his seat. The unspoken challenge lay in the air between them like a gauntlet thrown to the ground. Slowly Pierce stood up.

“What’s going on in here?”

Both male heads whipped around to find Jessica standing in the doorway, watching them with an expression that wavered between curiosity and disgust. Her assessing gaze went from one to the other as she did her own summation of the situation.

Jay spoke first. “I need to be shoving off, Jessica. But I don’t want to leave until I know everything’s all right here.”

Her expression softened as she smiled at her brother. “I’m okay. Thanks for coming over.”

Jay’s gaze returned to Pierce. “Can I drop you somewhere?” he asked bluntly.

The question struck Pierce like a physical blow. He was being asked to leave his own home. For one black moment, it was all he could do to curb the sudden rage hurtling through him. He turned to face Jessica who still hovered in the doorway. He tilted a brow in question.

Her gaze burned into Pierce’s until his heart started to pound. What was she thinking? he wondered. Did she still feel anything at all for him? It was impossible to think that for him only a moment ago they had been in love, happy, and now she might feel nothing at all for him except pity.

God help him, he could stand anything but that.

Jessica took a deep breath and released it as if she was gathering her courage for what she needed to say. Pierce’s own breath seemed suspended somewhere in his throat.

“This is your home, too, Pierce,” she said finally. “I can’t ask you to leave. Not when….” Her voice trailed off as she gazed at him, the gray of her eyes turning to mist. Pierce knew how he must look to her, and it made him cringe.

“Go on,” he said evenly.

Her gaze dropped. “Not when you obviously need a place to stay.”

“Jessica, for God’s sake, what do you think you’re doing?” Jay objected. “He can’t stay here. What about Max?”

“What about Max?” Pierce said in a deadly quiet voice that seemed to hold both brother and sister in thrall.

“My God, man, you have to know what this will do to him. He’s only five years old.”

“I’ll take care of Max,” Jessica said, and the firm note of resolve in her voice surprised Pierce. Once she would have turned to him to make such an important decision.

Five years, he thought again. Five years of his life gone in the blink of an eye. How much more was lost to him than just that time?

“I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” Jay muttered angrily as he pushed past them both and strode out of the kitchen.

Jessica chewed her bottom lip, a nervous habit Pierce remembered so well. It heartened him to know that at least some things hadn’t changed.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, then turned and hurried after her brother. Pierce hesitated a moment, then pushed through the door, too, distracted once again by all the changes Jesse had carried out on the house. Changes they had once planned to work on together.

Had she done all this by herself? he wondered as he walked through the formal dining room. The decor was elegant, but somehow the room left him cold. It was almost too perfect, he thought, remembering the house he’d grown up in. There was no life in it. No warmth. No love. It was a room that matched the hard chill in Jessica’s eyes.

He walked through to the living room and looked around. He liked this room better. The pictures of Max in here added a homey touch that somehow soothed him.

Jessica had walked her brother to the door, and now they both stood in the foyer, their furtive whispers attesting to the nature of their conversation.

Pierce crossed the hardwood floor to the fireplace and picked up one of the pictures of Max he’d studied so intently that morning. A baseball cap angled over the boy’s forehead as his brown eyes squinted into the sun. There was a rip in his shorts and a scab on one scrawny knee.

Pierce’s heart melted. He’d loved the baby Jesse had been carrying, and now he loved this little boy with an intensity that astounded him.

Jessica stood at the end of the sofa and watched Pierce. He didn’t look up, and she realized he hadn’t heard her come in. She watched him trace a finger gently along the photo, and the look of fierce possessiveness that came over his face shocked her. Her heart skidded with warning as her own defenses rose in reaction.

Pierce glanced up, and the expression in his eyes confirmed her deepest fears. When he spoke, his voice gave rise to new ones. Jessica trembled with dread as his gaze continued to hold hers.

“Where is he, Jessica? Where’s my son?”

Chapter Four

Jessica tried to keep her voice controlled. She didn’t want to give away her fear, didn’t want to appear weak or vulnerable even to Pierce. Especially to Pierce. “Max isn’t here,” she said, glancing away.

“Where is he?”

“He’s somewhere…safe.”

“Safe? That’s a strange term to use.”

Her eyes challenged him. “Is it?”

He lifted his brow, and the scar twisted it, giving him an almost sinister appearance. “Are you implying that I’m a threat to our son? Or to you?”

Jessica hesitated, then said, “You barely resemble the man I knew back then. You’ve obviously been hurt. Maybe you’re even in some sort of trouble. God knows what might have happened to you since you left. You’ve been gone for five years, Pierce. Five years. I don’t even know who you are anymore,” she finished in a whisper.

His voice lowered. “I’m your husband.”

“Technically,” she said, borrowing Jay’s term. Jessica took a deep breath and let it out, trying to calm her pounding heart. She walked over to the window and stared out into the darkness. “Can you even begin to imagine what this is like for me? All those years you were gone and not one word, not one clue, and now suddenly here you are, acting like nothing’s happened. Acting like you think…everything should be the same between us. It’s not. It’s not the same.” She turned and faced him. “It’ll never be the same again.”

His eyes close briefly. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s the truth. I don’t want to hurt you, but the sooner we face it, the better off we’ll both be.”

“My God, Jesse.” He spread his hands in appeal. “You’re acting like you think I left because I wanted to. And given your background, I guess I can understand that. My…disappearance—whatever you want to call it—must have seemed like the ultimate betrayal to you. You must have felt as though I had deserted you, too.”

“You can’t know how I felt,” she said, crossing her arms.

“No, I guess I can’t,” he agreed. “But one thing I do know. I didn’t leave you because I wanted to.”

Her chin lifted a fraction. “Then why did you leave me?”

“I’ve already told you,” he said helplessly. “I don’t know what happened.”

“You have no idea?”

Pierce hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “I have no memory of the past five years,” he finally said.

“It’s incredible,” she whispered. “So hard to believe.”

“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “It’s even hard for me to believe. So I guess I have to ask you, Jesse, given the circumstances, where does this leave us? Where do we go from here?”

Jessica made a futile gesture with her hand. “I don’t know. I think the first thing you should do is see a doctor, but beyond that…I just don’t know….” Her words trailed off as she glanced away. She couldn’t bear to look at him any longer. Couldn’t bear to see what the past five years had done to him. To her. “You need a place to stay for the time being. I won’t ask you to leave, Pierce. I…can’t.”

“Is it just pity you feel for me, then? I know how I look to you,” he said, with a derisive smile. “As you said, I’m hardly the man I once was.”

“That’s not what I said,” she flared out. “It has nothing to do with the way you look. At least not in the way you mean. It has everything to do with where you’ve been these past five years. What you’ve been doing. Why you left me in the first place.”

Her anger deepened as she forced herself to meet his dark gaze. Her voice grew shaky with emotion as she spread her hands in supplication. “Can’t you understand? Maybe you didn’t leave because you wanted to, but that doesn’t change the fact that you did leave me. I thought you were dead. All these years, I’ve mourned you, and now I find out it was all for nothing. It was all a lie.”

“You sound disappointed, Jesse.”

His observation startled her. Made her feel just a trifle uneasy about herself. Was she disappointed? Or was she just feeling hurt and confused? Angry and betrayed and…wronged. “I feel a lot of things,” she admitted. “Not the least of which is fear.”

“I would never hurt you.”

“You already have,” she said. “You have no idea.”

“But not intentionally. Never intentionally.” Pierce took a step toward her, but stopped when she flinched away. “You have to believe that, Jesse. I don’t know what happened five years ago. I don’t know where I’ve been, what I’ve done, why I couldn’t come back to you. I wish to God I did.”

He raised his hand to massage his right temple. His eyes closed for a moment as though he were experiencing excruciating pain. “It’s something I have to figure out. I have all these bits and pieces of memories floating around inside my head, and somehow I have to fit them all together again. I know none of this makes any sense to you right now. To me, either. But the one thing I do know is that I never stopped loving you.”

“How can you possibly know that?” she demanded. “If you have no memory of the past five years, how can you be so sure there wasn’t someone else?”

He lifted his gaze to hers. “Because there could never be anyone else. At least…not for me.”

It took Jessica a few seconds to register the note of accusation in his tone. The brown of his eyes deepened almost to black. His gaze was intense, probing, his voice a little too calm. Jessica felt a chill of apprehension as he said slowly, “Perhaps that should have been my first question. I’m almost afraid to ask it, though.”

Jessica glanced away guiltily.

“With good reason, it would seem. Is there someone else?” he persisted.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “No.”

“You don’t sound too sure.”

“There isn’t anyone else,” she repeated angrily. She tossed back her hair and eyed him defiantly. “But there could have been. And who would have blamed me? You were gone all that time. I didn’t know if you were dead or alive. For all I knew, you could have had another family somewhere else. You could have been in love with someone else. You could have forgotten all about me,” she said, feeling the sting of tears threaten her anger. “I had no reason to believe you’d ever come back. Why should I have waited for you?”

“Then why did you?”

Silence. Jessica’s heart pounded in her chest as his gaze held hers. His brown eyes softened, misted, looked at her the way he used to look at her, as if she was someone so very special to him. As if she was the only woman in the world for him. As if he couldn’t wait to take her in his arms and hold her. Dear God, how often she had thought about that look, how often she had prayed to see it again, just one more time.

But how could she trust it now? How could she trust her own emotions when memories of the past were so strong at that moment she could almost reach out and pluck one from the air between them?

She let her anger blaze to life again. “I didn’t wait,” she denied. “I was busy working, raising my son, providing a stable home for us both. I was busy growing up, learning how to make my own decisions and realizing that I had no one to rely on but myself. Look around you, Pierce. I did all this by myself. I didn’t wait for you. I’ve gone on with my life. Max and I are happy. We’re a family. We don’t need—” She broke off, realizing what she had almost said.

His brow arched upward, twisting slightly from the scar. “You don’t need me? That’s what you were about to say, isn’t it? You have changed, Jessica. I remember a time when you would never have tried to hurt me like that.”

Pierce’s face looked like a cold, hard mask. At that moment, he seemed more than ever like a stranger to her. A stranger who had shared her life once, who had helped create a son with her. A stranger who had walked back into her life just when she was beginning to feel good about herself again.

“Five years is a long time, Pierce,” she countered. “People change. I’ve changed. I’m not the same woman you left behind.”

“Yes,” he agreed quietly, “but I never would have imagined you could have changed that much.”

* * *

Jessica lay wide awake, staring at the ceiling, thinking how strangely quiet the house seemed without her son. She could hear the soft whir of the ceiling fan overhead, the chime of the Tompion grandfather clock down in the foyer, the rustle of leaves in the trees outside her window. If she listened closely enough, she could almost imagine she could hear the sound of Pierce’s breathing.

She turned her head and gazed at the side of the bed that had been his. She’d slept on the same side all these years, never giving it a second thought, even when Pierce’s would have been more convenient for getting up in the middle of the night with Max.

Had she unconsciously been waiting for Pierce to come back? Had she known all along, somewhere deep inside her heart, that he wasn’t dead? That he was alive…and still loving her?

Don’t, she told herself harshly. Don’t believe everything he says. How could he have loved her and left her like that? How could he have loved her and not gotten in touch with her all these years? How could he have loved her and forgotten all about her?

Maybe there was a perfectly logical reason to explain where he’d been all these years. Maybe he hadn’t left by choice, just as he claimed. Maybe he’d been in an accident and hadn’t remembered her at all until now.

Surprising how that thought gave her very little comfort. Her own husband couldn’t remember her? Couldn’t remember what they’d had together? Maybe because it hadn’t meant as much to him as it had to her, Jessica thought with a new flash of anger. Maybe because—

Oh, God, stop it! she commanded herself. What good did it do to go over and over all the possibilities in her head? Whatever had happened to Pierce didn’t change anything. Not really. Five years had gone by. Five years of her growing and maturing and taking charge of her own life. She hadn’t meant to hurt him earlier when she’d said she and Max didn’t need him anymore, but it was the truth, wasn’t it?

She’d learned everything there was to know about Pierce’s business, and it had flourished in the past few years. She’d redecorated the house to suit her own tastes, and the result was elegant and beautiful, if a little cold. She’d raised Max all by herself, with no help from anyone, and he was an adorable, well-adjusted, happy little boy.

Jessica’s life was ordered now. Completely secure. For the first time, she felt in control of her own destiny. She didn’t have to depend on anyone else for her security and happiness. She’d made a safe, stable life for herself and Max, and she wouldn’t let anyone, not even Pierce, threaten her peace of mind.

What right did he have to come back here now?

A little thread of guilt wove through her anger as Jessica punched her pillow, then turned her back on the empty side of the bed that had once been Pierce’s.

If only he didn’t look so hurt, so badly in need of someone to take care of him. She sniffed, telling herself she must be catching a cold.

If only he didn’t have those horrible scars to remind them both that the past five years hadn’t been kind to either of them. If only she didn’t have to wonder how he’d gotten them, about the pain he must have endured.

She tried to harden her heart at the rush of emotion that swept through her. She’d suffered, too, hadn’t she? She had her scars, too. She’d taken charge of her life and become her own person, but not without a price. She’d grown harder, colder, even bitter at times. She seldom laughed anymore, except with Max. It wasn’t a pretty image she drew of herself, she knew. Perhaps this change in character wasn’t one of her finer triumphs, but it was life. It was reality.

It was just the way things were now.

And Pierce, well…Pierce would learn soon enough that you can never go home again.

* * *

It was good to be home.

Now that he was back, Pierce didn’t intend to ever leave again.

He didn’t care what the hell the agency said. He’d paid his dues. Five years of his life gone, and Pierce had no idea what purpose they had served. What good he might have done.

Standing in the shadows of the backyard, he let his gaze roam over the familiar, yet changed, surroundings. The cherry trees he and Jessica had planted together had grown so tall, so thick and hardy. The flower beds were neatly tended, the grass freshly cut.

With a sharp pang of guilt, Pierce wondered if Jessica hired someone to come in regularly to do the chores that he’d once done. He’d always hated yard work, but now he found himself resenting yet another usurpation of his position here at home.

His home.

He sighed deeply. He only had to look at his reflection in the mirror to know that wherever he’d been in the past five years, it wasn’t a place he would have called home. The scars, the gauntness, the haunted look in his eyes suggested he’d been through hell.

He grimaced, remembering the first time he’d seen himself in the mirror. He certainly wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests, that was for damned sure. No wonder Max had been so afraid of him this morning.

Max.

Pierce still couldn’t believe he had a son.

He smiled into the darkness, recalling the little boy’s face, the dark hair, the brown eyes, the solemn expression. He might have been looking at his own mirror image thirty years ago, Pierce thought.

His smile disappeared, replaced by a brooding frown. He hoped the resemblance ended with the physical appearance. He’d hate to think his own son might be as unhappy and lonely as he’d been at that age.

But surely Max and Jessica had fun together. Surely Jessica spent time with their son, saw to the special needs of a little boy, made him feel wanted and loved—unlike Pierce’s own parents who hadn’t had a clue how to raise a child, he thought bitterly.

A boy should be allowed to have friends over, Pierce thought, remembering the hours he’d spent alone as a child. A boy needed to be able to get dirty and roughhouse once in a while without being reprimanded for it. Surely Jessica understood all that. But as Pierce stood there gazing into the darkened backyard, an image of the immaculate interior of their home flashed through his mind.

The house was beautiful, but so different from the way it used to be. He missed the casual mix-and-match furnishings they’d begun their married life with. Jessica had gotten rid of all the old stuff. He wondered if she’d even kept the antique pine bed they’d found together at an estate sale.

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