“I told you the point already,” Violet said, her irritation ratcheting up a notch. “He wants to get me back in your life so you’ll continue to fund all of his projects. My face in front of yours will be a nice little reminder of what he wants. This is all just more maneuvering from him.”
“Mmm. You sound angry. He wasn’t a very good father to you, was he?”
She sighed. “Are we going to talk about this now?”
“What’s wrong with now? Was I keeping you from your sleep?” Damn it, now he was aiming that lethal smile at her again, as if they were sharing a secret.
“No,” she snapped, her tone a little more brusque than it should have been. Violet straightened in her chair again. “But of the two of us, you’re the only one who seems to have pleasant memories of him.”
“I don’t recall you hating him that summer—”
“That was a fluke,” she interrupted. She knew exactly how she felt about her father, and didn’t need anyone else reminding her. “That was back when I still thought I could get him to care about me. I learned my lesson and didn’t make that mistake again.”
“I find it hard to believe he didn’t care about you at all,” Jonathan said in a quiet voice. “In fact, I find it almost impossible to conceive of anyone willfully disliking you.”
She squirmed in her seat. Surely she’d mistaken the heat in his tone. It was her own imagination running away from her. “My father cared about one person and one person alone. Himself. Everything he did was to further his own ambitions. He destroyed my mother with his neglect.”
Jonathan tilted his head, regarding her. “Dr. DeWitt never talked about your mother.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why?”
“Well, what’s there to talk about?” Violet rested her head against the back of the chair and tried to think of her mother without tears in her eyes. It was surprisingly difficult; all her lingering memories of Connie DeWitt involved her depression, her drinking, and how it had affected Violet. “She married him when she was twenty and he was fifty. My mom was one of his students, back when he still taught at the university. She was young and pretty and totally in love with him. He was, well . . . He was an old perv.”
Jonathan didn’t laugh.
Violet shrugged and went on. “They had me a few years later, and pretty much after that, my dad grew more and more famous, and the more famous he got, the less he came home. He drove my mother to depression, and when the drugs didn’t work, she drank herself into a stupor. She cried over everything.” Her throat went dry and she thought of her lonely childhood, full of dark rooms and tiptoeing quietly through the living room because Mom was passed out drunk on the couch. At least when Mom was asleep, she wasn’t weeping. The weeping was worse than anything. “My father would show up a few months later and everything would be great for about a day or two. Then they’d start fighting, my mother would cry and get depressed all over again, and then my father would leave as soon as he could get out the door.”
“I’m guessing that’s why it’s so hard for you to trust people.”
She gave him a sharp look, her hands twisting in her lap. But there was no judgment in Jonathan’s gaze, no reproach, just that wicked intensity she found so enthralling. Like she was a puzzle he’d put aside for ten years and had decided to solve again. Except she didn’t need solving, or saving. She was doing just fine on her own. “I’m sure my father seemed like a paragon to you, but he was only good to people who could get him what he wanted. The rest of us, he just didn’t give a crap about.”
“I never knew,” he said softly.
“That’s because I never let anyone know that it bothered me,” Violet confessed, and was surprised to hear those words coming out of her own mouth. How many years of therapy had it taken for her to get there? Violet knew she wasn’t good at sharing. Hell, she sucked at it. She expected everyone around her to come after her with an agenda.
No wonder she’d assumed the worst about Jonathan.
You don’t know that it’s not true, she chided herself. Still, she kept thinking about his days-long drinking binge and how upset he’d been when she’d attacked him. Drinking yourself into a stupor wasn’t the action of a happy person. She knew that from experience with her mother. You drank to forget the world.
Maybe she’d withheld too much of herself from him once upon a time.
Maybe it wasn’t entirely Jonathan’s fault that he hadn’t come after her. Maybe she hadn’t made her feelings clear enough. Hell, maybe she hadn’t been clear enough about the baby. At nineteen, dancing around the topic of marriage and family and then sending a note had seemed obvious. Ten years later, it just seemed childish. Maybe she hadn’t let him in long enough to have him see the real girl underneath all the armor, the scared, lonely pregnant teenager who just wanted a family of her own that wouldn’t drink or disappear on her.
She bit her lip. God, she hated thinking about the past. Violet glanced back at Jonathan. “So . . . how have the last ten years treated you?”
“They’ve been lonely.”
She knew why. He said he’d missed her. It made her . . . uncomfortable. And also breathless and excited, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. And angry at herself for being breathless and excited. Violet waved a hand. “Other than that, I mean.”
“I’ve been busy with projects. The first two years after I got out of college, I spent getting the car company back on its feet. It mostly took some shuffling of management and some new ideas.”
“Now you’re being modest,” she told him. She’d read the Time magazine articles about how his creative ideas and smart investments had turned Lyons Motors around and made them a force to be reckoned with.
He shrugged. “It’s just work. It’s not where my heart is. As soon as Lyons Motors could run itself, I started traveling.”
“Traveling?” she asked, a touch wistful. Once upon a time, she’d wanted to travel as much as he had. “Where did you go?”
A flash of real pleasure crossed his face, and her body reacted to see that. “Where haven’t I gone?” Jonathan said, and to her surprise, he got up out of his chair and sat down on the seat next to her own. She started to protest until he pulled out his tablet computer and began to show her photos of his travels.