Page 79 of Slow Burn
She wasn’t ready for the heart-stuff yet. Fear of rejection steered her elsewhere. “I heard you’ve been trying to get locals to sell off their land to your developers.”
He went still, light catching in crystalline blue eyes—the same eyes she remembered wet with tears after his last argument with her mama.
“Is this your way of asking if I set the house on fire?” He twisted the shiny gold band on his left ring finger.
A coldness seeped into her stomach. “Did you?”
He didn’t react or seem offended. Just kept spinning that ring, his head bowed low. “No.”
That one-word answer landed hard, flat. Honest. And it sent a measure of relief through her.
“Do you think I started the fire that killed your mama?” His voice held resignation.
Emotion came back full-force, and she blinked several times, hating that this was a conversation she had to have with her own father. “Sometimes I wonder.”
He didn’t miss the present tense and lifted his head. “I wish I could say having her gone made things easier.”
The words seared the space between them, and she stepped forward, lip curling as vitriol coated her tongue. “Is that supposed to prove you didn’t?”
“No!” He took a breath to steady himself. “No. I have no proof to offer you.”
“But you did come to the house that day,” she pressed.
His jaw tightened. “Hours before it happened.”
“Why?”
He looked away, shame coloring his cheeks. “To this day, I can’t shake the hold your mama has over me. I will always love her.”
Her blood burned hotter.Good, she thought.You should be miserable without her. “That’s not an answer.”
He swung his face back to her. “Your mama and me—we argued.”
“About what?”
He was no longer twisting his ring, but he held it between his fingers like he had to keep reminding himself it was there. “We’d… had a… tryst.”
She fought the poison of his words, refused to believe it. No way her mama would wreck a home. “Bullshit.”
He grimaced. “Your mama regretted it almost immediately and kicked me out after, told me never to come back, to never speak to her again.”
Jocelyn spun away, trying to fit this in with the woman she knew, the one who’d always been so faultless in her mind. The circumstances around her conception were a little less black and white but definitely not to this level. Nan had said Daniel made her mama believe he was free, or would be shortly. And then he’d come back to tell her that Lydia was pregnant, and that he was going to marry her.
Bonnie had fled town after that only to find herself pregnant, too. She’d tried to stay away, to start a life somewhere else. But for Nan, she came back.
Jocelyn was desperate for that story to be true because believing different would mean a whole shift she wasn’t ready for.
“We never stopped loving each other,” Daniel continued. “And it was a weak moment.”
She turned back to glare at him. He was staring out the window, only his profile visible, limned in bright light.
“I felt like I couldn’t live without her, so I begged her not to end things.”
Another wave of cold washed through Jocelyn. “Were you planning to leave Lydia for her, then?”
He stiffened but didn’t answer right away. The coward.
Her mama would’ve hated being the one who’d ended a marriage, but at least that might’ve been more honest.
