Page 810 of Love Bites

“I know you did. And I get the attraction. But… why? What sent you out there?”

More silence. More thinking. He was patient. He could wait for her to collect her thoughts.

“When I was twenty-one, something bad happened to my family.” She paused. “Well, actually, something bad happenedbecauseof my family. You ever hear of the Destacios?”

Eagan shook his head.

She gave a sideways grin. “Good. Then I traveled far enough away.”

He pulled her out of the way of a rock in the path.

“My family was wealthy, rich off the real estate market. My father was the breadwinner, but my mother had the brains. Investing, selling, investing again. They—we—were swimming in extravagant crap we didn’t need.” She smiled. “I remember even as a teenager thinking, this is too much.Somuch. We don’t need it.” She shook her head. “I was weird even then.”

“Not weird,” he murmured. His mate wasn’t materialistic. There was nothing wrong with that. “Sensible.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” She sighed, and he squeezed her hand to urge her to continue. “‘This money is a poison,’ my dad would say, as he spent it on booze, ‘I might as well drink it all away. I could drink a lifetime and not be rid of it’. Drunken rants because he was so unhappy, you know. Why? I don’t even know. But nobody cared because we were busy ourselves, doing things that didn’t matter. Spending money that didn’t matter. Wasting time that mattered, but we didn’t know it yet. Preoccupied. Self-absorbed. Blind.”

She shook her head, looking pained. Eagan wanted to erase that expression from her face and never see it there again. But he knew the type she talked about. They came to the lodge all the time. Too much money and no sense of responsibility. They weren’t villains, they were just too caught up in the abundance to focus on the things that really mattered. Like happiness and family and love for others.

“One night, he and my mama and my abuela went to dinner. They all had too much to drink, but papa drove home anyway.”

Eagan’s jag drew to attention, concerned because he could feel Clara’s distress through their growing mating bond. He had a bad feeling he knew where this was going.

He pulled her to a stop, setting the tub aside, and turned her to face him. She stared at the ground as the rest of the story tumbled out.

“He blasted through an intersection, t-boning a car with an entire family inside. He was going twenty over the speed limit. The daughter was driving the other car. Just got her learner’s permit. She… she was the only survivor between the two vehicles. She lost her mother, father, and tiny baby sister, all in a breath. In an instant, her entire family and half of mine was gone. Just… gone. And why? Because my father had a few too many and decided to drive?” She shook her head so hard her hair flew, and Eagan smelled the rank scent of tears.

“Clara…”

“No. See, it isn’t that simple.” She laid one palm flat, facing the sky, and slapped her other hand on against it. “Basic. Break it down to basics. That family died because ofmyfamily. Me, my sister, my mama, even my grandparents, were too damn busy with our preciousthingsto see how dangerous my papa was. We didn’t care that he was ruining his life one bottle at a time. We didn’t care until he ruined seven other lives. And we should havecared, you know? Who will care for you if not your family? Who?”

She stopped, breathing heavy with the weight of her confession.

“Then…” she gasped, and tears exploded from her.

Eagan drew her close, angry and wanting to fight away her demons, but unable to do anything but hold her. Shit.

“Thenwe cared,” she sobbed. “After it was too late.Thenthings became simple. The way to prevent it clear, if only we could have seen it earlier. I went to see her one time, the daughter, to tell her sorry. Do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘There is nothing to forgive. This wasn’t your fault.’ But she was wrong. It was my fault. If I had said,papa, you don’t need to drink. If I’d said,mama, don’t let him drive. If I’d done any of those things, I could have lived with myself in the aftermath.” Clara cried into his shoulder. “But I didn’t. I didn’t doanythingto prevent it. And the guilt… it was too much. It still is.”

Eagan held her while she cried, while she let all the poison of her guilt out. His jag took it, held it, and when she was ready he’d help her let it go. She deserved to be free of her past, of her pain.

“I came to the woods because I needed things to be basic, simple. I needed to be alone and to think, and to realize how little I could survive on. How little I needed money. How very little I neededperiod. I didn’t need a bed or TV or a bank account or… or… relationships. Life became easy and I could let go of the guilt. So much guilt. Even if just a little.”

Pieces of his mate’s puzzle began to click into place, and the picture it revealed gutted Eagan. Maybe people wouldn’t understand why Clara had chosen the woods, why she’d responded to her family’s accident in this way, but he knew people grieved on their own terms. What was one person’s way of working through tragedy, was another person’s what-the-fuck. It was a lesson he’d learned from Magic. That cat had lost more than any of them, but if the same had happened to Eagan who knows how he’d have handled it.

“Aw, baby, this isn’t on you. Or your family. Your daddy was a grown man who made lots of choices that brought him to that point in time, at that intersection.”

She shook her head. “We could have made a difference.”

“Maybe so. But…” Her way of thinking was inspiring. When he looked at it closely, it was so very much like an animal’s. The basics. Instinct. Need. And purpose. “…but at base, isn’t every person’s choice ultimately their own? Doesn’t each of us have to take responsibility for what mark we leave on the world?”

She pulled back, wiping her eyes, her brow furrowed. “That’s true. But—”

“So, this ishis. Not yours. This guilt over his choices, you need to let that go, Clara. You’ve learned from his mistake. You’ve grown and changed as a person. You don’t owe the universe anymore.”

Her mouth turned up, humorlessly. “Now I’ve got my own debt. Dug my own hole. I’m athief,” she sniffed.

A thief with a heart so big she’d mourned over burning ancient love letters. Letters that were boxed up and probably long forgotten, part of another lifetime altogether. So big, she took on everyone’s guiltandher own.

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