“You were just doing what you thought was best.”
“Don’t try to make me feel better. I fucked up.”
He shrugged. “At least I got a few answers for your trouble.”
“You must be devastated.” Rebekah reached for his hand and gripped it firmly.
“Damn, woman!” Eric said, jerking his hand away. “Your hands are like ice.”
“Sorry. I promise to keep them off your ass until they warm up.”
He chuckled softly, and it was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard.
“I’m not devastated,” he assured her. “I don’t know those people. If I lost you, that would be devastating, but them…” He shrugged. “I never had them in the first place.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant that or if he was just being kind and letting her off the hook.
“And I told you my mom was a crack whore,” he said.
“She didn’t start out that way. Aren’t you mad at these people for driving her away? Your life would have been totally different if she’d stayed.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’d have been aborted before I was ever born. That is quite a bit different than being abandoned and bouncing from foster home to foster home.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “So sorry for putting you through this.”
“I always wondered why my extended family never showed up to claim me. I thought maybe they were dead or no one knew where they were to inform them that I needed a home. I guess they just didn’t want me.”
Rebekah’s already tattered heart shattered into a million pieces.
“Fuck them,” she said. “I want you. I’m glad I don’t have to share you with a bunch of stupid pricks.”
He smiled. “It ma
de me feel good that you stood up for me like that.”
Rebekah’s jaw dropped. “It made you feel good that I tried to assault your grandmother in her own driveway?”
“Exceptionally good. While I was watching you try to sell me to her, I thought, wow, she must really love me.”
“I do,” she said. “I’m just glad you realize that’s why I went a little crazy. I don’t understand how anyone wouldn’t want to shower you with affection.”
“You’re the only one who does,” he said. “And you’re enough for me.”
For now. But she figured sooner or later they’d start planning their family and filling it with kids who had a fate similar to Eric’s. Kids who fell through the cracks. Kids who had no one else to love them. Kids who needed a big-hearted man like Eric Sticks in their lives. Maybe then she’d feel like everything he’d gone through as a child had been for a reason. At the moment, she was still supremely pissed at the woman who should have welcomed him into her heart as her beloved grandson.
They were almost to the airport when he said, “I wonder if my mother is still alive.”
She’d been missing over twenty-five years. The chances of her being alive were almost nonexistent. Still… “I can help you find her, if you want.”
“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”
“Do you have any idea who your father is?”
“Nope,” Eric said, pulling into a long-term parking area.
They planned to leave the Volkswagen here and have someone ship it back to California. But now they had a plane to catch. There wasn’t time to make more concrete arrangements.
“And promise me you won’t go looking for him.”
“There’s a spot,” Rebekah said, pointing to a vacant parking place. She wasn’t going to promise she’d never try to find his father. There had to be at least one awesome person in Eric’s lineage to account for her husband’s perfection. It obviously hadn’t come from his mother’s side of the family.
Chapter Eleven
Eric flapped his boarding pass against his thigh as he sat beside Rebekah in the terminal. They’d been waiting to board a plane to Pape’ete by way of Los Angeles for what seemed like an eon. He couldn’t wait to soak up some sun and sip a strong drink on the beach. Actually, he could wait. The more he thought about lounging in a tropical paradise, the less it sounded like fun. What he and Rebekah had shared over the past week? That had been fun. He hated to admit that his wife was always right so early in their marriage, but he couldn’t fight the truth when she was sitting beside him studying her fingernails.
Eric broke the silence between them by asking, “Do you think we can get the VW to go another few thousand miles?” They hadn’t spoken much since they’d left their little honeymoon van in long-term parking.
Rebekah went still and then her lovely face lifted. “Why?”
He shrugged as if the thought of another week of adventure with his new wife wasn’t making his heart race with excitement. “Our flight to Tahiti actually leaves from Los Angeles.”
“So?”
“There’s a lot of this country left to explore between here and home.”
“In December? I thought you were afraid you’d freeze your ass off.”
He grinned. “You haven’t let me down yet.”
He thought she’d laugh at his little joke, but she didn’t. She took both his hands in hers and stared deeply into his eyes. “I won’t,” she promised. “I won’t ever let you down.”
Not like those assholes who share your DNA was left unspoken, but he read the words in her fierce expression.
He kissed her, believing in her, in them, and then tugged her to her feet and led her from the terminal. The luggage they’d checked was full of shorts and swimsuits, so they wouldn’t need it. Their winter gear was still in the van.
“Well, we almost made it to paradise,” she said as he found the parking shuttle that would take them to their own little mobile paradise.
He looked down at her smiling face and his heart swelled in his chest. “I don’t know,” he said and drew her against him. “I think I made it. How about you?”
Tears swam in her eyes as she nodded.
Sometimes, Eric thought as he passionately kissed the embodiment of his heart and soul, paradise isn’t a place, it’s a person. She really is my everything. My Rebekah.