Chapter 10: If We Both Were Born, in Another Place and Time, This Moment Might Be Ending in a Kiss; But There You Are with Yours, and Here I Am with Mine

It was like the screen that had been dividing Danny’s past and present was slowly coming down. She had gone to bed disturbed at what was Chris’s truth and worried about how Kit would take it all. After Chris left with Jada, they had all sat in awkward silence until it was time for the others to leave. That silence had followed them to bed and settled around then as Danny fell asleep.

In her dreams, Danny kept getting little crumbs as the dark blank space that was her path became clearer. She followed the crumb path and fell into a rabbit hole that had her free falling into a montage of moments that were her past. But as time went on, a new but not foreign feeling clenched at her heart and squeezed. It was new to the Danny she was now but familiar to the Danny she was then. Grief.

The tug towards that potion of her memory that held so much pain was stronger than anything that she had felt before. The harder she tried to run from it, the horrible dread tagged at her even more, sinking her lower and dragging her down into its depths.

Then nothing. Just as sudden as it had come, her pain disappeared, and fear replaced it.

The constant banging of a sledgehammer to her head was what woke Danny up. She blinked a couple of times, her eyes resisting to open, hiding from the assault of light in the room. Quickly she realized that she wasn’t at home anymore. This was the second time she had woken up in a hospital not knowing what he happened to her or how she got there. At least this time she remembered the day before, and the year and her childhood.

I remember, I remember everything, a happy bubble swelled up in her chest. She was excited to have her memories back, but that bubble soon burst when her gaze landed on her sleeping husband on the couch next to her bed.

Fear, the fear that had plagued her dreams chasing her down inflicting incredible hurt and reminding her heart of the crushing pain she had gone through when Kit went missing. She was afraid that once more, he would choose his career over her. When she had lost her memory, Kit’s job didn’t bother her that much, that was because that her, had never experienced him being gone. But now she knew how much she missed him when he was deployed, and how she almost didn’t survive when he was MIA. She couldn’t go through that again, she wouldn’t.

Danny sat up in her bed, the banging in her head receding. She looked out the window and watched how the clouds floated past the building. She didn’t know how long she had been up before Kit stirred awake. His broad beautiful face went into a smile and the thought passed through her mind that he looked a lot haggard than she remembered. It was as if she was noticing everything all over again, how bigger he was now. The hard-muscled frame made something inside her shudder and relax at the same time. It was how she felt the first time she saw him shirtless at the beach.

Danny noticed the scar that ran across his face, telling a story that Kit would never say out loud, not even if she asked. So, she wouldn’t. Some gazes were the promise of protection, he was all that and more. But behind that, she saw a haunted man, and it terrified her. But Danny didn’t look away because she recognized the light in his eyes, something that gave her hope that everything would be better.

“Danny, are you okay?” Kit rushed to her side and stroked her hair and her cheek. Danny nodded in response.

She didn’t know what to say or where to start. So, she decided to ease both their mind and clear up some lies. “I never slept with him,” she said. Kit shook his head as if he was confused. “Christopher, I never slept with your brother. We had separate rooms in his apartment, and I was never drunk enough to let myself betray you.”

In his eyes, Danny could see Kit connect the dots. Any other person would have asked her about her memories, how much she remembered, and when they came back. But Kit asked, “So why did you decide to marry him?”

“Because he was here,” she didn’t think she could bring herself to say the words that her sure to hurt him. And yet when her lips moved in and out, her eyes blinked, and the tears pressed from her lashed and she did not need to use words.

“He was here, and I wasn’t,” Kit’s voice was low as if he was trying to hide his pain, but he couldn’t. The look of hurt and guilt in his eyes slashed through her, creating a new wound in her soul.

“My father and my brother DJ in one way or the other they had abandoned the women they claimed to love. It had worked out for DJ but, you know Reno and Rayne’s story and how their mother turned into a monster because of the pain my father caused her. I didn’t want to be her, and I was mad,” Danny admitted. “I wanted you to know how it felt to be abandoned.”

“I didn’t abandon you. I had a job to do. And you knew what I did for a living when you met me. I didn’t lie to you or sell you false hope,” Kit said annoyed.

“You were always honest, but I thought that one day you would realize that I was more important.”

Kit stiffened almost imperceptibly then combed his fingers through his shaggy hair, “I don’t think I was being selfish, the Navy was for me, I joined for myself to find fulfilment. I made a commitment that I had to see through.”

“I think I blocked out my memory because I felt guilty,” she admitted.

“About Chris?”

How could she say this without hurting him even more than she already had? “It’s hard being the one that’s left behind. They tell you to keep faith and to have hope when your husband is sent to a place you don’t know for a reason you can’t know and for a fight you don’t understand. Soon faith becomes a burden and hope becomes a delusion.”

“What are you saying Danny?”

Danny sucked in a breath, trying to stabilize her nerves, “I felt guilty because I was relieved when they told me you were gone. I was free from the faith, the hope and the fear that was slowly driving me crazy. Then when it all sank in, I did go crazy. I started drinking again and got lost in the grief,” Danny held his hands tightly as if her admission would make him disappear. “I loved you before you went missing and realised just how much. Then when I didn’t remember you, I fell in love with you again in a different way. Now those two loves have crushed into each other and what I feel for you now is more than love.”

Kit’s unblinking stare and silence made her feel weak. “It was a commitment I made to myself and the Navy as well. I had to see it through, but I didn’t realise how much it hurt you.”

“And now?” Danny sucked in a long deep breath and held it.

“My commitment is to you and our boys,” Kit said, the corners of his mouth turned up into a sly smile.

Danny released the breath she was holding.

“I was thinking that maybe the boys would like to see where Mom and Dad met. You could open your business back up and I could flip old houses, re-join the family business.”

“Your family business is tearing down old buildings and replacing them with skyscrapers,” she teased.

“I have discovered the importance of fixing what’s broken,” he took her hand and brushed his lips against her knuckles. “All it needs is patience and a gentle touch. I could build the structure and you could bring some warmth to the inside.”

“Repairing broken houses and making them homes?”

Kit nodded as he cupped her palm over his cheek and leaned into it. His eyes closed as a gentle expression claimed his features. “Home.”

Danny placed her forehead against his and absorbed his warmth. She couldn’t agree more, “Home.”

***

Chris watched as Jada lay sleeping in his arms. How her body curled into him with so much trust, her warmth, and the way her arms held him tight even in her sleep was incredibly too satisfying to pull away from. So, he told himself he would spend the night and leave early the next morning before she woke up. Chris held her tighter his actions rewarded by a content sigh from her slightly parted lips. 

If only he could stay like this forever.

When morning came Chris had an even tougher time leaving the bed. The sun was already up but Jada wasn’t, which as out of character for her. She was usually awake at dawn fussing over one thing or the other. Chris assumed that not having her family around let her relax more. He felt the sun on his face, he opened one eye and squinted against the assaulting rays of light that streamed in around the window shades. He swore and let his eyelid fall shut, raising his hand to his throbbing head. He was suddenly regretting all the whiskey he drunk the night before, but not spending the night with Jada, never that. 

His headache and the hostile sun had given him a reason to stay in bed, besides his claiming arm that lay over Jada’s exposed waist possessively. His fingers molded to her curves like a caress. But then his phone buzzed interrupting his peace and when he checked his message his world seemed to turn a little slower, not coming to a halt but at a speed that made it seem like it.

Danny’s memories have returned.

Chris read the message over and over, he probably shouldn’t care but he did. To him, it was a little game but Jada would not see it that way. Chris wondered if Jada would want this true version of him, the jealous and manipulative man who had to have his way. Chris got out of bed, pulled his jeans on, and sat in a dark corner of the room, space where the sun hadn’t touched. It mirrored his soul a little bit. Jada’s warmth had brought light some parts of his soul, but there was one, the one that had to get his way and get back and anyone who came in his way that still lingered in the dark. 

Danny remembered the game was now officially over. His family would be mad at him, what was new, but how would Jada react. Chris let it all wash over him as he sat in the corner, content to hide in the relative peace and darkness it offered. He wouldn’t let it ruin this picture of Jada’s beautifully dark body, tangled in white linen as the sun poured over her skin with such romantic affection.

Jada tagged at his heart and consumed his thoughts and Chris was determined to fight it with everything he had. After all the years he had spent carousing, such a reaction surprised him. He was the love them and leave them type, that was the habit ingrained in him. Unless it would somehow make his twin brother look bad or rob Kit of a little happiness, he never invested time in a relationship. But here he was watching Jada sleep.

Another message came through interrupting his thoughts, Family meeting, bring Jada.

Chris was curious why a stranger had received an invite to a Henry family meeting. Chris could already hear his father yelling, his mother’s sobs, and Kit’s silences. He could feel Duke’s glare and Kat’s disappointed looks. It was going to be an eventful evening that would not be in his favor. He most definitely was not going to take Jada there to be an audience. 

He made his decision that after this morning, he and Jada would have nothing to do with each other. Last night she had claimed that Duke would help her and Chris would let him. Instead after the family lynching, he was going to leave the country, travel somewhere far, and have fun spending his family’s money. 

Chris rose from his seat and walked over the bed. He leaned over Jada and pressed a lingering kiss on her temple. He inhaled her scent and told himself that this was the picture he would ingrain in his memory. The beautiful work of art that was the brief romance between the two of them. He didn’t expect to see her again and although a part of him was reluctant about it, he meant it. 

“Goodbye,” he whispered as his lips brushed her ear, then straightened, stared at her for a moment before turning his back on her and leaving.

***

Jada had felt Chris’s presence in the room. When she woke up, she knew she was alone in the bed as his warmth was replaced by nothing. But she knew he was in the room, she could hear him breathe ruggedly as if something was frustrating him, plus the beeping of his phone. Jada didn’t move but waited until he left the room. She didn’t want to face him that morning. She wasn’t ready to make sense of what had happened between them.

She was okay with this, not talking about it. Acknowledging it happened but not trying to pick apart their night together and make sense of it.

Her body was reluctant to let go of the wonderful sensation of resting in a warm cloud of eiderdown, so Jada stayed in bed and decided that she wouldn’t think of anything that day. She was going to take the day off from life and think about everything the next day. She had just made that decision when her phone beeped. It was Duke: ‘Be ready at 5 pm, the driver will come for you.’

Jada groaned and buried herself deeper in the cover. “So much for my chill day.”

Jada was ready and at the hotel lobby at five pm where she found the driver already waiting for her. She had asked where they were going but her questions had gone unanswered. So, she sat back in the back seat of the SUV and decided to let whatever happen, happen. They arrived at a mansion in the suburbs not far from where Kat and AJ had taken her the night before.

The driver led her to the front door when he rang the doorbell and handed her to a middle-aged woman that Jada could only assume was the housekeeper. She led her deeper into the house and into the Livingroom where she found everyone from the previous night gathered again except for Ethan and Catalella. In their place, there were two elderly couples. Immediately she could tell who they were, Chris’s mother looked so much like her daughter and twin sons while their father’s resembled Duke. Danny’s mother looked like her and her father just like DJ. It was obvious that Reno and Rayne didn’t share a mother with their two siblings, but their father’s deep brown almond-shaped eyes were on all four of them.

“Jada!” It was Rayne who welcomed her, practically hopped over to Jada. She embraced her and pulled her into the rest of the group. The women hugged her while the men nodded and smiled at her, for a moment she didn’t feel like a stranger.

Jada’s gaze rested on Kit, and she could immediately see the difference between the man she saw yesterday and the person she was looking at now. She was about to ask him how he was when Chris stepped into her line of sight, behind Kit, and walking up towards them.

Jada took his hand to shake it, this was the second time she was meeting Kit, but it didn’t seem like it, and just like the first, he left a great impression on her. Kit was the better version of Luke.

Where Luke left you anxious, Kit offered security, extinguishing your worries.

Where Luke existed in the dark cold corner of loneliness, Kit was warmth, like the gentle kiss of the sun on her skin.

It was even better knowing that he shared a piece of her father’s life. All around her she was surrounded by men who reminded her of her father one way or the other and she ended up with the one most unlike her father.

Jada’s bare palm pressed to Kit’s and the gentleness from his firm touch enveloped her slender fingers. A spark of sensation drained her of uneasiness, the seductive pull of Kit shimmering across her skin. Kit was everything a woman wanted, everything Luke was not. She knew that it was forbidden, this pleasure, and that fact was hard to accept. Why?

Still holding her hand, his gaze steady, his brow raised in question, his blue-grey eyes deepened as the contact between them lingered. Jada didn’t want to pull her hand out of his. She did her best to regain her mental footing and ignore the sweet fire curling up inside her. Finally, she conceded when she realized that Kit had already loosened his grip and it was she who was holding onto him. Her heart wept at the loss of his warmth, as a cold reality replaced it.

“Don’t tell me that you are also falling in love with him,” it was hard not to wince at the sarcasm at the top of Luke’s steel tongue.

It was also difficult for Jada not to take this opportunity to cut Luke down to size. “It’s difficult not to,” she responded with the same vehement. However, the tone of her voice sweetened when she turned back to Kit, whose cringed face showed that he was uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking. Jada ignored it. All her life she had been told about how much she lacked, she hated how those words cut into her. So as often as she could she complimented a deserving person, a few kind words that she was denied. “There is something about you, Christian Henry. You feel like home.”

First, it was Luke when he saved her from Nina and Darrell, then it was Duke when he took her in when she first stumbled into his office, Smith as well and now it was Kit and the way he showed her kindness and offered her a shoulder to lean on. Jada had a type, dependable men, men just like her father. It was too bad she had misjudged Luke- Christopher.

Jada chanced a glance at Chris, and his usually silvery eyes were as black as a thundercloud with posture as ramrod straight as the barrel of a gun. He was pissed off, but she didn’t care.

“Danny’s memory is back, does that mean the game is over? Darn,” Chris said in an exaggerated, melodramatic disappointment that was intended to irritate everyone.

“Harry, you raised an asshole,” Danny’s father bellowed, and Chris’s father responded with an equally annoyed grunt.

“Why did you do that?” Chris’s mother asked, her blue-grey eyes swimming in unshed tears.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kit cut in, in what seemed to be in defence of his brother. An act, Jada assumed he had done multiple times before. “We just wanted to let everyone know that Danny’s memory is back, and we are moving to Hawaii.”

“Don’t you care what he was doing to us?” Danny exclaimed.

“You are the one that came coming after me, talking about wanting to see Kit when looking at my face,” Chris’ lip curled in a bitter sneer.

“You didn’t have to keep getting her drunk!” Reno barked at Chris.

“And I didn’t, did I, Danny?” Chris’s question hung heavy in the air, everyone’s gaze shifting from Chris accusingly to Danny in question.

Danny’s fierce gaze softened as she now stared at the ground.

“You knew she was a recovering alcoholic, you didn’t have to enable her,” Reno went on in defense of his little sister.

“She also knew that as well,” Chris pointed out with an arched brow before he let out a short sardonic laugh. “You want to blame me for everything, go ahead. But Danny started drinking all on her own, and yes, I poured some of those drinks but it’s not my fault. She made it seem like she wanted me, but all she wanted was a living breathing picture of Kit.”

“You could have set her straight,” Kit’s tone was soft a complete contrast to how he was before. Jada had half expected him to have his hands around his brother’s neck by now.

“What fun would that be?” Chris was unapologetic and deliberate in the way he spoke to his family.

An uncomfortable itch of recognition turned into an anthill of irritation scratching at her skin. She recognized all of this. If she heard the ocean and the silence her mother held towards her mistreatment, Jada could swear she was back at home. She tried not to drown in her insecurities that were bubbling up at a terrible fast rate, but she could not ignore what she saw before her, who she saw. The realization that Chris was so much like Nina dropped sour lump in Jada’s stomach.

“You told me that your brother stole the woman you loved,” Jada murmured, her low tone carrying most of the weight in the room, with deadly earnest. “That’s what you said to me.”

Chris turned to look at her, a smile passed over his lips. “I lied.”

“You are just like her, you know,” Jada’s voice faltered in disbelief. Talk about a frying pan straight to the fire moment. Jada had run away from Nina’s selfishness and ran straight into the arms of the most manipulative man she had ever met.

Jada chanced another glance at Chris and noticed that his face seemed to take an odd calculating sort of expression. He took a step forward before realization burned bright in his eyes and that brought him to a halt.

A myriad of emotions played in his eyes, but it was the hurt and the pain of what in his mind was a betrayal that broke her heart. She had hurt him and that was killing him. Her mind sent an immediate cease and desist order to her heart, all she did was state the facts and say the truth. Nina and Christopher were two peas in a pod, and Jada and Christian bore the brunt of their egoism.

There was no other way to put it.

Jada had come to know Chris as someone who was quick when it came to attacking. He took giant steps towards her, grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her body hard against his. “What did you say?”

“He is your brother,” Jada’s voice trembled out. “Your twin brother. You are worse than her.”

Her.

Sounds from the myriad of curious conversations swirled around them, bombarding her senses bring crushing realisation down on her.

What am I going to do?

“Don’t grab her like that,” Duke gruff voice and feet chased quickly after Chris in his pursuit.

“I’ll do whatever I want with her,” his elbow tightened painfully around Jada’s elbow.

Her eyes didn’t leave his. Jada took in his rage, and even that didn’t make her look away, she held his gaze as she came to one realisation after the other, she loved Chris, she didn’t know him, she felt sorry for him, and she would have to stop herself from falling deeper in love with him. There was absolutely no way she would spend the next chapter of her life back where she started. She would not survive the male version of Nina. She thought back to the day she left home, how she had stood by the beach vowing to escape the toxic situation she called family. How could she willingly, with her eyes opened, walk back into something even more poisonous?

She felt herself shrinking within her body, wanting nothing else but to hide from this cruel world. Was her life a joke to fate? This was where she took control, she swore with weak resolve. Jada was frightened but determined that she would not imprison herself in a life that would only be consumed by resentment.

“Don’t hurt her! She’s pregnant!” Kat’s announcement had the room fall into an uncomfortable silence.

Chris’ head shook once in confusion and twice as if waiting for her to respond. “Jada?”

In this throat closing, stomach grinding moment, Jada looked back at Chris leaving his question unanswered. His gaze softened from rage to pleading. What exactly did he want her to say? Yes, I’m pregnant and it’s yours. Chris knew all of that. Jada was the one who needed answers.

Jada looked from Chris to Duke who was standing behind Chris his hand on Chris’ shoulder. The tears that were slowly clouding her vision rolled down her cheeks. Finding her voice, Jada asked Duke, not Chris but Duke, “What am I going to do?”

Her insecurities quickly turned to desperation, and she sank into it like quicksand.