Of course Jeremiah knew. Jeremiah knew all.
“Your father talked me out of coming back into your life—either of your lives, and he acted pretty adamant, expressing that he didn’t want me to try and speak to or see you. He said it would be too disruptive, that you were happy and fine and had grown to accept my absence. Is that true?”
Tamara folded her arms across her chest, feeling more defensive since she had arrived home than she ever had in her life. Now she could see where she had gotten her interrogational skills. “If you’re asking me whether or not I would have welcomed your call back then, I can’t honestly say. I don’t remember what my frame of mind was back then.”
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“That’s fair enough.” Jasmine raised a hand to touch her arm. “I can’t really blame your father for his reaction, but I just wanted you to know that I…I did try.”
“Not very hard,” Tamara muttered. She knew she judged her mother harshly, maybe too harshly. The woman was human, just like her father, and humans made mistakes—some more irreparable than others, some more painful. How long would she allow her mother’s mistakes to affect her most important life decisions?
“I deserve that.” Jasmine nodded and it seemed more like in defeat rather than agreement. “Can I tell you something?”
“Have at it, as you said.”
“I know you’ll probably find this impossible to believe, but I’ve regretted the decision I made to leave you and your father every single day of my life.”
“Please, don’t…” Why did she get choked up when she should have been righteously indignant? When she should have been doing like the woman had suggested earlier and telling her she never wanted to see her again?
Truthfully, she
wanted
to hear what her mom had to say, wanted to know that she hadn’t been forgotten just because she had been out of sight. Wanted to know that the woman who’d birthed her loved her. “Why did you leave?”
“Cowardice, Tamara. Plain and simple. I let other people decide what life’s journey for me or more accurately,
who
I took with me on that journey.”
“What people?”
“My family. They weren’t happy with my decision to marry your father. I think they thought him a passing fad, and that I’d eventually get over him and come down to earth.”
Much like her father had thought about her and Noah. “But you didn’t.”
“And my parents disowned me for it. Didn’t want to have anything to do with me…”
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Tamara’s vision swam with tears she fought mightily not to shed, heart pounding at her mother’s words that had hit way too close to home. “You followed your heart. I…I think that’s brave.” Her mother had acted braver than her with Jess and Jax, at least. She couldn’t even bring herself to say the three little words to them much less commit her life to them the way they wanted to commit to her. This made her wonder how much of a passing fad her father had thought Jess and Jax. Or maybe he’d been so against the idea of her and them together because he knew they
weren’t
a passing fad.
“I wasn’t brave as much as young and rebellious. But when real life set in, and I realized the life of relative luxury I had given up to be with your father, and that the only way to get it back I had to renounce him and my…my child…”
Maybe she was emotionally overwrought and needed someone to hold as much as her mother needed to unburden. Or maybe she just missed her father so much more than she knew. Whatever the reason, she found herself falling into her mother’s outstretched arms and hugging her tight as the tears flowed—from her and her mother’s eyes.
She couldn’t imagine what she would have done had she been forced to choose between Noah and her father. And she’d never had to find out because her father had taken the decision out of her hands and sent Noah away. She could just envision how her mother must have felt when her family turned their backs on her because she loved the wrong person.
She felt the same way when her father looked at her with distaste at the idea of her and Jess and Jax together.
How would her mother feel about it? Would she be as disgusted and judgmental despite what her own parents had done to her, despite what her family had forced her to give up?
Her mom pulled away from her, holding her at arm’s length as she looked at her for a long moment before thumbing Tamara’s tears away. “I know it’s a lot to ask, especially as despicably as I’ve treated Ebook piracy is stealing. It is a federal offense.
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you and your father, but do you think you could find it in your heart to forgive me for leaving you?”
Tamara had a sudden flash of her father in the hospital and his last words to her before he coded. He’d asked her to forgive her mother and to forgive him. “I already have.”
* * * *
Jess watched the two women crying and hugging each other, his own throat clogging up with emotion. He turned his back and quietly left, unwilling to invade Jasmine and Tamara’s privacy anymore than he already had.
He wished he could be more hopeful about the outcome of Jasmine’s conversation with her daughter, but he wasn’t. It heartened him to know they had finally gotten together and that Tamara had forgiven her mother. But he functioned under no illusions that Tamara had or would forgive him and Jax or that she would reconsider staying on the ranch.
Jess didn’t know why he believed this the end of the road as the situation concerned Tamara and her relationship with him and Jax, but he did.
“Jasmine and Tamara still going at it?” Jax asked.
Jess stopped in his tracks, jerked up his eyes to see his brother standing in front of him. Had Jax not spoken Jess thought he probably would have walked right into his brother.
Jax frowned and stared at him. “You okay?”
“About as okay as I’m going to get.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“It went well for Tamara. I don’t know what it means for us, but I’m happy for her. She deserves to have her mother back.”
Jax nodded, looked about as bad as Jess felt.
Jess didn’t want to give up like this, realized he had been dragging around the last couple of weeks like a dog with his tail between his Ebook piracy is stealing. It is a federal offense.
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legs, beaten and defeated. This wasn’t him. Maybe it had been, when he’d been young and could do nothing about Tamara leaving. But he wasn’t a kid anymore. He claimed manhood and had something at stake and the means to get what he wanted if he really put his mind and heart to it. His mind and heart wanted Tamara to stay.
“I’m not letting her go, Jax. I’m not letting this end here. You with me?”
Jax looked at him and grinned. “What do you have in mind?”
Jess told him.
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Two Months Later…
Tamara didn’t waste time trying to put her whole home-going experience behind her.
She went back to the office and to work the day after she arrived home to New York against numerous arguments from the firm’s senior partners. Of course their arguments hadn’t been too strident.
They’d been only too glad to see their number one litigator back at work and watched her throw herself back into the grind, trying cases and bringing money into the firm’s coffers. Money, of course, remained the name of the game.
Tamara had accepted this as an evil of her job, had accepted it a long time ago and gladly jumped back into the grind. The situation called for busyness—either go to work and keep herself busy or stay home, mourn and remind herself every day she stayed away from work of exactly what she had left behind in Colorado.
She hadn’t just given up her inheritance or left behind her dead father, or her mother and two younger sisters she hadn’t known existed before recently. She had left behind her heart and her future.
As much as she wanted to deny this, she couldn’t, and despite her burying herself in her work, she knew she couldn’t bury her feelings for the two young men she’d left behind.
She’d assumed that she could settle back into her career and her life in New York and things would go back to normal just because she wanted them to. She compartmentalized well, after all, had been doing it most of her life, but especially once she left home to go to Ebook piracy is stealing. It is a federal offense.
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school in New York. She compartmentalized so well sometimes she’d been accused of having a split personality.
Tamara didn’t even think a split personality would save her from her grief. The pain and the regret embedded themselves in her psyche too deep to just forget.
She couldn’t even console herself that she had done the right thing for all the right reasons. No matter how many times she counted the pros and cons of her relationship with Jess and Jax, no matter how many times the pros came up short, she knew in her heart what she needed to do to make things right between them all.
She loved them, belonged to them body, heart and soul as surely as she belonged to her mother and her father through blood. She knew for certain that they belonged to her, that they wanted nothing more than for her to stay at the ranch. But she had turned her back on them, had taken the easy way out and come back
home
.
Not that leaving had been all that easy. Saying goodbye to Jess and Jax had been the hardest thing she’d had to do next to saying goodbye to them eighteen years before.
Of course, this time, they were eighteen years older and seemed to take her departure with more equanimity than they had as nine-year-olds. In fact, they didn’t seem as torn up about her departure as she had been—continued to be.
Tamara looked at the phone on her polished cherry wood desk, fingers itching to pick up the receiver and dial the ranch.
How many times had she had a receiver or her cell phone in hand ready to speed dial her childhood home just to hear some familiar voices? And how many times had she discounted doing what should have come second nature because she couldn’t come up with a ready excuse for her to call The Double R
?
It wasn’t as if she’d left on bad terms, if you didn’t consider jilted lovers bad terms. Her family
lived
there after all.
Come to think of it, what kind of turncoats did her mother and sisters turn out to be to stay at the ranch even after she’d left?
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Tamara understood Maia had a particular fascination with the cowboys she had up until that point met at the ranch, and that she’d wanted to prolong her stay to explore it. Coupled with their Mom and sister’s wish to live where Tamara had spent the bulk of her life had been enough reason for the three of them to stay behind.
Tamara wondered what they all did now.
Had Jess and Jax done, as promised, finally shown Maia the finer points of riding a horse? Had Desiree finally managed to loosen up enough to get acquainted with the cowboys and the concept of roughing it? Tamara doubted it, smiling at the idea of her stuffy younger sister donning cowgirl gear and mounting a horse.
Desiree hadn’t mastered either activity by the time Tamara had left for New York. She doubted her sister had changed much in the interim.
Tamara closed her eyes at the pain that suddenly invaded her chest at the idea of her sisters enjoying the company of Jess and Jax when she couldn’t.
Scratch that. Not couldn’t—she
wouldn’t
allow herself to enjoy their company. She had denied herself when she left. It wasn’t her sisters’ fault that she acted stubborn and continued to be short-sighted.
Maybe James had been right to get out while he could. She obviously didn’t know her own mind, didn’t know a good thing—or in her case, two good things—when she had it.
She wondered how she could be so logical and clear-headed when it came to her job, but the exact opposite when it came to her love life.
She’d
thought
herself logical, seeing all sides of the situation when she left rather than just the side that said she loved Jess and Jax and should stay with them on that basis alone.
Her father had given her the perfect excuse to stay, outside of love, by leaving her shares of his stake in the ranch and his house. But with her father and his executor being so efficient and organized, the case had avoided probate altogether, allowing Tamara to refuse her Ebook piracy is stealing. It is a federal offense.
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bequest and leave everything behind without any legal strings to keep her in Colorado—a blessing and a curse.
The intercom on Tamara’s phone sounded, and she caught herself jumping as if from a shock, hand hovering over the receiver. She pressed down the intercom button and the crisp voice of David Frakt’s secretary sounded over the speaker.
“Tamara, David would like to see you in his office.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said without a second thought. She remained eager to get away from her desk and have something to constructive do.
She’d managed to catch up with her work and take on a new lucrative client since she had arrived back without ever once meeting her reclusive patron—thanks to the convenience of e-mail and cell phones. Oh the joys of technology.
However, Tamara knew that sooner or later she’d have to meet with her client, if only to have the woman—at least the client sounded like a female on the phone—sign off on official documents in her presence. The validity of e-mails could only go so far. But for now she just contented herself in the knowledge that J. Pines’ substantial checks cleared without any difficulties and the firm and Tamara always got paid on time.