Page 74 of Cold Case, Warm Hearts

“Oh. You’re saying…?” Aspen tried to imagine her father having a one-night stand. The man she’d known would never have done that, but he’d been young once, too, with hormones and desires.

Deborah patted Aspen’s hand. “Your father was a good man, and your mother… Well, she was good in her own way. I loved her very much, but she could be determined. And she’d determined that she wanted your father. And when she wanted something, no power in the world could stop her, not even your dad.”

So Aspen’s mother hadseducedher father?

Lovely.

And then another thought occurred to Aspen. “Did Mom get pregnant with me on purpose? Was she trying to trap him?”

Deborah lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “I never asked.”

Which meant that the thought had occurred to Deborah too.

The more Aspen learned about her parents and their past, the more she wished she’d never come to Coventry.

Deborah took her hand and held on tight. “Your mother was a complicated person. By then we were starting to see signs of her mental illness. Getting pregnant with you wasn’t rational. Marrying your father when the two of them had nothing in common—I meannothing.That wasn’t rational.”

“Dad married her, though.” And Aspen’s fatherwasrational. In a moment of weakness, he’d slept with Jane, but to marry her, after she’d seduced him and possibly gotten pregnant on purpose? That didn’t make sense.

“For you, dear,” Deborah said. “Your father married your mother because he knew that, if he didn’t, he’d have fewer rights as a father. He admitted as much to my husband once, that he’d put up with Jane forever to protect you.”

Put upwith her.

“He didn’t love her at all?”

“I think he did. He tried to, anyway. Once they were married, he did everything in his power to make her happy. He quit school to take care of you. He bought Jane everything she needed. He was a good, good man, and he tried his best. But to tame Jane was to tame a tornado.”

Aspen gazed at the college yearbooks. She couldn’t imagine learning anything in those that would rival what Deborah had told her.

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Anything.”

“The other person from your high school, the man. Was it Brent Salcito?”

Deborah’s eyes widened. “How did you know that?”

“He told me this morning that he and my mother were involved. That they were having an affair.”

Deborah sucked her lips between her teeth and shook her head. “Brent was head-over-heels for Jane, but an affair? I don’t think so. No, she’d have told me. She was a lot of things, but she loved your father. And she was fiercely loyal.”

Deborah seemed so sure. But Brent…

“Why would he lie?”

“I think that most of what happened between them was in his imagination. She was kind to him, but she was kind to everyone when she was in her right mind. They spent a lot of time together. I think what he saw as romance she saw as friendship. I doubt it helped that my boyfriend and I were paired off, so when the four of us were together…” She shrugged. “But Jane didn’t see it that way. I think he was just?—”

“Delusional? Mentally ill, like Mom?”

“Not delusional. In love. Love can make us stupid sometimes.”

Aspen didn’t know if that was true. She’d never been in love and, based on what she knew about her parents, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to be.

She could maybe see it happening with Garrett. Eventually. If she were to stay in Coventry, she could imagine love growing between them. Not the kind of love her mother had for her father, though, planted and cultivated in her disturbed mind. And not the kind of love her father’d had for her mother, a love borne out of fear and obligation.

Aspen wanted no part of that kind of love.

But true love, the kind they talked about in romance novels. The kind based on a mutual faith in Christ, on respect and honor, maybe.