"Yeah, I knew. I should have been honest with you. I've got no excuse
for it." Except I needed you. I needed you, Grace. "Marriage isn't
something I'm looking for."
"Oh, don't treat me like a fool, Ethan." She sighed now, too battered to
be angry. "People like us don't have relationships, we don't have
affairs. We get married and raise families. We're simple and basic, and
as amusing as that might be to some, that's just who we are."
He stared down at his hands. She was right, of course. Or would have
been. But she didn't know he wasn't simple or basic. "It's not you,
Grace."
"No?" Hurt and humiliation tangled inside her. She imagined Jack Casey
would have said the same thing, if he'd taken the time to say anything
before he left her. "If it's not me, who is it? I'm the only one here."
"It's me. I can't raise a family because of what I come from."
"What you come from? You come from St. Christopher's on the southern
Eastern Shore. You come from Raymond and Stella Quinn."
"No." He lifted his gaze. "I come from the stinking slums of D.C. and
Baltimore and too many other places to count. I come from a whore who
sold herself, and me, for a bottle or a fix. You don't know what I come
from. Or what I've been."
"I know you came from a terrible place, Ethan." She spoke gently now,
wanting to soothe the brutal pain in his eyes. "I know your mother--your
biological mother--was a prostitute."
"She was a whore," Ethan corrected. " 'Prostitute' is too clean a word."
"All right." Cautious now, for she saw more than pain, she nodded
slowly. There was fury as well, just as brutal. "You lived through what
no child should ever have to live through before you came here. Before
the Quinns gave you hope and love and a home. And you became theirs. You
became Ethan Quinn."
"It doesn't change the blood."
"I don't know what you mean."
"How the hell would you?" He shot it at her like a bullet, hot and
dangerously sharp. How would she know? he thought furiously. She'd grown
up knowing her parents, and their parents, never once having to question
what they had passed on to her, what she'd taken from them.
But she would, before he was done, she'd know. And that would end it.
"She was a big woman. I get my hands from her. My feet, the length of my
arms."
He looked down at those arms now, at those hands that had bunched into
fists without his being aware of it. "I don't know where I get the rest
from because I don't think she knew who my father was any more than I
did. Just another john she had bad luck with. She didn't get rid of me
because she'd already had three abortions and was afraid to risk
another. That's what she told me."
"That was cruel of her."
"Jesus Christ." Unable to sit any longer, he rose, leaped onto the dock
to pace.
Grace followed more slowly. He was right about one thing, she realized.
She didn't know this man, the one who moved in fast, jerky steps with
his fists clenched as if he would use them viciously on anything that