Flawed by Jo Bannister Read Free Book Online

want the relationship, but you also want the freedom of being single. You want to make all the decisions. And one of them – one of the big ones, the ones that got in the way of us being a success – was that you were never prepared to forsake all others and cleave only unto me. Not for as long as we both shall live – not for a few years – not at all.’
    Anger brought the blood to her cheeks. She might have given him reason once, but she'd thought – and he'd said -they'd got beyond the brief madness of her infidelity. ‘That's not fair, Jack. I'm sorry about what happened with Eric Chandos, but I'm not going to spend the rest of my life saying so. I wouldn't have done if we'd stayed together – I'm damned if I'm going to grovel for forgiveness now!’
    ‘I wasn't talking about Chandos,’ growled Deacon. ‘It wasn't him who split us up. I was talking about Daniel.’
    Outrage and genuine astonishment clashed in her voice like cymbals. ‘Daniel didn't split us up!’
    ‘Yes, Brodie,’ Deacon retorted forcefully, ‘he did. I don't think he meant to, but that's what happened. He took things out of our relationship that it needed to survive. But I don'tblame Daniel. He didn't steal those things, he was given them. You gave him parts of yourself that you owed to me. I knew from the start that you weren't a free agent. I knew you had a child who would always come first. Of course Paddy has first claim: on your time, on your love. But I expected to be next in line. I wasn't prepared to come third.’
    ‘I am not in love with Daniel Hood!’ shouted Brodie, furious with exasperation. ‘I never was, I'm not now, I'm never going to be. He's my best friend. I care about him, and he cares about me. None of which is any threat to what you and I had. If we couldn't make a go of it, you need to look elsewhere for the reason. Keep blaming Daniel for everything that goes wrong with your life if you must, but it isn't just me who's starting to find that pretty pathetic!’
    Men in positions of power – and being senior detective in even a small town qualifies – need families. They need people around them who aren't intimidated by their status, who'll tell them when they're being stupid or paranoid or are just plain wrong. Without that reality check they start to feel self-important, cocooned from the rough-and-tumble of everyday argument, invulnerable to the forces that moderate other people's actions. It's a dangerously short step from being master under God to thinking you're God.
    Before he knew Brodie, Deacon had never had that. There were arguments enough in his short marriage but it was easier to walk away than to resolve them. They finally stopped the arguments by not giving a toss, and the marriage ended soon afterwards.
    There were no children, and Deacon had no close friends, so until he met Brodie he had a simple rule-of-thumb fordealing with the world. Criminals, suspects and police officers of lower rank he shouted at; witnesses he listened to with frank incredulity; and the same for police officers of higher rank except that he tried to hide the incredulity. The system served well enough but left him almost totally ignorant of the language of personal intercourse. He spoke a kind of pidgin version, and never got enough practice to improve his accent.
    He'd been called all sorts of names in the course of his career, many of them unprintable, but before Brodie no one had looked at his six-foot frame, his traffic-stopping shoulders and his riot-quelling fists, and come up with the word Pathetic.
    Not that Brodie was a shining example of how to run a mature relationship. She was selfish. She admitted as much quite freely, even proudly. She hadn't always been. She'd been most men's idea of the perfect wife: attractive, attentive, admiring, clever but not too clever, an efficient housekeeper and devoted mother. She'd
worked
at being a good wife. She'd thought she had a happy marriage.
    But when John Farrell fell,