Stay With Me (Hope Valley Book 5)

by Jessica Prince

  Uncrossing my arms and pushing off the railing that surrounded the bullpen and separated it from the walkway two steps up, I moved in Rory’s direction. “Dollface—” I said quietly, hoping to catch her attention, but she was too far gone.

  “He’s been through more than any man, woman, or child should ever have to go through, and I’ll be damned if he’s placed with those people or in some group home.”

  I tried again as I closed the distance between us. “Rory, darlin’—”

  “You send me a list of the classes I have to take and the training I have to attend, and I’ll do it, starting immediately.”

  I placed my hand on the small of her back. “Ror—”

  “You want to assign a welfare officer to me for home visits to make sure I’m qualified? Go for it. I’ll pass with flying colors. But I’m telling you right now, it will not”—she flung her arm toward Miriam—“be her.”

  Wrapping my arm around her waist, I gave her a squeeze and leaned down to speak into her ear. “Rein it in, baby. We got company.”

  At that, she stopped, and every eye in our huddle shot around to where Zach was standing.

  The fire in her eyes dimmed as she disengaged from my hold and moved to the railing, placing her hand on it and looking up to him while she asked gently, “Hey, sweetie. You good?”

  Zach’s hard gaze bounced all around, taking each and every one of us in, but I could see the wide range of emotion swimming in their depths that he was trying desperately to hide. He’d heard every word Rory said. But this kid had been so mistreated and mishandled that he didn’t have the first fucking clue how he was supposed to feel, and he couldn’t see that this was the very moment his luck had changed for the better.

  “So what’s gonna happen now?” he asked, forcing his tone to be apathetic.

  Hayes, Trick, Becky, and Bill all pinned the man from Child Welfare Services with a hard look. Letting out a sigh, he reached around and massaged the back of his neck before answering. “Well, young man, it looks like you’ll be moving in with Miss Hightower here.”

  I walked over to Rory and wrapped my arm around her waist, pulling her against my side as she asked Zach, “Is that okay with you?”

  He studied the both of us closely, his assessing gaze bounding down to my hold on her before returning to my face. Then he shrugged and muttered, “Whatever. I’m goin’ back to sleep. Wake me up when this is done.”

  Then he turned and moved back toward the conference room like this whole thing was a waste of his time, but not before I caught the way his shoulders sagged in relief and the small grin tugging at his lips.

  I knew Rory saw them too, because she let out her own sigh of relief and gave me the rest of her weight. And when I looked down at her gorgeous face, she was smiling at where Zach had been standing like she’d just won the lottery.

  Fucking magnificent.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Cord

  I rested against the driver-side door of my pickup, my jaw ticking and rage coursing through my veins as I worked to control my breathing and keep myself in check.

  I’d driven Rory and Zach back to her place earlier that morning, leaving them both in the care of Bill and Becky before heading back to the police station. They were planning an impromptu trip to the Caswell residence, and there was no way in hell I was missing it. I needed to know just how bad that boy had it if Rory and I had any chance of helping him past it.

  When I’d pulled up with Hayes, Trick, the man from Child Welfare Services, and a handful of uniformed officers—including Fred Duncan at his own insistence—the initial sight made my stomach drop.

  The ramshackle two-story house, with its chipped-paint siding and gutters that needed to be cleaned so long ago you could now see shit growing out of them, sat on a brown patch of dirt, all the grass and shrubbery dead from lack of watering. Beer cans littered the ground, having laid out there so long they’d actually rusted with time and exposure. The steps leading to the front porch were completely rotted through and broken, exposed nails sticking out of the two-by-fours for anyone to step on.

  You could tell just by looking at the outside that the place was a pigsty, but as hard as it was to be believed—and standing here now, it was extremely hard—the inside was actually worse.

  The stench of filth and refuse was so strong when I first walked in that my stomach revolted and acid crawled up my throat.

  The place was every hoarder and packrat’s dream come true. Piles of old magazines and newspapers stacked waist-high lined the halls on either side, making it difficult to maneuver around. Old, moldy boxes of random crap were crammed into the living room. The entire first floor was littered with garage sale castoffs and shit that looked like it had been picked up at the dump. There was so much junk strewn about that you could barely see a single surface.

  But what was worse was the fact that there was also trash lying around everywhere. Actual garbage. Fast food wrappers, soiled diapers, rotted food, crushed soda and beer cans, discarded or empty liquor bottles. The place wasn’t just a pigsty, it was a goddamn hellhole. There was so much shit that it had to have taken years to accumulate it all. Which just went to show that not only did Miriam Weathers miss the last at-home visit, the woman had never fucking been there at all.

  Sure enough, the pantry and fridge had been padlocked shut. Not that it had mattered, because when Duncan cut the lock off the fridge and pulled it open, everything inside was so spoiled we all had to take a step back when the smell hit us in the face.

  And that was just the downstairs. When we finally managed to make our way to the second floor, what we discovered threatened to make me physically sick.

  “Hey!” Charles Caswell barked as he lumbered up the stairs after us, his big beer gut jiggling beneath his ratty, sweat-stained wifebeater. “This ain’t right! You can’t be goin’ through our house! This is private property!”

  “And this is a warrant to search the premises,” Hayes growled, slapping the document against the man’s chest so hard Caswell fell back against the wall at the top of the landing. “Now shut the fuck up and stay outta our goddamn way, or what’s already bad for you is gonna get a whole lot worse.” At that warning, he turned back to Duncan, who was still wielding the bolt cutters, and gave him a chin lift.

  At the silent command, Fred cut the padlock off the bedroom door and threw it open, letting out a disgusted “My god” at what he’d just revealed.

  The other three bedrooms on the second floor weren’t in much better shape than the downstairs, but each room at least held a twin-sized bed and dresser among all the junk stuffed inside. The only thing in this room was a thin, soiled mattress lying in the middle of the floor. The two windows had been boarded shut, letting only skinny rays of sunlight through the slats. The lightbulb in the ceiling fan had been removed, guaranteeing that no matter what time of day it was, the room remained dark.

  And huddled in the middle of that filthy mattress was a little girl, no older than seven or eight, holding on to a boy who looked about two years old and was wearing a diaper that had needed to be changed yesterday.

  “What the fuck?” Trick hissed through clenched teeth.

  “They’re bein’ punished!” Doreen Caswell shouted as she ran up the steps. “Children have to learn right from wrong! They have to!” she continued to screech, charging to the door in an attempt to throw it closed. One of the officers caught her around the waist and moved her back as she ranted and raved like a lunatic. “The wicked must be punished! Sinners must be punished!”

  That was all I could take. I forced myself outside before I did something, like rip Charles and Doreen Caswell’s heads clean off for what they’d put those kids through. And as I waited outside for the police to finish canvasing the house, my fury continued to grow.

  Hayes came out a while later with the Child Welfare Services guy in tow. The man looked like it was taking all his energy to remain standing. His skin had gone eerily white, his eyes wide and fu
ll of shadows. He’d never seen something like that before, which spoke volumes. Considering his age, he had to have been in this line of work for quite some time now, and if this was his first encounter with something this horrible, I could only hope that was a good thing.

  He and Hayes exchanged words I couldn’t hear as I pushed off my truck and headed in their direction.

  “I’m guessin’ by the look on your face right now and everything you just saw, Miriam Weathers is officially out of a job,” I said to the guy, my tone laced with venom as I stopped at their little huddle. “And word to the wise, if she isn’t, I’ll be movin’ to make goddamn sure that happens. Then I’m goin’ after yours.”

  A vein in the guy’s forehead began to throb, shock filling his eyes as he turned to look back at the house. “Miriam Weathers is no longer a welfare officer with our office, and I will be seeing to it personally that she is never employed in a position where the wellbeing of a child is priority ever again.”

  I inclined my chin when he looked back at me, and Hayes and I watched as he stomped through the dead yard and climbed into his car, ready to go deal with another nightmare.

  “You good?” Hayes asked once we were alone.

  “Not a fuckin’ chance.”

  I turned back to the house as he blew out a puff of air. “Expect none of us’ll get a decent night’s sleep for quite a while after that.”

  I nodded in agreement just as Fred Duncan and a female officer came walking out of the house with the toddler and little girl in tow.

  “Those two are goin’ back to the station with us,” Hayes announced. “Have units headin’ to the school right now to pick up the older kids. Put in a call while you were out here, spoke to the principal. I know it won’t do much to put your mind at ease, but even if you and Rory hadn’t found that boy when you did, it was only a matter of time before these kids were taken outta this godforsaken place. Truancy officers were plannin’ a visit at the end of the week.”

  That was good to know, but he was right. It didn’t do anything to tamp down the fire currently burning in my gut.

  I pulled up to Rory’s place a little after noon to find her dad’s truck was still in the driveway. At some point, someone had brought her car back to her, because now it was parked in the gravel lane right in front of her porch.

  I killed the engine and pulled the keys from the ignition at the same time I let out a heavy exhale and scrubbed at my face. My chest felt like it had a two-ton weight sitting on it, and no amount of deep breathing could do a thing to lift that off.

  The front door to Rory’s house opened as soon as I climbed from my truck and rounded the hood, and Bill Hightower stepped out onto the porch, closing it and the storm door firmly behind him.

  “Son,” he greeted with a small dip of his chin.

  “Bill,” I returned. “Rory and Zach sleepin’?”

  “The boy is,” he answered, resting a wide, square shoulder against one of the posts on either side of the porch steps. “He’s been knocked out all damn day, but Rory’s too wired up to sleep. Been workin’ herself into a lather since you left. Already got herself scheduled for those classes she’s required to take and got a home visit all set up. Even called to see about him switchin’ to a school closer to us.”

  Good god, she really had been working herself into a lather.

  “See none of that took the darkness outta your eyes,” Bill assessed. “You wanna tell me what went down with the police?”

  I really didn’t. I didn’t want to put that nightmare I’d witnessed on anyone, but the Hightowers had a right to know. “You mind goin’ and getting Rory for me? I’ll tell you all about it, but I don’t want to do it where Zach could hear if he wakes up.”

  Bill’s back went straight at that, his expression going guarded. “I’ll grab her and have Becky stay inside just in case. I can fill her in later.”

  “Appreciated, Bill.”

  He didn’t waste any time heading back into the house, and a minute later he and Rory came back out.

  “Hey,” she greeted, her bright blue eyes filling with concern the moment they hit me. She took the stairs down to the drive and kept coming until she was right in front of me. “You okay?”

  I shook my head and looked down at her beautiful face, that weight not lifting in the slightest. “Not even close, dollface.”

  She shifted in closer, placing her palms on my chest as she whispered, “Talk to me.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to rid my mind of everything I’d seen today, but the images had already taken root. “Anything you could imagine, darlin’, it was so much worse. Place was a goddamn shithole. When I say that, I mean it literally. Those kids were livin’ in squalor. The smell alone almost made me sick.”

  She pulled in a gasp while Bill let out a low, harsh curse.

  “Goddamn welfare officer’s never stepped foot on that property, let alone inside the house. If she had, those people never would’ve been approved, they’re that unfit. Silver lining though, that bitch is officially out of a job.”

  “Was Zach telling the truth? Was all the food locked away?” she asked, pressing her fingers deep into me.

  I nodded. “It was all locked up, even though most of the shit in there was spoiled rotten. But it gets worse, baby, and I need you to brace, because what I’m about to tell you means that boy in there’s got one hell of a long road to healin’.”

  She closed her eyes and turned her head to the side, pulling in a reaffirming breath before looking at me once more. “Tell me.”

  “Those kids get beaten, starved, don’t attend school like they should, live in filth, but those people’s favorite form of punishment was to lock them in a room for days at a time with nothing but a dirty mattress. Windows were boarded up so tight hardly any light got through, and they took the bulb, so when they were living out their punishment, they were doing it in total darkness and their own mess because they wouldn’t even let them out to use the bathroom.”

  “Goddamn it,” Bill hissed.

  But Rory didn’t say a word as her eyes filled with tears that spilled out onto her cheeks.

  Reaching up, I took her face in my hands and leaned in close. “That boy’s been to hell, Rory, and I know you’re strong. You’re one of the strongest women I’ve ever known, but you need to be prepared. How that boy lived, it scars you in ways that sometimes you can’t come back from. What you’re doin’ for him, it’s honorable, sweetheart, and I’m not saying this to you because I think you can’t hack it, but for his sake. You need to think about this. Think long and hard about if you can really do this.”

  “I can do it,” she threw back instantly.

  “Listen to me, baby. He’s gonna test you. He’ll push you in ways that’ll make you want to pull your hair out. That boy’s never had one single person in his life who’s looked out for him, and before he takes the risk of giving you his trust, he’s gonna make sure he puts you through the wringer.”

  “Sounds like you’re speakin’ from experience,” Bill spoke up.

  I gave him my attention as I told him, “First seven years of my life were spent with shitty parents. After that, grew up in the system. From seven to eighteen, it was all I knew. I saw a lot, and most of it wasn’t good.”

  “Hate you went through that, son,” he said, his voice taking on a husky scratch.

  “I came through it all right.”

  Rory sniffed back her tears and reached up to brush the damp from her face, forcing me to drop my hands. Her voice came out quiet and full of sadness as she asked, “I know you have experience, Cord. I know you saw a lot, but are you telling me this because it’s what you were forced to live through?”

  I didn’t want to give her the truth. I didn’t want to say a thing that would make her heart hurt any more than it already was. Rory gave her whole self to those she loved, and when she hurt for them, that hurt ran as deep as it did wide, but she deserved the truth. “Yeah, Rory. It is. And you already know there was only
one person who worked hard enough to get through back then.”

  She took one more step, bringing her so close I could feel the heat of her body filtering into mine. “I can do this,” she said with soft determination. “And not because I have something to prove. I can do this because it’s what Zach deserves. He can test me all he wants, push me, put me through the wringer, whatever he has to do so that one day he can feel safe with me.”

  Her eyes sparked with fiery determination, and I didn’t have a single doubt she’d best any challenge that kid threw her way. “All right, dollface.”

  She pushed her hands in even harder against my chest, and her breasts pressed against me as she leaned in to declare, “I wish I’d been there when you were younger so I could’ve done the same for you, but I promise, Cord, I’ll take care of him. You have my word.”

  I tucked a long, silky strand of hair behind her ear as I smiled down. “Don’t doubt that for a single second, sweetheart. And lucky for you, I’ll be around to help.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rory

  “What is this place?” Zach asked from the passenger seat of my car as I turned onto the lane to my parents’ house.

  The past two days had been interesting, to say the least. The first day at his new home, Zach had kept himself closed in the guest room I set up for him. When I’d checked on him shortly after night had fallen, he was passed out cold. But I noticed the lamp on the bedside table had been turned on. I’d moved into the room, gentle pulling the covers up over his shoulders to tuck him in and, remembering what Cord had said about that punishment room, I made sure to leave the light burning when I crept back out. Yesterday was pretty much the same, with the exception of me knocking on his door at breakfast, lunch, and dinnertime to tell him to come eat.