Protecting What’s Mine: A Small Town Love Story

by Score, Lucy

  He took one look at her on the sidewalk outside the airport and produced a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol from his bag.

  “You’re never going back there,” he said simply.

  “No, I am not,” she agreed.

  Fifteen hours after she’d flown out, feeling hopeful, Mack was back with no hope. Only pain.

  She was an idiot.

  And a coward.

  She didn’t turn on the lights in her house, not wanting to alert Linc to the fact that she was home early.

  How in the hell was she going to tell him what had happened? It wasn’t like she could avoid him until the bruises faded, until the hurt healed.

  But the thought of him knowing what she came from, what she was made of, sickened her.

  Wearily, she left her suitcase inside the door and flopped face down on the couch. Her phone vibrated in the pocket of her jeans.

  She pulled it out and finally checked her messages. Linc had responded to her text earlier that afternoon. Then he’d sent a picture of Sunshine looking happy with a glittery blue tongue with a sign that said, “I ate a bottle of glitter, and now my poop sparkles!”

  Linc: How’s it going? Miss me? Want me to fly out?

  Linc: Did you talk to your guests about Thanksgiving? I mentioned it to my sisters, and they got Chihuahua-on-a-sugar-high excited.

  Linc: I’m getting worried, Dreamy. Do you need anything?

  Linc: Call me.

  And then there was the most recent.

  Linc: What the fuck, Mackenzie? Where are you?

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t pick up the phone and call him or walk out into the backyard and knock on his door. She couldn’t put him in the same conversation as her family. He’d never look at her the same.

  Feeling sore and sorry for herself, she powered down her phone and dragged herself upstairs and fell into a fitful sleep.

  * * *

  She woke at dawn. Still hurting. But now there was an empty ache gnawing away in her chest. She’d worried Linc needlessly. That was unfair, immature.

  Rolling over, she reached for her phone.

  There were more than a dozen new messages from Linc.

  Still not ready for actual conversation, Mack chickened out with a text.

  Mack: Sorry for the radio silence. I’m safe. I’ll talk to you later.

  Her phone rang in her hand a second after the text sent.

  “Linc,” she sighed.

  “What the fuck is going on, Mackenzie?” he demanded.

  “Look, something came up. I got busy. I’m not required to check in with you constantly,” she said defensively. And in that moment, she hated herself.

  “That’s bullshit. You flying home early from a trip and holing up in your house without telling me is bullshit.”

  “Russell told you?”

  “When I called him ten minutes ago to ask if he’d heard anything from you,” he snapped.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “He said you flew home unexpectedly, and he dropped you off at your house last night.” She knew Russell hadn’t completely ratted her out by the fact that Linc wasn’t in her bedroom yelling at her and demanding to see her injuries.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  “No. You’re not, Linc,” she said, rocketing out of bed. She reached for a sweatshirt and sweatpants. Anything to hide the evidence of what she came from.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to come over. I don’t want to talk about anything. I just want to be left alone.”

  There was silence on his end of the call. Part of her hoped, prayed, that he wouldn’t listen. That any second now, she’d hear his knock, his demand to be let in. But then he’d see her, and he’d know.

  “So that’s how you want it?” he asked bitterly.

  “Yes,” she said desperately. “I need some…time.”

  “So it’s over? Just like that?”

  Mack hurried downstairs. She saw him standing there in the dim light of morning on her deck, his phone pressed to his ear. Shoulders slumped, a scowl on his beautiful face.

  Sunshine was behind him, tail wagging in the morning mist.

  “I didn’t say that,” she said.

  He looked up, spotting her through the glass.

  “Let me in, Mack,” he said softly.

  “No. I need to take care of some things myself.”

  “Let me in, Mack, or this ends now,” he said.

  No. That wasn’t what she wanted. Why should she have to choose? When would she stop losing things to her family?

  She shook her head, but she couldn’t get the words out.

  She couldn’t do anything but stand there and watch him hang up and walk away from her.

  Sunshine stood there on the deck for a beat. Looking back and forth between her humans before wandering off after Linc.

  Another knife to her already wounded heart.

  This was stupid. So fucking stupid. She’d just explain…vaguely. In a way that didn’t make him pity her or realize how damaged she was.

  He’d have to listen. To let her back in.

  And then she thought about the old fire station. About Karen. About the hurt that had radiated off him at the rejection of the woman he cared about.

  The shame, the guilt, took her out at the knees, and she sank to the kitchen floor.

  48

  Linc entered the station under a dark cloud. Sunshine, not a fan of Dark Linc, scurried off in search of friendlier people.

  “I thought you had the day off, chief,” Zane called out from underneath the carriage of the ladder apparatus. Zane, like the rest of the men, was back to stubble now that the real Movember was in full swing.

  Linc didn’t bother answering. Instead, he took his mood upstairs and closed the door of his office with a definitive slam.

  “Uh-oh,” Skyler sang.

  “Not good,” Zane said.

  * * *

  He wasn’t hiding in his office. He just wasn’t opening the door. Or answering the phone. He just wanted to stay in here until he didn’t feel a goddamn thing.

  He’d called it. He’d known from the beginning that Mackenzie O’Neil was going to pulverize his heart into a thousand shards. And then she’d gone and done it, and he was the idiot who was surprised.

  There was a brisk knock at his door.

  “Go. Away,” he snarled.

  It was either an idiot or a very brave person who opened the door. Apparently, it was several of them. Women filed into the room. His sisters, followed by Harper, Gloria, and Sophie, stepped in and closed the door behind them.

  “Hey, buddy,” Rebecca said.

  “How’s it going, kiddo?” Christa asked.

  “Now is not a good time,” he said, glaring at the grant request on his computer monitor that he’d been staring at for the last thirty minutes.

  “We heard about the breakup,” Sophie said, flopping down in the chair across from him.

  Of course they had. This damn town and its damn big mouth.

  “We’re here for you,” Jillian said.

  “Do you want to talk?” Harper offered.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look. I appreciate the show of support. But I’m really not interested in talking about anything right now.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Gloria said, sliding a fresh pumpkin pie onto his desk. It smelled like cinnamon and sadness.

  “I really thought she was going to be the one,” Christa complained.

  “Me, too,” Sophie agreed. “You guys were a match made in hot sex heaven. Plus, firefighter and trauma doc? Who else is going to understand your work better?”

  “Don’t you all have jobs that you should be at?” Linc asked.

  “We’re here for you, little brother,” Rebecca said, shooting him a look with so much sympathy he briefly considered jumping out his office window to get away from it.

  “Did she give you a reason
for wanting to break up?” Harper asked.

  “She didn’t break up with me. I broke up with her,” he said.

  Several pairs of female eyes snapped to attention.

  “You did what now?” Christa demanded.

  “She was going to do it. I just beat her to the punch.”

  Gloria took the pie off the desk.

  “Wait, if you’re all here, where are the guys?” Linc asked.

  Harper and Gloria exchanged a look. “They don’t know we’re here,” Harper said.

  “We promised to stay out of it,” Gloria added.

  “This is you staying out of it?”

  “Can we go back to the part where you broke up with her?” Jillian asked.

  “Look. It doesn’t matter. It was always going to happen. She was always going to pull away. She was always going to leave. I’m the idiot that got hopeful that she’d change her mind.”

  Harper pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and blew out a breath. “Okay. Let’s break this down. Soph, man the whiteboard.”

  As the women diagramed the timeline of his relationship with Mackenzie, Linc wished desperately that he’d kept a bottle of whiskey in a desk drawer like his predecessor.

  “So she flies home unexpectedly from a trip to visit a mother that she never talks about?” Sophie clarified.

  “She’s mentioned foster parents, but her going to Chicago was for her mother,” Christa said.

  “Foster parents mean that there’s some…at the very least inconsistency in her childhood,” Harper said. She knew from experience. “It could be worse. A lot worse.”

  “She was removed from the home at age six for parental neglect,” Sophie announced, drawing an arrow behind the timeline and wrote the words shitty childhood in red.

  Everyone froze. Linc came halfway out of his chair. “What?”

  Sophie pointed to the Benevolence Police Department sweatshirt she was wearing. “You guys do know I’m married to Ty, right?”

  “Did she ever talk to you about it? About growing up?” Harper asked him.

  “Or were you too busy constructing a self-fulfilling time bomb?” Rebecca demanded. “What? Come on. You got yourself all tangled up over Karen Aucker and then convinced yourself that you were never going to be worth taking a chance on for a long-term relationship.”

  Linc’s sisters nodded in annoying agreement.

  “Karen?” Harper’s gray eyes widened. “Oh, Linc. I’m so sorry. That must have been awful for you.”

  He waved it away. Wished they would all just go. “Can you all please get the hell out of my office and leave me alone?”

  “Absolutely not,” Gloria said firmly. “We’re not leaving until you’ve earned this pie back.”

  “The point is she didn’t trust me to tell me about any of this. She didn’t tell me she was home. She didn’t need me.”

  Everyone started speaking at once. The sympathetic vibe in the room was fading and being replaced with the sharp edges of accusations.

  “Hang on, ladies. I’ve got this,” Gloria said. “Linc, let me explain to you what shame feels like.”

  “Gloria, you don’t have to—”

  “No. I’m talking. You’re listening. I wasted a decade of my life on a man who was little more than a monster. I was ashamed. Ashamed that I stayed. That I thought he would change. I felt like his bad tainted me somehow.”

  “We don’t know that Mackenzie has some deep-seated childhood trauma.”

  “She broke her fucking leg jumping out of a second-story window, you idiot,” Christa snapped. “Yeah, Samantha told me. And now we know she was removed from her home around the same time. That’s not a normal upbringing.”

  “Something had to happen when she went back,” Harper guessed, staring at the whiteboard as if it held the answers to the feminine mystery.

  “Something bad enough that she flew back the same day she left and called Dr. Robinson to pick her up instead of Linc,” Sophie mused.

  “My money is on some kind of emotional falling out with her mother. Something that shook her up and made her want to shut down. She wouldn’t want Linc to see her like that,” Gloria said.

  Linc couldn’t help it. He reached out and laid a hand on Gloria’s shoulder. A sign of support.

  She reached up and squeezed his hand back.

  “Shouldn’t we be at the point where we can tell each other about having a fight with a parent?” Linc asked, clinging to the hope that he hadn’t just royally fucked up.

  “Shouldn’t you be at the point where you ask her to consider not leaving?” Rebecca asked, crossing her arms.

  “Why should I put myself out there when she’s clearly not willing to do the same?” he countered. Why should he open himself up for more scars? More hurt?

  He’d just keep doing what he’d always done. Focus on the good times. Having fun. No strings. No expectations. No responsibilities or obligations.

  But he wanted those things. Every last damn one of them, and he wanted them with Mackenzie.

  “What did she say to you about Dr. Dunnigan asking her to stay on here permanently?” Harper asked.

  “What?” He was out of his chair so fast it fell over behind him.

  “Oops. Guessing she didn’t mention that to you,” Harper said guiltily.

  “This. This is why we were never going to work,” Linc said, pointing at Harper. “She can’t even tell me that Dunnigan wanted her to stay.”

  “And you couldn’t tell her that you’re in love with her,” Christa announced.

  There was a beat of silence in the room.

  “Actions speak louder than words,” he said stubbornly. “She wouldn’t even let me in to talk to me this morning.”

  “Fear makes people act like dumbasses,” Gloria said. “It’s not an excuse. But it’s a reason.”

  “If neither one of you is willing to be brave enough to say what needs to be said, maybe you’re not meant to be,” Jillian said sadly.

  Linc glared at the whiteboard, the clinical debriefing of his too-brief love affair.

  49

  “Open up, doc,” Aldo called through Mackenzie’s front door.

  Mack pretended not to hear him and continued to stare at the blank TV screen.

  “Maybe she’s not here?” she heard Luke say. “Never mind. She’s in the living room.”

  “Benevolence PD. Open up!” Ty said in his most authoritative voice.

  “Leave me alone,” Mack muttered under her breath. Why couldn’t she just be left alone here?

  “She looks pissed,” Luke reported from the window as she stood up.

  She slid the chain free on the door and opened it a crack. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “What happened to your face?” Ty demanded. He pushed his way inside and tilted her chin to catch the light on her very impressive shiner.

  “Holy shit, Mack.” Aldo was practically vibrating with rage. Mack knew it was stirring up old feelings. She understood that irrational sense of powerlessness when some shadow rose up from the ashes of the past.

  “It’s fine. I’m fine,” she insisted.

  “Linc didn’t do this to you, right? Because if he did, he’s a dead man,” Luke said.

  “Jesus. No! Linc had nothing to do with this. Why are you here?”

  “You and Linc broke up. We came to see if you were okay. By the way, if our wives ask you, we were never here,” Aldo explained. “Now, back to that shiner.”

  “Did you have a run-in with the Kershes?” Ty asked, reaching for his radio.

  “No! Stop. It happened in Chicago yesterday. It has nothing to do with anyone here, so leave it alone.”

  “You’re pressing charges,” Luke decided. “Let’s find her a lawyer. We can see if our patent attorney has any pals. Criminal and civil, right, Ty?”

  “Did you talk to the authorities in Chicago?” Ty asked, all-business.

  “Get someone aggressive,” Aldo suggested. “Someone who will take the toilet paper
out of the fucker’s house as part of the settlement.”

  “Stop.” Mack held up her hands. Unfortunately, the movement made the sleeves of her oversized sweater slide up her arm.

  “Jesus Christmas,” Ty said, pushing one sleeve up higher. “You’re beat to hell.”

  “Oh my God, guys. I appreciate the concern. But I’m handling this on my own. So I need you to get out of my house.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Aldo said firmly.

  “Yes, you are. I’m not pressing charges against anyone. I almost got arrested. You can all go home, and we’ll never discuss this again. Got it?”

  “Have you ever met any of us?” Luke asked. “Because that’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Let me tell you, Mack. Just because you think you can handle something on your own doesn’t mean you should,” Aldo said. “You can’t live your entire life independent from everyone else. Especially not when there are a lot of people who are willing to help. Let us help.”

  “You can’t. No one can,” she said. It was her problem. And she had to find the solution. “I’m not dragging anyone else down with me.”

  “I’m gonna go make a few calls,” Ty said tersely. “And when I come back, we’re gonna have a talk.”

  Ty walked out the front door.

  “Aldo, you remember that time with the boxes?” Luke asked.

  “Yeah. Creepy. Two women’s lives packed up all nice and neat like you can just hide them away. Fucking weird. Glad you got over that.”

  “It’s my turn to be the voice of reason,” Luke told him.

  “Got it. I’ll go make coffee,” Aldo said, heading into the kitchen.

  “Just make yourself at home,” she called sarcastically after him.

  “Sit down,” Luke said.

  She was tired enough, sore enough, that she complied. He sat down on the sofa next to her, taking up too much space.

  “Here’s the thing, Mack. You remind me of a stupid motherfucker I used to know.”