“Thank you. I love you too, sweet girl.” She gave my hand a gentle squeeze, and I left.
I planned to be busy today with admin work and prepping for the spa. Since I wouldn’t be seeing Caine today, it was good to make use of the time.
I was also going to start clearing away the space I needed around the back of the motel for the beauty rooms.
I thought that whole back space could be used for it. All I would need was a little reception area for clients to wait, two rooms set up with a bed for the treatments, and another room set up for things like manicures and pedicures. Then the bulk of the space beyond that could be used for the steam and sauna rooms.
I thought, maybe it could be set up to have six or so clients at any one time.
Up to five people in the steam and sauna rooms each at any time, and then the treatments would be just me. I’d have to hire someone else too at some point. Maybe to do the nails and easier things like eyebrow waxing and tinting, so I could stick to the more specialist treatments.
For now, though, I’d be solo. I wanted to plan all of that out today, so I figured I’d sort out the stuff Halle wanted now before going to the motel.
The house was closer to the hospital, so it made sense.
If I could get her stuff together now, then it would just be a grab-and-go job in the morning.
I got back home within fifteen minutes because there wasn’t any traffic.
Grabbing one of her sturdy bags from the kitchen, I went up to her room, grabbed a chair, and climbed it to see what she had on top of her wardrobe.
I frowned when I saw the mess. My aunt was perfect, but she was one of the untidiest people I knew when it came to her personal stuff.
The rest of her house could be pristine, but try to sort through anything like letters or, like me now, looking through her beauty stuff, and a girl could go insane.
Quite literally.
There was a bag with the logo Sheila’s Health Shop on it. That was where she got her oils. I opened the bag and thanked God the coconut, jojoba, and neem oils were inside. The others weren’t though.
Where were they?
I searched around, looking from one bag to the next, and stumbled across a pretty notebook. The kind I liked, but this was covered in the kind of material used to make an Indian sari. It was luminous pink with beautiful yellow flowers running down the front and spine.
I smiled when I saw it and took it. If this was empty, I’d ask if she didn’t need it. It would be a pretty little book to have around.
I opened it, and my eyes zoned in on the first sentence written:
June 6th, 1998
Can it be called rape if I consented to keep my job? What kind of person am I?
It felt like a bolder had fallen inside me and hit the bottom of my stomach.
My eyes clung to that line, and I immediately felt like I’d invaded Halle’s privacy. This must have been her journal or diary of sorts.
I should have probably stopped reading, like any respectable person would, but how could I? She was talking about rape and her job. Keeping her job.
Halle had only ever had one job that I knew of, and that was before she had the motel.
Working for the Donoghues.
I read on. I had to:
People talk about sacrifice, but this is one hell of a big deal. I tried to leave again, but that devil, Braford Donoghue, tried to stop me. Even when I promised to never say anything. I just wanted to leave and find work somewhere else.
I couldn’t take it anymore. Having my body continuously used against my will like I’m nothing.
Caine doesn’t need me anymore. He’s going to the Navy. I’m so proud of him for not being just like his father.
Anya and Alicia need me though. Need me like they’ve never needed me before.
I have to work now more than ever to take care of them. I can’t let them lose everything and end up on the streets. Not like when Alicia and I were kids and we lost everything. I can’t let that happen to my baby sister again. And my sweet Anya. No.
So, this is it. Living with the devil who threatened to destroy me if I left, so no one would hire me. Living with the devil who thinks it’s funny to rape me over and over again just to hear me beg him to stop.
God, why have you forsaken me? Why?
By the time I got to the end of the page, tears were rolling down my cheeks and I couldn’t continue.
I didn’t need to.
All that she’d written gripped my heart and soul.
Caine said his father was a bad person. Now I knew why.
* * *
Caine
* * *
The breeze carried with it a cold chill that made me shiver.
Lopez and I were stationed on the junction between Quick and Easy Loans and the road that led down to the docks. It was a perfect spot for us to hide. We’d gotten here about three hours ago, at seven thirty when it was just starting to get dark.
We thought most of the action we wanted to observe would take place after hours when the place closed. Particularly since this was the one business place in the area that closed late on a Sunday. They closed at seven, while everywhere else did the usual times.
The air… it was tense with that element of anticipation I hated.
“Maybe we should come back tomorrow?” Lopez stated, breaking the silence.
While we’d sat here, nothing had happened. No one came out of the building, and no one went in. The shutters closed at seven, and that was it. No action.
“We can. How about we stay for another hour or two?”
“Okay, we’ll call it at midnight if nothing happens.”
Midnight was good, but I wanted to see the guys come out of the building.
It wasn’t the kind of place you could live in, and there were only two exits, both visible to us.
They were inside there doing whatever they were doing, and I mostly felt like knocking down the door and beating the shit out of them. All of them. Donny and friends.
“Do you think there’s an underground passage?”
“No, I had the place checked out, and there’s nothing like that. They have to come out through that side door.” He pointed to the metal door that I could barely make out in the shadows.
From under it I could see hints of light, but mostly the door looked like it was part of the building itself.
“What the fuck are they doing in there so long?”
“Counting money, no doubt, and planning next-level badness.” Lopez chuckled. He grabbed a packet of Cheetos from the back seat and started munching away. “So, it turns out I think I’ve built up the courage to ask Elizabeth to marry me.”
My gaze snapped to him, and I raised my brows. He and Elizabeth had been going out for over three years. I’d known he was serious about her from the first time he’d told me he was seeing her.
“Congratulations, man.”
He chuckled. “Bro, congratulate me when she says yes. If she says yes.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why wouldn’t she say yes?”
“We’ve never talked about marriage before. It scared me a little. My parents never got married. They didn’t see the point of a piece of paper and a ring. I see it though, or rather I see it now. I didn’t before, and she knew that. She knew never to mention it to me. Not a marriage guy.”
And I wasn’t a relationship guy. Apparently. “But does she want it?”
“She does, although she’s never told me specifically. I see her wanting it though. We’ve been to three weddings in the past year, and I see how she looks. Like she wants that for us, but maybe since what we have works, she accepts it. I don’t know. I just hope she says yes and doesn’t think I’m not serious.”
“I’m sure she think’s your serious, Lopez.” I chuckled.
“I hope so. What I don’t want is for her to think that I don’t want to marry her because not being married is like a hall pass to leave at any time.”
“So, do it and tell
her how you feel.” I nodded.
Lopez gave me a pensive look and smirked. “Says my best friend who’s so not into marriage or relationships. What was it you said to me once?”
I frowned and closed my eyes at the memory.
Lopez laughed. “You said there were too many fish in the sea to be satisfied with one, and if God wanted you to have one woman, he wouldn’t have made ninety percent of them so good looking.”
“God, I was young and dumb.” I laughed.
“Right, so is this you saying the young and dumb stage is over?”
“Maybe.”
He straightened. “And would this happen to be because of a certain young woman you rained hell on when we were kids?”
“Young and dumb, remember?”
“Young and dumb, I guess that’s a good excuse. Can be used for anything.”
“Things happened fast…” I reflected on the last few weeks. It was ironic how she was the one woman who’d managed to infiltrate my mind and change me. Change my way of thinking. But then… I’d always wanted her.
“Fast?”
“Yeah. It was like one day, everything made sense, and I just wanted to be with her. But there’s—”
A car I recognized suddenly pulled up in front of the loan shop.
As the car parked, the side door opened, and Donny came out. It was obvious he’d been waiting for this visitor.
“Finally, some action.” Lopez nodded.
I recognized the car and was stupid not to know straightaway whose car it was.
It was because I didn’t want to believe it. Must have been that because I had to wait to see who got out before I finally accepted who the person was.
Dad.
It was Dad.
Wow, that feeling I got around him that sent my nerves into overdrive… that feeling I got about not being able to trust him. This was it.
This was fucking it.
“Dios mio,” Lopez hissed.
My hands stilled along with my heart.
Instinct was what made me good at what I did. It was what had kept me alive for all those years I served, going from one war zone to another.
Instinct and the ability to trust what my gut was telling me.
Right now, they were screaming, screaming and hollering. Telling me that the friend was Dad.
Dad was the friend.
It had never crossed my mind to think of someone rich enough to offer these guys what they wanted. I’d just assumed it was someone from their circles.
A friend.
But it was Dad. My father was the fucking friend.
The friend who wanted Halle’s motel.
Chapter 18
Anya
* * *
I didn’t go anywhere.
I stayed home and continued to read Halle’s diary.
It was like I needed to know everything that took place, and now that I knew, I felt sick. So sick I threw up.
As I read on about how badly Bradford Donoghue had treated Halle, it made me physically sick.
And worse, because I knew I had a massive part to play in all of it.
That first entry I’d read earlier took place just after my father walked out on Mom and me. It was four months after, and we’d been so broke.
I remembered Mom talking about losing the apartment we lived in. It was small, but she couldn’t afford to pay for it herself. She’d done part-time work because Dad was fulltime and took care of us.
When he disowned us, he literally cut us off. When Mom said Aunt Halle saved us and Aunt Halle saved us again and again, I never thought about what Halle must have gone through to give us that money.
It never occurred to me. Why would it?
I was fourteen years old at the time, and I would never have thought about things like that, much less imagine it happening to Halle.
By my records, and average math, Halle continued to work for Bradford five years after the date recorded in the diary.
June 1998.
Five years. Over those five years, so many things happened to me, but so many things happened to her too.
She’d had the money to leave him and start her own business several times, but each time, she had to use it for me or Mom.
Us on the verge of losing our home, us starving, Mom dying, and Halle paying for her funeral costs, and me going to college. College took up the last of her money.
And all the time, I went my way, not knowing what she had to go through.
Not knowing how many times she’d tried to leave a job that practically held her captive.
It was awful, just awful.
I sat in her room for most of the night, crying and sinking into a depressive state that gripped my soul.
I stayed just like that until sleep took me.
It was the clicking sound of the radio before it came on that woke me at eight.
Sitting up, I looked around me, and my gaze went straight to the notebook. I wished for it all to be some kind of hellish nightmare, but I knew it wasn’t.
Caine…
Wow, it was the first time in weeks that I’d gone hours without thinking about him.
Caine…
His father had abused my aunt. His father did all that to her, and yet Caine was like a son to her.
There was no way that he could have known about what took place. I knew deep within me that he didn’t know.
He couldn’t have.
So… his reference to his father being a bad person must have been in regard to something else. I didn’t doubt that a man like that would have many secrets, many things on the list that classified you as bad.
Caine…
I wanted to see him, but I didn’t know if I could. It didn’t feel right. Although he’d done nothing wrong.
But his father …
God, why?
More tears spilled down my cheeks.
I rested my head on the pillow again and closed my eyes. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move to go anywhere, and I cursed myself for just wanting to be with Caine right now. Felt like he was the only person who could soothe my mind, wash the troubles away, and get me back to the way I was only yesterday when I was planning to go to the motel and do all that work for the spa.
Hours passed with me like that. In this state of woe as the ugliness of the truth continued to work its way into me.
It must have been five o’clock before I realized that my phone hadn’t rung all day.
No one at the motel would have called me because they were fully staffed today, and yesterday when I’d called in, I said I might be late today.
Who I was expecting to call me, though, was Caine.
Normally, if I wasn’t with him, he’d call first thing in the morning and last thing at night. There was nothing from him last night, nothing this morning, and nothing now.
I grabbed my phone from my back pocket and checked for confirmation.
Nope, nothing, nothing from him.
Shit. Had something happened to him?
I gasped, and my hands flew up to my mouth.
Oh my God, what if it was that?
The last thing he took care of last night was the loan.
Panic sent me flying down the stairs, into my car, and straight to his place.
His car was parked outside, and his bike leaned on the tree by the garage.
So, that meant he was home, right? If he is, why won’t he call me?
I rushed up to the door and rang the bell.
After five minutes of nothing, I rang the bell again.
“Caine, it’s me. Please, if you’re in there, open the door. I just want to see you. Please.” That was all. I just needed to see him, then I’d go. I’d go back to the depression that had seized me and try to figure out what to do next.
My heart rejoiced when I heard footsteps. I would have rejoiced some more when the door actually opened, but instead, I gasped at the sight of Caine.
He looked awful, like he’d been sleeping in a barn or gotten run
over backwards and then some.
His beard had grown out way past the mark of cool for him, his eyes were so red it swallowed up the lovely shade of green they normally were, and his face was red too and blotchy.
His clothes were also torn. Those were the same clothes he’d worn yesterday. A black T-shirt and dark jeans. But he looked like he’d been in some kind of fight.
“Baby, I’m …” When he spoke, I smelled alcohol on his breath. Strong alcohol, like rum.
“Caine, what happened to you? Were you fighting?”
“Lopez, that bastard. Him with his perfect family, perfect mother and father who love each other. He grabbed me to stop me from killing my asshole of a father.” Caine chuckled like it really was funny. Drunk was just the beginning of how I’d describe him.
What the hell happened?
His father…
“What happened with your father?” The question though was, what didn’t happen?
I could have marched over to the Donoghue mansion right now and killed him myself for all he’d done to Halle.
“He’s dead to me. I have no father, baby. I wish like hell Mom had given me up for adoption, or fuck, why didn’t she just leave his fucking ass? Why’d she have to leave me instead?”
When a tear ran down his cheek, I shuddered inwardly, and despair took hold of me. I’d never seen him like this. Not ever.
“Caine, what happened?”
“Can I call you later, baby?” he slurred and wobbled. To keep himself from falling over, he held on to the door. “Please, Anya, beautiful Anya. I remembered the first time I ever saw you. I was eight years old, and I couldn’t stop staring. Halle, sweet Halle. She’s family to me. She brought you to introduce you to my mother. The fuss the two of them made because you looked like a doll. I wanted to be jealous of all the attention they gave you, but I was stuck on staring because I thought so too. Please, baby. I don’t want you to see me like this.” His eyes held an unspoken pain that reached out to me while his words sparked that place in my heart that tried to shield my feelings from him.
My timing truly sucked, or maybe it was my heart, but that was the moment I let go and truly fell for Caine Donoghue.
Kiss From a Rose Page 14
