by Jewel, Bella
“Would you just get in the car please?”
Spencer darts around her and runs right to me, slamming into my body with all the force of a hurricane. I grunt as he wraps his arms tighter and holds on for dear life. He sobs. It’s too much. I wanna break away and comfort him all at once, and I don’t know which is the right thing to do here. Every nerve in my body screams at me to run, and every heartbeat tells me to stay, to fix this. To mend what I broke.
“Don’t let her take me, Jake Tucker.”
“She’s your mamma, Spence. There ain’t a man alive that could keep her from gettin’ to you. She loves you, and it’s her job to protect you.”
“I don’t want her. I wanna stay here with you and Nuke.”
“Can you do me a favor? Can you wait in the car while I talk to your mamma a minute?”
He glances up at me with wide eyes, fat tears spilling over blond lashes, his little face turned down in a frown. He nods and Ellie steps away from the door as I usher him inside.
“Buckle up for me, okay?” I say, and I tell Nuke to climb on in and sit with him.
Ellie folds her arms across her chest and steps back. Tears stream down her cheeks, and I want nothin’ more than to lay my ruined fingers against her soft skin and wipe them away, but I know I don’t deserve to touch her, so I keep my hands firmly at my sides.
“You’re bleedin’,” she says, glancing down at my hand. I nod and make a fist in an attempt to stem the blood.
“Stay.” I lean against the car, pennin’ her in between me and the side mirror. “I’m sorry about last night. It won’t happen again, angel.”
She laughs, but there’s no humor to it. “If I had a penny for every time I heard that . . .”
“I know what I did was unforgiveable, puttin’ my hands on you like that. I don’t have a good reason; there’s never a good reason.” I shake my head and run my good hand through my hair. “I screwed up. I reached for that bottle, and I can’t tell you I won’t ever do it again. I got demons chasin’ me from every angle, and the only way to shut them up is to drown ‘em out with drink, but you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. Elle, I need you—”
“What am I supposed to do with that?” she shouts. I reach out and grab her elbow, tryin’ to draw her closer, but she wrenches out of my grasp and shoves me, hard. I stumble back a step. “Tell me what to do, Jake. What am I supposed to do?”
“Stay,” I whisper, “You’re supposed to stay.”
“I can’t. I already loved one man that was no good for me. I can’t go through that again.” She looks up at me with tears glistening in her eyes. “Jimmy was full of empty promises. He lied through his teeth, he stole, he beat me, but he always came back with that silver tongue, whisperin’ in my ear, tellin’ me he’d changed, he’d given up drinking, and he wanted us to be a family. And I was so stupid that I believed him every time.”
“No, that wasn’t your fault. None of that is on you,” I say, shaking my head. “And I’d never hurt you like that.”
“You already have.” She sniffs and wipes her tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “You’re every bit as dangerous as he was. With him, I knew what to expect. With you, I don’t. I never know from one moment to the next which Jake I’m going to get—the broken Marine or the man who’s left.”
I swallow hard. She’s right. In my heart I know everything she’s sayin’ is true, and yet I still can’t let her walk away. “I am who I am—Marine, man, it makes no difference. War turned me into somethin’ different. You can’t separate the two.”
“You’re right, I can’t,” she whispers, turning from me. “All I can do is walk away.”
“Ellie, don’t leave,” I beg, desperate for a way to make her stay. She reaches for the door handle and yanks it open. I could lean against it. I could take her keys and force her back inside, force her to stay forever, but she’d only resent me for that so I step away. She climbs in, and I close her door. “You and that boy are the only good things in my life.”
“Then you need to work out a way to fix this, because I can’t.” A sob escapes her, and it takes everything in me not to pull that damn door from its hinges to get to her and pull her into my arms. “I can’t fix you, Jake. I wish I could.”
Ellie jams her keys in the lock, starting the engine as Spencer screams and scrambles to unfasten his belt, but Nuke is sitting on the buckle so he can’t get a grasp through all the fur.
“Nuke, come,” I say and my dog jumps off the seat and sits by me on the grass. “You be good for your mamma.”
I close the door as Spencer frees himself from the belt and Ellie stomps on the gas. The car rockets out of the drive and Spencer’s little hands beat the back windshield, his face red and howling for me as they disappear from view.
I stalk up to the garden path and kick over the giant ceramic pot I’d bought for her yard. It lands with a satisfying crack and breaks apart.
Elle was right to walk away; we both know it. It’s not safe for her here. I’m not safe.
I might have sworn to protect them from Jimmy and from anyone else who might try to do them harm, but who’s gonna protect them from me?
21
Jake
I know I shouldn’t be here, soaking wet, watching through the windows and hiding out in Ellie’s backyard during a rainstorm. Hell, if anyone needs an RO out against them it’s me, but I promised to keep the Masons safe, and that’s not an oath I intend to break. I hunker down into the bushes, miserable and sodden to the bone, though it’s certainly not the worst position I’ve ever found myself in. I didn’t bring a coat with me—didn’t think I’d need one in the Alabama heat—but the weather we’re having isn’t so much seasonal as it is caused by a hurricane off the gulf coast.
The light in Elle’s bedroom switches on. The blinds are drawn, so I can’t see anything aside from her silhouette, but even that’s enough to have my dick twitching inside my jeans. She begins removing her clothes. I glance away, but I can’t keep my eyes off of her for long. I know it ain’t right, yet still my gaze follows the glide of the negligee as it skims her body like a second skin.
Jesus Christ she’s beautiful.
Before I can gather my wits about me, I move toward her window, my feet swallowed by the wet ground. I can’t be here. I shouldn’t be watchin’ her like this so I don’t know how I wind up on the front porch, banging on the door to her salon for her to let me in. One by one, the lights flicker on in the house as she moves towards me. She pulls back the blind and her shoulders fall as she glances at me. She opens the door, and I don’t give her time to speak. I slide my hand through her hair and pull her to me. She’s surprised, that much is obvious by the way she stares up at me with her gorgeous whiskey eyes.
I lean my forehead against hers. “I know I shouldn’t be here. I know I’m no good for you.”
“Jake—”
“Just listen.” I shake my head. “I’m probably gonna break your heart, but it’ll break mine if I don’t get to kiss you just once.”
I’m a desperate man. In my grasp is the only thing I’ve wanted in as long as I can remember. I’m holdin this woman’s heart in my hands, and I’m tryin’ so damn hard not to crush it. I should leave her be, but I can’t.
Instead, I press my lips to hers. Her mouth opens, and her tongue moves between my lips, tangling with my own. Her hands slide through my hair. I groan into her mouth and palm her ass, lifting her so she can lock her legs around my hips. I stumble backward into the closed door, the wall, and then finally I get a hold of myself and march over to the washer. I sit her on top of it as I cup her face with my hands and devour her mouth.
I can tell she’s trying to keep from touching me. Her arms are wrapped around my shoulders, but her hands don’t caress my neck or back. A part of me feels the loss of that, and another part relishes the fact that she already knows my triggers so well.
I grind myself against her soft panties, and she breaks our kisses to
moan softly into my ear. I wish I could just slip inside her, release my cock from my pants, yank her panties out of the way and bury myself right to the very hilt, but I know that ain’t the way you treat a woman like this. She’s been hurt before; she’s felt the touch of a man who wasn’t kind, and she deserves more than a quick fuck on top of the washer in her empty salon. If I could just stop kissing her, stop touching her, I could tell her that. That she deserves more than Jimmy, more than me, more than some scared Marine who hasn’t let a woman touch him in eight years, and one whose mind has been ravaged, eaten away like acid by death, blood, and war.
If I could just move away out of her grasp, I could explain this to her. I could show Ellie her worth with my words and my heart, because it counts for nothin’ if you can’t tell a woman that she’s the most precious thing you’ll ever hold in your hands. I know I’m not worthy of a woman like this, because how could someone so perfect desire someone as ruined and ugly as me?
“Mamma?”
I leap back from Ellie and cover my mouth, angling my body away so the kid won’t see the erection straining at my jeans. Shit. I shouldn’t have come here. He’s gonna have questions that neither one of us are able to answer right now.
“What are you doing out of bed, Spence?”
“I heard a noise.” I glance at the kid who rubs his fists against tired eyes. “What’s Jake Tucker doing here? Hey, is Nuke here too?”
“No, Spence, he’s at home. I was just out for a run and came by to make sure you and your mamma were alright.”
“Well, what are y’all doin’ on the washing machine?”
“Er . . .” I shoot a glance at Elle, hoping she’s a fast thinker, but she’s busy staring at the bulge in my pants while she bites her lip. Damn it, that’s just gonna make it even bigger. “Elle, you wanna tell your boy here what we we’re doing?”
“Huh?” she says, her brows drawn together in confusion. “Oh, um . . . we were testing its strength, see? Jake bet me it couldn’t hold my weight.”
“Well it can,” Spencer tells me, matter-of-factly. “Mamma says I ain’t allowed to sit up there because that’s her special place.”
Ellie blushes all over.
“That so?”
“Uh huh,” the kid continues. “No one’s allowed in the salon when Mamma’s doin’ the laundry.”
“Okay, Spencer,” Elle says impatiently. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
“But I wanna stay up with Jake.”
“Sorry, kiddo, I gotta get back and feed Nuke, and you best listen to your mamma now, you hear?”
“Yes sir.” He salutes me with a yawn, and my heart plummets to the very bottom of my gut. I pray to God that this kid never makes it to Marine boot camp. I couldn’t stand to see him hurt by this lifestyle. I don’t want him giving up his freedom to fight a war that will ruin him, if he even comes back at all. I don’t want him ending up like me.
“Please don’t run.” Ellie pins me with a look as she passes. I reach out and slide my fingertips over hers in the lightest of touches.
“I don’t think I can run from you anymore.”
I watch her walk Spence down the hall. If I was a better man, I’d walk away. I have nothing to offer the likes of her. Nothing but heartache and the demons I fight in my head, and she deserves so much more than that.
I shouldn’t be here. But I am. I kissed her, and maybe it was selfish of me and stupid of her to let me in after what she saw last night. Maybe we both just got tired of fightin’. All I know is I’ve spent long enough being a prisoner to the Taliban, to the demons in my head, to my anger, and my grief, and to the feelings I’ve been tryin’ to hide from her. I’m awfully tired of tryin’ to break free from all of it, so I give up.
I give in.
I surrender.
22
Jake
I left Elle’s last night shortly after she’d finished putting Spencer back to bed. I was soaked through from the rain and I didn’t want to ruin her furniture, but more than that, I didn’t trust myself not to take things further. I’ve fallen hard and fast for Elle but now that I’ve tasted her on my lips, held her in my arms and known the touch of her hands, I am afraid of fucking it all up. Ellie Mason isn’t a woman you screw; she’s a woman you make love to. She is the kind of woman you worship for hours between the sheets. She is that rare gem that if you’re lucky enough to find, you grab onto and hold on like hell. So with a lingering kiss at her door, I said goodnight.
Walkin’ away from her was the last thing I wanted, but it was the smart thing to do—the right thing. What happened at my house—the screamin’, the nightmares—is the kind of thing she could expect every night if I took her as my wife, or even just as a girlfriend, and I needed her to be aware of that.
Fuck, what the hell was I thinking? I’d never wanted a wife before. I’d considered myself a career Marine; the idea of leaving a wife and kid behind each time I deployed had been my worst nightmare. With every deployment, I saw the buddies in my platoon go through it, and it was some kind of hell that haunted them all those long days and nights in the desert. And then upon my return home, I saw the haunted looks in the eyes of the widows unfortunate enough to be burying half-empty caskets and handed neatly folded flags in honor of their husband’s service.
I had no wife or children to survive me. My parents were gone, died long ago in a car accident, and my granddaddy and grandmamma had raised me. Mawmaw passed from throat cancer the year I joined the Marines, and I’m told Pawpaw died from a heart attack the day those service men came knockin’ on his front door to give him word of me being a prisoner of war.
No one would have been left to mourn me if I’d died over there in that desert. The Tucker bloodline ends with me, and I’m okay with that. When my service had finally ended, I’d come home to an empty house, yet it had been bursting so full of all my demons and all my guilt that I’d never felt alone. Miserable, but not alone. And though this town had given me a wide berth because I was the face of a war that made them uncomfortable, I’d never felt the need to put roots down somewhere else. I had roots, and they might’ve been severed somewhere in that desert, but I’ve grown new ones and buried them right here in my granddaddy’s house. I’ve been alone a long time, but this woman makes me want more. Still, wanting and knowing how to handle more are two very different things. And it isn’t gonna be easy. I know that, and I guess Ellie probably knows that, too.
I lace my running shoes and stretch, though not as long as my physiotherapist would like me to I’m sure. I don’t bother leashing Nuke—that way he don’t have a lead pulling at his neck and suffocating him as we run. He’s wearing his vest though, and I tuck his lead in my back pocket to attach once we hit the duck pond. Those ducks have been through enough these last few weeks without Nuke chasing ’em.
We start out slow, one foot in front of the other. I ignore the ache in my left side, the way my T-shirt sticks to me after just a few minutes, and the wheezing coming from not just my lungs, but Nuke’s too. By the time I round the corner and hit the path to North Beach Road, I’m struck by the sunrise over the gulf. Not its beauty, or stillness, but the way it reminds me of the first glimpse I’d had of morning when those Green Berets had pulled me from that dark hole in Afghanistan.
Every muscle in my body grinds to a halt as I sink into the sand the way I had then, my body too weak to carry me, too fucked up from the torture and from being kept in a room so small I couldn’t stretch my legs out properly. An anguished cry rips from my chest and frightens a flock of nearby birds. They take flight, and for a brief second as their wingbeats sound in my ears I hear the thump, thump, thump, of the chopper airlifting us out.
“Jake?”
Shit. Not here. Not like this. I don’t want her to see me like this. Not after last night. She’s already seen too much.
I brush my hand across my cheek and I’m surprised to find moisture there.
“Jake, are you okay?”
I clear my thro
at. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
I sit my ass back in the sand and scrub my hand over my stubble. I can’t talk to her about this stuff, but I’m tired of runnin’ every time shit gets hard, so I decide to change the subject. “Where’s Spencer?”
She gives me a hard look, her eyes tellin’ me she knows exactly what I’m doing, but she lets it drop and sits down beside me. “They moved his physiotherapy appointments to Mondays before school.”
“How did that go over?”
“About as well as you might think.” She shrugs. “He’s there now, so that’s all that matters. They don’t like me to be in the room; they feel having me to fall back on might hinder his progress.”
“And you let them kick you out?”
She huffs. “Well, I didn’t go without a fight, but as much as I hate the idea, it’s important for him to know that I’m not always going to be around. One day he’s going to grow up and leave home, and I’m not doing him any favors by wrapping him in cotton wool.”
“Is that you talking or his pediatrician?”
She rolls her eyes. “Them, mostly. I understand what they’re saying; it’s just so hard to learn to let go, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So, you wanna talk about it?”
I grab a fistful of sand and let it sift through my fingers the way Spencer does. “No. I really don’t.”
“Okay then, you wanna talk about last night?”
“Which part exactly?”
“All of it. What you were doin’ standing at my door in the pouring rain, that kiss? Where we go from here?”
I frown. “Where do you want to go from here?”
“I asked you first.” She grins and nudges my shoulder with her own. I don’t flinch at her touch. A part of me wants to pull her closer, but I don’t know if she wants … well, I don’t know what the hell she wants. I certainly have no idea what she sees in a hot mess like me.
