by Katy Regnery
“Same thing,” I say solemnly.
He chortles with laughter just as a fat raindrop plops onto my head.
“You lose,” he says, pulling me into his arms and dropping his lips to mine without permission.
Raindrops dot my arms as I reach up and lock my hands around his neck. More rain pelts my hair. Drops fall on my upturned face as his lips move hungrily over mine. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, his hands land on my bottom, cupping it, and he lifts me. His legs, rooted firmly to the ground, split mine, and I straddle his hips, instinctively locking my ankles around his back as he holds me.
I slide my hands to his jaw and cup his face as his tongue sweeps into my mouth to tangle with mine. He skims his lips along my jaw, licking the rainwater from my skin. I open my eyes and find that his long eyelashes have caught tiny droplets of water that glisten and shine like the glass dust that sometimes sparkles on the backs of his hands.
I’m crazy about you.
The words bolt through my head like that runaway train I was thinking about before.
He is so beautiful, I feel it everywhere—in every frantic beat of my heart—and I stare at him until he realizes I’ve frozen in his arms. When he looks at me, when his eyes meet mine, I’m so overwhelmed with emotion, I can’t speak. I loop my arms around his neck and rest my forehead against his. Then I close my eyes and breathe deeply, memorizing this perfect moment.
***
Julian
I like her—so damn much—it scares me.
The way she looked at me in the kitchen . . . the way she’s looking at me now . . . I can sense the depth and intensity of her feelings, and my heart answers them. If I wasn’t enjoying every second with her, I’d realize how enormously fucked I was. This girl is way under my skin, and I’m starting to wonder if this will be a passing fling, or if she’s there to stay. Some people breeze in and out of your life without leaving a mark. With Ashley? I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a mark. Nah. There’s going to be a big fucking gash.
I’m not an idiot.
I fucking realize that I haven’t known her that long.
But it just doesn’t matter. The heart wants what the heart wants. Mine wants her.
I loosen my hands on her ass, sliding them to her hips and holding her steady until her feet hit the ground.
My voice is hoarse with emotion. “We should go back, baby.”
She tilts her head and grins. “First, doudou. Now, baby. Which one is it?”
“Whichever one you want.”
“Both, please,” she says, just a tiny bit sassy, and I can see her mother so clearly in her for a split second, it almost knocks me on my ass.
“Both it is, baby doudou.”
“If that means ‘baby crap,’” she says, “you’re in hot water.”
She makes me laugh again, which is the wonder of Ashley. She’s in a world of shit up to her eyeballs and she’s still making me laugh. What a woman.
I whistle for Bruno and take her hand, turning us around and leading us back to the house. When the barn is in sight, I realize that there’s an unfamiliar car in the driveway, and every muscle in my body tenses. I’m immediately on high alert.
I yank Ashley against me, pivoting to hide us behind a tree trunk and look down into her eyes. “Are you expecting anyone?”
“No,” she says.
“There’s a car in the driveway.”
“Is it Gus?”
I shake my head. “No. The car’s black, not white.”
“Is it an SUV?” she asks.
I take a peek and shake my head. “No. A sedan.”
I can see her thinking before she whispers, “A Cadillac?”
“A Honda.”
Her shoulders relax. “It’s not Mosier.”
I nod, squeezing her hand and wishing I had my gun. I’ll clean it tonight and start carrying it with me at all times. “Stay behind me, okay?”
“Don’t take any risks.”
“I won’t. Come on.”
There’s no way he could know where she is already, I think to myself, unless the priest gave her up. Would the priest give her up? Shit. Ashley was positive he wouldn’t, but my initial feeling was that Răumann would stop at nothing to get her back. I should have followed my instincts. What if the priest fucking buckled and Răumann’s sent one of his men to grab her?
As I get closer, I realize there’s someone in the driver’s seat, and someone else, in a trench coat with the collar up, is knocking on the front door. Fuck. What the fuck is going on?
“Stay here behind the barn,” I whisper to Ashley. “I’ll go see who it is and let you know if it’s safe.”
“Okay,” she says. “Be careful.”
I drop her hand, walk around the barn, and call through the ebbing rain, “What do you want?”
To my surprise, Gus turns around and looks at me. “Julian!”
“Gus?” I look pointedly at the car and then back at Gus, a clear question in my eyes. Who the fuck is that?
“Him? Ohhh! No, no, no!” he says, reading my expression. “It’s just an Uber! Jock took the car.”
Shit. Okay.
As Gus thanks the driver for waiting and waves him away, I go back for Ashley.
“Gus is here?” she asks. “Hmm. I wonder what’s up.”
We meet Gus at the front door, then step into the living room. Gus takes off his khaki trench coat as I run to my bathroom for towels since Ashley and I are soaked. When I return, Ashley’s still standing just inside the front door, staring at Gus.
“You’re scaring me,” I hear her say. “Just tell me what happened.”
For the first time, I notice that Gus’s expression is deeply troubled, bordering on grave.
“Sit down, li’l Ash,” he says.
Gus sits in a wingback chair by the fire, and I sit across from him, beside Ashley, on the edge of the sofa. I place a towel in her lap, which she ignores. She is totally focused on her godfather.
“Please,” she whispers.
“Oh, honey. There’s no easy way to share this . . .” He winces, staring at the folded hands in his lap before looking up at Ashley. “I called your school today. Your, uh, Father Joseph . . . last week when I talked to him, he told me that he had a meeting set up with Mosier on Wednesday night. Uh, that was yesterday, um, night. So I called this afternoon . . . just to see how the talk went.”
Ashley’s entire body has tensed up beside me. Her arms are crossed over her chest and her shoulders brush the lobes of her ears. She nods at him to continue.
Gus licks his lips nervously. “Father Joseph . . . aw, baby doll, he had a heart attack last night.” Ashley gasps, covering her mouth with her hands, and I can’t stop myself—I put my arm around her rigid shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Ash, but he’s gone.”
“No!” she cries, her voice keening. “No. No, no, no. No. Please, no.”
“Aw, honey,” says Gus, leaning forward in his chair, his brown eyes brimming with tears. “I’m so damned sorry.”
She is shaking her head, sobs racking her small body as she repeats the word no over and over and over again. The depth of her sorrow is shocking and terrible, and I wish I could halve it for her, share it with her, make it go away.
But I can’t.
I look up at Gus, and to my great dismay, I realize that he isn’t finished. He has more to say.
“What else?” I ask, sliding closer to Ashley and rubbing her back.
“I asked . . .” Gus pauses before starting again. “I spoke to Sister James. She said that he was fine yesterday. She saw him at dinner, and he asked her to pray for him. He said he was meeting with the stepfather of a student at eight thirty that evening and called it a ‘complicated matter.’ When he wasn’t at Mass the next morning, she sent a student to the rectory. They found him at his desk. He was gone.” Gus sighs. “According to the coroner, the time of death was approximately nine o’clock the night before.”
Ashley has been cradling her head in her h
ands, but now her neck snaps up and she looks at Gus. “What?”
Gus looks sorry as hell to have to share this information, but he nods as Ashley adds up the facts in her head. “He either died while Mosier was still there, or directly after he left.”
“What do you mean?” Ashley demands, springing to her feet. “Did Mosier hurt him?” she screams. “Did Mosier kill him?”
Now Gus is on his feet. “Baby doll, your Father Joe wasn’t a young man.”
“Sister James said he was fine the night before!”
I stand up too, looking at Gus. “Did you get a sense of foul play? From the nun you talked to?”
Gus looks thoughtful for a second, then shakes his head. “No. She didn’t tell me that anything was off, aside from the fact that he seemed concerned earlier in the evening.” He takes a deep breath and releases it slowly, crossing his arms over his chest, his expression bleak. “But are you asking if I suspect foul play? I don’t know how you’d go about giving someone a heart attack, but the answer is yes. The timing stinks.”
I nod because I feel the same way.
“There are untraceable drugs that will induce a heart attack,” I say. “They aren’t easy to find, but someone like Răumann, who deals in the importation of illegal drugs, wouldn’t have trouble getting his hands on something. With a tiny needle, it would be virtually impossible to detect a puncture wound.” I take a deep breath, imagining an alternative. “Or he could have been threatened and frightened to such an extent that his heart sped up to dangerous levels and gave out. Either way . . .”
“You think Mosier killed him,” Ashley murmurs, her body falling limply back to the sofa. Her head falls forward, her shoulders shaking with sobs. “Oh, my God. Mosier killed him. Mosier killed him . . .”
Gus says, “We’ve been working with someone at the FBI who’s taken a great interest in the case. Special Agent Simmons. Jock called him today, and he’s flying up here tonight from Langley. Jock already went to go pick him up at the airport. That’s why I Uber’d here. We’ll put him up at our place for tonight and bring him here tomorrow. We need to figure out what comes next.”
“Good,” I say, grateful there’s a plan in the works. “Whatever you need, I’m in.”
Gus looks at Ashley, moving around the coffee table to sit beside her, to gather her into his arms as she cries. And although a part of me wants to be the person comforting her, I know that I have a much more important job ahead: to protect her from whatever is coming.
So while Gus rubs her back and lets her cry, I head out to the barn to clean and load my gun.
I’m not letting anyone hurt her.
Even if I have to protect her with my life.
Day #32 of THE NEW YOU!
Crazy.
I am crazy.
It all started that night at the table: Damon’s head in the beet soup and a look from Anders that I could have missed if I hadn’t raised my eyes to his.
But I did raise my eyes.
And he did capture my heart with that look.
And it became almost a game.
At first, it was all so overwhelming—to feel connected to someone again. My heart would thunder every time we were in the same room together. I would hold my breath. My whole body would BUZZ, like I was ALIVE.
I remember this old game, Operation, that Mam and Tad bought me at a tag sale when I was a kid. You’d put a metal pincher around a body organ and try to extract it without making a buzzer go off.
Our game is kind of like that, but this game is called Attraction. Him to me. Me to him. Like magnets. And if we’re caught—if we make the buzzer go off—we’re both cooked and we lose the game. So we’re quiet. We’ve learned to be quiet, to be careful, to be . . . flawless in our silent extraction of feelings.
We can’t talk.
We can’t touch.
We can only look.
And I have become very good at looking.
In fact, Tig—who was once such a loud, brash bitch—has become an EXPERT at looking.
He has 100 looks when something is funny. Another 100 for frustration. 1,000 for sadness. 10,000 for anger. Glances. Smiles. The many moods of his mouth and seasons of his eyes. I have learned them all this year. I know every nuance of his face, every twitch, every crease, the manifestation of every possible emotion you can imagine painted on the canvas of his face.
I have unlocked them, studied them, and memorized them.
I live for them.
I live for him.
The days he is away are my purgatory. The days he is here are my heaven and my hell. Because I want so much more. But I can’t live without what I have.
Today was a regular day.
Anders left early for Albany. M and Damon went to Newark.
No one was supposed to be back for three days. Thank God. A little peace.
M left a small crew behind—only four guys, with one inside and one outside at all times.
Boian had perimeter duty in the morning. Costin was beside the front door. After dinner, Sandu and Marku took over for the next twelve hours. Like fucking dogs. M’s kennel of thugs.
Grosavu, that evil fucking witch, had her eyes on me all day. Like I would do what? Start an illicit affair with potbellied, foul-smelling Costin? Get hammered on the cooking sherry on the fucking sly? She knows M locks up the alcohol whenever I am alone. That’s the joke of it all. I can’t get into trouble and she still fucking watchdogs me, typing texts to M, her lord and master, every time I walk from my room to the kitchen, following me around like she’s my fucking shadow.
Anyway, at midnight, I’m in my room watching some stupid horror movie where the girls run into the basement instead of out to the car, and there’s a knock on the door, and I just fucking know it’s Grosavu coming to check on me, and I’ve had it with her bullshit.
I yell, “If you come in here, you fucking troll, I will throw this crystal vase at your fucking head.” I know she’ll tell M that I was yelling and swearing, and he’ll call me and tell me to expect a special punishment. He’ll say a good wife doesn’t swear and doesn’t yell. And I’ll get beat for it when he gets home.
But it might be worth a beating just to clock Grosavu in the fucking face.
I hear the door open and close, and I think to myself, Is this bitch actually walking into my fucking room?
I pick up the vase on my bedside table and it’s like a cement block it’s so heavy. I grab the white roses and throw them on the carpet, ignoring the thorns that dig into my palm, and launch the water on the wall across from me. And I swear to CHRIST I’m about to hurl that $4,000 20-pound monstrosity at her, when I hear a voice say,
“I surrender.”
Fuck.
It’s not Grosavu, it’s a man.
And at first? It didn’t click. I didn’t know who it was.
I didn’t. I swear.
Because I barely ever hear his voice, and when I do, it’s directed at his father or brother, not at me.
So I’m wondering which of the four brainiac mongrels from downstairs has lost his goddamned mind, coming into my room at night, when he rounds the corner.
And . . .
The world . . . stops.
It isn’t one of M’s moron guards.
It’s Anders. Standing in my room. Smiling at me. And I know this smile. I know it like I know my own soul and it says, “Hello. How are you? Stay strong. I love you. I’m here.”
And that’s what I hear myself whisper aloud, the words dusting over my lips, feather soft:
“Hello. How are you? Stay strong. I love you. I’m here.”
He puts his hands on his hips, darting a quick glance at the vase I’m holding over my head.
“You wanna put that down, killer?”
I place it beside me on the comforter and ask, “How are you here?”
He takes the remote control from my bedside table and turns off the TV, then presses the button that closes the shades over my windows.
“Albany is
two hours away,” he says, watching as the shades lower, the gears a soft hum as darkness slowly envelops us. “I’m not actually here. I’m there. In my hotel room. Asleep.”
“You’re not here?”
He shakes his head. “Nope. I can’t be here.”
“Okay, you were never here,” I say. “How did you get in?”
“The tunnel to the wine cellar,” he says, replacing the remote. “My brother and I discovered it years ago.”
“How long do we have?” I ask him, rising to my knees and reaching out my arms. They’re shaking because they want to hold him so badly.
He steps over to me, cupping my cheeks like he loves me. “Two hours.”
“You’re driving four hours for two alone with me?”
“Teagan,” he says tenderly, leaning down to kiss my forehead, “I’d drive a thousand hours for two minutes alone with you.”
Oh, my heart.
Every wall within me fell. Every barrier slipped away. Every terrible, forbidden longing that we’d silenced for a year was given a voice.
He had me.
And I had him.
Again and again and again. In every way. In all the ways that singers write about in love songs and actors try to capture on the screen.
He treated me like I was loved. Like I was a person. A real person. Not a model, not an actress, not his father’s purchased whore. Not a pretty bitch to try on like jewelry. He touched me like he loved me. All of me. The bad parts and the shattered parts and the scared parts and the beautiful parts.
I have never been touched like that. Not ever before. And maybe never again.
It was like a rebirth. Or a baptism. Like his tenderness had the power to soothe or . . . or even erase all the horrors of my life—parents who didn’t love me, a daughter I never wanted, a career that tried to eat me alive, a husband who wants to beat all of the spirit out of me.
Anders just . . . loved me. And, my God, if I have to, I will live on those two hours for the rest of my miserable fucking life.
At two o’clock, his watch alarm went off. He rolled off me without a word and put his clothes back on in the dark.
“This can’t happen often,” he says.
“I don’t care. I’ll take whatever I can get.”
