by Casey Hagen
“I might be a bit. Is that okay?” Laramie asked as she tried to run her fingers through her hair and came back with flecks of red that had to be dried blood. Oh God. She needed to scrub it all away. She’d held her daughter like this. She’d eaten meals like this. The staff, her visitors, the doc, they’d all seen her like this.
Deidre glanced down at Laramie’s hand and frowned. “Honey, you take all the time you want.”
The doorbell finally stopped shrilling through his skull only to be replaced by heavy pounding, dashing any hope of the person on the other side going away.
“Dammit all to hell,” he said, then smacked his lips as the rancid rot of day-old liquor lingered on his tongue. Pushing himself off the couch, he stumbled to the door. In his post-drunken haze, he never even thought to check the peephole and instead opened the door to find Dylan standing on the threshold.
“Whoa,” Dylan said with a low whistle.
“Clearly, I shouldn’t be allowed to have days off,” Xavier mumbled as he backed up to let Dylan in. Slamming the door shut behind him, he padded over to the coffee maker.
“You did perfectly fine with days off…before,” Dylan said.
Xavier glared over his shoulder with a snarl and shoved the pod in the machine.
“You want to talk about it?” Dylan asked.
“No.”
Xavier turned just in time to watch Dylan catch a glimpse of the banker’s box on the floor and the pictures strewn about on the tile. “So, you really ripped off the Band-Aid, didn’t you?”
Xavier crossed his arms and kept his focus on Dylan. He’d have to put it all away and might very well have to have another round of drinks to manage it. Just the thought had the scent of scotch filling him, making his stomach pitch. “Something like that.”
Dylan crouched down and scanned the photos. “Feel better?”
“What the fuck is feeling better?” His head pounded like a team of carpenters were assembling his skull piece by piece with sledgehammers. His heart ached in his chest, making it hard to take a deep breath. And his muscles, well, useless. Just fucking useless.
Dylan glanced up. “Acceptance,” he said quietly.
“Fuck feeling better then,” he bit out, barely controlling the snarl that rose to his lips.
Dylan slid the pictures into a pile. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear, and now look at you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not on the clock, and I’m in my own home so I’m sure there’s more where that came from.”
Dylan picked up Xavier’s favorite picture, the one now damaged from his tears. “So, this is Morgan?”
Xavier swallowed but couldn’t force the words out so he only nodded.
“She’s beautiful,” he said with a sad smile.
“Was beautiful,” Xavier corrected.
“She looks just like you. A good memory.”
Speaking about her as though she were still here had his gut churning. If only the memories weren’t like dragging a red-hot sword across his skin. “You came here for a reason, right?”
As if he knew what it would do to Xavier to have to put the pictures away, Dylan scooped them up carefully and laid them in the box. Megan’s owl went in right after, and he replaced the lid, leaving it on the floor where he found it. “Yeah, to check on you. The guys and I stopped at New Hope to let you know what’s going on, and you weren’t there.”
“Why does it involve me?” he asked, followed by a rush of blood to his cheeks because he remembered right after the words slid from his lips that he’d involved himself.
“You’re the one who told me that you were to be informed.”
“Shit,” he muttered.
“You still think she’s in on the baby mill?”
“No,” he said, reaching for his cup of coffee, welcoming the sharp sting that burned his tongue with the first sip.
“What changed your mind?”
Xavier didn’t answer. Because the answer would incriminate him. “I just did.”
Dylan grinned like he knew just what Xavier wasn’t saying. The bastard.
“Good, so we’re on the same page. And in the interest of keeping you informed, we’re keeping Laramie and Harmony in the center indefinitely until we can gather all the evidence we need to put everyone corrupt and involved with her case behind bars. We have a ton of information to get us headed in the right direction, but none of it obtained legally, so right now, we have nothing.”
“So, Laramie and Harmony lived in a prison with her husband, and now you want to put her in another prison…indefinitely?”
Dylan’s narrowed his eyes. “I’d hardly call it a prison. No one will be beating her. She won’t be in danger.”
“Every family we’ve taken in, we’ve come up with a timeline based on their particular needs. That’s the commitment we’ve made to them. The promise. We help them break the cycle, and they go on and have a normal life. But you want to ask Laramie to commit to giving you control indefinitely? How can we ask her to make that decision?”
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
“We make her strong.” The air whooshed from his lungs as he said it, as the gravity of the words hanging in the air filled him.
“I’m listening.”
“Even if you think you’ve caught everybody, there’s bound to be someone you miss. You don’t know how many snakes will come out of the grass even after you blow this thing out of the water. She’ll be at risk. She may always be at risk.”
His stomach cramped as the cold hard truth stared him right in the face. There would always be danger lurking. And who said it would be someone she outed? It could be a guy mugging her on the street. A rapist lurking in the shadows. A drunk driver driving a two-thousand-pound death machine.
All they could do is give her all the tools she could possibly need to navigate the world and protect Harmony.
“Harmony will be a target since she’s the easiest way to get compliance from her mother. We make damn sure that no matter who might come for either one of them, they’re ready.” His blood raced, and his head swam with the rush of what he was suggesting.
Dylan’s eyebrows shot clean up to his hairline. “You want to train a four-year-old?”
Xavier scratched at the scruff on his chin. “Yes.”
“Train her in what exactly?”
“I don’t know. Evading. Running. Getting help. Whatever we can.” Yeah, it sounded stupid to his own ears, but there had to be a way. The more he thought about it, the more he wondered if maybe this was something missing from their program. They taught every abused resident self-defense, but what did they do for the kids to make sure they had a fighting chance?
“Jesus,” Dylan muttered, scrubbing a hand through his hair.
“That about covers it.”
“What’s the first thing we do?” Dylan asked.
“Convince her mother to be on board. Something tells me she won’t be happy about my plan,” Xavier said with a sigh. So much for keeping his fucking distance.
Chapter 8
Laramie glanced over at the sound of her hospital room door cracking open with a quick knock and spotted the doc himself heading on in.
“Good thing I wasn’t naked,” she called out, slathering butter on a biscuit she’d held on to from her tray that morning. She’d pushed herself pretty hard this morning and had to struggle not to toss the little bit she had managed to choke down for breakfast, but she knew the minute her stomach righted itself she’d be ravenous. One biscuit. She’d burn through it in fifteen minutes, but hey, she did what she could.
He skidded to a stop, his eyes wide. “Excuse me?”
“It was a joke,” she muttered past the biscuit, holding her hand in front of her mouth so she didn’t spray the sheet in front of her with crumbs. “Lighten up.”
“A joke. Good. Not that it really matters, I’ve already seen you naked,” he said, looking down at his iPad.
She sucked in what was left of
The bastard’s lips twitched as he continued to stare down at his tablet. “You going to make it?”
Was he actually joking with her? Mr. Rigid Unless I’m Watching You Sleep. Okay, without context, that name had some serious creep factor to it. Maybe it was better to not say that one out loud. “Clearly you’re not really worried. Oh, how far we’ve come since my coma four days ago,” she said.
“Dr. Keith seems impressed with your progress,” he said, still not really looking at her.
“Dr. Keith is not my doctor. No offense to Dr. Keith, but I don’t care what he thinks about my progress. I care what you think, and you weren’t here.” And now she sounded like a petulant child. Not that she meant to, but she’d just woken up a few days ago to a mountain of obstacles, and the only reason she’d managed to open her eyes at all was because the man standing in front of her, stubbornly not looking her in the eye, had sacrificed so much to keep her here.
Every time she pushed herself in the past two days, she’d done so for herself, for Harmony, but also for him. He hadn’t been here to see any of it. She didn’t need his praise. She just wanted to show him that she was grateful. To show him that she wasn’t throwing away the chance he’d given her.
Because that was the real heart of it. Call it intuition, call it being used to being judged, but something in the way he looked at her, the way he kept his distance, the way he was always one step forward, two steps back brought out all those insecurities in her. The ones that told her she was an impulsive fuck up just like everyone thought. Like he must have thought too.
She knew she wasn’t. She’d outgrown that shit despite evidence to the contrary. And shouting that from the rooftops would not make people believe it. But soon she would make them see.
“I haven’t taken a day off in over six weeks. It was time,” he said.
She studied him, drawn to the tension bracketing his mouth and the dark circles under his eyes. If it had been her, she would have looked like Harmony had free rein with her makeup and gave her the four-year-old version of smokey eye. But the doc…he still looked like he could set underwear on fire from a hundred paces with just a distracted smile.
Meanwhile, she was still cleaning remnants of blood out of her hair, and her face looked like Edward Scissorhands took a few swipes at her. She’d sigh, but who the hell could afford the energy when there were more laps to be walked after lunch.
And weight training.
Mother of God, she had always hated weight training. But dammit, she would do it if for no other reason than Harmony would be right there counting along through sign.
She pushed her tray away from her bed and sat up. Dangling her leg over the side, she set her foot swinging. Now that she wasn’t stuck in bed, she couldn’t seem to stop moving. “Well, I’ve learned a few things while you were away, Doc. First…catheters suck. I get the technology behind them; I know they’re necessary, but I’m going to make it my mission to never need one again. Second, showers are pure heaven, and I plan on taking two a day indefinitely. Third, I didn’t like that you left without saying anything. I don’t know what that says about me, about you, or about whatever this weird thing between us is, but…where the hell did you run off to?”
He looked at the wall just over her shoulder, his jaw clenched with tension. “Just a couple days off.”
They’d been rough days. Anyone could see that he’d come back hollowed out somehow. “Uh-huh. Doc?”
“Hmmm?” he hummed.
“Look at me,” she said quietly.
His shoulders stiffened, but he finally looked into her eyes.
“Wow, so there you are?” She shook her head and frowned. “You look the way I felt when I woke up.”
“How’s that?” he said so low she barely heard him.
Sliding off the mattress, she walked up to him, her legs steady, her spine straight. He’d missed quite a bit while he was gone, and the way his gaze traveled over her, she’d say he finally realized it.
He tapped his Apple pen in a staccato beat against the screen of the tablet and shuffled on his feet.
My God, he’s nervous.
“You’re wrung out and pale,” she said, reaching up and laying her palm against the warm skin of his jaw. She slid her thumb over his smooth cheek, the hint of a five o’clock shadow already appearing on his face. “Your eyes are guarded, like you’re trying to deflect anything that can possibly touch on those unseen bruises. You’re fidgeting like you’re just aching to run far and fast.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, his voice low and laced with pain.
“Oh, I think you do. A piece of advice for you,” she said, taking a step back and breaking the contact. “It doesn’t matter how far you run. The demons are in you. They’re only here because you’re holding on to them. Thing is, Doc…if you don’t let them go, they’ll tear you apart.”
Xavier had come back too soon. Two days hadn’t been enough time to perfect his poker face. Or Laramie was a damn witch with the ability to see inside his soul. Either way, he wanted to throttle her and kiss her all at the same time.
She looked good, not that he had any business noticing. Her honey-streaked blonde hair sat in a messy mass bundled on top of her head. He clenched his fist on his pen, holding it like an anchor to keep from reaching out to roll a lock of fallen wisps between his fingers.
The puffiness of her skin had faded away sooner than he thought it would. Setting the iPad aside, he cupped her jaw and applied gentle pressure, watching for any sign of discomfort clouding her piercing blue eyes. “So you’re some sort of inner demon expert, are you?”
He didn’t want to go there, but the stubborn tilt of her chin and the challenge blazing in her eyes despite the gentle delivery made it clear that she wouldn’t let it go. She may drop it for now, letting him think he’d won this round, but at some point, when he least expected it, she would club him over the head with it again. It had been so long since he dealt with the perplexing ways of women that he had no hope of coming out on top.
“Something like that. I’ve had to dance with the Devil for a while now.”
“Your husband?” The words sounded thick to his own ears as he ran his thumb along her fractured cheekbone, and when he did, her full pink lips parted on a sigh.
“Among others, but he’s the slipperiest of them all. I won’t ask how you know. I would imagine my brother has a wealth of connections and has figured most of it out by now.”
He nodded. “He has.”
Her eyes fluttered shut, and she swallowed hard. “But you still have questions.”
“I’m sure there are plenty of things they want to talk to you about,” he said quietly as he traced over the soft skin just under her eyebrow. What was it about that spot? Was it the contour? The soft skin?
Or maybe it was the way Laramie wrapped her soft fingers around his wrist when he touched her there.
He would ask her if there was pain, but she wasn’t pulling his hand away. If anything, she was holding it there, silently asking him to keep going.
Long lashes fanned against the edge of his thumb when she opened her eyes. “I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about you. Maybe I’m reading you wrong, but I don’t think I am. You’re not quite like them, and I think you have a few questions all of your own.”
His mouth ran dry. “Asking them crosses the line.”
“Watching me sleep crosses the line too,” she said.
His skin grew hot and tight. He wanted to look away, but that stare of hers, it captured him and he was lost. “I know.”
“So why are we talking about lines? What do you want to know, Doc?” she asked, her free hand brushing against his ribs as she slid her hand over him and under his white jacket.
He struggled to focus under her curious exploration. He anchored his hand around her neck, upping the ante in the dangerous game they played. “Why did you stay with a man who hurt you?”
“Because it wasn’t just about me.”
“Don’t tell me Harmony needed her father because that’s shit,” he said, that ball of anger he nursed inside him coloring his voice.
She shook her head. “He’s not her father.”
“What?”
Her slim throat worked under his thumb as she swallowed. He didn’t want to ease her discomfort, but his thumb grazed over her skin of its own volition, trying to soothe and not giving one shit what he wanted.
“Harmony’s father died, but that’s a story for another time. I stayed because there were others. They weren’t strong enough to take the hits. I was. And every day I was his punching bag, I gathered more evidence to put him away for good so he and his business partners could never manipulate another scared mother into giving up her baby ever again.”
“You kept Harmony there with you, at risk right alongside you.” Just like Sarah kept Morgan right alongside her on a dangerous ride that cost them everything.
“Oh, Doc,” Laramie said, leaning her forehead against his chest, her warmth seeping through his shirt. She propped her chin on his sternum and looked up at him. “She’s going to be at risk as long as he’s free. Because he gets off on hurting me, and there’s no way to hurt me more than through her. Nothing short of putting him behind bars will protect her.”
He pressed his forehead to hers. “Or you.”
“Or me,” she agreed, her breath feathering over his lips, pushing him to cross that last damn line.
Christ, he didn’t want to hurt her. His shoulders shook with everything he held back. He hadn’t done this in ten long years, and terror filled him at the thought of getting one taste and losing all control.
“I won’t break, Doc. So kiss me already,” she said, this time her soft lips grazing the corner of his mouth, setting him on fire.
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