As hard as it is, I need to remind myself that her life is complicated. She’s been hurt, and she needs someone that can give her all that she deserves. No complications. No past. Fuck, her life is so complicated right now that she might never want to let another man near her again.
Stop thinking about it.
“Okay, how can I help with dinner?” Trying to distract myself from the whirlwind of juxtaposing thoughts in my head is almost impossible as Avery walks past me to the oven, her scent lingering behind her.
“Mommy and Jo made dinner already,” Iris tells me. “And I helped set the table while Mommy was talking to her boss on the phone.”
My gut twists at the possibility that she’s thinking of going back. I don’t like it at all. A part of me wants to be as close as possible so that I can make sure they’re okay. Avery and Iris.
“Come on now!” Jo claps her hands from the table as Avery puts a casserole dish down. “Dinnertime, sugar!”
“Wash your hands,” Avery reminds Iris.
Jo hasn’t been this content in a long time. She’s genuinely smiling; even her snark has been lighter.
When both Iris and I have washed our hands in the sink, we settle for dinner. It’s louder than what it usually is when I stay with Jo, but it feels different to when Mark and his family are here. There’s no chaos, no one trying to talk over each other or constant joking around. I love them, but Mark and Charlie are full-on. As fun as it is being around them, there’s no chill. Not like this.
“Can we go to the beach tomorrow?” Iris changes the conversation from the apple picking and new chicks. “Jojo said that we could have a picnic and I can go swimming.”
“Maybe Garrett can teach you how to surf too!” Jo winks at me, I’m not sure why, but there are certain things I’ve given up trying to understand when it comes to her. It’s easier to go along with it.
“Sure, I can take you out on my board if your mom says it’s okay.”
“Is it safe?” Avery starts collecting our plates.
“I can swim. I got a medal for it, so I’m pretty good. Right, Mommy?”
“That doesn’t mean it’s safe.”
Taking the plates from her, I put them in the sink as she dishes up the apple pie and caramel ice cream.
“We can get you surfing too. It’s therapeutic.”
Combing back the loose tendrils that have fallen in front of her face, she looks up at me. The green in her eyes is so bright in contrast to the amber swirling in it. Dark, thick lashes flutter as she looks back down at the counter with a downturn of her lips.
“I don’t think my body is ready for it.”
When her gaze flits back to mine, the light dims in her eyes, and I hate it. It’s something so uniquely precious to her.
A dark chestnut strand falls to one side of her face. The temptation to brush it back with my fingers is too great to ignore, and when I tuck it behind her ear, I can’t stop myself from thumbing over her cheek. The swelling is gone, and the remnants of the bruising are disguised by her makeup, leaving only the glow of her flushed cheeks and the warmth of her bashfulness seeping into my fingertips.
Wrapping her arms tight around herself, Avery takes a step back. A look of confusion and guilt twists her face as she puts the lid on the ice cream and turns to put it back in the freezer. Without so much as a glance, she grabs the dessert spoons from the drawer beside me, careful not to touch me, before she takes Jo and Iris their pie.
I need to work on my control. I need to make sure that I’m not another selfish asshole when I’m around her, and to do that, I need to keep my distance.
Having cleared up the kitchen, I check on the horses and then the chick nursery in the small barn by the coop, snapping a picture to send to Mark like I promised Makenna I would.
Tomorrow I can come back and clean out the stable and coop while Avery takes Iris and Jo to the beach. It’ll stop me from doing stupid shit when it comes to any of them. Having them around is bringing Jo back, and I can’t be the person that ruins it for her. It’s what I wanted, for her to find something to make her want to fight harder. Avery and Iris could be it.
Getting into my Jag, I catch a glimpse of Iris behind the front door screen. She hops down the porch steps in her pink fairy pajamas and with a rag doll clutched to her chest, stopping only when she’s in front of me.
“Do I need a special suit for surfing?” My chest squeezes at the flutter of her long lashes. “I can’t wait!”
How can I let her down when she’s looking at me like I’m Santa Claus about to deliver her a lifetime’s worth of presents? A thousand excuses cross my mind, but none make it to my lips.
“Doc?”
“You can wear whatever you like, champ.”
“I’m so excited!” Her squeal is muffled by her tight hug, so different to the little girl I met almost a month ago that was scared to even look at me.
Lifting her into my arms, I take her back up the porch, setting her inside the front door. Avery pauses halfway down the stairs, still drying the lengths of her hair with a small towel. Her makeup is all gone, and she looks even better with her hair a tangled mess and an oversized T-shirt falling to the tops of her thighs over her shorts.
“What happened to having your milk and going to bed, missy?” She comes down and stops behind Iris, the sugar-and-almond scent of her damp hair filling my lungs.
I’m salivating at the smell of a woman, something completely new and frustrating when she’s out of bounds.
“I had to ask Garrett about my bathing suit.” Giving me another hug, Iris tips her head to grin up at me. “And I had to say good night.”
“Night, champ.” Hugging her back, I realize that it’s not just Avery that’s trouble.
This little girl is something beyond special with all her quirks and sass. She’s as difficult to push away as her mom. There are no boundaries or walls that I can put up that will withstand her. If I’m honest with myself, I don’t want to. Not when they’re so easy to be around.
“You want pancakes for breakfast?”
“Chocolate chip?” There’s that eyelash-batting grin that tells me the only answer I can give her is “Of course.”
“All right, time for bed.” Avery nudges her up the stairs with a kiss to the top of her head.
Iris trudges up a few steps before she turns and squeals into her doll again, “I can’t wait!”
“You can’t surf if you don’t sleep.” Avery claps her up the stairs until all we can hear is her running on the old creaky boards to one of the rooms at the back of the house. Making me wonder which bed Avery’s sleeping in. Knowing Jo, she would’ve given her the bedroom with the suite and the view over the lake and the hills. The room I normally stay in.
We’re standing in silence, when Jo comes out of her own room at the far side of the house. Both of us take a step back, Avery turning toward her.
“Why are you outside?” Jo asks me, looking between the two of us.
“Leaving,” I say at the same time as Avery tells her, “Saying good night. Ummm, goodbye. I mean goodb…night.” She shakes her head in a fluster as though we’ve been caught red-handed.
“Iris was saying good night, and Avery was saying goodbye.”
“I thought you were staying. No? It’s the weekend, Mark’s away…isn’t that what you normally do?”
“You have guests, and I got some things to see to at the clinic.”
“Right…” Jo nods, waving at me as she ambles toward the kitchen. “Good night and goodbye, Garrett.”
Her tone is a mixture of disappointment and annoyance. Although it bothers me, I shake it off.
“Get your beauty sleep for tomorrow, Josie. You never know who you might meet at beach.” At my teasing remark, she turns and sticks her tongue out at me with a glare before indicating with her fingers that she’s watching me.
Of course she is. Jo watches everything and everyone.
“See you tomorrow, sunshine.”
&nbs
p; “Good night,” Avery murmurs with a small wave.
Taking a few steps back, I look around the dimly lit porch and the drive. The ranch is secluded enough that it isn’t the easiest to find unless you know where you’re heading, but I don’t feel right leaving without making sure they’ve locked up for the night.
“I locked the back doors.”
“I saw.” She nods, rolling onto her tiptoes as she holds on to the doorframe.
Her towel is draped over one shoulder, and from the way it pulls the T-shirt taut to her chest, making her nipples poke through the worn white cotton, it’s obvious she’s not wearing a bra.
“Make sure you lock the door and bolt it, and you know what Jo is like with leaving the kitchen window by the cooker open.”
“Yeah.” Avery nods again, her tongue licking over her lips. “I’ll check.”
“Lock the door, Avery.”
“Yes, Doc.”
She doesn’t make a single move to close the door with her eyes flickering up and down my body to the deep rise and fall of her chest.
My staying-away spiel didn’t last two seconds, and it’s already backfiring with every step I take closer to her. Big eyes widen like saucers with every raspy breath.
Avery shudders at the lightest of touches as I urge her back inside the house so she can close the door. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to control myself with her standing in front of me with legs for days and her T-shirt leaving almost nothing to the imagination.
She’s so damn close that her breath warms through my shirt. The lure of her lightly tanned skin and the softness of her curves…
“You need to get inside.”
She nods. Yet neither of us takes a step back. Fuck, I know she wants something, but I can’t be the asshole that takes advantage of her. She’s been through enough as it is. She has Iris.
Avery’s still nodding when I force myself to pull away from her.
“It’s late and dark,” I groan at the loss of her closeness. At the magnitude of my need to be near her. “I want to hear that lock turn before I leave.”
“Yes.” She nods as I close the screen.
“Good night, sunshine.”
As they always do, her eyes widen, taking on a teary sheen at the endearment that I can’t seem to stop from rolling off my tongue. It’s her smile that tells me she likes it. It’s always there when I say it, more so than when I use her name. And I like that she prefers my endearment to her own name.
“Close the door.”
She does so with a light chuckle and shake of her head, and I don’t take a single step until the lock turns and I hear the bolt slide across.
Chapter Eleven
AVERY
The sun is rising from behind the hills when I look out of the back window from where I’m sitting on the couch with Jo. Garrett’s running along the edge of the lake at the back of the house. The three younger dogs are running with him, leaping in and out of the water to fetch the stick he’s throwing.
I find myself studying Garrett with my heart beating a hundred miles an hour in my chest. He’s tall and strong in a way that isn’t intimidating. On the contrary, everything about him screams safe. His broad shoulders are lean, and his muscular arms are defined but not exaggerated. His build is athletic but not bulky.
I know I shouldn’t be mesmerized by him the way I am. I know that it should be wrong to gravitate to him whenever he’s near—to miss him when he’s gone—but it doesn’t feel it. All noise fades when he’s here, and I swear I can breathe without my chest threatening to cave in on itself, even if every breath burns through me. Garrett makes me feel things I have never felt. When he’s around me, I feel safe and nothing like the person I got used to being.
Useless. Worthless. Plain Avery.
When he calls me sunshine, that’s exactly what I feel like on the inside.
“I like giving him shit,” Jo says, muting the television even though it’s low enough that I can hear without her raising her voice. “It keeps him on his toes. Truth is, he keeps me from going stir-crazy. I never got to have children—it wasn’t in the cards for me and Duke—but if we had been blessed…” She pauses with a low whistle as Breeze sneaks up behind Garrett and pounces on the back of his legs like she did to me the first time I came here.
He doesn’t budge, and she doesn’t stop until he takes a piece of carrot from his pocket and holds it high until she sits patiently. Looking straight at us, a grin spreads over his face when our eyes meet, and all I can do to hide the fact that I was ogling him is gulp down the coffee in my hand.
“You know,” Jo chuckles. “Duke came home one day and told me he was selling half of his practice to a down-in-the-dumps hotshot from New York, and I laughed. Truth is, it was the best decision he ever made.”
If it wasn’t obvious that she cares for Garrett like a mother dotes on a much-loved son, the way she smiles while she watches him run back toward the stables says it better than anything she could tell me.
“I don’t want him making any more shitty choices he’ll regret. One bitter divorce is more than enough.” There’s one tick of a second where she looks as though she wants to take her words back, like she’s said something she shouldn’t. All the while my chest is constricting so tight that it’s a vise around my panicked heart.
Garrett’s words from the night by the pool murmur in my ears. Take it from a pro, Avery…
It doesn’t make sense that someone might want to give him up. Maybe she was awful. Maybe she was a Carl or a Kayla…
Diverting my gaze to the paddocks, I try to push down my confusion.
He could’ve told me, couldn’t he?
“He’s a good man,” Jo states, bringing me out of my thoughts. “But, Christ, does he have the worst taste in women.”
“Oh,” I murmur, diverting my stare down to my lap.
My cheeks heat when she tips my chin up, narrowing her wise eyes on me. It feels like she can see so much more than I want her to. She can see what Garrett makes me feel, and I want to hide it from her. I want to silence all the accusations whirling around my head—Worthless. Useless. Whore.
“Avery…”
“Hmm…”
“We all have pasts, you know that, don’t you?”
“Of course.” I nod, but disappointment stings at my insides.
I’ve trusted Garrett with more than I care to admit to myself or anyone. I’ve trusted him with my shame, my fear and my pain. Why can’t he trust me with his past?
“Garrett isn’t everything you see. There’s a lot more beneath the surface. Not all pretty, but then I don’t believe there is a single soul in the world that is all pretty.” Wrapping her arm around me, she pulls me into her side. “Duke used to say that the most precious souls were the ones with the deepest flaws and darkest shadows.”
I swallow at the memory of what my father used to tell me about everything having a flaw if we search for it hard enough.
“Was he right?”
“I always felt precious with him, even after spending most of my life being told otherwise. Any man can put you down, sugar,” she tells me, taking my empty cup from my hand and sitting closer. “But words…they don’t mean shit. Nothing. And a past is a past. We all have them. Crappy, shitty, and hellish.”
I’m not sure where mine falls. Some days it feels crappy and others it’s hellish, and others it doesn’t feel like a past at all. Maybe it’s because I’m still looking over my shoulder, anxiously waiting for the ground to crumble beneath me. Sleeping dogs don’t sleep forever, even if you let them lie. Eventually they wake up and they sniff you out.
“The water is probably going to be really cold this morning. It’ll be warmer after lunch,” Garrett tells Iris, and I can’t help notice the way the longer strands of his hair curl slightly at the ends as they fade into the shorter sides and back.
“Yeah.” She beams up at him with chocolate still smeared around her mouth from the pancakes we picked up at the
waffle house. “That’s because the sun is so high in the sky that it’s like a heater to the water.”
“All right, smarty pants, stop showing off! You’re making me look bad!”
The two of them carry on joking around while I watch, completely rapt by their friendship. In this moment I feel so full and so happy that it takes me by surprise given the conversation Jo and I had this morning.
There have been a couple of times that I’ve almost asked him about his divorce. I’m not even sure why I’m so caught up in it, but my curiosity and the need to know him better are niggling at me.
Laying his board on the sand, he stands on it and shows Iris the right stance. “You’ve got to bend your knees like this so that you can balance.”
My eyes meander down his body in awe of the shape he’s in, but then I should’ve expected it given how active and outdoorsy he is. It’s obvious he’s not a young guy, but damn, his lean muscles have muscles of their own. Even if I didn’t know firsthand from the few times he’s held me, I’d know from looking at him that every inch of his person is hard and strong.
“You think you’re ready to give it a shot?”
“Yes! Yep, yep, yep…” Iris is running toward the water before Garrett can get his board in hand.
“Are you sure you got this, Doc?” Jo calls from beside me, laughing her ass off when Iris waves at him to hurry up.
In reply, he sticks his tongue out at her and jogs to meet Iris by the water. The waves are pretty tame, and when he has the board down, he sits her on it before taking her deeper. He’s got the patience of a saint as he helps Iris up onto her feet while keeping the board stable. Of course, she doesn’t last two seconds, but they keep going and going until the sun is right over us.
“Does she ever get tired?” he asks, standing in front of me, hugging his board with one arm. Water sparkles over inch after inch of lightly tanned skin.
Although Garrett is fair, his skin has a golden kiss to it from all the hours he spends in the sun. He might be the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, and it’s intimidating as hell when he stabs the board into the sand and sits beside me on the towel, watching as Jo and Iris collect shells ahead of us. I feel so self-conscious in my faded baby pink swimsuit. The bruises on my thigh are yellowed, and they look more like a patchy tan than actual evidence of what I ran from.
Endurance: A Salvation Society Novel Page 9
