I let my chin hang to my chest in resignation. “After all these years, she’s the proverbial devil on my shoulder. She’s not going anywhere.”
“What happened after you left the house?” He was demanding but in a tender kind of way. He wanted me to finish the story, once and for all.
I grasped Justice and held it to my belly. “I … uh … I ran, looking for a way out of town. As I ran, this other voice filled my head and told me to stop. My mom screamed at me to keep going, but I knew it was wrong,” I explained, my voice cracking. “I had no love for Moses, but I didn’t want him to ruin my life the way my dad ruined my mom’s. It happened anyway, but at least I don’t have to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”
“You turned yourself in?”
“Yeah.” The word was more of a sound than an actual conscious answer. “I walked into town and put the gun in a mailbox.”
He laid a finger on my lips. “Why a mailbox?”
“Because I didn’t want to walk into a police station with a loaded gun,” I whispered. “It didn’t seem smart.”
He tapped my cheek. “See, didn’t I say you don’t give yourself enough credit? I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
“When I told the police what happened, they went to the house and found him. They got the gun with my prints and then cuffed me and took me to the hospital, but no one overreacted to the situation. Everyone knew Moses beat me. Everyone knew I didn’t cut myself, especially when they found the knife still in his hands and his prints were the only ones on it.”
“They let you off,” he deduced. “I guess it’s hard to prosecute a victim.”
“Unlike my mother, I had proof he attacked me first. I had hidden cameras in several rooms of the house and I told the police where to find them all. They pieced together what happened from there. It was obvious I was doing nothing but preparing to go to bed when he came after me. They agreed the shooting was self-defense and I had no other choice, other than to let him kill me.”
His fingers held my chin tenderly. “What do you say?”
“I say I brought a gun to a knife fight.”
He shook his head, his hand sliding off my chin and resting on my chest. “No, you protected yourself from a man who was supposed to love and protect you, not attempt to kill you.”
“Well, he almost succeeded, even from the grave.” I sighed and held up Justice. “I went back to the hospital a few days after the first visit because my arm was on fire. They couldn’t tell me where I picked up the bacteria. It could have been from the lake, the hospital, my coat, or even the knife itself. They didn’t know, but in the end, it didn’t matter. I could see the truth in the doctor’s eyes. If they didn’t amputate, I was going to die. That was the day Justice was handed down. So, while I didn’t serve a day in jail for his murder, I was served with a different kind of justice.”
“I’m sorry, Mercy,” he said, holding me to his warm, bare chest. “You were right when you said it was gruesome and brutal, but he brought that upon himself.” He caressed my elbow and laid a kiss on my lips. “You need to find it a new name. This isn’t justice. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t justice.”
My breasts were pressed against his hard chest and he held me to him tightly. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything other than how wonderful it felt to be safe in someone’s arms. I wrapped my arm around him and rested my head on his shoulder, his words of comfort slowly healing the gaping wound in the center of my chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HAYES
She trembled in my arms, but it wasn’t from the cold. It was from fear.
Fear of being trapped in the past.
Fear of letting go of the past.
Fear of facing a future where someone besides her knew the truth.
Fear of what I had done to the life she had made.
Fear controlled our lives more than we ever wanted to admit. The only thing I wanted to do was protect her. I wanted to protect her from the pain of the past, and preserve the time we had left together.
I caressed her arm to soothe her until she stopped shivering. “Thank you for telling me,” I whispered in her ear. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
She rocked her forehead on my shoulder in answer and tightened her arm around me instinctively. “I wish I had a better story, but that’s mine. It’s more like a repeating nightmare. First my father and then my husband. My lack of education and desire to have something, anything, in my life was what kept me from seeing the bigger picture.”
I rubbed her back, sinking lower so she was mostly covered by the warm water. “Domestic violence can touch anyone. It’s not limited to the uneducated or the poor, you know.”
The sound she made was pure sarcasm before she spoke. “And you’d know so much about it, Mr. I Was Born with a Silver Spoon in My Mouth.”
I lowered her to the bench next to me and knelt on the floor of the tub, only my head above water when our eyes met. “I promised not to judge you, and I didn’t. I see the bigger picture of what you were faced with. I know if faced with the same situation, I’d do the same thing. I know because I did.”
Her eyes widened and then she slapped me straight across the face. “Don’t. Don’t you dare try to tell me you killed your spouse.” Her hand and voice were shaking with anger, frustration, and more hurt than I had ever heard come from a woman’s mouth.
I rubbed my cheek and took a moment to forgive her for jumping to conclusions. “I never said I killed my spouse. What I said was, I did the same thing. Meaning I hurt someone in the middle of a domestic situation.”
She jumped backward and tried to scramble out of the hot tub, which only served to make her smack her chin on the side. I grabbed her loosely and held her to my chest, both of us butt naked in the freezing cold. She was shaking but fought valiantly to get out of my arms.
“Mercy, I’m not going to hurt you. Settle down, please,” I said calmly. “I’ll help you get out of the tub, just stay calm so you don’t hurt yourself more than you already have.”
She stopped fighting me and I set her over the edge of the tub. She grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her, so I did the same and followed her into the cabin. The fire had kept it toasty and the moment we stepped through the door our faces warmed pink again. She went straight to the kitchen, pulled down a bottle from the cupboard, poured a shot, and hit it back. She did it twice more before I took the bottle from her.
“Enough, before you get alcohol poisoning.” The amber liquid beckoned me and I poured a shot for myself then slammed it back. I screwed the lid on the bottle and took Justice, leading her down the hall to the bedroom. Her feet dragged the closer we got until she was impossible to move. “I’m not going to do anything to you. I want you to climb into bed so you don’t get sick from being cold and wet.”
“And then you’re going to leave,” she said, sliding past me and into the room where she slid under the covers. The wet towel appeared and was dropped over the edge of the bed before she snuggled into the down comforter.
I leaned against the doorframe for a moment before I walked in and sat at the end of the bed. “No, I’m not going to leave. I’m going to tell you my secret, so you know you can trust me with yours, okay?”
“It’s a little late, I already told you mine, but something tells me you already knew.”
Now would be the time to lie, Hayes. Now would be the time to deny you knew what happened to her, but you’re not going to. You’re not going to because you know that the truth always comes out.
“Caleb, my brother and head of security,” I said and she nodded, “he called me the second day I was here. He ran a check on you.” She opened her mouth to protest and I held up my finger to stop her. “It’s his job to run checks on any place I’m staying. I’m dealing with some,” I waved my hand around, “people right now, and he was making sure you weren’t one of them.”
“Shouldn’t he have done that before you got here instead of after?” s
he asked accusingly.
“He tried, but it took some real wrangling to get to the bottom of who Mercy Jane Johnson really was. She didn’t exist four years ago.” She swallowed hard and I rested my hand on her hip. “He’s not going to tell anyone. You’re safe with us, always, okay?”
“No one is after me,” she added quickly. “I just don’t want it to ruin my business.”
I shook my head adamantly. “No one will know. Relax. He gave me the gist of things, but I didn’t know exactly what happened. I wanted to hear that from you, not some news article that was slanted one way or the other.”
“Well, you got your wish,” she said sarcastically. “Now you can go.”
“No, my wish would be that you hadn’t gone through it at all.” All of the fight was gone from her body and I rubbed her hip to keep her calm. I lifted her chin to check it and frowned. “I think you’ll have a bruise there in the morning.”
She laughed and the sound was actually amused and not a cross between sarcastic and cynical. “I’m always one big bruise. Hazards of having only one hand.”
I grasped that one hand and held it to my chest. “Listen to me, okay, before you judge me?” She didn’t answer, but she also didn’t pull away, so I accepted that as the go-ahead. “I told you about my sister, Sarah?” I asked and she nodded. “The reason we’re sitting here having this conversation is due to what happened after her first baby was born. Keep in mind, my sister was born with all the affluence in the world and has a Ph.D. in social work. I want you to know that because it’s important later on. She’s older than me and was already working and married to a lawyer by the time I finished college. Her husband was a real ass. After my nephew, Goodhue, was born—”
“Good Lord, she named a kid Goodhue?” she asked, her face twisted up in horror.
My laughter was loud enough to wake the dead and Beast came trotting in to check on us. I shooed him away and grinned at Mercy. “I know, it’s a ridiculous name. It was his other grandfather’s name. We call him Huey,” I explained.
“That’s much better.”
“He agrees.” I winked and a smile filled her face again, though it was brief. “He’s eight now and not a fan of his real name. Anyway, after he was born, my brother-in-law became extremely jealous and paranoid about Sarah. He was extremely possessive of her and wanted her to ignore the baby to take care of his needs. When it came to blows the first time my sister walked away and got a restraining order on him.”
“Smart woman. Too bad I wasn’t that smart,” she sassed.
I rested my finger on her lips. “No, see this is where that silver spoon comes into play. She could do that without a second thought. She had a place to go with her baby. She could go back to the family home and be supported. You didn’t have that. You can’t compare the two.”
“I had no one,” she whispered. “Literally no one, and it remains that way to this day.”
I ran my hands through her damp hair and held her eyes with mine. “Yes, you do. You have me, and the power of the Rutherford name behind you. I’d hazard a guess that Mr. Boling is rather fond of you, too.”
A smile tipped her lips. “You’re probably right. He might slay some dragons for me as long as they didn’t require him to take too much time away from fishing.”
I tweaked her nose, her smile slowing my heartbeat as I sorted out how to tell her the story with the best spin I could put on something like that. “It was Thanksgiving about ten years ago and Sarah was staying at the house with Huey. Still to this day I struggle to remember how all of it transpired. I remember pulling up to the house after visiting a friend and my sister was in the driveway with Martin, her soon to be ex-husband. He had a gun trained on her chest and she had a baby in her arms.” I took a deep breath and tapped my temple. “I don’t know if I even took a moment to think, Mercy. I don’t remember thinking. I just reacted. I mashed my foot down on the accelerator and plowed him over. He never saw me coming. I can promise you that a Land Rover will always win over a man, even a man with a gun.”
She sat up and held the blanket to her chest. “You ran over your brother-in-law?”
I held her eyes, not afraid to show her my shame. “I did. I ran him down and didn’t think twice, Mercy. At least not until it was over. I jumped out of the SUV and grabbed my sister and Huey as she passed out in my arms. I didn’t care one iota that piece of shit was dead. I called the cops and waited in the driveway for them, then I told my story and handed over the surveillance videos. Like that, the whole thing was over. At least my sister’s nightmare was over.”
She bit her lip and shook her head. “I Googled you when you first came here and there was no mention of you killing anyone. Trust me, there are tons of pages of information about you on the net, but not one mention of that.”
My lips thinned and I rubbed my hands down my face. “I know, and that’s where you’re right again about the silver spoon in my mouth part.”
She switched arms to hold the sheet and rested her hand on my leg. “I shouldn’t have said that. You can’t help how or to who you were born.”
I grasped her hand, thankful for the peace offering she extended. “No, you were right there. My grandfather and father managed to sweep the whole thing under the rug and made sure it never hit the papers. They didn’t want it to ruin my career before it even got started, which in hindsight I’m not sure was the right thing to do. I don’t hold it against them, though. They did what they thought was right at the time.”
“Why in hindsight?” she asked, her head cocked. It was as though a light came on and she sighed. “Those are the people who are looking for you, right?”
I nodded, one side of my lips tipped up in a sarcastic smile. “Tabloids, always eager to ruin someone’s life.”
“Wow, I knew you were a big shot, but I didn’t know you were tabloid-worthy.”
I rolled my eyes and snorted with disdain. “Anyone is fair game for a tabloid if they think you’ll sell newspapers for them. I’m not worried about them. Caleb will make sure they stay on their side of the fence.”
“How do you deal with knowing you took a person’s life?” she asked, resting back on the pillows. “I struggle with it from the time I open my eyes until I close them again.”
I scooted closer to her and caressed her cheek, her skin soft under my fingers from the soak in the tub. “I don’t look at it as taking a life. I look at it as saving two lives. That’s easy to say now, but it took some intense therapy after the fact to get there. I thought I was okay and I went back to work, but it wasn’t long and the whole thing came crashing down on me. My parents were able to get me connected with a counselor who dealt with domestic issues. He worked with me until I could look at myself in the mirror in the morning and not point a fake gun at myself and pull the trigger.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Life is a real shitshow sometimes, isn’t it?”
My thumb traced the lines of her mouth for a moment before I spoke. “That’s the thing about life, Mercy. It doesn’t care how much money you have, what your name is, where your family came from, who your dad is, what he does for a living, or any other factor or variable you think gives you a leg up. There is no hierarchy in life.”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” she said, her eyes trained on the bed rather than my face. “Everything in my life tells me otherwise.”
I fell silent for a moment, my mind caught up in those memories again, mixed with the experience she’d had. Hers was far more horrific than what I dealt with, and she had no help or support.
I grasped her hand in mine, as much for me as for her. “I guess what I’m saying is, regardless of who we are or how much money we have, that doesn’t mean we’ll escape life unscathed. You and Sarah are both here for a reason, and there’s a reason Moses and Martin aren’t. Life has never been, and never will be, black and white. It took me a long time, but I finally learned it's what lies between the two that define who we are in this world. I don't lose sleep ove
r killing Martin anymore, but I still carry shame about it. I look at my nephew and my sister and realize they are my reasons for the decision I made that day. They’re the reason I can carry the shame without buckling.”
She pulled her hand from mine and rolled to her back, Justice resting above the covers. “Great needlepoint expression, Hayes, but that’s all it is. I don’t have a reason for what I did. I just did it. I didn’t think about anyone other than myself.”
I nodded, giving her a wink and a smile. “Maybe at the time, but again, I didn’t think before I acted either. All I did was react. It wasn’t until later that I could sort out the ripple effect it had. What if your reason is even wider than mine?”
“Not following,” she said, her brows knitted.
“If you hadn’t taken Moses out and he took you out instead, or even if that fight settled out and you split, he could have gone on to hurt other women. What if all the stars lined up that night to change the course of not only your life but some other woman’s or child’s?”
“I never thought of that,” she admitted on a breath. “Like, ever.”
I held her hand to my chest. “If you have to look at it that way, then by God you look at it that way because you should be able to look yourself in the eye every single day without guilt. You belong here just as much as Sarah does, as much as Huey does, and just as much as I do.”
She was silent as she stared at the ceiling, a tear trailing down her face and into her ear. I swiped it away, my heart contracting to see her cry. “You could be right. He could have hurt someone else. He probably did hurt someone else before me.”
I wiped away another tear tenderly. “You have to stop believing that your act was the evil one, sweetheart. Your act was the brave one.”
“I wish I was as well-adjusted about it as you are,” she whispered. “I’ve carried this around for so many years it will take me time to see it in a new light.”
“I know it will, and that’s okay. Just because my family had the means to smooth out the rough edges faster doesn’t make me any better. It just means my atonement was bought and paid for, rather than earned. Sometimes, when we don’t face the situation at the time, it comes back to haunt us later on, as I'm learning firsthand.”
The Secrets Between Us (Billionaire CEO Romance) Page 16
