Chapter Twelve
They got home early that morning. As Terri expected, they didn’t leave the Sunset until well after five, more than two hours after closing. The sun was just making its appearance when her head hit the pillow.
Since it was Sunday, and due to some religious observance from her understanding, the club was closed. That meant she could sleep in without worrying that her alarm would shock her awake a few hours later. Taking full advantage, Terri slept well into the afternoon, only pulling herself out of bed when nature called and her stomach decided to eat itself.
“What’s for breakfast?” she asked groggily as she stumbled into the kitchen and took a seat beside Luke, who looked fresh-eyed and bushy-tailed with his neatly combed hair and award winning smile as he took in the Sunday paper. It made her sick. Couldn’t he have at least one bag under his eye?
“You mean what’s for dinner,” Luke corrected her. At her questioning look, he explained. “It’s almost four-thirty in the afternoon, Terri. You slept the day away.” Leaning closer, he kissed her hair then began folding the paper back into shape.
She had? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a full night’s sleep, let alone dozing nearly twelve hours straight. It was unconscionable.
“So I was thinking maybe a nice steak, or chicken if you prefer. Maybe some grilled corn, a little vino…”
“Or beer,” Terri chimed in.
Luke chuckled. “Or beer. Why don’t you go grab a shower while I get the food started.”
“Don’t trust me with the stove?” Terri asked with a smile as she slipped off the bar stool and headed toward her room.
“Not a chance,” Luke tossed back.
Terri was still grinning as she stepped under the hot spray. She couldn’t deny that she was looking forward to dinner, even more so the company with which she would be sharing it. When she was around Luke, the world seemed to fade away, her troubles dissolved, and she felt at ease. Hell, she actually slept through the night—or day—without suffering any nightmares or jolting awake at the slightest sound, and that was saying something. Not for the first time was she forced to admit to herself that she felt safe with Luke, which was a little frightening. Scarier still, she trusted him. That wasn’t something she thought she would ever be able to say again. It seemed that suffering years of Randy’s cruelty hadn’t stolen her ability to love and trust, but had instead taught her to use them judiciously.
What would she do if anything ever happened to him because of her? She shook her head, refusing to examine the thought too closely. If Luke got hurt trying to protect her, she would never forgive herself.
Finished with her shower, Terri toweled off and dressed in a pair of sweat pants and a close fitting T-shirt, and then she set out to help with dinner. She found Luke outside standing before a grill. Striking a large matchstick, he slipped it between the metal gratings and set the small flame to the coals, then closed the lid.
“Hey,” he said noticing her, his expression bright as took the two steps to her side. “Enjoy your shower?” Terri barely had time to nod before Luke was pulling her into his arms and stealing her breath with a gentle, yet wholly passionate kiss. When he stepped away to gather the food for the grill, Terri took a moment to regain her bearings.
The small deck she stood on overlooked a meager lawn surrounded by dense forest. The sun was lower in the sky, just peeking over the treetops and casting a warm glow across the landscape. Birds tweeted merrily from their hidden perches, mingling with the soft buzz of various insects.
She could grow accustomed to a life of such serenity, she mused as she dropped into a nearby lounge chair. Luke reemerged carrying a platter filled with meat and foil-wrapped corn cobs. “Do you want some help with that?” Terri asked, gathering herself to stand.
Luke set the plate on a small table next to the grill and opened the lid. “If you could run inside and grab a couple beers and plates that would be great.”
Terri found herself eager to help. Eager to please, she admitted only to herself as she strode inside. She was on her way back outside when Luke’s voice carried inside. “Oh, and can you grab the plastic bowl on the counter?”
Spinning on her heel, Terri quickly found the bowl in question, filled halfway with chopped fruits. Then, with beers tucked under her arms and her hands full, she returned to the deck. “Where do you want it, boss?” she asked. He tossed an amused expression over his shoulder and nodded toward the small, round table sitting between the two lounge chairs.
Once dinner was done, Terri and Luke settled into their seats with their full plates nestled on their laps. The sun had slipped below the tree line, and the air held a little chill, but Luke had built a small fire in the woodburner, and that added all the warmth they needed.
“So,” Terri said, breaking the comfortable silence. “Tell me about yourself, Luke.”
Luke seemed thrown off by her sudden question, but he quickly recovered and cast his empty plate aside. “What do you want to know exactly?” he asked slowly.
Terri shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything.” She thought for a second. “Where did you grow up?”
“That’s easy. Fort Lauderdale.”
“Wow, Florida? That must have been amazing,” Terri said, picturing crisp blue ocean waters, sandy beaches and perfect weather all year round.
“Only if you’re rich,” Luke commented in a tone that said he didn’t picture it quite the same way.
“Money doesn’t always make people happy,” Terri returned, knowing the truth of that all too well. She and Randy had plenty of money, and look what had happened to them.
“No,” Luke agreed, taking a swig of his beer. “But it certainly can make life easier.”
Again, Terri could argue that point, but she didn’t feel it necessary to bother. Everyone saw the grass greener when looking over the fence. Sensing that this line on questioning was only going to upset him more than he clearly already was, Terri switched topics. “Okay. What were you like when you were growing up?” Again, her mind conjured pictures, this time of a dark-haired boy with dark blue eyes that stood just a little taller than all the rest of the kids on the playground. He would be a protector, just as he was now, one of those people that everyone turned to when they needed help or just an open ear.
Luke snorted, and Terri realized she had spoken aloud. “I wasn’t always the calm person you see sitting here now. It took some time to find a balance.” His expression was tight, his eyes trained on the trees as his thoughts turned introspective. “I was hell on wheels, as my mother always liked to say. I got into more fights as a kid than most bouncers see in a lifetime. I refused to hear anything anyone had to say.” He smirked and glanced over at her. “I was a kid, so I already knew everything.”
Kicking his legs out, Luke crossed his feet at the ankle and settled in for a long talk. “By the time I hit eighteen I had been in and out of juvie more times than I could count and the judge was getting sick and tired of seeing my face. So one day, after finding myself in front of the judge again, he and my lawyer concocted a plan: If I agreed to sign up for the military, I wouldn’t be transferred into the adult jail.”
Terri was frozen to her chair, her vision of Luke nothing at all like she had dreamed. “What did you do?” she asked quietly, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“The only thing I could do,” Luke replied, draining the last of his drink. He gathered her empty bottle and his own and lumbered to his feet. “I signed up for the marines.”
Terri was left sitting on the deck, alone, while Luke disappeared inside. She couldn’t believe she could have been so wrong about him. Luke wasn’t the type of guy she would ever have imagined being a hotheaded, law-breaking hoodlum, but then she never had been a good judge of character, as evidenced by her marriage. Now that she thought about it, though, she supposed all the signs were there. Luke was too quiet most of the time, very reserved, and he seemed to shy away from everyone. Even at work, he mostly stayed shut
in his office. Did he do that to keep from blowing a fuse? And the few times she had witnessed him get angry, she had caught a glint of barely controlled rage gleaming in his eyes that scared her a little.
Maybe Luke wasn’t the nice guy she thought he was.
When Luke returned, he seemed more relaxed, more himself. He was carrying two fresh beers, and he handed her one. Terri still wanted to know more. She needed to find something about him that told her he wasn’t like Randy, that whatever mistakes he had made were the result of being young and stupid, and not a fatal character flaw that would follow him through life. She didn’t want to deal with another mentally defective person. She just didn’t have the energy.
“So what did you do after you went into the military?” she asked with interest.
“I got into more trouble,” he said with a humorless laugh. “I didn’t even make it a full two years before they’d finally had enough and kicked me out.” This was not what she wanted to hear, but Terri kept listening, keeping her thoughts to herself. “I bounced around, sleeping on friends’ couches, sometimes floors, taking odd jobs that never lasted more than a couple weeks, until I finally grew tired of it all. I went home and begged my mother to let me stay there for a while, until I got my feet under me, and started looking for a serious job.”
“Then what happened?” Terri urged him on.
“I worked, kept my nose out of trouble—mostly—and saved every dime I could until I finally had enough to do something.”
“Is that when you opened the club?”
“Well,” Luke said with a lopsided grin, “there was a lot of boring stuff that came before all that, but eventually, yeah. I wanted to make money, but I also wanted to give people like me a chance to turn their lives in a better direction.” He grimaced, no doubt thinking the same thing she was. That the women there turned tricks in the bathrooms and people dealt drugs on the open floor. “It didn’t turn out exactly as I envisioned, I guess, but my workers are safe and well cared for and, most important, they can choose for themselves what they want to do with their lives. It’s a hell of a lot better than what happens out on the streets.”
When put that way, Terri guessed she could see his point. At least if the women she worked with did things on their terms, in a place where they had some measure of protection, then they were relatively safe. There were no pimps to take their money or beat and drug them, so, at the end of the day, Luke had offered them all some sort of soft place to fall.
“What about you, Terri?”
“What about me?” Terri said, her thoughts still stuck on Luke’s confessions.
“What were you like growing up?”
“Perfect,” she said with a scowl. “I was the daughter of a preacher. I was expected to be in perfect form at all times. There was never a hair out of place, my dresses were perfectly pressed, I was polite and well-mannered. Everything any parent could want in a child.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Luke said sympathetically.
“It was suffocating,” Terri admitted. “No one wanted to play with me because I wasn’t allowed to get dirty or stay the night at their house or even go for a walk around the block. I was no fun to be around, so they chose not to bother. Instead, I spent my days alone in my room playing dolls and reading books, anything to pass the isolation a little faster.”
“Jesus, how did you stand it?” Luke asked.
“I don’t know, but eventually I didn’t have to anymore. I was eighteen and I had done so well in my studies and had such good grades that I was able to attend college on a full scholarship.” A small, mischievous smile crooked her lips. “Boy did I go wild.”
Luke laughed. “You? Wild? I can’t picture it.”
“Oh, I did,” Terri assured him. “I went to all the parties, tried every drink, and even made out with some of the boys. I made a few friends, but most of the girls hated me, probably because I flirted with just about every guy that crossed my path.”
“Still can’t picture it,” Luke said, shaking his head.
“Trust me, it happened. So, anyway, one evening, one of my girlfriends talked me into going to this party. By the time we got there the booze was flowing and people were dancing on tables half-naked. I made my rounds, drinking my share, and then everything just stopped.” She couldn’t help smiling at the memory. “I looked up from my plastic cup to find this gorgeous man standing in front of me, his eyes focused directly on me. He was so stiff and commanding as he stood there. Pure authority. Then I saw the uniform.”
“A cop?”
“Yep. Him and about ten of his buddies filed through the door shouting for the person responsible to show themselves. Naturally, everyone freaked. Every window and door in the place became an escape route and in the confusion, I got shoved so hard I fell to the floor. That officer, the one I mentioned, he was the only thing that kept me from getting trampled.”
“Are we talking about your husband?”
“Well, he wasn’t my husband then, but yes, it was Randy.”
“So what happened? How did you end up marrying this guy?”
Terri could hear the pure hatred in Luke’s words and knew he was judging her, wondering how she had let herself fall into Randy’s trap of abuse. “He wasn’t like he is now,” she defended. “For all his brute masculinity, Randy was actually pretty sweet. He let me off that night with a warning, when most students were spending the night behind bars. The next day, he showed up at my work, bought me lunch.”
“How did he know where you worked?” Luke asked suspiciously.
Terri looked at him for a minute, seeing that same critical look in his eye that she saw in Randy’s. “That’s the thing. You think faster, know all the right questions to ask. I was a kid. Young and naïve. I was just having fun, breaking the chains of being suppressed all my life, and Randy stomped in trampling everything in his path, and swept me off my feet. By the time I finally thought to ask him all those questions, how he knew where I worked, lived, my phone number, he told me flat out that he had hacked into the police database, but I was flattered. The idea that a man like him would go through all that trouble just to see me again…”
She turned to Luke, desperate for him to understand where she was coming from. “I’d never had someone pay so much attention to me before. To want to be around me, who seemed to really enjoy my company. It was heady, and I grabbed onto it with both hands, determined to keep that slice of happiness for as long as I could.”
Reaching out, Luke took her hand in his, his thumb stroking small circles across her knuckles. “So when did it all go south?”
Terri sighed, her mood deflated. She remembered that day exactly. How excited she was. How happy she expected him to be. Nothing had turned out the way she expected it to. “We had been married barely six months when I found out I was pregnant.” Luke’s finger stilled. She should have stopped then, but the gates had opened and she couldn’t stop herself. “He was so angry,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Randy had come home early that day, upset over something that had happened at work. She thought she could shine a little light by telling him her news. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Randy lashed out, slapping her across the face. He accused her of sleeping with another man, then of trying to ruin his life. He never wanted kids, but he had never told her that, so how was she to know? He threw things, ruined furniture and eventually turned his fury on her. The beating she’d suffered that day had been the first, but not the last. She’d called the police a few times early on, but learned quickly that Randy was above the law as long as he was a part of it. There was nowhere to turn.
“I lost the baby a couple days later.” She’d never had the courage to say that aloud before. From that horrible day on, it had become a dirty little secret that only she and Randy shared. The confession was humbling, the truth of it crippling. At that moment, something inside Terri broke, and she began to cry, hard, wrenching sobs that only grew stronger when Luke knelt in front
of her and pulled her into his arms.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but after a long while Terri’s cries idled down to small hiccupping fits and a few sniffles. Luke sat back on his haunches, used his thumbs to wipe away the moisture under her eyes, and regarded her with sad, sympathetic eyes. “I’m sorry for what he did to you,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
“It’s okay,” Terri sniffed. “It was a long time ago.”
Luke stood, pulling Terri to her feet along with him. As he led her inside, he said, “Judging by what just happened, not long enough.”
“It’s nothing a warm bath and a cup of hot chocolate can’t fix,” Terri said resolutely, already tucking her painful past back into the black box in the back of her mind. While she had been telling Luke her story, she had made a promise to herself. Never again would she allow Randy to rule her. Her future was her own, and she would make of it everything she had ever wanted and dreamed of and he had denied her.
Wrapping her arm around Luke’s waist, she allowed him to steer her to her room, feeling the warmth of his comforting embrace all the way to her soul.
Chapter Thirteen
Randy threaded the truck in and out of traffic. Horns of angry drivers blared after him, but he didn’t give a damn. The excitement of finally going home was an impenetrable armor against anything that might want to spark his temper today. He finally decided that his days of staying at the Motel 6 had come to an end. Why suffer in filth and decay when you could put yourself up in luxury accommodations? Terri’s home sure wasn’t a five star hotel, not without her there to cook and clean and meet all his needs, but for now, it was far better than anything he’d had for the last year.
Dark thoughts seeped into his head, bleeding past that barrier he had erected and slicing into his happy mood like a needle through cotton. Terri wouldn’t be there to greet him. She was too busy gallivanting around town like a cheap whore on a Saturday night. He was so tired of her games, tired of her running from him, tired of her making him chase her. And he was sick and damn tired of not knowing where she was. Usually she would make things easy for him. After a fight, she would hang out at her usual haunts and he would give her an hour before showing up and dragging her home. Now she was making him dig, and Randy didn’t like getting his hands dirty.
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