by Nicole Helm
Something in him had been deserving of that punishment.
He stared at the ceiling of Rose’s dilapidated house, much like he’d stared at the ceilings of a hospital room, a rehabilitation center room, the Revival Ranch house, and then the bunkhouse. He’d spent years now staring at ceilings, wondering when he’d be able to figure out what he’d done to deserve this fate.
Answers hadn’t come to him before, but here was Rose. Beauty and hope, like a drink of cold water in the middle of a harsh, dry desert. He ran his palm down her spine. She was here, and she was something like his. At least for a while. Wasn’t that worth something?
Naked, she somehow looked vulnerable. In need of protection or support. That had to be a figment of his imagination, because Rose needed none of those things. He still wanted to give them to her.
She shifted, the scratchy blanket she’d pulled over them last night sliding down her hip. He traced the tattoo there. It was small but dark. A black feather with blood dripping down it. It was the most disturbing of all her tattoos, even more than the wolf on her arm. It seemed the most vulnerable. The saddest. What on earth did a bloody feather mean?
She rolled over onto it, facing him fully now. Her eyes were still closed, but she curled into him. He wrapped his arm around her, holding her against him. He thought her snuggling in had been some sort of sign, some acquiescence, but then bit by bit, he felt the tension creep into her body.
When her eyes opened, they were wary.
“What does the feather mean?” he asked.
She simply stared at him, those dark-brown eyes fathomless. She was beautiful and special, and he knew there were a million secrets swirling around in there that he would have to fight tooth and nail to hear about. But he wanted to. Rose felt like an impossibly beautiful thing he didn’t know how to hold on to, no matter how hard he fought.
There was something invigorating in wanting to fight though. He hadn’t wanted that in far too long.
“You have to get back,” she said, ignoring his question about the tattoo.
It was true. He did. So he didn’t have time to press his question, no matter how much he wanted to. He had to believe there would be time. “Yes, I do.”
“I think I dropped the car keys on the table by the door. Take my car and drive back. I’ll call my sister to pick me up after I’ve slept longer.”
“You want me to leave you here?”
She lifted a shoulder carelessly. “I’m going back to sleep. Besides, if you take my car without me, it’ll give Madison something to think about.”
He frowned at that. He didn’t want to think about Madison right now. But she was there, with his family, and not wanting to think about it didn’t make it or her any less there.
“I might be a little bit late tonight,” he said apologetically, pulling the blanket back up to her shoulder so she didn’t get cold.
“Tonight?” she murmured sleepily.
“It’s Friday.”
“Oh. Well, you don’t have to watch the bar while your family’s here.”
“Who will do it if I don’t?”
Rose blew out a breath and looked away from him. “Maybe I’ll call my brother-in-law or something. You should be spending the evening with your family, and I’m not sure how much longer I’ll need your help. I think the problem resolved itself.”
She wasn’t looking at him, and he didn’t think she was telling the truth.
“You don’t have time to argue with me. Go home. Hang out with your family. Text me the next time you want me to pretend or whatever.” She waved a hand, dismissing him.
Pretend. That word he was beginning to hate. No matter how accurate it was. Whatever was between him and Rose wasn’t the same thing they were pretending for his parents. Or, more specifically, to prove to Madison and Mike he was fine. But the more he got tangled up in Rose, the less he cared what anyone but the two of them thought. Let Madison pity him. What did he care? If Rose was in his bed, he didn’t.
How long would he have Rose here, naked and vulnerable? What could they build if she wasn’t even happy that there was something between them at all? Then again, wasn’t that the point of a life that didn’t have a road map? He didn’t have any particular plans for the next year, let alone the next five. He could build whatever suited him. They could have something like nothing else he’d known or experienced, and that was okay. It would be whatever would work for both of their lives.
Except she wasn’t meeting his gaze.
He pressed a kiss to her mouth. Soft, light. Finally, her brown eyes met his. He smiled. “I’ll see you soon.”
She rolled her eyes, but her mouth curved. And not that patented Rose smirk that meant she was about to eviscerate a guy. It was something sweet and soft, maybe even something she was trying to fight.
But his smile made her smile, and vice versa, and that had to be something. It had to be.
She gave his chest an ineffective shove. “Go and leave me alone. I’m exhausted.” She looked it too. The crescent of faint purple under her eyes a clear sign she needed some rest. So he slid out of bed and grabbed his clothes.
She made a sound, and when he looked down at her, she was looking at his leg. It was the first time she’d seen all his scars in some semblance of light, and something painful shifted inside his chest.
“Told you it was bad.”
She immediately sat up, moving across to his side of the bed. She brushed her palm up the particularly ugly web of scarring from his knee to his hip. Then she pressed a kiss to the middle of it.
He could only hold his clothes in his hands and watch her, fascinated by that response. Then she got on her knees on the mattress and wrapped her arm around his neck. “The only thing bad about it is I think about how much it must’ve hurt you, and it just about breaks my heart,” she said firmly. “So it’s not bad at all. It’s brave and amazing.” There were tears shimmering in her eyes, but then she pressed her mouth to his, and when she pulled back, the tears were gone.
“I have to go,” he managed to scrape out.
“I know.”
He cleared his throat, trying to convince himself family obligation was more important than erection obligation. “So that kiss was mean.”
She grinned. “I know.” She yawned and lay back down on the bed, snuggling under the blanket. “Bye, Jack.”
“Bye,” he returned, staring at her there in that grimy bed as if it were the nicest, warmest of places to sleep. Slowly, he got dressed and tried to work out any of what had just happened, but it was impossible. There were too many competing things going on, too many raw emotions swirling around.
It was something like physical pain to leave the house with Rose still in it, but she wanted it that way, and he had things to do. He walked out to the front, grabbed the keys she’d left on the half-broken table by the door, and went to Rose’s car.
He drove back to Revival in a dark, predawn world. The earliest hint of pearly light was just a tinge behind the mountains, but mostly he could still see the stars and the moon in the sky. Night, but not. Promises all along the horizon.
She’d called his scars brave, and he knew they weren’t. They were just bad luck of the draw, but he felt proud somehow, that he’d done something to amaze her even if he’d simply endured it.
He pulled up the ranch drive and winced. The RV’s outside light was on, and the figure of a woman holding a baby stood in the bright center. He cursed under his breath and pulled to a stop next to Becca and Alex’s truck.
The last person he wanted to talk to right now was Madison. He’d rather listen to Gabe give him crap about disappearing with Rose. He turned off the ignition and paused, but Madison was standing there, staring at him, and he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing him slink away. He had nothing to cower about.
He stepped out of the car and offered a l
ittle wave. “Morning,” he muttered, hoping that would be that and he could keep walking toward the bunkhouse.
“Jack. Wait,” she said softly, taking a few steps after him. Croy whimpered in her arms.
He stood trying to make eye contact without feeling anything. The moment seemed to taint everything he’d had with Rose last night. He never wanted to feel as though that had been a reaction to her.
“I…I guess you’ve been out,” she said, her pale eyebrows drawn together as she studied him.
He didn’t respond to that. What was there to say? So he gestured at the kid. “Having trouble sleeping?”
Madison smiled. Grimaced might have been a more accurate description. “He’s an early riser and still on East Coast time.”
“Well. I’ve got chores,” he offered, making a gesture toward the bunkhouse. “See you at breakfast.” He started to head away again, but he could hear Madison’s footsteps following him.
“Jack, wait. I just have to say this, because I know this is probably the only time we’ll have alone together.”
Jack decided to keep walking. “I’m going to have to pass.”
“I never meant for it to happen,” she called after him, her voice breaking. “We never meant for it to happen.”
Jack stopped abruptly. Never meant… He turned to face her, old anger and new anger twining inside him like wildfire. “I should fu—” He glanced at Croy and stopped himself from swearing. From yelling. “I should hope you guys didn’t mean for it to happen, considering we were engaged. You and me. So if you had meant for it to happen, that would be even shi—crappier than I already thought it was.”
She sniffled. “I just don’t want you to hate me, Jack.”
He didn’t know what to do with that teary statement. Because hate wasn’t the right word. He didn’t hate her, but he sure didn’t like her. And he was furious with her. Still. It had been two years, and that anger still burned in him. He’d tried to tell himself that things had turned out for the best after all. That he hadn’t had to worry about being a burden to her when he’d been recovering.
But all he could think was that if he’d had someone at his side, someone who loved him, the tragedy, rehab, all of it—it wouldn’t have felt so bleak.
“I did love you,” she said in a squeaky voice.
He laughed, bitter and caustic. Ugly. How dare she throw out the word love like it hadn’t been a lie? “You slept with my brother, you got pregnant by my brother while my ring was on your finger.” Something niggled in the back of his brain about the last few hours, but he pushed it away, fueled by anger and outrage.
“It wasn’t you. It was just, he was so nice, and we both missed you. Neither of us knew quite what to do without you.”
“I don’t want to do this with you. I don’t care why you slept with Mike. I will never care why you slept with Mike. I will never be able to look at the fact that you two did that to me and thought it was okay or for the best or however you justified it to yourself. What you two did was wrong on every level. I get that we all do stupid things, but you chose to hurt me and couldn’t even tell me yourself. Dad had to tell me. Neither of you had the balls to own up to your mistakes.”
“Dad thought it would be best,” she said weakly. “To hear it from a detached party. Since you were—”
“Deployed in Afghanistan. Risking my life every day for something I believed in.”
“Something you believed in. Not me.”
And the wildfire burned hotter, because he had not been selfish. He had never been anything but honest, and how dare she throw that at him? “I gave you the chance. I told you what my plans were. When I asked you to marry me, I told you what I wanted to do. I gave you an out, and you didn’t take it.”
“Because I loved you! But it’s hard to love someone who’s not there.”
“Then you should have told me that. You should have told me the second you thought, hey, maybe I’d rather have someone other than my fiancé touch me.”
“You can’t tell me you never touched another woman while you were gone. I don’t believe for a second you never kissed another woman.”
“Never,” he said, and he didn’t know if it was a shout or a whisper. “I never looked at another woman. I had a plan, all along, and it was you. I was never, ever going to deviate from it. I knew what was right and wrong, and I was going to always, always do the right thing.”
Knew. Was. So much past tense.
Madison was crying now, and he felt a little bit like crying himself, but he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t give in to this horrible thing inside him. He was better than that. Maybe it was egotistical or something to think he was better than them. But he did. He was.
“You’re my sister-in-law now. The mother of my nephew. You are married to my brother. You’re in my life and in my family, and that is irrevocable. I will treat you with respect, but if you’re looking for forgiveness or some way for me to ever look at your choices and not think they were anything but horribly wrong, you’ll never get it from me. What both of you did was wrong.”
He wanted to swallow down the rest of what he had to say. It was the Armstrong way, to ignore the pain and hurt, to never let someone see your pain or too much of your happy.
Maybe the Armstrong way sucked.
“It hurt me,” he said, the words raw and sharp against his throat. “And it’s been a while, and I am healing from that hurt, but that doesn’t mean I can ever think of you as anything but someone who betrayed me.”
“That isn’t fair,” Madison cried, her face illuminated by the slowly raising dawn, blotchy and tear soaked. Croy looked around, wholly unperturbed by everything.
Fair? Hell if he knew what fair was. “I have work to do. Don’t follow me.”
He walked away. Limping. Feeling cracked open and a little bit ugly. Broken. He thought about what Monica had said at their session the other day though. About dealing with the fallout instead of pretending it didn’t matter.
Maybe Monica was right. Maybe things could only heal once they had been completely broken.
Everything sure felt broken, so maybe healing was next.
* * *
When Rose woke up a few hours later, she did not call Delia. Or anyone. For good or for bad, she still didn’t want anyone knowing about her little refuge.
Except Jack.
She wouldn’t analyze that or anything about last night. It had been a moment of weakness, and it would be stupid and harmful to Jack to let it ever happen again. She had to erase last night from her mind.
No matter how he’d looked at her this morning, as though she were something special. No matter that he’d been embarrassed about that maze of scars that was his body’s proof of how strong and brave he was, and she’d been desperate to wash that away. To show him how much he amazed her. How much he meant, but that only gave him the very wrong impression she meant something too.
Where had that ever gotten her? Delia loved her, and Rose had nearly cost Delia and Caleb their lives. Maybe that was all ancient history, and maybe Delia and Caleb had no idea she’d had something to do with it. She swallowed at the lump in her throat. She wasn’t going to cry, and she wasn’t going to mourn the loss of something she didn’t even deserve.
She was going to walk over to the Lane property, have Summer give her a ride to the bar, and she was going to go on with her life, everything about last night forgotten.
Like the way Jack had whispered her name like a benediction, the way she’d woken up and naturally curled into him like he was a safe shelter.
She shook her head, as if she could make her brain listen from sheer force of movement. She left her house, walked by the pond, ignoring the memory of that night she and Jack had jumped in, ignoring the reminders she’d started this all—and she had to be the one strong enough to finish it.
It was a little l
ess than two miles over to the Lane ranch and house, their driveway butting along the wooded edge of her property. She walked and walked, focusing on the way her limbs moved, focusing on the blue sky. The truth was, she didn’t get out of her bar enough, she didn’t walk enough, and this was good exercise and a timely reminder that life existed outside of sticky tables and grumpy, drunk patrons.
Rose focused on breathing and her destination and fought off the intrusive thoughts and memories with every kernel of strength she had built during her thirty years on this planet. She found the place in the barbed-wire fence that had sagged and fallen and stepped over it, walking up the winding drive to the Lane ranch.
A little over a year ago, her friend who was also Caleb’s sister, Summer, had married Thack Lane and moved onto the property with his father and daughter. After a few months of married life, Summer had quit singing at Pioneer Spirit on the weekends to spend more time with her husband and stepdaughter. These days, Rose saw Summer mostly when she went to Shaw family gatherings. They seemed to have more and more of those as their families expanded.
Something clutched in Rose’s chest, but like she did with every other conflicting feeling, she pushed it away.
She trudged up the porch stairs and knocked on the door. She glanced around, but Thack would probably be out working.
The door swung open, Summer’s bright expression falling. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry,” Summer said, reaching out and pulling Rose into a hug, something Summer did no matter how many times Rose threatened her. “I’m waiting on someone else.” But the normally overly friendly Summer did not invite her in, despite the hug.
“I suppose you can’t give me a ride into a town?”
“Oh, um.” Summer looked inside before turning an apologetic gaze to Rose. “I can’t. I’m so sorry. I can call up to Shaw, but we have…”
“Someone mysterious coming.”
Summer took a breath, darting a gaze inside and then at the stables. Then she grabbed Rose’s arm and leaned forward, all cloak-and-dagger like.
