How West Was Won (Haven, Texas Book 7)

by Laylah Roberts

  “Where’s your brother, Flick? He wasn’t at the house when Beau and Maddox came for you,” Alec asked.

  She frowned. “He went to Houston yesterday. He’s supposed to be coming back today.”

  “Did he drive?” Jake asked.

  She nodded. “He’s got a modified vehicle.” She gave Jake a few details about her brother’s car.

  How could a brother do this to a sister? None of them had a sister, obviously. And he’d gotten into plenty of physical tussles with his brothers over the years. But they gave as good as they got. But he would never touch a sister. Ever. Mia was the closest thing to a sister they had and the thought of raising a hand to her, or to any woman, made him feel like he was going to throw up.

  “Right. Give me a minute to make a call,” Jake told them. He stepped out of the room, and West leaned into her.

  “It’s all gonna be all right, Flick,” he told her.

  She looked up at him in surprise. “That’s the first time you’ve called me that.”

  “Called you what?”

  “Flick.”

  “Yeah, well, Flick sounds like some teenage tomboy. So don’t expect me to say it often. Last thing I want is to think of you as a kid.”

  Alec snickered. Flick looked at him as though she didn’t understand, but he wasn’t going to explain. Before she could question him, Jake returned to the room.

  “No one is home yet. Got someone watching the house and I’ve put out an APB on his vehicle. I need to hear, in your words exactly what happened, Flick. I also want to know when he started beating you.”

  “He’s going to be furious.” The fear in her voice was stark.

  West gently grasped told of her chin and turned her face towards him. “He’s not your problem to worry about anymore.”

  “Spencer is always my problem,” she told him.

  “No,” Jake told her. “He’s mine now. West is right. You need to stop worrying about him. We’re going to protect you now. This is my town. You’re one of my people. And you’re a woman. In case you haven’t gotten the picture, we look after our woman around here.”

  “You don’t know who we really are,” she told them all. As she spoke, her words were slightly slurred. She was exhausted and in pain.

  “We should stop this now.” West looked up to Jake. “Can’t this wait?”

  “No. I need to tell you now. I might chicken out later.”

  Her lips trembled. She reached out and grasped West’s hand. He massaged the back of her neck, feeling how tense she was.

  She cleared her throat. “I got home three nights ago, after I spoke to West. After he told me . . . well, it doesn’t matter now, I guess.”

  West could feel Jake’s eyes on him but he didn’t look up. His hand tightened around hers then he quickly loosened it, not wanting to take the chance of hurting her.

  There was a soft knock on the door before Mia opened it. Alec walked over to talk to her briefly and when he returned, he held a glass of chocolate milk, with a straw. He handed it over to West, who let go of her hand to grab it. He pulled it out of her reach.

  “West?”

  “Got a need to take care of you, sunshine,” he whispered in her ear. “And you need to let me.” She looked up at him. He thought she was going to argue. But she seemed to get that he needed this.

  And so she lay still without protesting as he held the straw up to her mouth and she took a few sips.

  “Mia said Doc Harper is on his way out,” Alec told them all.

  She looked back up at Jake, who gave her a patient, kind look in return.

  “When I got home, it was close to nine. He didn’t used to drink bourbon until later, but over the past year or so he’s started hitting the hard stuff earlier.”

  “He drinks a lot?” Jake asked her.

  She snorted. “Define a lot.”

  West rubbed his fingers through her hair and massaged her scalp. “Yeah, he drinks a lot. I kind of have to tell you about the past in order to tell you about the now.”

  “You tell us what you need to, darlin’,” Jake told her.

  She let out a deep breath. “My parents died when I was twelve. They were working in the Congo, with a group of missionaries. Some rebels raided the village they were staying in and took all the missionaries, including my parents. There should have been a ransom demand. If there was, we would have paid it. Would have gotten them back.” She let out a small sob, and his stomach dropped. He felt her pain as though it were his own.

  “I didn’t even know about any of it until afterwards. Until Spencer came to my boarding school to tell me they’d been murdered. The rebels shot all their hostages without even trying to ransom them.”

  Fuck. He couldn’t imagine what she’d gone through. How losing your parents at twelve in such an awful way would feel. He couldn’t remember his mom; she’d left when he was young. His father had been a self-serving asshole. But he’d always had his brothers.

  “What happened then? Didn’t you have other family?” Jake asked.

  “No,” she said quietly. “My dad had a sister, but she died of breast cancer when I was young. My grandparents were all gone. It was just Spencer and me. I usually spent most of the year at the boarding school. It was an okay place and I had friends there. But, after they died, I just didn’t want to stay there anymore. I wanted to be with Spencer. He was in the army at the time, but he got a discharge so he could take care of me.”

  “As he should have,” Alec told her. “Older siblings are supposed to take care of younger ones.”

  The way Alec had taken care of all of them. But West knew it wasn’t that way in every family.

  “He gave up everything for me.”

  “You’re his sister. You’re precious,” West told her. How could her parents have left her like that? Taking care of other people instead of their daughter?

  “I felt bad that he left the army for me. Spencer was a good man back then. I’m not sure how you can go from being such a good man to becoming what he is now. He sold our family house, neither of us could live there. Too many memories. And everyone knew what happened to my parents. It was too hard. So he bought some land in a different state. He always loved horses, and he had the money to pay people to do everything else.”

  She let out a small breath. “My parents never updated their will once I was born. Everything was left to Spencer, not me. He always said he’d settle money on me when I reached eighteen. Then he decided that was too young, so he said I had to wait until I was twenty-one. Then he pushed it out to twenty-two. I finally stopped asking. I started thinking I didn’t deserve it.”

  “You could take him to court,” Jake told her.

  “Yeah, but how am I going to pay for a lawyer? Every time I try to get a job, he steps in. I’ve got some things I can sell, but it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “That bastard,” West snarled.

  “He wasn’t always like this. He took care of me after our parents died. He’d tuck me in each night, kiss me on the forehead, he called me button.”

  “When did he change?” Alec asked.

  “After the accident,” she whispered. “The one that left him paralyzed from the waist down. His horse threw him, and he rolled down a cliff. It took hours for someone to find him.”

  “Jesus,” West muttered.

  “When I did a background check on you and your brother, there was no military experience listed,” Jake said to Flick.

  “Oh, that’s probably because we now use my grandmother’s maiden name,” she told him.

  They all stared at her in surprise.

  “Why is that?” Jake asked. “What is your actual last name?”

  “My full name is Felicity Angelica Maria Maas.”

  West frowned. Maas. Killed by rebels in Africa. Maas. Suddenly it hit him, and he heard Jake’s low whistle. “Your parents were Angelica and Frederik Maas?”

  “Yeah, you’ve heard of them?”

  West knew they’d been billionaire
s. Old family money. The press had had a field day with their deaths. But he didn’t remember much about the children being mentioned, but that had been thirteen years ago.

  “The press wouldn’t leave us alone and so many people came out of the woodwork wanting something from Spencer. It was a nightmare when all we wanted was time and space to grieve. So when we moved that first time, Spencer paid someone to change our names. To build us new backgrounds. Even once things died down in the media, we kept these names. I guess there was still too much notoriety with the last name Maas for Spencer. People might have paid us more attention than they did and that’s the last thing he wanted.”

  Jake ran his hand over his face. “What happened after the accident?”

  “Spencer spent time in hospital, but he hated having other people help him. So I took over a lot of his care. The fall changed him. He was so angry. He started drinking. Maybe six months after it happened. He’d sleep in late and then he’d get up and start drinking beer. That was our first big argument. I refused to buy him beer, and he hit me.

  “I packed my bags. I was going to leave him, but he was so remorseful and I felt like I owed him. Nothing happened again for another six months. But the drinking continued. I don’t know what set him off the next time. But it was a similar pattern. I would do something to anger him, he’d hit me, then the next day he’d apologize. Tell me he loved me. Buy me shit I didn’t need. I stayed out of guilt in the beginning. Because of all he’d done for me. But, gradually, I realized it wasn’t going to stop. So, the day after he dislocated my shoulder, I packed some stuff and hopped into my car. I was getting away from him. I didn’t care that I had nothing.”

  “What happened?” Jake asked.

  “He sent someone after me,” she whispered. She shuddered, and West tightened his hold on her.

  “Who?” West asked.

  “Someone who didn’t care I was on the run because Spencer had hit me. All he cared about was getting me back to him so he could get the money Spencer had promised him, and he didn’t care if I came back with more bruises. I only had to be alive.”

  “He hurt you,” West growled.

  She rubbed her good hand down her thigh, the memory obviously a terrifying one. “Yeah.”

  “You know his name?” Jake asked.

  “He calls himself Snake,” she told Jake. “But I have no idea of his real name. I can give you a description. That wasn’t the only time he was sent after me.”

  .

  “You never told anybody?” Jake asked. “Never went to the cops?”

  “I didn’t want to get him into trouble in the beginning. I owed him. And he’s in a wheelchair. He’s been through a lot. He needs help.”

  “What the fuck did you owe him?” West barked.

  “For taking care of me. There was no one else. If he decided he didn’t want me, I would have gone into foster care, I guess. Poor little rich girl, right?”

  “You owed him fucking nothing,” West growled at her. “He’s your brother. He’s supposed to look after you. What happened to him sucks, sunshine. But it doesn’t excuse him for what he did to you.”

  She looked up at him. “I know. That’s why I finally tried to leave. But he’s got money and power. I didn’t stand a chance against him.” She looked up at Jake. “I tried to go to the police once, but he had most of them in his pocket so my complaint got dismissed.”

  Jake tensed. “Gonna need the name of those cops.”

  She just stared at him. Then she nodded slowly.

  “How the hell did you end up in Haven?” Alec asked. “This seems like the last place he’d want to come to.”

  “I don’t think he quite gets Haven,” she told Alec. “He thinks the men here are all in charge. That the woman are subservient to them, and he likes that idea. He thinks that you keep your women weak and oppressed. Not that you give them a safe place to be themselves.”

  “He made a mistake then, didn’t he?” West said.

  “He’ll never admit that. Spencer doesn’t admit to making mistakes. He doesn’t even get remorseful anymore after he hits me.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me, after you had learned what this town is like?” Jake asked. He nodded over at Alec. “Or go to him?”

  “I was the reason we moved from the last town.”

  West thought that was a strange change of topic. He glanced up at Alec. His brother’s eyes were narrowed as he studied Flick.

  “We sold the ranch where he had the accident and moved to another town. He bought another place that had plenty of land, so we didn’t have neighbors close by. I met a guy. Brian. I fell for him. He was kind and caring and he listened to me. I thought he loved me.”

  West tensed at those words. He tried to stop the reaction. But, luckily, she didn’t seem to notice. Alec turned his gaze to him. He should have known his eagle-eyed brother would see.

  “I told him about my brother,” she said quietly.

  Oh, fuck. Now he had some idea about where this was going. It wasn’t a change in topic.

  “Brian said he would help me get away. We were going to run away together. That he would liquidate his assets so we had enough money. That he’d look after me.”

  She was staring down at the bed covers, but he knew she was stuck in the past.

  “We made plans to escape but when I turned up at the rendezvous point the night we were supposed to leave, Brian wasn’t there. But Spencer was. With Snake.”

  West could almost feel her fear as she said Snake’s name. He glanced at his brother and saw the way he held his jaw tightly. This Snake guy had to be found. “Spencer told me it was over. They knew all about our plans. And hadn’t I learned by then I couldn’t leave him? What an ungrateful bitch of a sister I was for trying to run off, for trying to take a good man with me.”

  “What happened to this Brian?” Jake asked.

  “He paid Brian off. I learned the next day that Brian went to Aruba. With one of the waitresses from the diner with him.”

  “Fucking asshole,” West muttered.

  “Who? Spencer or Brian?”

  “Both.”

  “Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “You’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you? There’s no getting away from him.”

  “Has he hurt you any other time since you came here to live?” Jake asked.

  “Um, yeah. Nothing bad. He, uh, grabbed my arm a couple of times, bruising me. I don’t think he’s wanted to hurt me too much before he figured this place out. Except . . .”

  “Except what?” West asked her.

  “My foot,” she whispered.

  West stiffened. “He had something to do with you breaking your foot? I thought you fell out of a tree.”

  “I did. I was trying to get away from him. That day when I came home, he was already upstairs, waiting for me. I was most of the way out of the window, climbing onto the branch, when he grabbed my foot. I lost my balance, he couldn’t hold me, and I fell.”

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”

  She stared up at him, eyes wide as he vented his fury.

  “Sorry, baby,” he told her as gently as he could manage. Which wasn’t very. His voice was rough with anger. “Didn’t mean to scare you. You don’t ever need to fear me.”

  “I-I know.”

  Maybe she did, deep down, but he knew he had to move carefully with her. He looked up, met Alec’s gaze, and saw the warning in his eyes. He got it. Until she learned to trust him, he needed to handle her like she was made of the finest crystal.

  “Right,” Jake said tightly. “We’ll make a note of that too. Doc will be here any minute. I need to speak to him first. Alec, you want to walk me out?”

  Alec nodded.

  Jake looked down at Flick. “Coming to Haven was the best thing that could have happened to you, darlin’. You’re one of mine now. And it looks like the Malones have claimed you as well. Now, if you ever want rescuing from these guys, you can come to me about that.”

  West growled at him. “She
doesn’t need rescuing from us.”

  “We’ll see.” Jake winked at her. “Rest up. I’ll be in touch.”

  Alec and Jake left, but West stayed.

  She looked at him. “I’ve put you in danger. I never should have thrown myself at you. Even if you wanted me, which you made clear you didn’t, there’s no way I can have you.”

  She twisted the fingers of her good hand in the bed covers. “So stupid. Such an idiot. I was so selfish to try and bring you into my problems. I’m surprised Spencer let me come over here. For someone who doesn’t leave the house often, he seems to know a lot about what goes on with me. I guess he’s probably amused by me chasing someone who doesn’t want me.”

  “What do you see when you look at me?” he asked her.

  Her eyebrows came together quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  “This Brian? Was he like me?”

  She tried to smile then grimaced as it, obviously, hurt. Fuck. He hated that. Detested the fact she was in pain. “Like you? No, he was nothing like you. Brian was a computer geek. Soft. Just a few inches taller than me. He had a soft belly. He never argued. He never tried to boss me around. He let me make all the calls. In fact, it got kind of annoying having to make all the decisions.”

  That wouldn’t be an issue with him. He knew what he was like. He was glad she would push back at him sometimes, but no way would he ever allow her to lead.

  “You set your sights on me because you knew I had a chance against him. That I’m strong enough to take him. To protect you.”

  She thought about that for a minute. “That makes me sound so calculating.”

  “You could never be calculating. It’s nature. Searching protection from someone strong. It’s instinct. And, baby, yours was spot on. No one will hurt you now. I’ll see to that.”

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