by Angel Payne
“You’re absolutely right,” he murmured. “I’ve been a first-rate dickwad and I apologize. You deserve better than this. You always deserve the very best of me.”
I leaned back, looking up into his eyes. He still looked so wary, a tic pounding in his jaw, a pulse throbbing in his throat.
In an instant, I forgave him.
Not that he had to know that yet.
I pulled him close and buried my face in his chest. He clutched me tighter, kissing into my hair. We stood there for a while, exactly like that, simply savoring the nearness of each other.
I didn’t want to let him go. Ever.
With the same air of reluctance, he pulled back. “Let’s find some coffee. There’s a Starbucks across the way.”
“Perfect.”
Armed with liquid courage of the non-mind-altering variety, we headed along one of the Village’s scenic stone pathways toward the waterfront.
The coast had become my solace, as it was to so many Californians. I didn’t fully understand the pull until recently—and admittedly, I wasn’t as Zen-deep into the ocean as Killian—but being on the water was definitely therapeutic and easier on my bank account than all the shrinks of my past. Right now, I looked out over the sparkling bay and sucked air in through my nose. I did it a few more times as we strolled slowly next to the water. My eyes slid closed as my shoulders gradually sank from where they’d been hovering near my ears. A similar energy drenched the rest of me, too. Warm. Calm. Not completely stress-free yet…but better than I’d been thirty minutes ago.
I opened my eyes again. Michael had just done the same. “This was a good call.” He leaned over, pressing his lips to my forehead. “Thanks for forcing it on me.”
“I wasn’t about to let you to drive off again.” I looked down at my toes. I couldn’t face him while voicing the rest. “You—that—tore my heart out.”
“Margaux.” The sound was strangled in his throat. “I… I needed space. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“But you did. We said we would face our problems together. And the first big one that showed up? You bolted.”
“And I was wrong. It was wrong. What more do you want me to say?”
I stopped cold. “How about that you won’t do it again? How about the reason why it happened to begin with? How about justifying the huge fucking trigger that Declan pulls for you? Why not start with any of that, Michael?” I refused to feel bad for a millimeter of the new tension in his jaw. “Not even a month has passed since the day you asked me to marry you, to spend the rest of my life with you—but I can’t even guess why the sight of that man, your own uncle, unhinged you like that. Do you see why I hesitated about answering your proposal? We have some serious shit we need to deal with. Now, it feels even bigger than the night you first brought up marriage.”
He didn’t move. I tugged on his hand and pulled, making him walk with me again, so people stopped veering around us. It was a Monday in October so the Village wasn’t packed, but the place did brisk business no matter what day or season.
“Well? Are you going to say anything?”
Michael sipped quietly at his coffee. Stared across the bay.
I wanted to slap him.
Finally, he murmured, “It’s hard to determine where to start.”
“What about at the beginning?”
He grunted. “Right. I’ll get on that. Trying to organize a lifetime of memories and hate into one conversation…there’s not really a beginning to that. Give me a few minutes, okay?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He squeezed my hand, reassuring. “Of course you didn’t.”
No. I didn’t. But why was I filled with shame about it? There was another black hole I didn’t understand, and that pissed me off all over again. Why did I feel so bad for demanding to know what was going on with the man I loved—the man who wanted me to share every detail of my life with him but wasn’t willing to do the same in return?
I battled to keep myself wrapped in that ire but one look at Michael, and all the torment twisting his features, started to answer so many of those questions—in wrenching ways.
He was in pain. Deep inside. Not ‘oh, ow, that hurt’ pain. It was ‘please God make it stop’ pain.
I froze in my tracks. Reached for his free hand. “Just tell me what it is. What’s going on, baby? Please. I want to help you. I want to be here for you, like you’re always here for me, but you have to talk to me. You can’t always save the world, Captain America.” I tugged him over to the concrete ledge that lined the stacked rock break wall. We both sat. “You have to talk to me. It has to start right here…right now.”
Michael dragged in a long breath. I pulled my feet up under me before yanking his hand into my lap, pressing it between my own, silently urging him with as much patience as I could force. In return, he toyed with his coffee cup, looked over the water again, kicked at the ground, picked at something that wasn’t really on his thumb—
And finally, finally, looked me in the eye.
“This is so fucking hard,” he grated. “Harder than I thought it would be.”
“Why?” I cupped his face, peering into the hazel eyes that still flipped my heart on itself. “What are you so afraid of? It’s just me. It’s just me.”
“I know.” Nevertheless, he looked lost. “I know.”
“Well…maybe the beginning is a good place. How’s that? Declan is your…” He didn’t say anything so I continued. “Your uncle? Right? He doesn’t look like Diana so he must be your father’s brother.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and huffed. “Yes. My dad’s brother. When my dad passed, he left the farm to all three of us. Apparently, Dec took that as a signed permission slip to become ‘king caretaker’ for Mom and me.”
The air quotes he used didn’t go unnoticed. “But caretaking wasn’t what happened.”
“Loosely interpreted?” he returned. “Actually, scratch that. Just consider it my little joke of the day. Declan really only wanted to get his hands all over the business. No, scratch that, too. Not the business—his share of the profits. He came around every month acting like the doting guy, but when Mom refused to extend him credit on his share, he started getting—”
“What?” I tilted my head, forcing him to maintain our eye contact.
“Aggressive,” he muttered, like a kid rasping his first swear word. “I—uh—I was still real young, so I don’t remember it all from the very beginning, but, yeah, aggressive is a good word. And angry. He was always angry. And he would say things, to me especially, but never when Mom was around.” He blinked hard. Shoved his lower lip against the upper. Sniffed in hard. “They were—mean things, Margaux. Things my dad never said to me. I was just a fucking kid—so, yeah, I lost it sometimes.” He shrugged. “Maybe I lost it all the time.”
My breath stopped in my throat for a long second. “But—your dad died!”
“You think that mattered?” He pulled his hand free. Curled it into a fist and tucked it against his side…as if shielding himself. “Well, the tears really made him mad. Then he’d totally lose it…”
He trailed off, shaking his head, seemingly lost to memory. I watched, mortified and silent, as his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, swallowing the pain. Without thinking, I grabbed his hand again, squeezing until I shook, battling to bring him back to where we actually were.
Back to me.
His eyes snapped to my face. Refocused. He actually smiled for a second, as if waking up from a nightmare.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“What just happened?” I modulated to quiet and soothing. I didn’t trust his brief smile. Something was still going on in that head of his—confirmed by the new shake he gave it, shutting down his thoughts…shoving me away.
“No. Please don’t shut me out, Michael!”
He jerked his head all the way back. For a long moment, he studied a trio of seagulls cavorting on the wind. I watched their reflecti
ons in the amber depths of his gaze, dark twists dancing against the light…like his memories had been all these years?
“Do you remember when we were in Julian, back in July?” he finally uttered. “When you first met my mom?”
I nodded, not wanting to interrupt.
“You were onto the right trail then already.” He looked back down at me, lips lifting once more—but his smile was the kind that broke my heart, not melted it. “Mom and I have been hiding a lot of shit from the world for years…but you saw through it on your first visit to the farm.” He grimaced and gulped again. “Fuck. Even I didn’t see it at first.”
“And you’re supposed to know about makeup tricks like that?” I countered. “Stop beating yourself up for that, damn it…or you’re just letting Declan win on the inside too.”
He struggled to take that in, sniffing hard once more. “That scum-eating shit gave her a black eye!”
“I know. I kn—”
“There was a restraining order. We filed the goddamned restraining order. But the bastard—he’s clever. Caught her in town. Followed her like the fucking rat he is. Lurked and lurked until he got her at one of the few times she went somewhere alone…then…”
I jerked hard on his hand. He was getting agitated again. It was clearly a living hell to relive the memories of his mom’s suffering—but it illuminated so much for me. His need to protect everyone he loved…it made so much more sense.
But who’d been there to guard him?
The answer didn’t matter, because that person was now me.
I reached out to soothe him. “Hey, listen. It’s okay.”
Michael jerked away as if I’d just spewed flames. Jolted all the way to his feet. “God damn it. It’s not okay! Stop saying it’s okay—because it’s not! It never has been—and as long as that piece of shit walks the earth, it never will be. He wants everything we have, Margaux. Do you get that? He wants it all. He’ll stoop to any level to get it!”
I cringed back, now pretty damn happy he stood away. With the force of my glare, I reminded him that he was shouting like I was the guilty party here—a huge discrepancy from the truth. Huge.
My silence pierced reality back in on him. “I’m sorry.” He rubbed his neck again. “This is all so fucked-up, princess. Now you can see why I didn’t drag you into this mess—why I still don’t want you anywhere near it.”
I uncurled my body but hung on to my glare. “Well, that’s total bullshit.”
“The hell it is. Damn it—why can’t you understand?”
“Because we’re supposed to be in this together!” I barely got out the words coherently. “It’s what we promised each other, remember?” I looked him in the eye, despite being terrified of the next question. “Or have you changed your mind now? Is this going to take you away from me?”
“I don’t want that to happen. I swear I don’t. But Saturday night, when I saw him talking to you…touching you? I thought I was going to explode.”
“Well, you looked like it, too.”
“Don’t you see? My worst nightmare has come true. He knows who you are, Margaux. He knows my biggest weakness. He’s going to use it—use you—to his advantage. It used to be only Mom. Now he has one more weapon in his arsenal.”
“So, we’ll go to the police.”
“Don’t be so naïve.”
“And don’t be such a dick. Why is that naïve? Aren’t the police supposed to help people? Protect them from people like your uncle?”
His face grew shadowed as his tension jacked to a whole new level. “My uncle isn’t the only problem.”
I looked on as his shoulders took on the stress too. His chest. Down his arms, into his fisted hands. “I—I really don’t understand.”
“There’s more to the story.”
“More?” As he nodded in strange little jerks, I asked, “Am I going to need a drink stronger than this latte?”
“Likely.”
“Shit.”
“That’ll make two of us.” The agonized smile spread across his lips again. “You know, I should’ve killed him when I had the chance.”
“Stop it.” I marched at him and punched him in the shoulder, even as he sat back down on the wall. “You need to stop saying things like that, damnit! That’s how we ended up on Broadway this morning—where I bailed you out of jail. Remember?”
Michael was quiet for a minute. Two. He stretched his long legs out and crossed them at the ankles. I wanted so badly to crawl into his lap and just hold him, to make his pain go away for a while.
The yearning gave me an idea. “I’ll be right back,” I said with a little smile. “I need to run to the car.”
He uncrossed his legs. “I’ll come with you.”
“No, no. It’s fine. Save our spot. I’m going there and coming right—”
“No!” He surged up again, his fierce stance matching his tone. “From now on, until this shit works itself out, you go nowhere alone. I’m serious, Margaux. You take Andre everywhere—even to piss.”
I raised a brow.
“Okay, take Sorrelle when you do that, but nowhere else alone. We’re in some serious shit. You’ll understand when I tell you the rest.”
I let him take my hand and lead the way to the car. Andre was surprised to see us, but understood better when I asked him to open the trunk, where I now stored some beach essentials—heavy wool blanket, baggy boyfriend sweater, flip-flops, sun screen, a couple of paperbacks, the latest issue of Vogue, a bag of almonds, a bigger bag of Skittles.
I grabbed the blanket and my sweater in case it got cool, and informed Andre of where we’d be. I knew the perfect spot Michael and I could have some privacy and finish our talk.
When we got to the secluded alcove along the shore, I spread out the blanket and kicked off my shoes. I sat down, grinned up at Michael then patted the spot next to me.
“How did you find this spot?”
“I’ve become a beach bum.” I giggled a little. “Actually, Kil told me he brings Claire here sometimes for romantic dates, and I wanted to snuggle with you a little bit. Now I think we both could use it.”
“I think I agree.” He smiled and kissed my temple as I scooted over, fitting my body against his. His warmth was perfect, sinking into me, filling the fissures in my soul, which had split so much wider the last two days.
I was so addicted to this man. I needed him like the air I breathed.
I swung my hair down over my shoulder so it didn’t hang in his face, and stared at him with intensity I’d been bottling up for days. This was exactly what I’d needed. One moment of looking into his eyes, as brilliant as flames through amber glass, and I knew his cracks had opened just as deep.
“I love you.” I ran a finger along his lip. “I will do whatever it takes to make sure I don’t lose you. I want you to know that, to believe that. You are the most important thing in my world, Michael Pearson. I can’t be without you. I simply can’t.”
He swallowed hard then licked at my finger. “I love you, too, princess. And I’m so damn happy to hear you say that. I acted like an ass on Saturday…but I can’t bear to lose you, either, especially not to the clutches of my uncle.”
I giggled again. Couldn’t help it. “The clutches?”
“Don’t laugh this off, Margaux. I’ve seen what that man will do to a woman. It—it killed me as a kid, having to watch him beat on my mom. When he hit me, it was fine. I preferred it, even goaded him into doing it, because there was hope he wouldn’t go after Mom…but most of the time, I was wrong. He’d already warmed up on her and came to me next, or vice versa.” He averted his gaze upward, glaring at the rock formations in the ceiling. “When I was old enough to fight back, I tried fighting for both of us. It was pretty useless, sometimes it just made shit worse. We’d nurse our bruises together.”
I brushed my hand up, struggling to smooth the tension from his brow. His words echoed with such sorrow and helplessness. “What kind of loser beats on a woman? And a little kid?
”
“Domestic abuse happens more often than you think.”
As he spoke, I rolled over so we could spoon. Maybe his response to my next question would come more easily if he didn’t have to look me in the eye. “Tell me now, honestly, what happened on Saturday—after security took you outside.” If he really had beat on Declan, I now fully understood where the rage came from. We’d deal with it after he told me the story himself.
He settled in a little closer, arm around my waist, before starting. His gruff snort tickled my ear. “Well, to no surprise, as soon as you were out of sight, those goons dropped me in the sand like the day’s trash. One of them took a shot at me, which was how I ended up looking like I’d gotten into it with Dec.”
I added a snort, too. “Not that the Acme Guard School asshole will ever cop to that.”
“Not even worth the effort, sweetheart.”
“What saved your bacon with Porky Pig?”
“They got another call and had to leave. By then, I just let it go and walked down the beach a little. Tried to cool down and get my shit together before coming back in to you. I wasn’t down far, only past an outcropping of rocks.”
He paused, whether to let me digest his account so far or to recall more, I wasn’t sure. I rubbed his forearm, urging him to go on.
“I heard some men approach. Took three seconds to recognize one of them as the bastard from my nightmares.”
“Declan.”
“I prefer Fucking Declan, but, yes. He was out there on the beach, with a group of—shit, I don’t know what to call them—goons? Guards? Henchmen?”
“Henchmen?”
“Hello, Al Capone, right? But that was what I thought. Modern-day mafia. Esquire meets the Corleones. Dressed in all black, greaseball smirks, slicked-back hair and built like fucking brick houses, all of them. I wouldn’t think of taking one of them on myself, let alone the four they had me outnumbered at—five if I counted Dec. So, I stayed in the shadows and listened.”
I turned over then sat up. He was right. This was getting serious. “What did they say?”
