I saw one of my neighbors a few feet away, but she didn’t see me, and I ignored her. If I wasn’t good enough for her or the rest of them because I chose a lifestyle that was common in this day and age, then they weren’t good enough for me with their close-mindedness. That was how I would look at it from now on. I didn’t have time to worry what anyone thought. There were only two opinions that mattered to me – Ginger’s and Dawson’s. As long as the two of them were happy with me, I was content.
I smartly brought heavy cloth bags with handles, and it made carrying my purchases back to the car far easier. I hummed to myself and, as I filled the trunk with my spoils, I picked several grapes off the vines and stole an apple from the bag. I cranked the volume on the radio on the way home, singing along with the songs I knew so well, and, as I pulled into my driveway, I was shocked to see Ginger come running out of the house next door to greet me.
She threw her arms around my legs in a big hug, and I bent at the waist to hug her back. “Hi, Mommy! We’ve been waiting for you!”
I was a bit confused, and I looked up to see Dawson striding toward us with a cocky swagger and a salacious grin that played over his lips until he finally reached us. He replaced it with a welcoming smile that was more appropriate in front of a five year old and stood three feet away just watching.
“Waiting for me for what?” I asked, my tone directed at Ginger but the question more for Dawson.
“For dinner, silly,” she told me, as if I should have known that already.
Dawson cleared his throat and crossed his arms. “Ginger and I had a discussion earlier about the fact that I had to go on a very long trip, and I wouldn’t be able to visit for a while. She decided that we should all have dinner together before I leave.”
“We’re a family, right, Mommy?” she asked, tugging at my hand and, ultimately, my heartstrings. “Daddy said today is my day, and I want our family to be together on my day. So we’re going to have dinner together, and you can both tuck me in to bed tonight.”
I heard what she didn’t know to say – that she wanted her last memory of being with Dawson to be of the perfect happy family. Dinner, kisses from two parents. It made my throat raw just thinking of the sweet, selfless idea that was born from what Ginger probably thought was a selfish desire. But her request was a gift to me, and if I read the expression on Dawson’s face right, it was for him, as well.
“Well, how could I say no to that?” I laughed. “Why don’t you help me get all the things from the market into the house, and then we’ll decide what we’re going to have for dinner?”
Dawson gathered all the bags, not leaving anything for me, and handed the bread to Ginger to carry inside. She very purposefully reached up and tossed the bread on the counter. “Thank you, sweetheart,” I told her, eyeing the loaf and considering smearing some peanut butter on a slice and stuffing it in my mouth. I hoped my appetite would even out, considering that, since I’d left the nausea behind, I’d been plagued by starvation. If I kept up at this rate, I’d gain fifty or sixty pounds before Dawson was released, and that was unacceptable.
As I started putting away the fruits and vegetables, Ginger kept trying to convince us to bring this or that for a salad or side dish. Eventually, Dawson stepped in and told her, “I think we have everything we need at our house, baby. Unless there’s something specific Mari wants to bring.” He raised an eyebrow at me in question, and I had to ignore my stomach as it urged me to pack a bag full of snacks to munch while dinner was cooking.
“No, I don’t have any special requests.” With that said, we trekked over to Dawson’s house, Ginger chattering the whole way about different ideas for dinner that ranged from cheeseburgers and tater tots to pancakes and sausage. By the time we made it to their kitchen, I was feeling sick with hunger, and I didn’t care what we ate, as long as it could be ready fast.
“I have an idea,” I said, clapping my hands, and four eyes fixed on me. “I think we should make it quick and easy like a real family dinner so we spend less time cooking and more time enjoying.”
“What did you have in mind?” Dawson asked, obviously relieved that someone had managed to stop the child. He was already on board.
“I don’t know. Hot dogs. With chili and cheese and relish. Open a bag of chips to go with it. And maybe ice cream sundaes for dessert.” It sounded delicious to me, and nothing about it took more than ten minutes to prepare. It was the perfect way to disguise my insane appetite and my inability to wait for something else that took longer.
“Perfect!” Dawson announced.
Ginger hesitated for a moment, like she had to think very hard about something. “Do we have ketchup and mayonnaise and mustard?”
“Of course we do, baby,” Dawson said, giving me an exasperated look. I covered my mouth to hide a snicker. “In fact, why don’t you help Mari get all those things out while I grate cheese and cook the dogs and chili?” Something told me he was pretty hungry, too, and he was too edgy to deal with Ginger’s need to control the situation.
Any other day, I might have been fine letting her go on planning for hours. But two things drove me to the conclusion I’d rendered for us. One was, of course, starvation, and the other was limited time. I didn’t want to spend the last few hours of our time together as a family going over every possible three-course meal arrangement we could have for dinner and then coming up with reasons to eliminate them one by one.
It literally took fifteen minutes from the decision being made to complete the preparation and have it served on the table. I entertained the conversations as they came about, whether serious or silly, but mostly I observed. I wanted what Ginger wanted: to lock this image into my memory. It would keep me going through the roughest times.
I also considered Dawson’s explanation to Ginger. It worked well. After all, he was going away, and he would be gone for a long time. At five, she didn’t need to know any other details. There would be a time in the future, when Dawson’s history was clear and she was old enough to process the truth about the Valves and everything leading up to his incarceration, that Dawson would be able to offer her full disclosure about this separation between them. And presumably that would be the time she also found out about being adopted. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to explain that to her.
After dinner, Ginger went to bathe and dress for bed. Dawson helped her get clean, and I brushed the tangles out of her hair while he threatened to put them right back in, which made Ginger dissolve into giggles. By then, her eyelids were already drooping, and we took her to bed, tucking her in and kissing her goodnight. I’d be doing this alone soon, and I hoped it felt just as good, even if there was a sadness from a missing piece of the puzzle.
As we left the room and Dawson flipped the light switch off, I sighed and wrapped my arm around his waist. As many times as I told myself every moment for the past couple of weeks that I would back off, start the healing process, I couldn’t seem to walk away from him and keep my distance as long as he was still available.
But I did want him to have time with Ginger, just the two of them, so I wouldn’t be spending the night and staying for breakfast. I pulled away to turn and tell him I would see him tomorrow, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me to him. “Just a few more minutes,” he said. “Ginger’s already asleep, I’m sure, and I just want to look at you for a while.”
I smiled up at him, not quite ready to be alone yet. “As long as I can look back.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“You told Ginger you were going out of town.” I was sprawled naked across Dawson’s chest in his bedroom, tracing patterns on his shoulder with the tip of my finger. Looking became touching, which led to naked looking and touching and culminated in a round of very hot sex. Now, we were lethargic and satisfied, but my brain was spinning and going off in a million different directions.
“I said what I thought she could understand without feeling like I was abandoning her.” His voice rasped with emotion and exhaustio
n, but he continued tickling my spine with light caresses.
I gave him a hard look. “How do you plan to explain the bars and the orange uniforms?”
His eyes widened and he shook his head. “She’s not going to visit me in prison, Mari.”
I gaped at him. “Dawson, you can’t do that. I can’t keep her away from you for years without contact. Ginger needs to see you. She’d be devastated.”
“Letters and pictures, Mari. That’s it. I won’t have her exposed to a place like the one I’m going to.”
“Dawson…”
“No!” He cut me off and set me aside rather roughly as he stood and started pacing. I sat up and watched him in his anxiousness. “I don’t want her to know that I’m a prisoner, and I don’t want her asking questions about why. More than that, I don’t want her to see the sort of men I have to be around.” He shook his head. “And I know there’ll be sick men in there, and if I ever get the slightest idea they’re thinking about my daughter with their dirty perversions, there is no way I can keep my hands clean.”
I cringed. I hadn’t thought about the horrors Dawson faced on the inside. I’d been conscious of how much he would miss Ginger and, presumably, that he would miss me. I thought about boredom and prison gangs. I’d even considered the possibility, however remote, that the Valves would have some sort of contacts on the inside that would go after him for being a rat. But the type of men that would surround him, that he’d have to see and deal with every day, had never crossed my mind.
I felt like an idiot. And as much as I hated to admit it, he was right. It wouldn’t be good for either Ginger or her father if they had visits with Plexiglas between them or in a prison yard. Hanging my head, I whispered, “Okay.”
He stopped moving, and then I heard his footsteps coming my way an instant before the bed shifted with his weight and his hand took my chin and lifted it so I had to look at him. “I’m not trying to make you sad. These are the things we have to talk about, okay? These are the things you have to know.”
“I get it,” I told him. “It doesn’t make it any easier.”
“I know.” He sighed. “I vote we run through everything now, quickly, and then we don’t have to talk about it anymore. I’ll even write it all down for reference, if you want, so there don’t even need to be questions or reminders.”
I smiled sadly. “I’m sure I can remember. Just tell me. All of it.”
We pulled on robes and went to brew some tea, and then we sat at the kitchen table facing each other while I waited for him to speak his mind. “I’ll write two letters a week to Ginger. I’m allowed to have a few pictures, so I’d like to hear from her at least once a week with a picture.”
“I can handle that. We’ll make it twice,” I promised. I could be organized and even obsessive about it. “Go on.”
“I told you about the house. This house is paid off. I’m not trying to take anything away from you, so don’t take it that way. I just want things to be easy for you. If you want to work, go ahead. If you don’t, you don’t have to. If you want to keep your house, that’s fine, or you can sell it and move in here with no mortgage. One bonus of being with the Valves for so long is the money. I have a front account that I turned over to the police as evidence, but I also had a secondary account, and when you signed those papers to take custody of Ginger, you also got access to that. You have enough to get you through at least three years without either of you wanting for anything. All I ask is that you funnel some money into my commissary account once a month so I can eat something decent and have hygiene supplies.”
So far, this wasn’t hard to follow, other than knowing that he’d set things up to care for both of us financially. I could understand leaving money for Ginger, but for me? “I can do that, too, but I don’t need you to provide for me.”
He held up a hand to stop me. “I know you can take care of yourself, Mari. You did it for a long time before I ever met you. But I want to do this. It makes me feel a little less guilt about all of this.”
I didn’t want him to feel guilty. That had never been my intention with any of my decisions. “Dawson, I’m sorry for the way I acted. I know I went a little off the deep end and said some pretty horrible things to you about putting Ginger in danger and bringing me into it. I told you it was wrong to keep me blind, but you didn’t do that. You told me you needed to protect me, which meant that there was danger. I should have just trusted you in that and not pushed.” I swallowed as my voice grew raspy with emotion and added, “And I know you were doing everything you could to keep Ginger safe. I understand now that she wasn’t the one in danger.”
“No. She wasn’t. Not directly.” He looked away. “But through me, she was. You were right about that. But I’m making amends for this now.”
I didn’t know if he’d said everything he wanted, but I had questions. “Am I allowed to visit you?”
He didn’t look up, and I knew the answer. “I can’t tell you what to do, Mari. I would love to see you on every visitation day. But I have the same issue with you coming as I do with Ginger. I don’t want to suspect that any of the men I’m locked up with are fantasizing about you. I won’t be able to control myself.”
I grabbed my teacup, suddenly chilled, and let the heat seep into my hands. “So, what, only letters and pictures from me, too?”
“And calls. I can’t talk to my daughter on the phone. I can’t let her hear the voice on the line telling us how much time we have left before it hangs up. But I’d like to talk to you once a week.” He gazed at me with a plea in his eyes, and I certainly wasn’t going to say no.
“Is there anything else?” I asked, fearing what he’d say.
But he shook his head. “Nothing else for you to do.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What does that mean?”
He reached across and covered my hands with his. “I got the word on my sentence. They won’t drop it down, so it’s five years.”
I felt like someone had just sucker punched me right in the gut. I wouldn’t see his face or touch him for five years. And somehow, during that time, I was supposed to keep his daughter satisfied with letters, tell stories and show her old pictures to help her remember her father. What if I couldn’t remember him very well after that long? What if we’d all changed and grown apart?
I started to panic, and my vision blurred as my blood pressure skyrocketed. “Five years is too long, Dawson. I thought we were talking about three, tops.”
“I know. I tried. But if I can go in and do my time quietly, I can be out in two years. Twenty-four months, Mari. That’s not even half the sentence. That’s better, right?” He rubbed his thumbs over my wrists. “I need to know you can handle it, and that you’re going to back me with this. If I have you here, holding down the fort, taking care of Ginger, and the two of you waiting for me to come home, I can get through this without any problems.”
“I can.” I had to. I didn’t have a choice. I had taken on the responsibility of a child, and now I was going to carry the weight of the lover, holding out and waiting for him to return to me as well. And even if he started to hate me before we reunited, I had to hold out until then to make sure I did my duties as promised. “I’ll be here, with Ginger, and the two of us are going to welcome you with open arms, bright smiles, and support. As long as you still want both of us.”
“I’m always going to want you, Mari.” I put down my tea, walked over to him, and wrapped my arms around his neck, cradling his head against my chest.
“I won’t be alone, not if I can help it,” I told him. “I’m going to call in my support system. I’ll lean on my sister, and you can lean on me. We’ll all get through this together.” His arms came up around my waist and held on tight as I smoothed a hand over his hair, stroking his head. “I’m not going anywhere, Dawson. I’ll be here when you get back, okay? And then, if you decide you hate me for driving you to this point, I’ll leave.”
I stayed there and waited until he released me, not c
aring how much time past, and when we moved, I walked him to bed and tucked him in like we’d done for Ginger.
“You’re not staying?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No, you need one last breakfast with your daughter, the way it used to be. I’ll be right next door.” I kissed his forehead and whispered, “I love you.” Then, I stood and walked to the bedroom door, flipping the light switch.
“Mari?” His voice was anxious, and I turned to look at him in question, barely able to see his face in the dark. “I love you, too.”
I choked back a sob. Those words did things to me that the best sex could never do, and I couldn’t believe I’d finally heard Dawson say them to me. I knew tears were falling down my cheeks, but I ignored them and smiled, nodding at him. “I know, baby. I know.” I left for my house, despondent and exalted all at the same time.
HAWK: The Caged Kings MC Page 46
