Honor had just dismissed some science guy and was preparing to call another science guy when there was a rumble of activity at the back of the room, and Melina ran up and waved Honor to the rail. They spoke with somber speed for a minute or two, and Heath could see that it was something important. She turned to the bench.
“Your Honor, request a sidebar.”
The judge nodded, and Honor and the prosecutor went up.
Heath heard his brother’s voice ask, “What’s going on?” and he turned to see that he’d asked Melina—who only shook her head and pointed toward the bench.
As the attorneys stepped back, the judge said, “Court is in recess until nine a.m. tomorrow.”
Now Logan asked Honor, “What the hell is going on?”
She spoke to the whole cluster of Heath and his family. “Ellen’s in the hospital. Devlin caught her in his room and beat her. He’s in custody. Let me find a conference room here where we can talk.”
“No—somebody’s got to get to the hospital,” Morgan said.
“Art’s already there. I’ll go as soon as I debrief you. Which I guess I can do right here: You all absolutely need to stay away from Ellen until this is done. Heath—Devlin is already asking for a deal. He asked for a deal before he asked for an attorney. He’s taking Whitt down. I think once he gets his head around the idea that his perfect case was wrong, Hayes will withdraw the charges against you in the morning. So let me get out of here. Go home and wait. I will call when I know more.”
Heath had heard all of her words, but they didn’t get through the dead space inside him. It seemed ridiculous that after the past nearly four months, everything would just be over, that they would just stop and let him go on with his life.
“Heath.” Gabe took his hand. “Heath, it’s gonna be okay.”
There was color and life in her face again, and a smile that didn’t seem quite so intentionally brave. She believed it. She believed the words she’d said. They weren’t just a mantra anymore. She believed that they were true.
He nodded. “Okay.”
*****
Ellen had a concussion, a broken collarbone, and a host of bruises and lacerations. But she was conscious and able to talk, and she had told her story. Devlin had done all that damage in a matter of seconds, before Luke, one of the other ranch hands, had heard Ellen screaming and burst into the room. He’d knocked Devlin out with a metal softball bat to the back of his bald head.
While he was out, Luke had hogtied him and called for help.
He’d started talking as soon as he was in custody. Denham Whitt had been arrested in his home late the same evening. Catherine Spelling had been arrested as well.
Now, Heath sat yet again at the table in the courtroom, with Honor at his side and his family at his back. The jury box was full of confused and expectant strangers. As soon as the bailiff got the morning started and called the court to order, Jackson Hayes stood up. “Your Honor, in light of new evidence, the State withdraws all charges against the defendant.”
The judge, with whom Honor and Hayes had met first thing that morning, turned to Heath. “The defendant will rise.”
Heath rose, as did Honor.
“Heath Cahill, all charges against you have been withdrawn, and the case against you is dismissed. You are free to go. Members of the jury, you are released from your duty. The Court thanks you for your service. We are adjourned.”
It was over.
Just like that.
His brother whooped and hugged Honor. Emma, sobbing loudly, grabbed Heath and hugged him until he thought she’d cracked something in his back. His father pulled Gabe close and kissed her head.
And then they all backed off and let Gabe come to him.
When he had her in his arms, when he lifted her off the floor, with the rail yet between them, and tucked his face against her neck, when he heard her whispering It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay—then, and not before, Heath knew it was true.
Magic words.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Daddy! Daddy! Look!
Heath opened his eyes.
He’d dreamt of Ruthie, but the dream hadn’t turned dark and filled with flame. It hadn’t been a memory brought to life, though it had been enlivened by memory. Just him and his little girl, taking a walk through the Cahill woods, her baby-soft hand in his leathery one. A white bunny had bolted from under the brush, and she’d called out, giggling and pointing.
The watery-bright glow of the moments just before sunrise filled the room, and he smiled at his view of fair olive shoulders and thick, sable waves against the white sheets. Gabe slept in her favorite position, almost on her belly.
Almost, but not quite. Her belly, their child, was beginning to put itself in her way.
His wife. Their child. Their bed. Their home.
On this morning, the day after his case had been dismissed, he had dreamt his first dream about Ruthie in four years that hadn’t ended in the horror of her death. On this morning, he’d woken full of happy thoughts about his girl, in his bedroom full of morning light, in a bed full of his wife, who was full of their child.
He was still in turmoil, trying to make sense, to find balance against the great yaws of his life. Yesterday, he faced a life in prison. Today, he faced a life of…everything. Like coming up from the ocean floor too quickly, he felt sick and disoriented. All around him last night had been celebration, but he’d been unable to find the same joy—or at least to express it. He was relieved, and he was happy, but he felt the need to grab hold of something—Gabe—lest his life take another violent pitch and throw him out of reach.
He had to wake up again. As he watched the calm rise and fall of Gabe’s tranquil breaths, as he felt the ease of her presence weave in with the lingering peace of his dream, Heath had the feeling that Ruthie had done just that. She’d walked him to his future.
A silly thought, but it felt good.
He scooted to Gabe and smoothed his hand down the silken plane of her back. She woke at once with a little purr and tried to roll toward him.
Pressing his hand between her shoulder blades, he stopped her and leaned close to whisper in her ear. “Don’t move. I love you in this position.”
Oh, and he did, too. She was laid out before him, and he could get his hands all over her and touch every single part that made her tremble and moan.
Her body was changing with the baby, more than simply the roundness of her bump. Sybil had changed very little, developing a nearly perfectly round bump and little else—not even her breasts had grown much. She hadn’t breastfed, so what little change there had been had gone quickly away.
Gabe, on the other hand, was changing everywhere. Her hips were filling out, her ass, her breasts, her face. She was self-conscious about it, worried she was gaining too much weight, but Heath loved it. She seemed truly full of their child.
His hand roamed over her shoulder and back up. He curled his fingers in and drew his coarse knuckles down her spine, smiling as she writhed and gooseflesh roughened her skin. Then he opened his hand again and eased over that plumping swell of her hip and ass.
She had brought her top leg up high, knowing exactly where he was headed and opening wide the way for him, but for now, he held off and retraced his path over her back and arm again. Leaning close, over her, but holding his weight away, he brought his lips to her skin and traveled the same journey. Her skin smelled like sandalwood, left over from their bath the night before.
“Heath…” she gasped as his mouth latched onto the back of her neck. Her hair covered his face like a satin drape.
“Shhh.” He made his way down the beads of her spine. “Let me do what I want.”
With a nod and a moan, she settled and moved her arm, offering even more of herself to his desire.
It was more than want, more than desire. It was need. As he touched her, tasted her, on this morning after, the world—this world, its future—seemed to fill in for him, to gain a weight and permanence it h
adn’t had since long before he’d met Gabriela Kincaid. Gabe Cahill. His wife.
His kisses reached the small of her back, and he licked a line over to her side. He slid his hand over the curve of her ass and found her core, wet and spread wide, waiting for him.
Flinching at his touch as if his fingers carried an electric charge, she grabbed her pillow in both arms. With the baby, she was even more sensitive, and he knew to be gentle at first, to touch lightly until she was ready for more, until she was begging for everything he could give her.
He played lightly through her folds, danced over her clit, dabbled in her wet until she was quivering in his arms, sending wee little moans into the light air of the morning. His cock, pressed so firmly to her body they might have been melded together, strained for more, aching at the feel of her shaking muscles vibrating against him.
Holding her tightly, his face buried against her side, his mouth pressed into the soft flesh of her hip, Heath pushed two fingers into her dripping, swollen center, and she cried out and tried to curl over, her body clenching hard around his fingers. Now she was ready for something other than gentle attention. Keeping her in the vise of his embrace, forcing her body to keep the shape that gave him access wherever he wanted it, he curled his fingers inside her and drove hard at the spot he knew would send her from sanity. Biting down on her hip, he slammed his fingers into her again and again, shaking and twisting and probing, until she shrieked into her pillow and her body flailed wildly against his grip. When she came, drenching his hand, she went utterly silent and still but for a series of rhythmic spasms that racked her from head to toe.
The very second he felt her body begin to loosen from its orgasmic clench, before she had come down completely, Heath pushed his body up fully behind hers, wrapped her up in his arms and legs, and shoved himself deep into her hot, wet, spasming core.
Her head flew back and collided with his chest. “Oh God! Go hard, go hard!”
He went hard; he doubted he’d have had a choice. His need for her was piqued to a feverish extreme by her wholehearted, full-bodied response to him, but that wasn’t so unusual between them. What drove Heath now was deeper than that, deeper even than the spiritual, elemental bond he’d always felt with Gabe, even before they’d been intimate.
In this moment, on this morning, with his body inside hers, her body inside his, Heath felt his life in his hands—truly, firmly, real and concrete. He felt alive. He was awake. Fully, in every atom, every cell.
His past had no more hold on him. Now he only had this present and the future they would make together.
Gabe came again, nearly weeping as it crashed over her. He held her yet more tightly and murmured at her ear, his voice erratic and strained as his own climax slammed through him. “I’ll never leave you. I love you. Forever.”
And he knew it to be true.
*****
“Are you sure about this?”
Heath stepped back from the wall and considered the color. A couple of days earlier, he’d covered Ruthie’s pink walls with primer—that had been a little hard, but not as bad as he’d feared—and now he was painting the room the color Gabe had picked out.
First, he’d had to patch the wall. And they’d bought a new crib. Heath counted that night, when he’d lost his shit in this room—what he remembered of it—as his lowest point since the night of Ruthie’s death. He hoped it would be the lowest point of the rest of his life.
Gabe leaned against the door jamb, smoothing her hand over her bump, as she so often did now. “Yeah. It’s perfect.”
“I thought it would be blue. It’s grey.”
“It’s called ‘Dewy Dawn,’ and it’s perfect. Hold on.” She disappeared from the doorway and was back in a few seconds, with her phone in her hand. “Look.” She came into the room, holding the phone out. He saw a couple of small photos of decorated nurseries. “See? The pale grey and yellow and brown? They look great together. Blue is so obvious for boys.”
Heath thought it was awfully sedate for a baby’s room. He’d loved turning the room into a pink princess hideaway when Ruthie had been on her way. But he wasn’t about to fight the point with Gabe. Whatever he could give her to make her happy, she would get. Forever. “It’s what you want?”
She rolled her eyes and took her phone back. “Obviously. That’s why I picked it. When we decide on a name, Emma’s going to show me how to make quilted letters to hang on the wall over the crib.”
The week before, they’d gone in for her sonogram. The baby was healthy and strong. And male. The sonogram machine was higher-tech than he remembered with Ruthie, and they had a little photograph that actually showed his perfect face, and his little hand under his chin, like he was thinking serious thoughts.
Heath was going to have a son.
He went back to painting. Gabe had bought ‘baby-safe,’ zero-fume paint, but he still had to bite off the urge to shoo her from the room. His protective instinct had always been strong, but in the weeks since he’d been freed to live his life again, he found himself especially anxious that something new would happen to snatch it all away from him.
He was keeping control of it, hoping it would back off as he settled again into his life. They had been through enough. He had been through enough. They would be okay.
As he filled the roller with paint and pushed it over the wall, he said, “I have another idea for a name.”
They’d already discussed and dismissed a handful of ideas. They had months to go yet before the birth, but Gabe wanted a name for him now. She wanted to think of him by name.
“Hit me.” She was leaning against the door jamb again, scrolling through her phone, probably shopping for baby stuff.
“He should have part of your name, too. What do you think of Kincaid? That’s a strong name—Kincaid Cahill.”
“No.”
Her answer was so short and sharp that Heath took the roller from the wall and turned to face her. She was pale and frowning, her phone forgotten.
“Gabe?”
“I don’t want him to have my father’s name.”
“It’s your name, too.”
“No. I’m a Cahill.”
Heath had found the limit of the power of his past, but Gabe, he thought, had not. She spoke almost never about her life before Jasper Ridge. He knew virtually nothing about that part of her history—almost her whole life. He, by now, was an open book to her. He, his brother, and his sister had shared with her just about everything about him there was to share, and his life had been laid out for public consumption during the trial, too.
Gabe, on the other hand, was a locked diary. Not because she was keeping secrets from him, but because she had turned her back on her history.
He didn’t want to press her, however. It was her history, her story, to keep or tell as she wished. That story had made her who she was, the woman he loved, and beyond that, he had no significant investment in it. Except that he wanted her happy, and every night that she woke gasping, he worried about the way her past still pulled on her.
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” He set the roller down and went to her.
“It’s okay.” She smiled, and there was just a tinge of that brave affect that told him she’d had to shove a hard memory away. “We just need a better name. How about Hogan—like Heath and Logan combined.”
Thinking that was an interesting idea, he tried it out. “Hogan Cahill. Not bad…but it’s so close to Logan. Could be confusing when Emma hollers it.”
Gabe laughed. “Good point.”
He wanted her in their son’s name. “How about your grandfather? What was his name?”
“Edgar.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I don’t think it works.” Her eyes shifted from him and focused on a point that seemed elsewhere than the room they were in. “That’s a nice thought, though. I loved him.”
She’d said the name with an accent; Heath had never heard an accent in her voice before. He realized that he didn’t
know if she, his wife, of half-Mexican heritage, was bilingual.
They really had moved quickly into their life together.
“Do you speak Spanish?”
If she was surprised by the question, she didn’t show it. “Not enough to say so. My father didn’t, and he didn’t like my mother speaking Spanish around him. He thought she was talking about him, and she probably was. He didn’t want me to learn at all. My grandparents spoke it around me enough that I picked up a few things. I could probably get us by on vacation, but I couldn’t hold a deep conversation or anything.”
He felt greedy about the bits of her that seeped out around the edges of her locked past.
A puckish twinkle glinted in her eye. “Do you speak any other languages?”
“No. Strictly monolingual, me. How about your grandfather as a middle name?”
She made a thoughtful face, considering it. “What about Matthew Edgar?”
Matthew Cahill had staked this claim. Heath had been given his name for his middle name, and he hadn’t been the first. It was a good family name. And Gabe’s grandfather’s name. He rolled it over his brain a bit.
“Dad will love it,” Gabe added.
She called his father ‘Dad.’ It made Heath smile every time. She was truly a Cahill. He wanted to hold her, but his hands were sticky with stray splotches of ‘Dewy Dawn.’ “Yeah, he will. I like it. Matthew Edgar Cahill.” He tried to pronounce it as she had, but he failed, and she chuckled.
“Just Edgar.” She dropped the accent. “No need to make him have to pronounce it for everyone forever. Just Matthew Edgar Cahill. I like it.”
“Yeah. It’s a good name. A rancher’s name.” Unable to resist, he put his paint-splotched hand on his wife’s round belly.
*****
For generations, the Cahill family Thanksgiving tradition had been to serve two meals: a big meal for the ranch workers the day before, and then, on Thanksgiving itself, another big meal just for family. Occasionally, one or two select guests would be invited to share the family meal. This year, they’d invited Honor Babinot, but she’d declined with polite thanks, explaining that she was going home to Wisconsin to spend the holiday with her family. For all the hundreds of hours she’d spent with the family in the months before and during the trial, when it was over, it was over. Until she had declined the invitation to Thanksgiving, the last they’d heard from her had been the day her final bill had arrived in the mail.
Somewhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 1) Page 29
