by Jill Haven
“I’m glad you suggested this,” I mumbled to her.
“You sounded off when you answered the phone earlier. I know taking walks chills you out,” she replied, her tone so happy it was nearly a chirp. Even though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was already getting that dreamy late-in-the-day quality, thanks to fall settling in. She smiled at me and I did my best to return it.
This morning had been hell. It was my day off from Go Wild, so I hadn’t set an alarm, and I had woken up from one of those really good sex dreams with Carlisle in the starring role—even hotter now that I knew what his body felt like against mine—only to find myself shivering and freezing under my blankets. My heart had raced a mile a minute, in a very bad way. I was so twitchy while I tried to pour myself a bowl of cereal that I’d spilled milk on the floor. After cleaning that mess up, I’d showered and thought about Carlisle, but instead of enjoying the memory of that knock-my-socks-off kiss he’d laid on me last night, all my panic-soaked brain could do was point out the reasons things between us could never work.
He was older and had his life together. He had a place in Charleston. He had money, and I didn’t. He didn’t have mental health issues, probably, or if he did, he had them worked out. I should have already left Muscogee, should have already found a doctor to help fix my brain. Maybe then, when I wasn’t broken anymore, I could seriously date Carlisle and be good enough for him. Everyone always got sick of my problems fast—my ex hadn’t even lasted a week before he started being mean to me about how anxious I got for no reason—which only made things worse.
My problems are all my fault.
The negative thoughts played on a loop in my brain. I was aware that the doom and gloom wasn’t completely true, and I knew I was catastrophizing everything—that’s something one of the self-help books I’d bought had talked about. Too bad being clued in to my faults didn’t make it any easier to stop myself from going to a dark place.
Sometimes my anxiety just attacked. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and I’d been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder by an ER doctor one of the times Jade took me in while I was having a meltdown. I hadn’t seen a doctor in years before we started going to the ER. It was a long trip to get to the hospital from Muscogee, and I suffered by myself before Jade had realized what was going on. She forced me to go. Sometimes my body was just set to danger response. Sometimes I thought it was because I spent so many years walking on eggshells that my body didn’t know any better.
But I was calming a little now that we were at the park, taking the path near a small stream and the spindly willow trees that reached down to bop the top of my head with their wooden fingers. The water nearby burbled and sparkled and soothed the ragged spots inside me.
“I need to leave Muscogee.”
Jade tilted her head and gave me a squinty, assessing look. “I know. I think I’m going to come with you. Is that okay?”
“Seriously?” I grinned at her. I’d never expected that because she had a house someone in her family had left her, and that meant she’d have to figure out what to do with it.
“Yeah. I’ve had enough of our wholesome small-town life.” She leaned her head on my shoulder for a second and some chipmunks chittered nearby. Goldenrod fronds waved next to the path, bright and yellow, in a small breeze that rustled through park. Everything was just about right for a few seconds. “Besides, who will keep you on your toes if I stay here?”
“Maybe Carlisle,” I whispered under my breath, but I swear she heard me because she giggled.
“So, how is that going?”
I covered my mouth and coughed. My cheeks flared hot. Jade outright cackled.
“You slept with him or something?” She tugged at the sleeve of my hoodie.
“No, I’m not that easy.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re a grown man. It would be fine if you had.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t.” I shrugged. The heat in my cheeks spread until I felt like I was melting. “He seems like he’s a nice guy who believes in taking his time. He… we did kiss.”
“How was it?” She narrowed her eyes and focused on my face so much that I pulled the collar of my hood up and buried my face inside it for a second. She giggled and poked at my side until I unburied myself and dragged in deep breaths of cool air.
“Perfect,” I whispered. “Absolutely everything I ever thought kissing someone should be. Better, even.”
She nodded and for a second was really serious, but then she beamed a thousand-watt smile my way. “That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you.” She tossed her arms around my waist and hugged me, and I laughed and squeezed her back.
“I said we kissed, not that he asked me to marry him.”
She stood back and rolled her eyes. “It’s a start. I’ve never heard you talk about anyone like you have him. It seems like you finally found a decent guy. That’s really good.”
“Yeah. It makes me feel like I should get help for my, you know.” I gestured toward my head, and she sighed.
“You will. Be gentle with yourself.”
She jerked around and frowned into the trees beside us, her hands on her hips, and I caught a familiar smoky musk that started a low pleasant tingle in my belly, but a sharp, familiar shout nearby had my chest squeezing hard. Farther along the path was someone I hadn’t seen in a long time and didn’t want to have near me now. My fingers itched, and I brushed them over the raised scar on my jaw.
My dad came around a bend in the path about twenty feet ahead of us, yelling and dragging a poor woman I vaguely knew from around town with him. She was young, had graduated from high school two or three years ahead of me, and I thought her name was Tamara. Her long red hair hung in her face and she struggled to get him to let go of her arm. He had a death grip, though, and I knew he wouldn’t drop his hold, not if he was mad. The closer they came, I tensed.
“You fucking bitch! You promised me I’d get you all night.”
I trembled and took a step back, grabbing Jade to move her with me. He hadn’t noticed us yet. I tensed, thought about running. He was on a rant about something, sounded like maybe plans that got ruined because she got a call into work, from what I gathered in between him calling her a thousand names, and she was sobbing. He had her arm clutched in his fist so tight it was turning red.
Dad was bigger than me, always had been, a bulky guy who worked construction, and he’d only muscled up more during the year he had spent in jail for smacking me around when I was younger. Thankfully, I’d turned eighteen about a week after he was hauled away, so I’d just moved my things out of the house and never looked back.
I tried to avoid him as much as possible, but it seemed like today I wouldn’t be getting out of a confrontation.
Jade tugged on my arm, tried to physically move me off the path into the woods, probably to hide, but I couldn’t have gone if I wanted to. My muscles were frozen. The closer they came along the path, not only had the girl’s trembling enraged me—god, how familiar I was with that—but she had a large purple bruise on her cheek that became visible when she tossed her head to get her hair out of her face, and she was wearing a low-cut shirt in spite of the chill in the air, leaving more bruises clearly visible on her chest above the top of her shirt line. What the fuck had he been doing to this woman?
Dad stopped and shook her hard, and I couldn’t contain myself. “Hey! Leave her alone.”
“Damn it, no,” Jade said, but she seemed resigned. She dropped me and threw her hands up into the air.
Dad stopped still like he’d been hit on the head and slowly turned to glare at me. The look hit the panic button in my brain. I’d been here a thousand times before. His dirty blond hair and cold gray eyes were almost as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror. I shrank in on myself but refused to run. That glare always brought pain, and mean words, and days of berating myself. If I were only better, smarter, faster, a good son instead of a disappointment, he would love me and be nice.
The lies already swirled in my head. I knew them for what they were, but a tiny piece of me still believed them.
“You little shit, I’ll be damned.” He dropped Tamara, I was almost sure that was her name, and stormed my direction. “That fuckin’ mouth of yours. Apparently, you’re still running it when you shouldn’t. You dating girls now?” He looked Jade up and down and I stepped in front of her, earning a poke in the back. “Thought you’d turned queer? Heard you were fuckin’ that guy at the diner so he’d let a screw-up like you have a job.”
“What? Eric?” I gaped. Of all the stupid things I thought I might hear from him, that wasn’t one I’d imagined. “Really?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Jade hissed from behind me.
Dad stopped but listed like he was in a strong wind. He might have been drinking even though it was early. My stomach turned to acid and ate at my insides. He was awful when he drank.
“You don’t want to fuck a murderer, girl,” he said to Jade, rather than me. “He killed his Momma coming out of her, strike one.” He jabbed a finger into my face, and I flinched. “It was all downhill from there. I should have smothered you when you was a baby.”
My breaths came faster, and I clenched my fists as rage surged through me. “Grandma had me when I was little. You never took care of me as a baby.”
“Good thing. You bitched and cried enough from a few love taps as a teenager, can’t imagine how fucking annoying you were as a baby.” He laughed and looked around at his girlfriend, maybe expecting her to be amused too. She was too busy checking her arm out, tracing fingers over darkening bruises. She sniffled too loud and he whipped around to face her. “What’s your problem?”
“Haiden was always nice in school.” She shot me a tremulous smile. “Maybe give him a break?”
Dad grabbed her by the hair and pulled. “Shut your fucking whore mouth. When I want your opinion on my family, I will give it to you. Call your boss back and tell him you blew a tire. You’re not going nowhere this afternoon.” She struggled against his grip as tears fell down her cheeks, and I knew what it was like to be trapped with him breathing his whiskey breath in my face.
She tugged at his hand and a broken whimper left her.
I snapped, “You coward. Let her go.” I stepped forward, not sure what I was going to do, but I couldn’t let him hurt her any more. I got what I wanted when he dropped his hold on her, but I wasn’t prepared for how fast he moved. He was in my space before I could draw a breath and shuffle away. He backhanded me, hard enough that it moved my whole body to the side, and I stumbled to the right. My glasses flew off and landed somewhere on the path with a clatter. The world instantly turned into fuzzy blobs. My ears rang and pain flashed brilliant and electric into my brain.
Dizzy from the unexpected, but well-remembered, blow, I went down on one knee and braced with my arms over my head for the inevitable follow-up, but none came. There was a surprised grunt from Dad.
Jade shouted, “Pull your punches!” which confused me. I fumbled my hand across the ground for my glasses and I shook so badly it took both hands to get the frames back on my face.
When I turned toward the scuffle that had broken out, the world new and clear, I nearly vomited. Carlisle was there. Had he seen me getting hit? Did he think I was a weakling now? Where the hell did he come from? He had Dad on the ground, a hand around his throat, and he was riding him like a bucking bronco. Dad’s eyes were bulging, and his face was purple. He clawed at Carlisle’s hand, but couldn’t move it from his windpipe. Tamara stood back, her mouth open in a silent scream with her hands on her own neck.
Carlisle looked like he was going to kill my dad.
“No,” I said quietly, and then louder, “No! If you hurt him too bad, you’ll go to jail and he’ll walk, no matter what he did. Let him go! Please. I don’t want you locked up for this ass.”
I scrambled across the dirt to Carlisle’s side and rested a hand on his tense shoulder, feeling woozy and confused and still a lot like I wanted to throw up. He glanced back at me and I froze. His eyes… weren’t right. They refracted the sun strangely, a golden color, the pupils slit straight up and down, dangerous and pointed like a venomous snake. I blinked and looked around and then back, but Carlisle’s eyes were still the same.
“Let him go? He hurt you.”
“Please, don’t kill him,” I begged, bile rising up to bite at the back of my throat. Carlisle nodded and dropped his hold, standing up fast. Dad sat up and gasped, coughing and choking as he rolled away from us. When I looked back at Carlisle, his eyes were the pretty blue they’d been when we first met, and I thought maybe I was crazy, but I’d never hallucinated before. I knew what I’d seen.
Carlisle kicked Dad so hard on the side that he moved a foot with the blow. “If you ever lay a hand on Haiden again, I’ll rip it off and feed it to you. Don’t talk to him. Don’t come near him. If you see him walking on the sidewalk, you better go the other way.” Carlisle bellowed each word directly into Dad’s face. Dad shook on the ground. Carlisle’s face was red and his focused gaze so deadly, I believed him, even if Dad was too stupid to realize he’d almost died today.
Dad got to his feet and didn’t look at us, just ran back the way he’d come, and the girl followed him. “Don’t,” I moaned after her, but she didn’t stop. My heart hurt for her and my mind spun with confusion. What in the heck was going on?
11
Carlisle
My shoulders heaved and I had troubled reining in my dragon. Pain roared through me from where my sharp fangs dug into my bottom lip, and the tang of blood fueled my rage higher. I turned my back on Haiden and Jade. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that asshole—who had bred Haiden’s mother, and apparently done little else for his son—shove the woman he was with to the ground not far from us and take off running. She stayed there, crumpled, sobbing. I felt bad for her, but far worse for Haiden.
“Damn it, this is a fucking mess.” My words were a growly hiss, lower than they should be. I closed my eyes, but all I could smell was Haiden’s sweet scent cloaked with the stench of fear. That horrible tinge to his personal smell had driven me out of the spot where I’d been waiting in the trees, hoping I could find a way to discreetly join him on his walk.
“How, what… how did you know we’d be here?” Haiden’s strained tone had me struggling with myself harder. It was torture to hear him so upset, and I wanted to shift, race after that man and snap and snarl at him, rip him to shreds with my talons, and give his still-beating heart to Haiden as a gift. The blood-soaked fantasy socked some sense into me. As a man, I knew that was wrong, and it was so disturbing that I gasped and found part of my humanity again. The dragon in me thought destroying his tormentor would be a proper mating present. Nothing I could tell that small, animal part of me would do, so I thought about how he would recoil if I acted on my impulses, and the dragon seemed to settle deep in the spot in the back of my mind where he normally rested.
Deep breath in, Carlisle. I held air in my lungs until they burned and then let it all out again as I spun around. Haiden shivered and held onto his own arms so hard it seemed like he’d be decorated with bruises later.
Jade shoved me, and I stumbled. “I told this guy we’d be here because he said you two had a nice date last night when he came into the diner this morning. I wanted to help.”
“Oh.” Haiden sounded hollow, as if everything that made him Haiden had been washed away and replaced with a zombie who wore his face. He blinked at us both and Jade shared a look with me, one full of guilt. Shit, she wasn’t very good at hiding her emotions for someone who lied to Haiden every day—or maybe that’s what made her bad at it. He clenched his teeth so hard I heard them squeak and I winced at the way his jaw stood out.
“Did he lie to me?” she asked.
“No, we had a good time. I already told you.”
She nodded but studied me carefully. I’d also told her about the dragon I had chased off this morning, and she’d shocked me b
y tossing her arms around my neck and giving me a quick hug right before she rushed off to bring me coffee. The woman who had been thankful was nowhere in sight. She widened her eyes at me and jerked her head toward Haiden, mouthing something that looked like he saw you, dumbfuck, but I couldn’t be sure.
Damn it all.
Haiden shook and ducked his head, rocking from side to side on his feet. “Haiden.” I stepped toward him and he backed off, so I stopped. “Are you okay?”
“Your eyes. They were—” His mouth worked, and he shrugged. “Not… not human. Spooky. Not normal.”
I tried again to go to him, and he paced me in an odd dance that left me shoving my hands into my pockets and planting my feet on the ground. I’d be damned if I would chase him when he was scared. His scent hadn’t settled yet, and it was playing hell on me. All I wanted was to have him in my arms. Had I been so upset that I’d started to change fully? My teeth had been sharp, for sure. Mad as I’d been, it wouldn’t have shocked me to have sparks fly out of my nose. I’d wanted to destroy that man—and still did.
“You were upset,” I finally said with a shrug. “Adrenaline can do strange things to the mind.” Jade stood slightly behind him already shaking her head. What was she trying to tell me?
Haiden straightened to his full height all at once, and I was sort of surprised. I was larger than him by a lot, but the way he held himself normally made him seem smaller, softer. He bared his teeth at me the way a dragon might when he was pissed off, and my heart picked up pace at the aggressiveness from him. The way he moved as he stomped closer stirred up the wrong emotions in me. Swallowing down the lust that rolled through me, I tried to focus on the here and now.
“You… you jerk. Don’t gaslight me. You know that guy? The one saying all the mean shit to me? He’s been doing that since I was little. Let me tell you something, I’m not going to take someone telling me I’m making stuff up in my head when I just stood here and saw your eyes. They were different. You’re lying to me.” He jammed his finger hard into the middle of my chest, but it didn’t hurt. “Don’t.”
