by Abbie Roads
“It has a name?”
“It most certainly has a name.” The way Dr. Stone spoke the words sounded like he was offended by her question.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be difficult. I just don’t believe in all this.”
“You can choose not to believe in the law of gravity, but your beliefs don’t make it any less true. What’s happening in your dreams is not a matter of belief. It’s happening. It’s real.”
“Why me? Why now? How can I get rid of it? I don’t want it.”
The doctor looked from her to Lathan. “The first time you had one of these special dreams was the night you met Lathan. Correct?”
“How do you know that?” She glanced at Lathan, who obviously wanted to hear the same answer.
“I’ve got a theory, but I don’t have enough information yet. Why don’t we start tonight? Come back at eight p.m. We’ll conduct the baseline tests. Then you can spend the night and—”
“I need to think. About all of this.” She stood and so did Lathan.
“I know this is hard to understand, but it’s your new reality. Things will go easier for you if you embrace your power, rather than fighting and fearing it.” Dr. Stone’s eyes gleamed and widened. She felt like he was trying to tell her something more than what his words conveyed. He handed her a business card. “My numbers are on it. Call me. Anytime.”
As Dr. Stone led them back through the house, she replayed the conversation. For all the time they’d spent with him, she felt like none of her questions had been answered—especially not the biggest one—how to get rid of the nightmares.
As they drew near to the front door, muffled conversation sounded from the other side. She recognized one of those voices. Matt.
She froze. Everything from her head down went numb.
Matt entered first. Evanee hadn’t seen him in months and soaked up his appearance. Didn’t take long. He looked exactly the same.
Matt took in Gill, then Lathan, and then his blue eyes froze on her. The smile on his face shattered like glass thrown against a concrete wall. “What are you doing here?” Shock threaded with embarrassment powered each of his words.
Lathan drew her in closer and tighter against him.
Xander and Isleen entered. The moment Xander saw them, his arm, already around Isleen, tightened, and his other one wrapped around the front of her as if to shield her from the bomb he thought they might throw.
Isleen smiled at them, looking sweet, innocent, and kind, while Matt and Xander looked ready to rumble.
“Lathan Montgomery.” Xander’s tone wasn’t exactly friendly, but definitely familiar. “What are you doing here?” Xander’s gaze darted to his father.
“I didn’t realize you lived here.” Lathan aimed his words at Xander.
The guys knew each other.
“Gill Garrison and Lathaniel Montgomery are here with Evanee to consult about her dreams.” Dr. Stone spoke in a weird tone, almost like they should know exactly what that meant. Maybe they did. Maybe Isleen really was the other person he’d mentioned.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Matt’s voice captured her attention. He reached out to grab at her, but instead ended up with two hands—Lathan’s hands—on his chest, shoving him away.
“Don’t you touch her.” Lathan moved in front of her, shielding her from Matt and Xander.
She peeked out from behind Lathan’s back. Xander shifted Isleen behind him and moved in next to Matt. Gill stepped up next to Lathan.
Oh crap. Oh damn. Oh shit. A four-man brawl.
“Everyone, stop. Xander. Matt. Stop it. Your manners are atrocious.” Isleen’s disembodied voice came from behind Xander. She moved out to stand between the two groups of men. Isleen was all of five foot two and probably didn’t weigh ninety pounds, but her sweetness was an antidote to everyone’s anger.
Xander moved in next to Isleen, tucking her into his body. And when Isleen looked up at him, the expression he gave her was filled with adoration and love. God. They loved each other. Really loved each other. A love like Evanee had never seen.
Longing hummed through the chambers of her heart. All she’d ever wanted was someone to look at her that way. With her history though—never gonna happen. But even as those words crossed her mind, she recognized she wasn’t quite being honest with herself. Lathan looked at her like that. But was it a look of love, or was he simply trying to understand her speech?
“Don’t you see it?” Isleen asked Xander.
“Are you sure?” Xander asked her. They talked like no one else existed in the room.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Isleen and Xander and everyone else looked at Evanee and Lathan.
Sometime within the last few seconds, she wasn’t even aware of when exactly, she’d nestled into Lathan’s side with his arm around her. Almost exactly like Xander had his arm around Isleen.
“What are you talking about?” Evanee asked.
“I suspected,” Dr. Stone said.
Isleen smiled, her expression full of offered friendship. “You’ve met your protector.”
Chapter 10
Lathan couldn’t remember one thing about the drive home from the OIO. He completely lost himself in reflecting on Matt’s memories. What he saw set his rage on simmer.
He’d witnessed for himself, felt for himself Matt’s total indifference to Evanee. The only emotion the man had toward her was anger because she’d shown up at his place.
What really burned was that asshole could’ve protected her from Junior, but never cared enough to open his eyes and see the truth. Just thinking about it cranked Lathan’s rage up to boil.
He snapped out of his thoughts at the same time Gill parked in his driveway. Lathan was out of the car and dragging Evanee behind him up to the house before Gill even had a chance to unlock his seat belt. Maybe the guy would get the hint. Gill wasn’t exactly tops on Lathan’s friend list at the moment. Trying to talk to Honey without him knowing was a betrayal. Lathan needed to be alone with her to calm all the emotions.
But when they entered the house, Gill was right behind them.
Fucking damn.
This wasn’t going to end well.
“What now?” he asked Gill and made sure his tone conveyed the warning of his impending boil-over.
A rush of burning cinnamon emanated from Gill. He was just as pissed. “What’s your problem?”
“You.” Not all Gill—some was on Matt—but Lathan wasn’t going to explain. “Talking to her behind my back. Trying to keep secrets from me.” Gill knew—fucking knew—how Lathan’s hearing problems isolated him and had used that against him.
“I’m the only one watching out for you. You’re acting like some pussy-whipped motherfucker, panting around after her because you finally got fucked. And trust me, the pussy might be new now, but it’ll get old. It always does. Then what?”
He didn’t bother correcting Gill’s mistaken assumption. “Leave. Now.” Lathan spoke the words through clenched teeth. The only thing holding him back from going all MMA on Gill was Honey standing next to him. He dropped her hand and moved a few feet away. Just in case.
“Can’t you see what’s going on here? Her ex was Matthew Stone. The guy’s old enough to be her grandpa. Look where she works. Look where she lives.”
Lathan wasn’t going to enter a debate with Gill about Matt. “You saying my house is trash? ’Cause you didn’t seem to mind before.” His muscles constricted, on full alert, waiting for the command to strike.
“She’s moved in? Are you that fucking desperate? Have you asked yourself what she might want from you? What she has to gain by being with you? At best, she’s taking advantage of your generosity. At worst, she’s working with the Strategist.”
Rage at Matt and at Gill overflowed, pouring straight into Lathan’s swinging fist. He connected with Gill’s cheekbone. H
is knuckles compressed. The impact reverberated up his arm. Now to get ten more shots like that in, and he’d be feeling just about awesome.
Gill’s head snapped to the side. He lurched in that direction, but regained his footing and tackled Lathan low in the torso. Lathan stumbled back a few steps until the counter stopped him. He shoved Gill off and came at him with an uppercut. Gill blocked and swung for Lathan’s stomach, but Lathan braced. The blow hurt but didn’t give Gill what he wanted—Lathan bent over sucking air.
Lathan heard Honey, but couldn’t make out her exact words.
“Stay the fuck out of the way,” he yelled, then chanced a glance toward her. She charged Gill.
Pain radiated from the side of Lathan’s mouth. Gill had landed a punch in that brief moment when Lathan’s attention was on Honey. The lights went out. Back on. Blood gushed onto Lathan’s tongue.
Honey tried to tear her way in between them, tried to shove Gill back.
Inside Lathan’s mind, the future played out. He saw Gill swing for him, but his aim was thrown off by Honey pushing against him. Gill would miss him and land the punch squarely on her nose.
Lathan shoved Honey out of the way. “Stay back!”
Gill’s fist connected again with the same spot on the side of Lathan’s mouth. Blood flew from between his lips in fat droplets that would need to be wiped off the floor later. Lathan slammed his right fist into Gill’s stomach, followed by his left into Gill’s nose. A wash of crimson gushed down Gill’s face.
The stench of their mingled blood and anger was thick in the air. Lathan jammed Gill in the chest—his form of a truce—and waited until Gill caught his balance. “Get the fuck out.”
Gill stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking like he was contemplating coming back for another round.
“And don’t come back.”
Something flickered in Gill’s expression, but Lathan was too amped to try to interpret it.
Gill raised his fist in the air. For a moment, Lathan thought it was an invitation for the fight to continue, but Gill fixed him with a middle finger. This time, there was no disguised meaning, no humor in the gesture. A fuck-you full of anger. Gill walked out the door.
Lathan turned on Honey. “For fuck’s sake, woman. Do I look like I need help?” He spread his arms wide.
“I’m not going to watch someone I love be thumped on. And you’re a…if you can’t accept help from a girl.”
He missed a word, but got the gist.
“I’m plenty big enough to handle Gill on my own. A good ass-stompin’ wouldn’t have killed either of us. I don’t want you getting hurt. Especially on my behalf.”
His brain must’ve been operating in delay mode because her words from a few moments before finally got absorbed. When someone I love. She’d said she loved him. Loved him. Fucking loved him.
His heart pumped up two sizes. A smile cracked across his face. He saw her confusion at his abrupt change. No way was he going to tell her why he was really smiling. Didn’t want her to clarify or, worse, take those beautiful words away from him. “You’re pretty fearless. You know that?”
“I’ve had to be.” She didn’t say his name, but Junior hovered, an invisible specter between them.
An instinctual urge, so ingrained that it wasn’t even on the level of thought, rose up inside him. “I’ll kill Junior if he ever tries to hurt you again.”
“Sit down.” She pointed at a chair and watched him until he complied. Anything she wanted from him was hers. She wet a clean dishcloth. He opened his mouth to tell her not to mess with the blood, that he’d take care of it, but she walked right past it to stand in front of him.
She moved into the open vee of his legs. Her scent folded around him. He ripped off his gloves, spared a fleeting thought of wonder for the fact that Gill had punched him skin to skin and he’d had no reaction from the contact, then settled his hands on her hips.
She grabbed his chin and tilted it upward to bring his gaze to hers. “Hold still.” She wiped the blood off his face and neck with the washcloth. He couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t need to. He had something more important than oxygen. He had her taking care of him. Something no one else had ever been able to do.
He couldn’t let anyone take care of him. Touch was a good-bye to reality, something he couldn’t tolerate. But this, with her—Holy Jesus—he felt special. Loved.
If he was less of a man, he might’ve fucking bawled like a baby. But he was no baby and she definitely wasn’t his momma.
“This is going to sting.”
She pressed the cold cloth against the split in his lip, but he felt no pain. She and pain couldn’t coexist. That’s why his lip no longer hurt, why her touch had the power to calm him, why the SMs couldn’t survive in her presence. She was his miracle.
She bit her bottom lip as she worked on cleaning him up, but the scar at the corner of her mouth still tilted jauntily upward. A beautiful imperfection. He touched the line briefly. The raised ridge felt wrong in a way that went beyond words.
“How’d you get this?” he asked.
The lavender scent of her sadness engulfed them. Without answering, she walked back to the sink.
“I shouldn’t have asked.” He spoke the words to her back.
She returned to the vee between his legs and applied the newly cold rag to his lip. “I got in trouble for telling a lie.”
“Someone hit you? Junior?” Should’ve known.
She turned the cloth over and pressed the cold side against his lip. “My mom.”
“Your mom? How old were you?”
“Five.”
Five. Just five years old. What kind of lie could a kid—a little girl—tell that warranted being hit? “What happened?”
“I told her about Junior.”
He wished he hadn’t read the words right. “You were only five when Junior started…” He trailed off. Couldn’t let her know how much he knew. “What kind of fucked-up mother would hit her own daughter for telling the truth? ’Cause that’s what it was. The truth.”
“Apparently, my mom.” He couldn’t hear the sadness in her voice, but he could smell it and see it in the clouds over her dazzling eyes. “I used to wish I could jump back to the moment before I told Mom. And not tell her. It was like from that moment on, she hated me. All I ever wanted was for her to love me as much as she loved Junior.”
Lathan didn’t possess any words of consolation. He just put his hands back on her hips and held on tight.
A blush, fresh and new as bud in spring, dusted her cheeks. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”
“You can tell me anything. Everything. You know that, don’t you? Nothing you say to me will ever change…” He gestured between them to indicate their connection and stared into her eyes, willing her to open up, to tell him her pain. He wouldn’t feel so bad about already knowing and hiding it from her, if she just out-and-out confided in him.
“Are you hungry? We didn’t exactly have time for breakfast this morning.”
The abrupt subject change meant she didn’t trust him. And why should she? Just because he felt connected to her didn’t mean she felt the same way about him. “I’ll make us something.”
“I’ll do it. It’ll be fun to cook in a kitchen instead of using a hotplate or a microwave.” The smile on her face wavered. “Unless you don’t want me messing around in your kitchen.”
“Everything I own is yours.” He gestured to indicate his entire home. “I want you to feel that way.”
Surprise flared in her eyes, diminishing the clouds.
Might as well lay it all out there. He ate the way he ate. Couldn’t change it. Couldn’t hide it. And if she thought he was a freak… No, he didn’t want to go there. “But, I’m particular about my food. Really particular.”
“Gill said you didn’t do dairy.”
&nb
sp; “What else did he tell you?” He better not have mentioned the SMs. No, of course he didn’t. She was still here.
“He told me to ask you about your hearing and about your childhood.”
“Fucker.” Anyone who knew how he’d spent his childhood would be as frightened of him as his own parents were. He clenched his hands into fists. He wanted another go-round with Gill. Needed it. Owed it to Gill.
She held up her hand as if to placate him. “I’ll make you a deal. You don’t ask about my childhood, and I won’t ask about yours.”
“Deal.” He didn’t have to ask to know her childhood was shit. He’d seen bits of it in Junior’s memory. Those bits were revolting.
“So you’re picky about food. Picky how?”
“I don’t eat anything bought in a grocery store or from a restaurant.”
Her eyes widened. “You don’t eat anything from a store? Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“How is that even possible? What do you eat?”
“I eat what I harvest from my garden. I can fruits and vegetables to put back for winter. I buy flour direct from an Amish mill and make my own bread. I buy peanuts and grind them myself to make peanut butter. I eat a lot of peanut butter. For the protein.”
“You”—she pointed directly at him—“can your own vegetables and bake your own bread?”
He nodded.
A smile hitched up her cheeks, then morphed into laughter. She was laughing at him. Emotions sliced through him, and yet he couldn’t name them. All he knew was that none of them felt good.
He pushed out of the chair and headed for the back door, then stopped but didn’t face her. “You have no idea what it’s like to struggle for food. To spend the entire spring prepping the ground and planting. Then there is the eternal fight with bugs and fungus and disease. If it’s a drought year, I’ll be out there watering, nearly running my well dry, to keep the plants alive. And canning the harvest doesn’t even exist in the same dictionary with the word fun. But I do it all to have some variety in my diet.” He opened the door. “I’ll take you to the store to get whatever you want to eat when I get back.”
