Obsession (Magnetic Desires Book 4)

by Misti Murphy

  Crawling in behind the wheel, I turned to her, but she propped an elbow on the door, resting her chin on her hand, and stared out the window. I guess I should have expected after I’d walked out of the room that she’d think it was because of her, but I still got so pissed off at myself for not coming clean that night, and later for not rescuing her from that asshole. I cleared my throat and started the truck. Just fucking say I had cancer.

  No. I’d let her doze for a while. The reappearance of her father had dredged up enough pain for her to deal with, and I’d already added to it enough this morning. It was clear she tied her guilt over what happened between us to him, to the person she believed she had to be because of him. This trip home, this sudden need to go back to the past showed how deep that hurt ran. There had to be so much shit going through her head right now. I couldn’t dump my own issues into the storm raging through her. Not while she was dealing with so much already. It would be better to wait until she got through this.

  We travelled for half a day in silence. Small city gave way to towns, and then to fields stretching endlessly in every direction. Nothing but dried grass and giant rolls of hay, dotted with the occasional town, for the next couple of days.

  I’d cleared my throat a couple of times, but fuck it if I wasn’t still angry as hell at myself for being an asshole over something that wouldn’t have happened if I’d had the guts to tell her my diagnosis when it happened, or even after, but here I was, still holding it in. It shouldn’t have been that difficult. It sure as hell didn’t matter now. I’d gone into remission and then declared cancer free, even if I still had follow up visits for another year. But it was wondering about her reaction that had me on edge. This small thing, this tiny, inconsequential detail that had taken over our lives and ripped us apart. How would she take it when I finally told her?

  Mellie alternated between dozing and staring at me from behind those oversized sunglasses. Each time I caught her, she’d turn away and stare out the window. When her stomach had started growling incessantly, we’d stopped for gas and a bite to eat at a roadside diner, and still she hadn’t uttered more than a monosyllable. I’d counted the fence posts, the wooden railings, and the wire lines that never seemed to end, since other cars were scarce, but the dirt brown paddocks irritated me. Not a person, sheep, or cow as far as the eye could see and so much distance between us in the tiny amount of space in the cab, we might as well have been on opposite sides of the continent.

  “Fucking hell,” I muttered under my breath, itching to drag her next to me, wrap my arm around her and break through this standoff I’d started. We had an entire week alone, and I wanted to enjoy at least some of that time with her, albeit I’d have preferred a better reason than this trip to Hollyfields.

  After she did whatever it was she needed to do out here in the middle of nowhere, I’d take her somewhere away from the real world, work, friends, and all the things that were a distraction. Maybe Paris, or some quiet island in the middle of the tropics. Where ever the hell she wanted to go, we’d do it, if it meant time alone to get back to where we’d been.

  “Did you say something?” She dragged the glasses down, peering at me.

  “Nope.” I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. “Didn’t say a fucking word.”

  “Oh.” She pushed them back up her nose and turned the radio up, then turned it down. “I am sorry for dragging you all the way out here.”

  “Did I give you a choice? Whatever you need to deal with out here, whatever you need to do to come home to me, I’m going to be there.” I wound the window down, fresh air blasting me with the smell of sun and dirt.

  “I’m sorry about what I said this morning, too.” She grimaced and sucked in a breath. “And that it happened in the first place. If I could take it back I would. Of all the people—”

  “I know you are.” I took her hand and laid it out on my knee, squeezing it. “I nearly killed him that night.”

  “What?” She turned, pulling her legs up on the seat.

  “The first time I ended up at Wolf’s, I found that bastard assaulting a woman.” My throat tensed, and I rubbed my thumb along my jaw, remembering. “I might not have had the greatest upbringing, but I knew what he was doing wasn’t fucking right, so I broke it up. But I was a scrawny seventeen-year-old, fresh off the streets, no meat on my bones. He laid me out and beat the shit out of me.”

  “That’s why Wolf called you Knight?”

  “Yeah. When I saw him with you, what he was doing to you, I fucking lost it. I wanted to rip him apart with my bare hands.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I wanted to.” I cupped her face, caressed her cheek. It didn’t matter how much time we put between us, I still found it difficult to breathe when I remembered that night. My chest tightened, a stabbing kind of pain in the center of it. “The way you looked at me, it ripped my fucking heart out.”

  “Shit, Mike.”

  “I grabbed him as soon as he came out of the bathroom, hauled him outside. I’m not sure he even got a swing at me before I had him down, but I couldn’t stop. Wolf had to pull me off him.”

  Dipping her chin, her hair fell over her face. “There are so many things I wish I could change, so many things to be sorry for. I don’t even know how you can look at me after what I did.”

  “Stop thinking like that.” I wrapped an arm around her shoulder and tugged her closer, and with one eye on the road I tilted my head to graze her mouth with mine, until she clung to me, breathless and shaky. “You didn’t deserve to be treated like that by him, by me. That’s what pisses me off the most. Not you, but me. You wouldn’t have even been there if not for me.”

  “Don’t blame yourself for my stupidity. I’m the one who did it, knowing how much it would wound you. I wanted so badly for you to hurt like I did.”

  “I already was. Do you think I didn’t notice the pain in your eyes every time you thought I wasn’t looking at you?” I squeezed her tight against me. “We both did stupid shit. Things we won’t do again, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” She rested her head on my shoulder, her hair tickling my throat. The road disappeared beneath us in silence for a while before she spoke again. “So why, Mike? Why did you push me away?”

  My pulse picked up and I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. I’d dreaded this moment for years, but telling her could ease some of the storm, couldn’t it? If I told her the truth, maybe she’d lean on me more, maybe she’d realize she was loved so hard and so much that those who had let her down didn’t have power over her anymore.

  “Mike?” She shifted, her hand clutching my shirt, her face turned up in expectation.

  I should have pulled over, stopped the vehicle, and carefully word my explanation, but instead it came tumbling out. Funny how after all this time the words came so easily. “I had cancer.”

  She jerked back, her eyes going round. An almost comical expression of shock on her face. “What? Did you say—what?”

  I cleared my throat. “I had cancer. Testicular cancer.”

  Her hand flew to her throat and she gasped. “Come again?”

  “It was pretty bad.” I shrugged. “Surgery, chemo, radiation. I lost a nut.”

  She didn’t say anything, just gaped at me.

  “You’re not going to say anything?” I glanced at her. I thought I’d be some kind of wreck telling her all this now. Instead, I was calm, relaxed. More at ease than I could remember being. If only this conversation could have been so easy when I’d first been told.

  “Cancer?” She squeaked. “You hid cancer from me?” She shook her head, turned to stare straight ahead at the road. “Freaking cancer?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not that big a deal. I mean it was, obviously, but I don’t have cancer now.”

  “You didn’t tell me. How could you not tell me something like that?” When she turned, her eyes were glazed over, her face pale. “How bad was it, Mike?”

  “Stage two. Close to stage t
hree.”

  “Fuck a duck.” She smacked her hand against the dashboard. “Holy mother of fluffy bunnies. How could you not tell me that? How could you not tell anyone?”

  “I was going to tell you,” I mumbled, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “I called you straight after I got the diagnosis. But you sounded so worried, I couldn’t bring myself to upset you further.”

  She screwed up her brow, her mouth twisted into a thin line while she tapped her fingers against her lips. “So you, what? Decided it would be better to push me out of your life than tell me you were sick?”

  Pulling the truck over on the side of the road, I let it idle and stared out the windscreen. “Do you remember when I told you about my father and how I’d found the note he left in his old journals?”

  “You told me he’d been sick. That it hadn’t just been depression.”

  “Testicular cancer can be hereditary. He’d been diagnosed too late. By the time they caught it, it had spread to his lungs and brain. My mother had taken off only a couple of months before, and he was working two jobs to keep a roof over our heads. I always thought he hadn’t been able to deal with her leaving him, but it was all in his journals when I searched them for clues to my medical history.” Turning to face her, I scrubbed a hand over my face. “He couldn’t afford to look after himself, or me, and he knew he was going to die anyway. I guess he thought it would be easier on me if he ended it, so I wouldn’t have to watch him go through it, wouldn’t have to look after him.” I smashed my fist on the steering wheel, the blast of the horn scaring a few birds from the trees and making her jump. “I didn’t know if I was going to leave you. How was I supposed to tell you that?”

  “Leave me?” She trembled. “It was bad, wasn’t it? You thought you were going to…”

  The pain in her eyes stabbed at my chest, my breath catching. “Shit.” I stretched across the cab, grabbed her wrist and dragged her to me. “I didn’t know what was going to happen, only that I didn’t want to see this look in your eyes and know there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Knowing all my promises might mean nothing in the end.”

  “You should have told me. You can’t protect everyone from everything all the time.” She tossed her head. “I should have been there for you so you didn’t have to go through it alone.”

  She pushed away from me and curled herself up on the seat, her chin on her knees, while she stared out the window.

  “I regret it every fucking day.” I swung the truck back onto the road. “But damn it, I didn’t cheat on you, I didn’t stop wanting you. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear? I didn’t fucking want to leave you.”

  “Bloody hell.” She stared at me. “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No,” I muttered through clenched teeth. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Did you even think about how we’d all cope if you’d…?”

  “All the time.”

  Silence resumed, mile after mile falling away behind us before she spoke again. “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s over now. I went into remission. I still have follow up consultations every six months or so, but I’m cancer free.”

  “I mean tell me what you went through. I didn’t get to be there for you when you needed me.” She sidled closer, and pulled my arm around her shoulder, holding my hand. “Let me be here for you now.”

  “All right.” Once I opened the gates, words flooded out. I told her everything from the diagnosis, the surgery and treatment, through to my last appointment, when I’d found her sister, Lola. “The worst part wasn’t being sick. It was seeing you every day and not being able to be what you needed anymore. To not be able to look after you the way you deserved, and knowing that if I was gone, you’d be alone. Then when you accused me of having an affair, it seemed better to let you believe it than tell you the truth and drag you down with me.”

  “That should have been my choice to make.”

  “You would have stayed.” This conversation was one I’d run through in my head, over and over.

  “Damn right, I would have stayed. I only needed you to tell me what was going on. I would have been there no matter what happened. Don’t you realize that?”

  “But I didn’t want you to. Not when I couldn’t give you more than a day at a time. For a long while there I had no idea what the future was going to hold.”

  “We would have gotten through it together.” There was such determination in the way she said it that if I hadn’t regretted keeping it secret from her before, I certainly did now.

  “It was more than that.” I scrubbed a hand over my arm. Admitting the effect cancer had had on my ego was harder than telling her why I’d left. “After the surgery I didn’t feel like enough for you anymore. The idea of not being able to satisfy you, to make you scream my name, terrified me. I wanted you so much, but not like that.”

  “You didn’t want to have sex?”

  “Not for a long time, even after we broke up. I didn’t want anyone to see me naked or have to explain what had happened.”

  “You were never just a dick to me.”

  “That’s not what you said the other day.” I chuckled.

  She fluttered a hand to her mouth, her cheeks going a deep shade of pink. “I didn’t know. I would never have said it if I’d known.”

  “Don’t get all flustered over it.” I brushed my knuckles over the pink. Such a sexy shade on her. “Honestly, when I suggested we hook up, I didn’t know if I would be able to. I mean I wanted to, more than is probably healthy for an adult male, but that feeling of not being enough weighed me down. Hell, it wasn’t until I dragged you out of Wolf’s the other night that I finally felt like the man I used to be. The one who got whatever he wanted. Including you, sexy legs.”

  I’d had enough space between us to last me a lifetime. Pulling her into me, I wrapped my arm around her neck and dragged her mouth to mine, sucking her bottom lip between my teeth. “And believe me, I do have you. You can hum and haw about it all you want, but I don’t give up on getting what I want. Once you’ve done whatever it is you have to do out here, I’m taking you away, you choose where, and we’ll hole up in some fancy hotel until you make up your mind to move back home.”

  “You’re so bossy, Mr. I always get my way.” She turned the radio up and settled back against me, singing along to some tune from the eighties. The old and familiar ease with which we could spend an afternoon not saying anything, but being perfectly content, made my chest swell. It was possible I’d forgotten what happiness felt like.

  “I don’t exactly know why I’m going back.” She turned down the radio, her brow screwed up. “Is that funny? I just know I have to find some kind of closure on what happened back then, find some way to put it all behind me.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever forgive him for leaving?”

  “It wasn’t the leaving so much. I mean yeah, I hated him for doing that to us. Hated how my mother fell apart. Finding her…” She shuddered. “But he should have come back, shouldn’t he? I couldn’t understand how it was so easy for him to forget he still had one daughter that needed him. That isn’t right, is it? Parents shouldn’t just walk away, should they?”

  I squeezed her hand, my chest aching for both of us. Her life and mine had followed such a similar path. “No, it’s not right. There’s something wrong with them, but it’s not your fault he’s an asshole.”

  “I don’t think I can forgive him. I wouldn’t even know where to start. How can Lola put the past behind her so easily?” She shifted position and laid her head on my shoulder.

  “Your sister’s had a difficult life, but it was different for her. That’s all I can put it down to. She has her own issues to deal with.”

  She nodded, contemplating her nails against my arm. “I don’t want to be like him. I want to forget that I share his genes.”

  “You have to stop thinking you are. I get it. I really do, but you’re not him and you don’t have to follow his path. You’re a fucking
hurricane, love. You tear through whatever stands in your way and make your own path.”

  Her stomach grumbled loudly, filling the pause in conversation, and she laughed as she rubbed her belly. “Are we going to stop soon?”

  “Hungry? We’ll stop in the next town.”

  “Starving.” Another grumble punctuated her answer. “You?”

  I slid my hand up beneath the hem of her skirt, with a half-smile. “Famished.”

  Gripping my hand with her own, she laughed. “You have a one tracked mind, mister.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Mellie

  We stopped as the sun melted over the horizon and Mike shrugged out of his jacket to put it over my shoulders. “Time to get something to eat and find somewhere to stay.”

  “Okay.” I sidled out of the truck after him, pulling his jacket tighter around me as the heat of the day turned chilly. I couldn’t drag my gaze from him. There were no outward signs of what he’d gone through, but it had been worse than he made out. He was always strong, a rock for everyone around him, and yet I could tell that rock had been chipped away at. My heart twisted, knowing that I could have lost him so easily and might never have known why. Not being his was hard, but if I’d never had another minute with him, even as friends… my eyes watered.

  “Come on, let’s get inside.” Linking his arms around my waist, Mike guided me up the steps to the diner. There wasn’t much to the town we’d stopped in. Built to service the families on the farms surrounding it, there was a feed and hardware store and a few other shops. A couple of cafés, closed at this time of evening, dotted the main street. The diner we’d pulled up in front of seemed to be the main stop for dinner. Further down the road stood a small hotel with half a dozen rooms, and several neat rows of houses, which hinted at the inner population of the town.

  A few truckers sat in booths along the windows, talking or staring out into the deepening twilight, and I slipped into a vacant one, Mike taking the opposite side.