Lessons in Love: A Western Romance Novel (Long Valley Book 8)

by Erin Wright

  Her shoulders weren’t shaking quite so much, so Elijah dared to reach out to touch one. “Hannah?” he whispered again. “You…you wanna tell me what’s goin’ on?” She flinched when his fingertips brushed against her skin, but then, she did the damnedest thing – she scooted backwards just a titch so as to put her skin against his fingers again.

  Huh.

  He experimented a bit by openin’ up his hand and cuppin’ her shoulder with it. Not only did she not tell him which bridge to jump off of, but she snuggled into him just a smidge bit more.

  Well, at least we’re makin’ progress.

  He decided to get brave and snuggle up against her backside, spoonin’ her like he used to with Sarah. Drapin’ his arm around her tiny waist and pulling her towards him, he realized how much he’d missed this. It’d been years and years and years since he’d spooned with a woman, and there weren’t no part of him that weren’t lovin’ it.

  Nope, no part at all.

  You can just quit that right now. Hannah’s ‘bout 14 seconds away from bawlin’ her head off again. She don’t need no randy boy pawin’ at her.

  “Igstory,” she mumbled into what had to be a very soggy pillow.

  She was speakin’, which was progress, but not real great progress, considerin’ it weren’t English.

  “What?” he said, strokin’ her wet hair away from her cheek. How one person could produce this much moisture was beyond him.

  “I didn’t mean to cry,” she said, and at least that time it was English she were speakin’, although she weren’t makin’ a lotta sense.

  “I figure most tears aren’t on purpose,” he said seriously. “Wanna tell me what those tears were all about?”

  She started shivering again, and he realized that without the heat of lovemakin’ to keep ‘em warm, it was getting a might bit nippy, especially since they was buck naked. He reached down to the foot of the bed where they’d shoved the comforter when they’d begun havin’ their fun, and pulled it up over them. She snuggled back against him again with a happy sigh.

  “Thank you,” she murmured. “That’s much better.”

  He wrapped his arm around her, fittin’ nicely into the curve of her waist and up between her tits, and then didn’t move another inch. “I don’t wanna push you none,” he said softly, “but it seems to me that you gots somethin’ you need to talk about. You feelin’ up to tellin’ me?”

  She shook her head violently, paused for a moment, and then nodded slowly. “I don’t want to,” she said seriously, as if that were some sorta shock to him, “but you’re right, I need to. I thought…” She blew out a breath. “I thought I’d gotten over it. I mean, it’s been thirteen years. That’s plenty of time. Except, you were on top of me and I was back there again and…”

  She stopped.

  His mind spun. She hadn’t actually said the words, of course, but it sure sounded like she were talkin’ about rape. Nothin’ much else made sense. Why else would she be freakin’ out about him bein’ on top of her?

  “Who was the son of a bitch?” he snarled, his body going rigid with anger. “Who was the slimy bastard?”

  “I’d come home for the summer,” she answered, as if that were a damn answer to anything. “I had one year left in college, and then I could come back to Sawyer to teach. I was home on summer break – I guess I already said that, didn’t I?” She blew out a breath of frustration. “It was the 4th of July. That’s always been one of my favorite holidays – the fireworks going off, the smell of black powder in the air…there’s nothing that screams holiday and summer and fun like a huge fireworks show. I was walking up the hill towards the city park, going to meet Dad, when suddenly I was being pulled into the trees. You know that line of poplars along the back side of the park?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered, imagining it all in his head clearly. Them poplars were the favorite of every horny teenager in Long Valley; in fact – and he’d die before he admitted it to Hannah – he was pretty damn sure that’s where Brooksy were conceived. With the slope of the hill and how bushy the city let them poplars grow, it was about as private as you could get outside of a hotel room.

  “He…he pulled me in there. Wrapped his hand across my mouth and told me to shush my crying. So I did. I didn’t fight him. I didn’t scream. I didn’t slap him or knee him in the balls. I just laid there and stared up at the dark sky and listened to the fireworks boom and everyone cheer and clap, and wished I was dead. A part of me felt dead. I don’t remember what I was wearing, or what he was wearing. The focus of the whole world…I don’t know how to describe. Things just aren’t there for me. I don’t even know how long it lasted. And I sure don’t know why I didn’t fight back. He told me that I must want it – that’s why I wasn’t fighting him. I didn’t believe him – of course I didn’t want this – but it’s always haunted me. Whenever I’m forced to think about that night, I have to wonder who that Hannah was. Of course you don’t just lay there and take it. I would never do something like that. But I did. And I don’t know why.” Her voice was broken and reedy and thin as she finished whisperin’ the worst story Elijah had ever heard.

  “Did you tell your dad or the police or anybody?” He was sure he knew the answer, but he had to ask anyway.

  She shook her head, still facin’ away from him. “No,” she whispered, and hiccuped. “He told me that no one would believe me over him. Plus, it would ruin my career as a teacher. He promised me that I’d never get hired if word of this got out, and he was right.

  “So, I went home and cleaned up and hid in bed under the blankets and then told my dad the next morning that I’d gotten a headache and that’s why I didn’t go to the fireworks. He could tell I wasn’t telling the truth, but…Dad was good at not pushing when you didn’t want him to. So he left it alone.”

  “I don’t get it,” Elijah said slowly. “How would being raped hurt your career as a teacher? It weren’t like you’d asked for it to happen. No school would hold that against you.”

  “They would if your rapist was the teenage son of the judge in town.” She said the words simply, as if stating the earth were round or the sky were blue.

  Teenage? Son of the judge?

  Good Lord above, she’s talkin’ about Richard Schmidt.

  Chapter 27

  Hannah

  She knew the moment that he’d figured out who’d raped her. He’d been slowly stroking her arm and hair, trying to suppress the anger she could feel roiling below the surface, and then he went stiff as a board.

  “Richard Schmidt raped you?” he whispered, and she could feel him against her back, shaking from the shock of it all. “But, but,” he sputtered, “he’s two years younger than me. He woulda only been what, 15, 16 years old at the time?”

  This.

  This was why she hadn’t ever told anyone what had happened. Blaming a 15-year-old boy – “I’ll be 16 next month,” he’d boasted to her as he’d dropped his pants – of raping her…

  It was ludicrous.

  Then add into the equation that he was the beloved and coddled son of the judge in town who believed he could do no wrong…

  It would’ve been suicide for her to tell anyone.

  But it was especially stupid of her to tell Elijah. He’d liked her and look at what she’d gone and done. Just like she’d expected, he didn’t believe her.

  Stupid Hannah. Stupid, stupid. You never should’ve told him the truth. You should’ve made up some story—

  Her anger, boiling at a low simmer for the last thirteen years, overflowed and directed itself straight at Elijah Morland.

  “Yeah, Richard Schmidt,” she said sarcastically. “And you want to know what really chaps my butt? The fact that you seem to think that just because he was a teenage boy at the time, that he wasn’t capable of rape. Well guess what, bucko, that’s exactly why I didn’t tell a single soul what had happened. I’d already been raped once. I didn’t need to be raped by public opinion, too.” She flipped over to face him and b
egan shoving at his chest with all her might.

  Well, pounding on it, if she was going to be honest about it. Pounding and hitting and scratching.

  “He knew I was going to become a teacher!” she yelled. “He laughed at me while he was pushing away on top of me. Laughed and laughed. Told me that if I went to the police, that he’d tell them that I spent months trying to seduce him. As if I wanted his scrawny dick anywhere near me! But I’d be finished as a teacher – finished before I even started!”

  And then she was sobbing again, when she’d just been sure she’d cried every bit of moisture out of her – apparently, she still had some left. She was hiccuping and her head ached from the force of her tears and her eyes burned from the pain pouring out of her and she hated, hated, hated Elijah in that moment. Hated him for prying the story out of her for the first time in her life; hated him for not believing her.

  So, she told him that.

  No, she shouted it at him. Calm, sweet, quiet Hannah who wouldn’t say boo if her life depended on it – yeah, she yelled.

  And it felt great.

  “I! Hate! You!” she shouted, pounding on his chest with each word. She was shaking with anger and pain and no doubt snot would be dripping off the ceiling after she was done, but she couldn’t calm down.

  Wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t.

  She realized then, in some dim and distant part of her mind, that Elijah was talking. She hadn’t heard him say anything over the rushing of the hatred through her veins, and she wondered for a moment how long he’d been speaking.

  “What?” she asked dully.

  She was going to throw him out of her bed. It was her house – she would make him leave. Tell him she never wanted to see him again. He could clean her classroom after she was gone for the day. Or wear a ski mask while he cleaned her room so she wouldn’t have to look at his rotten, lowdown, pile-of-cow-poop face.

  “I’d always known that Richard were trouble,” he said, slow and quiet, stroking her hair out of her face again. Long and tangled and a pain in the rear as always, it’d gotten stuck to her copious snot and tears, and she was sure that there was no one on the planet who was less sexy than her in that moment, but she didn’t care. She didn’t give a rotten fig leaf if she was the ugliest woman on earth. He caused this. He could darn well stare at it. “I also knew he liked to push the girls. Even two years younger than me, I was always hearin’ him braggin’ up a storm ‘bout gettin’ girls to do what he wanted. I didn’t know that he pushed the line that far, though. I…I can’t imagine what you went through. How hard it musta been, ‘specially since you couldn’t tell no one. Damn, you was real lucky he didn’t get you pregnant.”

  She settled down into her soaked pillow, still facing his direction but refusing to meet his gaze. “I cried again when I started my period two weeks later. Tears of joy, which was a nice change of pace for me at that point.” She laughed bitterly. “If I’d ended up pregnant…I don’t have a clue what I would’ve done. Not one. I don’t like abortion, but giving birth to the baby of my rapist, plus he was underage…my life would’ve been ruined. Destroyed. Yeah, I was really lucky he didn’t get me pregnant.”

  They were silent then, just letting the weight of the truth settle out over them.

  The gushing anger that had propelled her towards shouting at Elijah was gone. She just felt…numb. Like there was some opaque filmy barrier between her and the rest of the world. She was moving slowly through the sludge and mud, not sure if she ever wanted to speak or think or breathe again, when she remembered something he’d asked her about a while ago, which she’d been mulling around ever since. It’d taken her a good long while to figure out why she’d hated his question so much, or rather, face the truth of why she did. A part of her had known; she just didn’t want to admit to it.

  “A while back, you asked me about why I wasn’t wearing glasses in my high school senior photo,” she said in a robotic voice, still not looking at him. Maybe she’d never look at him again. That seemed like a real good plan in that moment. “I probably surprised you with how I responded, since it was an innocent question. But it was skirting painfully close to the biggest secret of my life, and I didn’t want you anywhere near that sore spot.”

  She heaved a big sigh. “I wouldn’t have admitted to it at the time, but I started wearing those thick glasses as armor against the world. After that night…I went down to Dr. Mor and told him that I wanted to wear glasses because contacts were just too much work. Then I asked for the thickest lens he had; they can thin them out now so even the most blind among us don’t have to look like we’re peering through a funhouse mirror at the county fair, but I wanted them thick. I stopped wearing any makeup at all; I stopped curling my hair; I stopped even wearing my hair down. The uglier I was, the less likely it was that someone would jump out and grab me. No one wants to rape an ugly chick.”

  “But you changed this year,” he said, cupping one of her hands in his and bringing it up to his mouth to kiss. “You’re damn beautiful.”

  “I was taking a chance on you,” she admitted, mustering up the courage to look at him for just a moment, and then her eyes dropped back down and she was staring at their hands, folded together between them, tanned roughened skin against the painful whiteness of hers. There was a strange kind of rightness to the sight – that the differences showed that they belonged together, instead of proving how wrong they were for each other. “Michelle and Carla…they pushed me every step of the way. They don’t know – no one does except now you, and Richard, I guess. Unless alcohol has pickled his brain to the point that he doesn’t remember anymore. Always a possibility,” she said dryly. He didn’t earn the title of town drunk by being a teetotaler, that was for sure. “But Michelle and Carla – after years of being my friends, they just thought that I was shy and needed help figuring out how to wear makeup and put in contacts. And, spoiler alert, I am shy, and I did need help learning how to wear makeup.” She laughed a little at that, and he joined her, pulling her up against his strong chest and cuddling her there.

  She waited for the panic to come – the suffocating feeling that she was going to die or (even worse in her estimation) be hurt and not be able to stop it – but…it didn’t come. They’d cuddled a lot over the past few months, and it’d never caused her to have a meltdown before, but after the worst attempted round of sex in the history of mankind, it was hard to take anything for granted.

  So it’s only sex that causes me to lose my ever lovin’ mind. Good to know.

  “Your disguise sure worked on me for a long time,” Elijah admitted, freeing one of his hands so he could stroke down her shoulder and side in long, even strokes. “You was just Miss Lambert. I knew who you was, but I didn’t pay no attention after that. But then…I don’t know. One day, I just seen you – the real you. You weren’t just the teacher, there but not someone to pay attention to. You was beautiful, even with your hair pulled straight back and not a stitch of makeup on. Although, I do love your hair – you should never pull it back in a bun and hide it again. I could do nothin’ but play with your hair for the rest of my life, and die a happy man.”

  She laughed a little at that, but he rushed on. “I mean it,” he insisted. “You ain’t just got red hair. It’s red with bits of gold in it, like sunshine done took up residence in your hair or somethin’. It’s never the same – depending on the light, it’s dark red or strawberry red or golden or almost black – I ain’t never seen anything like it.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t a romantic,” she reminded him with a light laugh, scrubbing at the dried tears on her cheeks. Laughing, even a little…it felt nice. Real nice. “Sunshine taking up residence in my hair sure sounds romantic to me.”

  His mouth twisted up as he thought about it. “You might be right,” he finally admitted. “I thought romance was for fools. After everythin’ with Sarah, it was real hard to believe that I was ever gonna find love. The best I was a-hopin’ for was sex. Love were just somethi
n’ the country singers sing about to make money. It weren’t real. But…” He stared straight into her eyes, his gray-green eyes serious, like he was saying the most important statement of his life, “I was wrong. Hannah, I love you like I ain’t never loved anyone in my life.”

  She teared up then – happy tears – and opened up her mouth to speak, when he lightly placed a finger on her lips to stop her. “I need to say all of this ‘cause you gotta know. I’m sorry I scared you earlier. I’m sorry you didn’t feel like I was takin’ you seriously or thinkin’ that you was lyin’ to me about Richard. You wasn’t. You ain’t got a lyin’ bone in your body. Plus, the way you was cryin’…no one can fake cry that hard. Hell, Sarah fake cried on me a lot over the years, knowin’ I’d hate to see her tearin’ up, but after a while, I started to realize when they was crocodile tears, and when they was real tears. Earlier tonight, them tears you was spillin’ was as real as they get.”

  He loves me…he loves me!

  In all her life, Hannah had had one male say that he loved her, and that had been her father. Hearing Elijah say the words – it set her world on fire.

  She stroked his stubbled cheek, looking into his gray-green eyes that were looking back steadily, waiting patiently for her to speak. “I want to…well, you know.” She waved her hand around to indicate their bodies, too embarrassed to say the word ‘sex’ out loud. Which was stupid, because she’d just finished discussing rape with Elijah, but still…she wasn’t used to talking about this sort of thing with anyone at all, let alone a male. “I just don’t know how. When you were on top of me, I was at the park again and I couldn’t breathe and…” She trailed off. “I want to, I really do. Please have patience with me, though.”