The Truth About Him (Everything I Left Unsaid #2)

by M. O'Keefe

  She tried to flinch away from it, but he was too heavy.

  Every breath she took, that knife rubbed her. Scratched her.

  “Look at me, Annie,” he said in that calm voice. “I found you and we’re together again. There’s nowhere for you to go. And you need to realize that.”

  She shook her head, trying to buck him off with her hips.

  “This Dylan man, he’s not for you. And you know what? I forgive you for having an affair with this man.” His voice said otherwise. His voice and his narrowed eyes and the vicious, disgusted curl to his lip, they told her she would be paying for these sins. “Some kind of dirty affair. Sending a man who is not your husband a picture of your naked body. You—”

  He shifted over her and she felt, to her utter horror, that he was hard under his zipper. This man who’d so rarely had sex with her was aroused. She closed her eyes against this new, awful terror.

  The sheathed knife and his erection dug into her.

  “This man you were screwing, did he know you were married?”

  Annie did not respond. Would not. He was playing some sick game. He touched her hair just above her ear and she could have screamed.

  “You smell dirty. Like sweat and sex.” He sniffed her. Over and over again, his nose in her hair. Her neck. “I want you to spread your legs, Annie.”

  Whimpering, she clenched them together.

  I am going to die this way.

  There was a sudden knocking on the door and both of them stilled. She opened her eyes in time to see a momentary flash of panic on Hoyt’s face. But as soon as it was there it was gone, replaced by that terrifying vacancy.

  “Annie!” It was Ben. Old, frail Ben. “You all right? I heard screaming.”

  “Who is that?” Hoyt asked.

  “My neighbor.” Ben Daniels. Dylan’s father. And…quite possibly, her only friend.

  “You don’t want that man to get hurt.” The menthol smell of Hoyt’s breath flowed over her face. He ate Halls cough drops like candy. “And if you say one word to him, give him one reason to think you aren’t okay, he’ll get hurt. We’ll still be going home together, Annie. You cannot change that. No matter what you do.”

  This whole situation was made worse by the fact that Ben was a former motorcycle gang member and convicted felon. Cops would take one look at her face, and Ben’s record, and they’d believe whatever Hoyt said.

  Hoyt was very believable.

  Bit by bit Hoyt got off Annie, watching her every second to see what she would do. Annie’s reactions had become unexpected and she took some strength from that, from no longer being underestimated.

  Shaking, she slowly got to her feet, grabbed the pink washcloth from the table, and held it to her head. Hoping Ben would believe the lies she was about to tell him.

  Hoyt got out of sight and Annie pushed open the door to her trailer and stepped outside, the door closing quietly behind her.

  I could run. Right now.

  But Hoyt would come after her. And Ben would get hurt.

  “You all right?” Ben asked, looking worried. He wore the familiar clean white shirt, pristinely ironed. He’d been sick recently, and he’d lost weight. No matter how tough he’d been years ago, now he was frail and he was old.

  And he could not help her.

  “Fine,” she lied with a smile. “There was a snake and I screamed and jumped and smacked my head on the cupboard.”

  “I get those king snakes all the time,” he said. “You want me—”

  She got in his way as he leaned to the side as if to see into the trailer, or worse, try to come in. “I’m fine.”

  That lie didn’t sound at all convincing and he pointed up to his own eye. “You smack your eye, too? Your lip?”

  “Please,” she breathed, unable to pretend anymore. “Please, Ben, just go.”

  “Annie—”

  “For fuck’s sake, old man. I’m fine. I’m exhausted and I just want to get some sleep. Leave me alone.”

  His dark eyes missed nothing and she had no idea what he was thinking but in the end he surrendered, holding up his hands and going back to his trailer. Taking all hope of rescue with him.

  Annie was going to have to do this herself.

  DYLAN

  If hope was hard for me, faith was impossible.

  Growing up Dylan Daniels among the thieves and killers and rabid animals disguised as humans that were my family, faith didn’t stand a chance.

  But goddammit—I was trying. I clutched hope and faith in my scarred hands. Hands far too used to shoving those things away.

  I leaned back against my kitchen counter and read the text Annie sent me two hours ago. I knew it by heart. Could probably recite it on my deathbed. But still, I looked at those words, as if reading them again would help me actually believe them.

  I know about jail. I know what happened. It doesn’t change anything for me. It doesn’t change who you are. When this is done, when I am done…I’m going to come back to you. To hear the story from your lips. To finish what we started.

  If you’ll have me.

  My life since the fire five years ago had been about control. Letting no one in or out, including myself. I lived in a fortress on top of a mountain I owned. The headquarters for 989 Engines, the company I started with my only friends, was here; the garage was here. I worked with the same guys I’d been working with since the moment I’d gotten out of jail nine years ago.

  I worked. I made money. More than I could spend in my life as a recluse.

  I wasn’t lonely. I didn’t want.

  Or at least I thought I didn’t.

  Until Annie McKay came out of nowhere. Right out of my blind spot, crashing into the center of my life.

  And I never saw her coming.

  It had taken years for me to kill all the feelings I had about my family. But I’d done it. The memories had been bound, chained, and dropped to the bottom of the ocean. My brother. My mom. Pops. It had been hard. Harder than most things, and I was the better for it. I knew that.

  But Annie had left my mountain two hours ago and the place was crowded with her ghosts. The air thick with memory and scent and the fading echo of her voice.

  There on my couch was where she’d let me into her body. Tight and wet and small. I could still feel her breath breaking against my shoulder as she worked to accept me.

  On the chair, there, beside the couch, Annie had sat with her legs spread, her busy fingers beneath that blue underwear, her heavy-lidded eyes watching me.

  She was drinking Champagne at the table. Lying about the cheese she didn’t like. Wearing that black silk robe I never used.

  The bathroom was haunted by her sitting up on that counter, leaning back against the mirror, her body laid out before me, pink and white. That surprising thatch of red hair between her legs. Annie had dyed her hair white blond and I should have suspected something staring at those red curls. But I’d been so hungry for her. I’d been so…compelled, those clues meant nothing to me.

  In the bedroom her ghost was curled up on her side, telling me—shattering me—with her secrets.

  I am married, she’d said after I fucked her. Twice. After weeks of a relationship of sorts over the phone.

  I didn’t have a whole lot of rules, but I didn’t fuck married women. And I was pissed, sure, but it was fleeting. Both of us had been keeping secrets. That was hers.

  Mine was…fuck, mine was worse.

  And she said she knew, that Pops told her.

  But did she really?

  Someone knocked on my front door, and only two people would do that. My business partner, Blake, or his mother, Margaret. And I didn’t want to see either of them. I didn’t want to see anyone. I just wanted to be here for a few minutes, in the quiet. With Annie’s ghost.

  “Go away!” I yelled.

  But the door opened anyway.

  “You deaf?”

  “I’m not.” It was Blake walking into my house, and I quickly picked up the robe that w
as still draped over the table and the condom wrapper on the edge of the couch. “But maybe you are?” Blake asked, coming to stand in the kitchen. He wore one of his expensive suits and a silk tie and you couldn’t see any of our garage in him. As the money guy, he’d had the grease manicured right out from under his nails.

  He wore pink ties. Pink. And no one gave him shit about it.

  Because he owned it. Made it work.

  That smile he was flashing me was familiar. I’d seen it plenty of times before, right before he eviscerated someone. Blake had a well-played charm card and it suckered a lot of people. “That would explain why you haven’t answered my calls.”

  He watched me with eyes exactly like his father’s, the green of old glass Mountain Dew bottles. But unlike his father, Miguel, Blake’s eyes judged me.

  They always judged me. Even when he was trying not to.

  And right now, he could fuck himself with that judgment.

  “I’ve been busy,” I hedged, dumping some of the leftover food in the garbage.

  Blake leaned against my table, grabbing an olive and tossing it into his mouth. “So I’ve heard.” He smiled as he chewed and then spat the pit into an empty champagne glass. There weren’t a lot of people who could get away with talking to me like this. But Blake’s father, Miguel, and his mother, Margaret, had taken me in after jail. Given me a second chance.

  It gave Blake the right to bust my balls.

  But only so much.

  “What do you want, Blake?”

  The charm fell away and Blake pushed off the table.

  “Everybody is down at the garage running final tests on the transmission, including me, I might add, despite the twenty other things I need to be doing. Because we’re behind schedule, because other engine builders are trying to replicate this shit, because all our very interested and very rich buyers are getting antsy, and you’re cleaning your house?”

  “The guys can handle it. I’ve put in more hours than anyone else on that transmission. I’ll be down there when I’m ready.”

  “Is this about that woman?”

  My hackles rose at his tone, the smear his voice put on “that woman.”

  “Her name is Annie.”

  “Whatever. I thought she left.”

  “She did.”

  She left a few hours ago, somber and decided. Unwilling to take more from me than my lawyer’s phone number. She wouldn’t take my offer to stay up on the mountain. Or to stay in my house in Charleston. Or my offer to drive her down to the trailer park myself. She left and she was going to divorce her husband. Get back her land and her freedom and her life.

  I need to do this myself, she’d said with the kind of implacable courage I understood.

  And I let her go because I believed her when she said she needed to do it on her own. I admired her for it.

  “Thank God, man,” Blake said. “Maybe now we can actually get some work done. You’ve been walking around this place for two months like your phone was attached to your dick.” That was truer than he probably even guessed. It had gotten so bad in the last month that every time my phone rang my dick got hard.

  “She’s coming back.”

  Because when she asked if she could come back, I’d said yes.

  I’d said I would be waiting.

  “Coming back? Here?” I understood Blake’s incredulousness. People…women…didn’t come up here. “Did you tell her—”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Dylan,” he sighed. “You’ve got to tell her. Prison and what happened there—you can’t keep that a secret.”

  “She knows.”

  “How?”

  “Pops must have told her when she got to the trailer park. She texted and said she knew and she didn’t care.”

  “Your dad is involved now? Holy shit, this gets better and better. You think he told her…everything?” Blake asked. Which, frankly, was the same damn question I’d been asking because there was no way she knew the real story, or the whole story, because a woman like her, a human like her, would care once she knew what I’d done.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  And maybe the right thing to do was to let her go, free and clear. No ties. Nothing but memories.

  But I wasn’t ready for that yet. I still wanted more of her. All of her.

  “And you trust this woman?”

  Oh man, if Blake knew she’d lied to me—from the beginning and over and over again—he’d lose his shit.

  “I want to,” was all I said.

  Blake laughed, but it was bitter. Hard. “I’ve known you nine years, man, since your family dropped you on our doorstep and walked away when you got out of jail. I’ve worked side by side with you. Made a shit ton of money with you and for you. My mom practically saved your life after the fire. My dad loved you like a son—”

  “What’s your point?” I snapped.

  “My point is that after all that, I’m not sure if you trust me. You don’t trust anyone.”

  “You sound jealous.” I tried to make it a joke. But it wasn’t funny. Not at all. Because he was right. I didn’t trust anyone past a certain point. And that point was a shallow one.

  My family had done that to me.

  “No. I’m pissed. Because you’re trusting some woman—”

  “She’s not ‘some woman,’ ” I snapped at him.

  “They’re all some woman,” Blake said. “The cute ones, the smart ones, the ones that suck your dick. The ones that don’t. And now your dad is wrapped up in this. When has that ever worked out in your favor?”

  Never. Not once.

  There was a faint buzzing and Blake dug his phone out of the jacket of his suit.

  “Hold on, man,” he said to me and then turned and walked away toward the shadowed foyer, his phone pressed to his ear.

  My weak hold on faith was breaking. I didn’t want to listen to Blake. I didn’t want his words to be true.

  But so many of them were.

  I had the Champagne bottle in my hand, the bottle Annie and I had drunk just before we had sex. Just before she told me about being married.

  I wanted to smash it into the sink.

  I wanted to smash that person Blake was talking about—that version of myself. Break him into a thousand pieces. I wanted violence and blood, or speed and the roar of engines. I wanted every distraction I could get from being myself. Being trapped in this wrecked body with all this goddamn damage.

  “Hey, man,” Blake said, coming back in the room. “We got a problem.”

  I turned, and Blake held out his phone. His face had that still, quiet, damage-control look on it that I’d seen hundreds of times, in the minutes before he gave me bad news. “The call is for you. It’s my brother…Phil. Down at the trailer park.”

  “What the fuck is he doing there?” I’d fired Phil not too long ago, the final straw in the fragile relationship between Blake and his brother.

  “Apparently that’s where he’s living.”

  “My trailer park? Did you know that?”

  Blake shook his head. “Phil keeps everything a secret. Everything. He’s paranoid as fuck.”

  Oh Jesus. Now I have to worry about Phil living next to Annie.

  “But he’s saying some old man has a knife and is demanding to talk to you.”

  There was only one old man down at the trailer park who might be able to connect the dots between Blake, his shithead brother, Phil, and me.

  And that was Ben.

  Pops.

  That part of me that was so attuned to karma prickled with sudden awareness. Sudden dread. I could feel forces out there moving around, events I could not avoid starting to take shape.

  Inevitable.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Blake said, because he knew anything having to do with my father and Phil could not be good. Blake handed over his phone before slipping back outside to give me privacy.

  “Hello?”

  “Dylan?”

  I’d had Pops looked in on
for years, but hadn’t once heard his voice. Not since that day he visited me in jail and asked me to give up my life so my brother could have his.

  And hearing it now—that old pack-a-day voice, the rasp and the drawl—was like having a boulder dropped on my chest, pushing out all my air. I was twenty-nine and nine all at once. Distance shrank to nothing, and the years and the memories collapsed inward.

  That first night in Duval, when my door rattled open in the middle of the night…God, I would have done anything to hear Pops’s voice then, telling me to get my fists up because a fight was coming.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Son—”

  “Don’t.” It came out unbidden. My hand came up, too, as if I could fend him off from miles away. Years away. Don’t call me “son.” You lost that right long, long ago.

  When I was a kid, I kept wedging myself into impossible cracks in his life, Max’s, too, just so we could be close. Just so we could be together. After jail I let Max and Pops go. But only so far. I still had Ben watched, because the old man was dangerous. And the old man’s mistakes had a way of coming back to bite me in the ass.

  But Max…Max was long gone. Max left me alone at that party with a replacement brother and replacement parents and never looked back.

  “Why are you calling?” I asked. Why now?

  “It’s Annie,” he said, and my entire body, my whole life, sharpened. “Some guy’s in her trailer. Roughing her up. I think it’s her husband.”

  Jesus. Fuck.

  “Can you get her out?” I asked.

  “I tried. She kicked me out. I’ll keep an eye on things, but you need to get here, son. And you need to get here fast.”

  Ben hung up and I gave myself one second.

  One second for the fire of my rage to blow through me. And then I grabbed my keys off the hook by the door and stepped outside into the cool twilight. Blake was there, leaning against the rough wood of my house. In my adrenaline rush I felt everything. The air. The gravel beneath my shoes. The sharp bite of the key in my palm.

  “Everything okay?” Blake asked, and for all his tough words in there, I could see his worry. The guy was a dick, but he was the good kind of dick.

  I threw Blake his phone and he caught it with one hand. “Is Annie—”